Website Hosting Basics

You have a business, you need a website. That’s a given. For a little while, a brand new business can get by with just a Facebook page, but sooner or later you’ll want to own your internet presence.

So, you find a registrar, choose a domain name, find a web host, set up hosting, point your DNS to your web host, and voila! You have a website. (Of course, somewhere in there you’ll have to build the thing, but that’s a post for another day.)

Yeah … huh?

Actually, yeah. That’s exactly how you do it. It sounds complicated because of the web developer jargon, but it’s not. Here’s the process, same as the above, in regular English:

1. Select the company to buy your domain name from (this is your domain name registrar).
   Typically, registrars charge a yearly fee to reserve a domain name and give the owner the right to use it. In addition to registering domain names, the registrar typically manages your Domain Name System (DNS) settings, which tell browsers where to find your website (your web host) and route your traffic to that location.
2. Choose your domain name. When you purchase your domain name, unless you already have website hosting set up, select the option to park it. This means you own the domain name, but it isn’t pointing website traffic anywhere, yet.
3. Select a different company for your web host. Your web host stores your website files on a web server. Some hosts support multiple platforms including WordPress (like Hosting.com or GoDaddy), while others are all-in-one systems with their own built-in framework (like Squarespace or Shopify).
   

For example: The domain name for this website is herwebsitelaunchpad.com. Our domain name registrar is DirectNIC, and the files and database that power WordPress for this site live on a computer server at our web host, Hosting.com.

Keep ‘Em Separated

Many web hosting companies, such as GoDaddy and Hosting.com, offer to serve as both registrar and website host. On the front end, this is simpler and sometimes less expensive. But simpler and cheaper don’t equal better, especially when your complete online presence is at stake.

Why? If your hosting company controls your domain name, your hosting and your email, you’ve got all your eggs in one basket. If something happens to the company, your online presence is kaput. (Think it couldn’t happen to a major hosting company? Keep reading.)

With everything separate, if you ever decide to change your web hosting company, all you have to do is log into your registrar and edit your DNS record to point it to a different web host. If your current host controls your domain name, things become exponentially more difficult — in some situations, they can prevent your domain name from being transferred for up to 60 days. Having complete control over your own domain name is a much better situation to be in.

Ask Me How I Know

It’s a lesson I learned the hard way.

In August 2005, I gave birth to my youngest — a beautiful, perfectly healthy baby boy. Nine days later, we were in the hospital with my son fighting for his life from meningitis.

We lived in Chattanooga, TN. A few hours after my son was admitted, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, where I’m from.

In shock, I spent the next four days with my son in quarantined NICU, numbly staring at the television and the devastation Katrina unleashed. During that time, it never occurred to me that I had 24 websites hosted on servers in downtown New Orleans. Had I thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have worried, because I would have remembered that the company I used for web hosting — one of the top rated companies in the country at the time — had a mirrored backup server in San Francisco.

Except the unthinkable, the impossible, happened. Two days after the floods knocked out the company’s computers in New Orleans, their building in San Francisco caught fire. Temporarily at least, our website hosting was gone, and I was in no position to deal with it.

When the Easy Route Isn’t

Fortunately, my staff was on top of it. We had backups to every website. For 19 of them, they copied the sites to a new web host and changed the DNS settings at the registrar, pointing the domain names to the new host.

But for five of the sites, I had taken the easy route: in a hurry during setup, I bought the domain names through our hosting company and left them as our registrar. (Did I mention they had the highest customer service ratings in the country at the time? I thought we were safe.) No one could have foreseen a natural disaster on one coast and a fire on another temporarily knocking out the company, leaving us no way to edit the domain name settings for five stranded websites.

The websites were only down 2-1/2 days. (And my son? He’s a perfectly healthy college student whose 6’1″ frame towers over his older brothers.) No lasting damage from either crisis, but a lot of temporary heartaches. And lessons painfully learned.

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