Web Vs Domain Hosting Vs Email Hosting – What’s it all about?

We often come across businesses and even personal clients that are simply not sure what they are paying for or why they have different hosting arrangements so we’ve put this little article together to help explain what it’s all about in ‘simple’ terms.

The easiest way to visualise as per the diagram above is that there are 3 main parts to your website that require hosting. For all those tech savvy or those that may be researching, you may have heard of terms thrown around like cloud hosting, CDN, shared hosting, VPS, dedicated hosting etc, there’s all sorts of hosting and terminologies but today we’re going to break down to the bare basics so that you know the fundamentals and understand what is needed and why.

Domain Hosting (DNS Hosting)

What is Domain or DNS Hosting?

In simple, it’s your websites address. Think of it as an address like the address to your home or business, nothing else, just the address so that people know where to go when they are looking for you.

What does domain hosting do and why do I need it?

For a basic setup, your domain host tells website visitors where to go. E.g. if it’s to look at the website, then it says to go to the website or if it’s for an email, then to the email box. But wait, isn’t this what domain hosting does? Short answer is no. That’s why we have website hosting and email hosting separately.

Website Hosting

Before we get into website hosting and why we need this, we need to understand what websites are made from.

What are Websites?

Websites are generally a collection of files and databases that work together to give us the end result that we see on the screen. These files can include HTML, coded scripts like Javascript, images, videos, PDFs etc. All these files and databases take up space and need to live somewhere.

Why Do You Need Website Hosting?

As mentioned above, these files need somewhere to live and unless you’re planning on leaving your computer on all day and night for people to access your website files, they need to live somewhere and that somewhere is on a website host where your website can be viewed by anyone anytime.

Email Hosting

What is Email Hosting?

While your website has website hosting, emails are separate to your website and require hosting in its own right. Effectively it’s where your emails live.

Do I need to pay for email hosting?

Depending on where your website is hosted, some hosts may provide some free form of email hosting. Note that this may come with some limitations or future upsell attempts from some hosting providers. What we tend to find for small businesses just starting, it makes sense to take advantage of the free email options to then upgrade to a paid hosting option as they grow.

Hosting Summary

So if you’re a business or personal user looking to have a website for people to view and want to have a professional looking email address that has the URL of your website rather than a hotmail, outlook or gmail type email, then you will need to have all 3 components hosted which generally end up in 3 different bills being paid to keep your website running.

If you’re not worried about emails (e.g. a personal blog is the usual scenario) then you do not need to engage in a paid service or may choose to at a later date.