Is Domain Registration different than hosting?
It seems like a fairly simple question. Domain Registration is very different than hosting. When you register a domain, this essentially means that you “own” that domain name. Typically a domain will be auto-renewed, so a domain can be registered essentially forever, but only for a maximum of 10 years at a time. Everything has to be able to expire at some point!
When you register a domain, there are 4 types of contact information that are required to be publicly available. These are the registrant (the legal “owner” of the name, which CAN be a business), the administrative contact (Typically the person responsible for domain administrative functions, such as DNS management, the technical contact (mostly in charge of the website), and last, the billing contact (responsible for billing issues regarding the domain, as well as billing issues for the particular company, depending on the domain owner’s preference). Typically, all 4 contact types will be exactly the same.
Most domain registration providers (registrar) provide some sort of privacy service, to allow this information to remain hidden from public view. Consider adding privacy to your domain to keep your name, address, phone number, and email address off the public registry!
So how is domain registration different than hosting?
Domain registration is ownership on a particular name, and hosting is a general term given to server space that is designed to serve a website. Essentially, hosting means that there is a server specially designed to show your pages to the internet. A Website, then, is what somebody sees when they actually visit your Domain. You can have a domain registered, but not hosted. You can have hosting, but no website, oddly enough! (Hosting is setup, but you have not provided website content (HTML)). But, you cannot have a website, without website hosting, and a registered domain that “points” to your hosting account (refers to how the DNS is setup for your domain; don’t worry about that for now!)
So, what do I need to host and design a website?
For the most part, our hosting packages are designed to serve the needs of the majority of websites, and you will be able to use the site-builder of your choice to easily design a website. There are also incredibly easy-to-use applications to help you get your site only quickly! Consider using Wordpress, a popular choice among bloggers and other website designers (How-to-Install-Wordpress : It’s EASY!). We have a built-in installer to make building a Wordpress site easy! There are also many different applications to design your website: you can use a template-style of website builder or another application such as iWeb or Dreamweaver.
There are countless ways to actually build the website! All you have to decide is how great you want it to look!