The Basics - Domains, Websites, Email & Hosting

Understand the basic hierarchy and elements of your online profile

When we first jumped into the website design world, the first learning curve for us is the first learning curve most business owners take as well. You want a website address, a website, and email account - but don't really understand how they interact.

At 543 we're all about giving our clients as much knowledge or upskilling as they want when it comes to the online world, and one of the most important things to understand is that your domain, website hosting and email hosting are separate things, that can be held in separate places. We like to use the analogy of a house to explain it:

• Domain (also sometimes called url) - this is your website address. In New Zealand, it's your .co.nz, while international and American sites tend to be .com. Using the house analogy, your domain is your address. It let's people know where to find you. For this reason, a local domain (.co.nz) is really powerful for a local businesses, as it tells all the search engines that you are a New Zealand based business. Think of having a .co.nz domain name as being listed in a New Zealand yellow pages, versus an international one....imagine thumbing through a directory of the entire world versus just New Zealand to get an idea of how much of a benefit it can be. 
• Website hosting - this is where your website lives. It's the place where the files of your website (images, text, code etc), sits on physical servers. If the domain is your address, the website hosting is your actual home on the internet. 
  
• Email hosting - this is where all your emails are stored. Again, even with cloud hosting, your emails will be stored on a physical server somewhere. Your email hosting is your mailbox!
  

What is really important to understand about all of the above is that they can be packaged up and paid for all together, or completely separately. You can have your domain with a domain provider, your website hosting with your website designer, and your email hosting with someone like Gmail managed directly by you. If you ever want to separate (or combine) where they are held that's a decision that's entirely up to you. When you are first starting out you can jump in and secure your domain for a yearly fee and just hold it until you are ready to connect a website to it, or equally, you could ask your website designer to do that for you.

Sometimes it's easy for those of us in the online space to assume that everyone knows the basics of how the web works, but it can be a pretty foreign place to most. Don't ever feel like there is a dumb question. In fact, we encourage you to contact us and drill us about anything online, we're more than happy to chat.