What is the domain and hosting for the site Rubric: Website creation
Creating your site is one of the stages of a long journey that a neophyte is going to, who has decided to freelance or blog and earn in this way his bread and butter. And where does the site start? Of course, from thinking over its general concept – what is it about, why, how will it be technically implemented. But when these issues are resolved and it is time for the site to arise physically – further problems arise: where and how to register a domain, from whom to buy hosting. I decided to devote my next article to the analysis of these particular concepts: to many newcomers, they seem complicated and frightening.
Author’s drawing: What is a domain and hosting
In this article I want to examine in detail the terms themselves and what is behind them, without going into the details of providing services with specific services. Of course, to illustrate some points and clarity, we will look at the websites of companies.
So, we proceed. What is a domain and hosting?
It is impossible to answer this question without understanding (at least a little) what modern Internet is and how it works.
The Internet and the World Wide Web: a bit of theory
The Internet is a collection of various computer networks interacting with each other using certain protocols, in other words, the “languages” of information exchange. But often, the Internet is understood as one of its services – Word Wide Web, WWW, the Web, the World Wide Web.
WWW is a system that allows its users to operate with various information stored on computers (servers) connected to the Internet. The main way to organize data on the web is hypertext (specially marked) documents, or web pages linked by hyperlinks. A set of hypertext pages interconnected into a single holistic project is called a web site.
You know, all these concepts — the site, the link, the page — have become so firmly established in our life that it seems as if they need no explanation. Nevertheless, many people are confused in terminology and do not always have a clear idea of our everyday miracles. And it is necessary to understand these already slightly more “advanced” things like domain and hosting. So be patient, let’s get to the point soon.
So, a website is a collection of web pages. This economy is managed by a web server – a program that is installed on a computer (it is a server) connected to the Internet. Often the web server is also called this computer itself, “hardware.”
The task of the web server is to accept from the client, which is usually the user’s browser program, a request to issue data, process it and issue information: a static page or a page formed on the fly by the content management system of the site. The exchange between the server and the client is carried out using the HTTP protocol (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, Hypertext Transfer Protocol).
So, we come to the question: how does the client program find the desired site? Yes, we know that each site has its own name. Having entered this name in the address bar of the browser, we are not surprised at all when seeing the display of the site pages on its screen. It happens so easy and simple thanks to the domain name system.
What is a domain?
The name of the site that we use to access it is not clear for the web server: it only knows the IP address of the site.
An IP address is a unique address of an Internet resource consisting of four decimal numbers from 0 to 255, separated by dots (according to the IPv4 version). The possible number of such addresses is more than 4 billion. I think you saw them: something like 123.45.67.8.
It turns out the following: we write the name of the site, and the browser somehow turns it into a numeric address, which is understandable to servers. This is due to the special service of the Internet, which is addressed by the browser and which deals with the issue of the interrelation of names and IP-addresses of sites. This system is called DNS (Domain Name System) and is, in simple terms, a server with a distributed database containing information on the correspondence of domains and addresses.
Domain – this is the name of the site, or its domain name. They are introduced for the convenience of people: it is much easier for us to deal with meaningful words than with a jumble of numbers. Unlike IP addresses, we deal with domain names all the time, so it makes sense to find out in detail what this is: not everything is so simple with this term.
Domain names
If you now look at the address bar of your browser, you will see this line: https://copirayter.ru/chto-takoe-domen-i-hosting-dlya-sajta. This is the so-called URL of the current page, an address that uniquely identifies its location. With the help of such a record you can find any page of any site on the Internet. What we see here:
https – the name of the protocol by which the resource is accessed;
:// – separator;
copirayr.ru – the domain name (domain) of the site;
/ <address of the page> – the address of the page with this article on my site.
