The domain name and hosting services are the two must-have components of every online website.
Without them both, you won’t have an online website.
In this section, we will talk about domain name and hosting, what are they and why do we need it.
What is a Domain Name
Your website domain name is the address that visitors will need to enter in their browser window in order to visit your website.
For example, when you want to visit Google, you’ll type google.com in your browser to load it.
google.com is the domain name of the Google website.
Think about a domain name like a psychical address. When entering a psychical address in your GPS, it will take you to your desired address.
In the online world, your browser software is your GPS and the address that you would like to reach is the domain name (or the website).
Because there are millions of websites, there is a high chance that your desired domain name is taken.
In case your domain name is not available, you’ll need to dig deeper and be more creative when searching for a domain.
If you own a gym business and you would like to purchase the goodbody.com domain, you’ll find that it’s already been taken.
If so, you have two options:
- Get the domain name with a different extension instead of
.com. Other extensions can be:.co.net.organd etc. - Use a long tail keyword domain such as
goodbodygym.com.
Click here to find out if your desired domain name is available.
What is a Website Hosting
A hosting service will let you host all your content such as pages, blog posts, articles, media, images, and videos on their servers.
When your domain name has been requested, your hosting provider will deliver all the necessary files to the client-side.
For example, when a visitor types in his browser goodbodygym.com, the website hosting server will deliver the required text and the images to load the webpage.
There are many good WordPress hosting providers but in this course, we will use HostGator.
HostGator is known as one of the best WordPress hosting servers and for a good reason. Their servers are fast, reliable, and secured.
There are a few different kinds of hosting plans:
- Shared Hosting – Share resources with other websites on the same server.
- WordPress Hosting – Same as Shared hosting with a set of added services and performance tweaks to increase speed & security.
- VPS Hosting – Provide you with dedicated resources on a server with multiple users.
- Dedicated Hosting – Dedicated server with dedicated resources to a single client.
Note: you can host a WordPress website on any of the plans above (Shared, WordPress, VPS, and Dedicated).
For beginners, I highly recommend to start with a simple hosting plan such as Shared hosting or WordPress hosting (both very affordable) and upgrade in the future if necessary.
When signing up with HostGator hosting plan, make sure to use the siteborn coupon code at checkout to enjoy about 60% off the price.
Click here to signup with a HostGator hosting plan.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we have learned what are the domain name and hosting of a website. In the next tutorial, we will install WordPress on our domain name.
