Domains and hosting explained

A lot of business owners pay for a website for years without knowing what they're actually paying for. Domains and hosting are two different things, and it helps to know which is which.

The domain is your address

Your domain is the name people type in, like yourshop.com. You rent it by the year from a registrar like Namecheap, GoDaddy, Squarespace or Cloudflare. A .com usually costs around $10 to $20 a year. Watch out for cheap first years that renew at a much higher price.

The domain should be registered in your name, with your email, on an account you can log into. This is the most important thing in this whole post. If a past designer or a nephew registered it on their account, get it moved to yours now, while you can still reach them.

Hosting is where the site lives

Hosting is the computer that stores your website and sends it to people when they visit. The domain points to the hosting, a bit like a forwarding address. You can change hosting without changing your domain.

Good hosting is fast, stays up and keeps the site secure, with the little lock icon in the browser. For a small business site you don't need anything big. My sites come with 3 or 6 months of hosting included, and after that it's $19 a month.

Email is a separate thing too

An email like you@yourshop.com uses your domain, but it's usually set up through something like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. It's separate from your website. That means a designer can change your site without touching your email, and they should be careful not to break it when they connect the domain.

Keep track of your logins

Write down where your domain is registered, where your site is hosted and where your email is set up, along with the logins. Keep it somewhere safe. When something goes wrong, or when you want a new site, this list saves days.

When to renew

Turn on auto renew for your domain and keep the card on file current. If a domain expires, someone else can buy it, and getting it back can be hard or expensive. It's a small bill that's worth never missing.