Hosting Articles
There are two entities you need so as to own a web site. The first one is a domain name that will exhibit your website when you write it in a web browser, and the other one is a web space hosting account, which is fundamentally the hard disk storage space on a web server where the website files will be located, plus a few more services that come with it. The domain and the web hosting plan are 2 connected, yet different solutions, and you need both of them in order to have a working web page.
A domain name is the alpha-numeric name that you will pick to be the address for the web portal: my-best-domain.com, for instance. A domain can be up to 64 symbols long and it is composed of 2 components – a top-level domain name (TLD) and a second-level domain name (SLD). In the above illustration, my-best-domain is the Second-Level Domain, and .com is the Top-Level Domain. While you can select the second-level domain name of the domain to be anything that has not been taken yet, there is a finite number of TLDs to select from. The TLDs can be generic (gTLDs) or country-code (ccTLDs), and can be registered for a particular stretch of time between 1 and ten yrs. They may involve additional prerequisites with respect to the registrant.
As the domain name is just a hostname and nothing more than that, you demand a web hosting plan where you have to accommodate it. Thus, when you type it in a browser, it will exhibit the web content that you have in the account, i.e. it will open your web portal. You can have a domain name registered with a specific provider and obtain the hosting service from another, even though many hosts provide both solutions and it is more user-friendly to handle everything from one hosting Control Panel GUI. Either way, since the domain registration and the web space hosting package are different services, you have to point the domain to the web hosting server where it will be added as hosted. To accomplish that, you have to change a specific setting, or record, of the domain name - the commonly named nameservers. Each web hosting supplier has at least two name servers - ns1.webhostingfirm.net and ns2. webhostingfirm.net, for instance. The webspace hosting CP that you utilize for your domain gives you the possibility to alter the NS records and point the domain name to one web hosting distributor or another.
Once the domain is pointed to a particular domain hosting company and is added to their servers, you will receive various services. The most crucial one is that the site files that you have on the web server will now be exhibited when you type your domain name in a browser. You will also be able to establish mail accounts such as name@my-best-domain.com and avail of webmail or a mail user agent to manage them. Whether you administer a personal or a business web page, being available online and being permitted to create e-mailboxes with your domain name are the two most important things that come with a hosting plan. In case you have a corporate web portal – it will identify your business before your visitors or customers. That’s why you require a stable provider that will offer a dependable and steady hosting service.
Additional online services that you receive by hosting a domain are: FTP access to upload and download files easily, domain forwarding, email auto-responders and mailing lists, and the ability to set up and edit specific domain records from your web site hosting CP. The presence of these features may differ depending on the web host, but reliable web hosting vendors such as 'NTC Hosting', for example, offer all of the aforesaid functionalities with their site hosting accounts, leaving their competitors far behind.