It’s common for anyone venturing into having their own online blog, eShop or Corporate Web Presence to be confused between a domain name with web hosting. However, it’s very important for you to be clear on the difference before you move forward in hosting your very first website.

So What is a Domain Name ?

A domain name, is like the address of your home; web hosting on the other hand, is the space of your house where you place your furniture.

Instead of street name and area code, set of words or/and numbers are used for the website’s naming’. The same goes with hosting, computer hard disk and computer memory are used instead of instead of wood and steel for storing as well as processing data files.

Definitions

Domain Name

When you register a domain, it gives you sole ownership and rights to the name of your site. No one else in the market has the access to the actual name of that particular domain besides you. (Keep in mind you’ll need to renew your domain, before the allocated term has ended.)

However, just because you have a domain does not mean that you can server a website to the world. To run a website, you will need a domain name, and a configured web server to put up a website.

Web Hosting

Web Hosting is normally known as a service that provides web server (where you will store your files, management systems, emails and data at), along with its network connections, configurations, and its maintenance.

If you’d like to know more about the different types of web hosting services, click here .

Doesn’t a Domain Name and a Web Hosting Service come together ?

Well, at certain times, Internationally Listed Domains, such as a .CN (China), .IN (India), .CA (Canada), .SG(Singapore) etc. require you to register with their various NICs or their select Partner Registrar separately.

It basically depends on your preference in terms of billing/payment and the pre-requisites listed by both the Domain Provider and the Web Hosting Provider.

Here’s wishing you an excellent start to your foray into the Internet !

You choice of web host depends on how demanding your web application is, and how much traffic you expect.

“Shared Hosting” – which is what you are getting via GoDaddy and our future 9Dome and Zeta*Dome Services, is the most economical in the hierarchy of web hosting service, albeit excellent solutions for Domain Hosting. This can be very economical for small web sites (those with under 1,000 visits per day). There are many providers including DreamHost, and other smaller companies. Make your decision based on cost, reliability, and support of the application platform you want to use [expect under $10-15/month].

“Premium/Extended Shared Hosting” – Which is what you are getting with our SIMPLY HADDAD – Web Hosting Services and other CPanel Based services, are similar to the “Shared Hosting” Services, but with the provision of a Control Panel, more Disk-Space (i.e. without Overselling/Limitation Clauses), Extended but Usable Bandwidth and added Functionality such as Add-On Domains, eMail Functionality, Subdomains, etc. .For example, our Web Hosting Services include LiteSpeed Tech. for those using L.A.M.P. (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) Systems.

“Virtual Private Hosting” – This next level of service, provided by RackSpace, Slicehost, SoftLayer, Hivelocity and others, guarantees you a higher level of service, bandwidth, and control of your server environment. If you need to install custom applications, and directly control your operating system configuration, you’ll want at least this level of service. This is a good solution for web sites under 10,000 visits per day and configurations where multiple servers are needed; expect to pay in the $40/mo range per server.

“Dedicated Hosting” – gives you exclusive use to your own server. Most hosts have a manual provisioning process that can take 24 hours to setup your hardware. But then you have complete control and exclusive use of that resource. Depending on your application complexity, you can serve up to 100,000’s of daily visitors from a single server. More complex applications may require multiple front-end web servers, and one or more back-end database servers. Expect to pay $50-$100/mo per CPU, plus bandwidth charges and additional service charges.

Amazon EC2 gives you a dedicated machine, but offers the flexibility to provision one of more machines very rapidly (and even go up and down as demand changes). Pricing starts at about $80/mo per CPU. If you need the flexibility to scale your application as demand grows, EC2 is a great choice. You will likely find less expensive hosting dedicated hosting options, but with much slower turn around time on changing your configurations or adding machines.

Google’s AppEngine service. While not a generalized hosting model, AppEngine provides a different level of Cloud Computing that scales automatically when your demand goes up. Applications have to be written specifically for AppEngine (in the Python programming language, today), but the popular Django framework is supported.

Source(s):
McKoss from Mahalo.com
AppEngine Pricing Proposal – http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/20080527_google_io.html