As it is in our contemporary world not all users or business owners are familiar with the concept of website hosting and domain name. In fact, a lot of users and business owners do not understand the difference between Website Hosting and Domain Name. A lot of people think that they do the same thing.
Most people who are also learning how to build websites or website development for the first time also do not understand that domain name and web hosting are two separate things.

What we will attempt to do here is to explain the difference between a domain name and web hosting.

WHAT IS A DOMAIN NAME?

A domain name is the address of a website that people type into their web browser to access the website. For example, the domain name of Google is “google.com”. Domain names are registered with domain name registrars and must be unique.

what this means is that if we liken your website to a house then your domain name can be likened to or called the address.

Bear in mind that your address can actually be a physical address without any physical structure on it yet. The same thing applies to domains as you can have a domain name with nothing on it until web hosting is done.

Let us expatiate further

First, we need to understand what makes up the internet. The internet is usually a giant network of computers connected to each other with the aid of cables.

To make it easy to uniquely identify each computer they are usually assigned a series of numbers known as IP addresses.

Now what do we mean by IP address?

This is usually a combination of numbers separated by dots. It takes the form 66.249.66.1

Now these numbers are pretty easy for computers to remember but the same is not the case with human beings who will not be able to remember these numbers to connect their websites to the internet. so to make it easier for humans to remember domain names were invented.

Domain names comprise the use of words which makes it easy to remember website addresses without having to memorize a string of numbers.

So visiting a website on the internet becomes easier as all you need to do is to type the domain name.

What is web hosting or Website Hosting?

Web hosting, on the other hand, is a service that allows a website to be accessible on the Internet. Web hosting providers host website files on their servers, making them available for users to access via the website's domain name.

Webhosting can be referred to as the actual house or building structure at your house address. The house contains you and everything you own.

you can also look at web hosting as the place where all your website files reside that is your scripts, your images, etc . Let us just call it the actual home of your website.

It is worth noting that all websites on the internet need a place to live – web hosting

So, the way this works is that when someone enters the domain name of your company website in a browser the domain name usually gets interpreted into the IP address of your web hosting company's computer.

The web hosting company or your web host usually has a computer known as a hosting server that contains your website's files and it sends those files to the users' browser whenever it is called for.

web hosting companies specialize in storing and serving websites.

There are different kinds of hosting plans offered by web hosting companies to their customers.

These include shared hosting, vps hosting, managed word press hosting cloud hosting e-commerce hosting, and more

source: https://beyondwebsitedesign.com.ng/2023/04/11/difference-between-webhosting-and-domain-name-part-1/