If you are planning to create a website for your business, we are sure terms like domain, hosting, and CMS will sound familiar to you. In today’s digital world it is crucial to have a quality, well-made website and for that, you will need a domain, hosting, and a CMS too. As a beginner in the world of web development, there are many terms you will come across, some might sound familiar, but there might be some you have never heard.
Today we are going to help you deepen your understanding of web development by discussing some of the most common and basic terms you need to keep in mind when working on your website. So if you are here to learn about these 3 terms and understand how they relate to each other, we’ve got you covered. In this article, we are going to get behind the meaning of domain, hosting, and CMS and see how they are connected.
What is a domain and why do you need a domain name?
Once you start creating a website, a domain name is necessary so that users can find your website without having to type numbers in order to access it. Otherwise, the numbers would be the IP address of your website. When users type in your domain, the network will know which IP to access, this way it can create the connection to the “computer” where your website is located. The so-called computer serves as a storage space, but we will discuss this a little bit later.
Your domain name is followed by the domain suffix, such as .com or .org. While .com is the most common domain suffix, the latter is mainly used by social, non-profit, and governmental organizations and foundations.
But how exactly can you buy a domain? To buy a domain, you will need to register your domain name. To do this the very first thing you should do is to check if the certain domain name is free. Luckily, there are many tools developed to help you with this, such as GoDaddy or domain.com just to mention some.
What does hosting mean and what is a hosting provider?
Hosting is where your website is hosted. To put it simply, your website is made up of data, images, and text. You need to store these somewhere and that is exactly what your hosting provider will help you with. Your hosting provider will allocate a dedicated space for your website on a webserver to store all its files and data. This way your website will be available for viewing online. Once you find a hosting service that you like, you decide how much storage space your website needs. Looking at the offers, you will see that the hosting services usually offer different storage spaces such as 1 GB or 5 GB. On average, 1 GB of storage space is enough for most websites. Needless to say, you can easily expand the storage space afterward.
Websites and CMS platforms
A website is a collection of related web pages or content identified by a common domain name. To build a website you need a content management system that will serve as the base of your website. Being the most popular content management system platform, WordPress is a go-to option when it comes to choosing a CMS platform for your website. It is an open-source, free, flexible, and user-friendly platform, just to mention some of the key features that make it so popular. If you want to learn more about how WordPress can help you create and maintain a quality website for your website, check out one of our articles about this very topic.
If WordPress is not your ideal option, there are many others you can choose from. Wix is another highly popular website builder with a great support community, such as Shopify or Squarespace.
Final Thoughts
We hope our article helped you understand the meaning behind domains, hostings, and CMS platforms. If you are interested in what are the 6 steps we follow to create your business website, do not hesitate to check out our previous article!
See you in the next one!