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Domain
Name and Hosting ] |
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What
is a domain name? |
| A
domain name is a unique name of your website on the Internet.
For example, our site has domain all-about-hosting.com. Whenever
people enter this name into their Internet browser, our site
comes up. So a domain name is a means of assigning a name to
your website so that people know how to find it.
As you can see, our domain name ends with
.net letters. There are several possible endings (called TLDs
- Top Level Domains). When you buy your domain name, you must
choose one of them. Most popular TLDs are as follows:
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.com
and .biz - originally intended for "commercial"
websites, but now used for all types of websites. Whenever
possible, you should get a .com domain because people
are most familiar with them.
.info
- intended for informational websites (news, directories,
etc).
.org - intended for non-profit
organizations
.net - intended for companies offering
hosting, Internet access, and other Internet-related services.
.name - intended for personal homepages.
Country TLDs. Each country has a domain ending associated
with it. For example, Germany has a TLD .de,
France has .fr and so on. You should
consider buying a country-specific domain if you expect
that most visitors to your website will be from a specific
country, because they will be most familiar with their
country's TLD.
Of course, there are no strict rules which force you to
have a certain type of domain for a certain type of website.
You can decide on your own which one is right for you.
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In order to have a domain name, you must buy
it. There are several companies which allow you to buy domain
names, but the one we highly recommend is GoDaddy. They have
very low prices and offer many TLDs to choose from.
The good thing about domain names is that
they belong to you, not the company where you buy hosting.
This way when you change the hosting provider, the domain
name of the site stays the same and users will usually even
not notice that any change happened.
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| [
Hosting ] |
| What
is web hosting? |
| If
you want to have your own website on the Internet, you need
to sign up for hosting. Hosting is basically a service which
allows your web page to be seen by other people on the Internet.
It is done by putting all your website files (i.e. content,
graphics, sounds, an so on) on a special computer, which has
the following characteristics:
Has a permanent Internet connection. This
means that it's connected to the Internet all the time, so
that people can always go to your website and see it.
Is always turned on. This way, your web site can be accessible
at all time.
Has a special software which allows to view
websites which are put onto the computer's hard disk. Such
computers are usually called servers.
Apart from making your website accessible
on the Internet, hosting companies usually offer a range of
another services, including:
Mailboxes (also called mail accounts).
This allows you to have email addresses associated with your
website. (click here for more info...)
Script support
This allows you to put special files called scripts, which
are simple programs that run on the server and display a generated
web page. This allows to create so-called dynamic websites,
i.e. sites which have content changing with time. (click here
for more info...)
Database support
This allows you to use databases, which are collections of
data to be displayed on your website.
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