Every website needs both web hosting and domain hosting. It’s common to get confused between the two. They are in fact two different things.

Hosting services like Bluehost, Siteground, and GoDaddy offer both web hosting and domain hosting. When someone starts their first website, it’s common to buy both domain and web hosting from the same provider. That makes it easy to assume that the two services are the same. 

What is Domain Hosting

Domain hosting is a service that provides domain names for websites. A domain hosting service sells domains and registers them to an owner in exchange for a yearly subscription fee. Different types of domains have different prices, from as low as around 10$ reaching up to the $1000’s. Depending on how common or uncommon the domain is.

A domain is set up like this; www.YOURWEBSITENAME.com. It has different sections separated with dots. What a domain does is direct visitors to a specific website, much like the address of a house. Every domain has a matching IP address that sets its location on the internet. Of course, it’s much easier to remember and share a domain name than an IP address.

Domains are categorized into levels. The most common are top-level, generic top-level, and second-level. All web hosting providers that also offer domain hosting all have top-level domains, some generic top-level domains, and some second-level domains. The usual domain names are .com, .net, .org, .edu, .edu

There are also specialized domain hosting providers that offer all sorts of second-level domains, and generic top-level domains like .photo or .media.

Some top-level domains like country-code top-level domains are only used for websites in particular countries. In some cases, a country domain can be used outside of the country it stands for as long as the owner of the website has permission. For example, bit.ly, uses the country code top-level domain for Lybia. Bit.ly permission to use that domain even though they are in the US.

By buying a domain from a domain host, you gain ownership of that domain for as long as you pay the yearly fee. But you can’t build a website without web hosting, a domain only gets you an address.

What is Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that offers space to keep all the files for your website.  To be able to buy web hosting, the provider will require that you already own a domain. If you don’t already have one, the web hosting provider can sell you one. We’ll see later why that might not be a good idea, and why it’s best to keep them separate.

There are a few different types of web hosting, the most common are shared, managed, and dedicated. Depending on what type of web hosting you buy, you will have different tools at your disposal. Some web hosting offers services that help keep your website running without you needing much technical knowledge.

Other web hosting services give the owner partial or full control of the servers, therefore needing a skilled tech team. Also, there’s managed hosting, which can make any type of web hosting easier to handle with the help of the hosting provider’s own developers and techs.

Shared

In shared web hosting, a number of websites are hosted on the same server. This is the best choice for small websites, bloggers who are starting out, and new business owners.

In a shared server, all the websites use the same RAM and CPU, meaning that if all websites stay small, there shouldn’t ever be a problem. On the other hand, if one of the websites in a shared server gets a surge of visits and crashes the server, all the other websites hosted there will be affected too.

Dedicated

Different to shared web hosting, dedicated web hosting hosts each website on its own server. Since websites arent’s sharing a server, they can have a much larger bandwidth for high traffic. Dedicated servers also offer a large amount of file storage for websites with lots of information.

With a dedicated server, the client has direct access to root and admin access. This is a good choice if the company has a skilled tech team. Nevertheless, dedicated web hosting can also be dedicated managed hosting for large websites without tech teams.

Managed

Just how there can be confusion between domain hosting and web hosting, there also tends to be confusion between shared /dedicated hosting and managed hosting. The reason it gets confusing is that all types of web hosting, be it shared, dedicated, or cloud can also be managed.

That’s because what managed hosting does is add a full suite of tools to install and run WordPress, manage files, manage email. All that plus a team of developers always at your disposal who are keeping things running smoothly under the hood.

Having managed hosting saves a lot of time and eventual headaches when things go wrong. Shared managed hosting is the most common type of web hosting for many types of small businesses and blogs. Dedicated and cloud-managed hosting are the best for big companies with websites that get a lot of traffic.

• Your domain can be used with any type of web hosting.

Why You Should Keep Domain and Web Hosting Separate

Just how a hosting provider can offer domain hosting and web hosting in the same package, it’s not always a great idea to buy them from the same provider. There are a few reasons why.

1. Better security against hacking. Separated domain and web hosting can help keep a website safe from being hacked completely. If a hacker gets access through your domain, they can then get access to all your files. Then they could lock down the website and transfer the domain to wherever they want. You’d lose it all.

If a domain is not hosted with the same provider, then at least you won’t lose it. Of course, as long as you don’t use the same login and passwords for both.

2. Preventing domain loss. Let’s say you pay for web hosting and domain hosting on the same day with the same provider. One year later, your subscription expires and your domain goes into a holding pattern. If you didn’t switch hosts before that happened, you could lose the domain completely.

Final Thoughts

The confusion between domain hosting and web hosting is not as complicated as it might seem at first. When a client of your web design business asks what each thing is, this article can help you explain it. You can also simply send them the link.

We hope this article helped clear up some confusion and helped you better understand the difference between domain hosting and web hosting.