Domain Web Hosting
There are two things you need in order to have a website. The first one is a domain name that will open your website when you type it in a browser, and the second one is a hosting account, which is basically the disk space on a server where the website files will be located and a few more services that come with it. The domain and the web hosting are two related, yet separate services, and you need both of them to have a running website.
The domain name is the alpha-numeric combination that you will choose to be the web address for the website: my-best-domain.com, for example. A domain name can be up to 64 characters long and it consists of two parts - a Top-Level Domain (TLD) and a Second-Level Domain (SLD). In the aforementioned example, my-best-domain is the SLD, and .com is the TLD. While you can choose the SLD of the domain name to be anything that has not been registered yet, there is a set number of TLDs to choose from. The TLDs can be generic (gTLDs) or country-code (ccTLDs), and can be registered for a certain period of time between 1 and 10 years. They may have additional requirements regarding the registrant.
As the domain is just a name and nothing more than that, you need a hosting account where you have to add it. In this way, when you type it in a browser, it will open the content that you have in the account, i.e. it will display your website. You can have a domain name registered with one company and get the hosting service from another, although many companies offer both services and it is more convenient to manage everything from one and the same Control Panel tool. Either way, since the domain registration and the hosting account are separate services, you have to point the domain name to the server where it will be added as hosted. To do that, you have to change a certain setting, or record, of the domain name - the so-called name servers. Each hosting company has at least two name servers - dns1.ntchosting.com and dns2.ntchosting.com, for example. From the Control Panel that you have for your domain name, there is an option to change the name servers and point the domain name to one hosting company or another.
Once the domain name is pointed to a particular hosting provider and is added to their servers, you will get a number of web services. The most important one is that the website files that you have on the server will now be accessible when you type your domain in a browser. You will also be able to create email addresses like name@my-best-domain.com and use webmail or an email client to manage them. Whether you have a personal or a corporate website, being online and being able to use emails with your domain name are the two most significant things that you get with a hosting plan. In case you have a corporate site - it will identify your business before your visitors or customers. That's why you need a reliable company that will provide a fast and stable web hosting service.
Additional services that you get by hosting a domain name are FTP access to upload and download files easily, domain forwarding, email auto-responders and mailing lists, and the ability to create and edit certain domain records from your hosting Control Panel. The availability of these services may vary depending on the provider, but reliable hosting companies like NTC Hosting, for example, offer all of the aforementioned services with their hosting plans, leaving their rivals far behind.
