Beginning Domains and Hosting

This is a beginning tutorial of how domains and web hosting work.

The purpose of a domain name (example.com) is to make it easier for us as humans to remember a site by name instead of it's IP address. The IP address (Internet Protocol) is a long unique number (ie. 123.123.123.123) that is the network address for the web server that holds your domain name. The IP address is the real address of the website. The web server translates the IP address into a domain name. Kind of like a telephone number. The phone number is unique. The domain name is memorable and easy to spell, instead of trying to remember a very long IP address for every site you want to visit.. The domain name keeps the really technical stuff invisible to viewers.

With a domain you need a hosting account. A hosting account hosts your domain name. It's like your home, it's where you place your webpages and monitor them. The hosting company rents you a spot on their internet and server, just like your C drive is your home for all your local computer files.

There are a couple of ways of obtaining a hosting account. You can have a blog account, which means one of the blog sites supply the hosting account. You have to sign up and create a page, in turn they reserve a place for you on their site. However, this is not a true hosting account as you can not create various pages. These are free but some have plenty of advertisements that you can't control.

When selecting a hosting company you want a company that is well known, reasonably priced and 99.9% uptime (meaning the site does not have too many technical problems). You also want them to have numerous email accounts, web tools, templates and large disk space for marketing. Most of all you want them to have 24/7 personal customer service.

In order to control your own internet marketing you must have a network presence that you control. You need a hosting company and a webpage built from the domain you have created.