The process of creating a website and getting it online can be a tricky one, especially for the non-technical community. And this surely isn’t helped by the common misconception that domain registration and web hosting is one and the same.

So let’s clear things up. Domain registration and web hosting are two separate processes, both of which need to be completed so that you can create a website and make it live on the internet.

Put simply the process is as follows: a domain must be registered by a domain registration company and then that domain name must be hosted on the internet through a affordable web hosting company.

And here’s where the confusion comes in. Many companies will offer both domain registration and affordable webhosting, whereas others will only offer either web hosting or domain registration. Therefore you can choose to register your domain and host your website with the same company or register your domain with one company and host your site with another.

It really as easy as that, but is something that causes a lot of confusion and unnecessary stress to many people wanting to create a website.

Domain Registration

To use the internet to communicate with others or to look up information, you have to type an address into your computer. These addresses are a name or a number and are more commonly known as domain names. Every domain name needs to be completely unique so that the internet knows the correct website to bring up for the user.

If you wish to create your own website, you need to devise a name you wish your website to be known as. This name then needs to be registered with a domain registration company to ensure that it is unique and you become the legal owner of that domain name.

You also need to pick a domain extension to attribute to your domain name. By this we mean.com,.co.uk,.org,.net etc. You should give careful consideration to the domain extension you choose to ensure that your full domain name best represents that of your business or project. For example if you’re a UK business and are only selling to the UK, it might be most effective to choose a.co.uk domain extension - especially for achieving good UK search engine rankings.

It is imperative that before registering web site with a domain registrar that you check that they are a credible domain registration company. One method of doing this is to check that the domain registrar’s website is featured on the ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Accredited Registrars list

Web hosting

Once you have registered your unique domain name with an accredited domain registrar, you need to get your website live on the web. To get this done, you need to buy a aplus web hosting package from a hosting company.