Before you start looking for a web hosting plan for your company website in Halifax , you should know some basic terms in web hosting and what they mean. There are three parts in any website. They are the domain, web hosting and sites files.
The domain name is the name that appears in the address bar of your browser (like, www.websitename.com). You can see the domain name in the URL. One of the functions of the domain name is to identify the IP address. An IP address is like a telephone number. Just like we use telephone numbers to connect to other people, computers use IP addresses to connect to each other. A domain name can connect to more than one address (for example, Microsoft.com connects to many IP addresses).
Without a domain name, your Halifax web hosting is redundant. Every domain name ends with a suffix, which indicates the top level domain it belongs to. For example, .edu, .gov, .com, .org and so on.
What does web hosting consist off?
Let us say that you are starting a new business. You don’t own an office, so you rent one. This rented office space is similar to web hosting. Your physical space may be furbished but a virtual office space isn’t. However, it is very easy to furnish this space provided by your Halifax web hosting service. There are many online tools that create a framework.
Web hosting is important because without it, your Halifax business won’t have a home on the internet. Without it, your domain name is comparable to a disconnected telephone number.
Site files are the actual products and services seen by visitors to your website. Site files can be in the form of .html or .php, .mp3, .jpj or any other files extension that can be parsed by your browser.
How does a website work?
Here is a short summary of the whole operation. Consider that you are a website visitor. You enter the URL into the address bar (www.websitename.com). The address bar extracts the domain name from the URL (websitename) and uses it to query the DNS server (Domain Name System) for the domain name’s IP address.
The DNS is a naming system for services, computers or any other resource connected to a private network or internet. Once it receives the IP address from the DNS server, the browser assembles a request and sends it to the web host server. If your WordPress web hosting service recognizes it, it will generates a response in HTML. The browser then reads the HTML and converts into a web page (or site files).
If you understand and internalize this difference, it will be easier for you when you begin to build your web site.