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Web hosting and domain name are two technical terms you will encounter in the beginning as a blogger. Often beginners struggle to understand web hosting and domain name, and a poor understanding leads to restricted growth of their blogging business.
To be straight with the words, no online website can exist without web hosting and domain name.
Your creation, content, video, podcast, images, graphics, or whatever it is, needs a server to host it on the internet, and so hosting is a must. At the same time, the hosted website will have an address that’s called its domain name.
In this article, we will dedicate our time to understand the concept of web hosting and domain name, and check some of the best available hosting companies for hosting your blogging website.
Let’s start.
Concept of Hosting & Domain Name?
Let’s understand hosting with a perfect analogy!
And, I will start it by asking you a question, which I ask from every student when explaining to them about the hosting concept.
This question is:
What is the first thing you need to build your house?
Some of my students failed to guess it, while most of them easily hit the correct answer, “Land.”
“Exactly!”, That’s my reflex reply.
Just like you need land to build your house because you can’t have a house floating in the air, similarly, you need a hosting server for your website to base the content you create in the internet world.
So, once you have purchased the web hosting for your website, it means you have purchased a piece of land for your house. Building your home in the real world; means building your website in the internet world.
Now, what about the domain name?
Your domain name is like the address of your house. It is the way to locate your website in the internet world. In fact, these addresses are in the form of numbers called IP addresses, but to make it human readable we use words (nxtdecade.com), and you reach that location of my web hosting company where all my website content is available.
The technical definition of the Hosting:
Web hosting are the powerful computers called server that are active 24/7, 365 days, maintained and managed by the hosting service providers. These computers stores your website content and show up to the readers whenever it’s requested (even if you are offline). The kind of service you choose (VPS, Shared hosting, and dedicated hosting) decides nature and storage space you have on the server.
The technical definition of the Domain name:
The address of your website in the server is located in numbers called IP address. For example: the IP address of the google.com is 8.8.8.8. 8.8.4.4
Domain name of the human readable form of these IP address of the server.
With all this knowledge, you now know that Hosting is a must for setting up your blogging website. And, of course, Hosting is not for free. Atleast quality hosting is not!
In general, a few companies let you create a website for free, such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, wix.com, etc., but there are several limitations in those websites, making it straight NO for me. (in this blogging course)
So, we will discuss this in the next section.
Can I Use FREE hosting?
Free Hosting is a waste of time and effort. Companies offer free Hosting to keep their prospects engaged with their business and not help you start your serious business.
If you are serious with the blogging business, then get good Hosting and grow. It’s not costly. It costs about two pizzas per month (shared hosting type).
Using free Hosting for your blogging business is like building your home in a jungle and expecting traffic and visitors. With free Hosting, you won’t get your custom domain; it will have the company name such as .blogspot, .wordpress, .wix in your domain name that gives an unprofessional look.
Business is done in the market. Not in the jungle!
If you work hard with those free hosted websites, you will struggle to bring visitors to your website, and ultimately your business will fall out of demotivation.
Conclusion – Get a High-Quality Hosting For Serious Blogging Business.
Which is the Best Hosting?
A good “piece of land” is essential for the strong foundation of your house. If you build your home on swampland, the house will ultimately fall. This is why I will recommend you only quality hosting.
There are many good web hosting companies, but I will recommend what I have personally used and verified and am highly convinced by their services.
Its Bluehost!
>> Read Bluehost Review: 10 Reasons to Get Bluehost Hosting
It is the best. And it is one of the top recognized web hosting companies in the world. Its Hosting is reliable and fast.
The reason why Bluehost is best:
- Simple and organized dashboard
- Ample of SSD storage
- Pre-installed WordPress
- Excellent support 24/7, live chat, and call support.
- Free SSL and 1-year free domain name
- No headache in managing hosting.
I have used a few more hosting companies. Poor and unclear dashboard, excessive upselling and cross-selling marketing, unhappy customer support, and other issues made me ignore them.
WordPress works seamlessly with Bluehost, and I can freely work on your WordPress website design.
Types of Hosting
Shared Hosting (Recommended for blogging beginners): When your website is stored in an environment where other website are stored as well. Its mainly because your website has not got enough content.
VPS: It stands for Virtual Private Server. In this service, you get a separate storage environment for your website but in the shared server.
Dedicated Hosting: In this plan, you get a dedicated server for your website, separate from other websites.
Shared hosting is much cheaper than VPS or dedicated hosting. As a blogging beginners, choose shared hosting and grow and then upgrade to VPS or dedicated hosting.
Wrapping Up
You have successfully completed this part of the course. I hope you now have a good idea of what Hosting and domain are.
In case you still have any doubts, feel free to mention them in the comments. Or connect with me on various social platforms.
In the next part of this course, we will read more about Bluehost hosting, my review, how to purchase it, and how its dashboard looks.
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