Web Hosting Demystified
Web Hosting Demystified
We’ve talked a lot about domain names till now. Let’s leave the world of domains for a while and enter the mystic world of Web Hosting. If I were to explain everything about Web Hosting, probably we’ll need a whole education series about that separately. So I will limit myself to the very basic understanding of Web Hosting in this article.
One thing I have been noticing since the time we started and even today is that people aren’t able to differentiate between a domain and web hosting. So let’s just understand that first.
As you must have known by now your domain name is JUST the name by which your online presence is recognised. Thats all, nothing more. Now why did you register this domain in the first place. Because you wanted a website for your company / yourself showcasing your products / services. So you would typically hire a company which would make the website for your company. This website would have some files, images, documents, animations, etc. etc. Now comes the BIG question of putting everything together.
Let’s assume you got your domain registered with DirectI and you choose XYZ Web Design company for making your website. Now how would you bind your domain name with the files that have been produced / made by XYZ Company, so that when somebody types www.yourdomainname.com in the browser it would actually show up your files. This is the bonding that is established by “Web Hosting” and the company which would provides this service to you is the “Web Host”. So let’s say you go to www.google.com and do a search for “web hosting companies India”. You would get 10000s of results for it. One of those is for Tradebooster. So you decide to give us a call and all goes well and you make the final decision of actually “hosting” your website with us. Now there are two more parties involved in the entire deal.
1. DirectI – your domain registrar
2. XYZ Company – the one who made your website.
From the article “The domain record” you would recollect that Item No.6 was something called the Name Server Information. I briefly mentioned that the name server information tells the registry WHERE the domain is hosted. So all you need to do is ask us for our Name Server information, then go to your domain control panel, login there and update the Name Servers to what we told you. This would update your domain record and tell the registry that your domain now points to the server of Tradebooster. This update process normally takes about 24-48 hours (actually takes less, but it’s always better to be on the safer side of things 
) to reflect across various parts of the world. In about maximum 48 hours from the time you update the Name Server information, requests for www.yourdomainname.com would be redirected to the server of Tradebooster.
When you ordered the hosting account with us, you would have received an email containing technical information about your hosting account. Keep this email safely and DO NOT delete it. Since XYZ company has made your website, you would need to pass this information to them so that they put the files for your website on the server where your hosting account is setup. Once those files are transferred to the server successfully, all requests for www.yourdomainname.com would start showing the homepage (simply said, the first page) for your website. Thats it. Everything is now setup and you are ready to start advertising your brand new website. Congratulations!
There are actually a lot of technical things involved in the entire process, however, I am a firm believer of simplicity and wanted to keep this article as non-technical as possible. The above, I believe, is the simplest explanation for web hosting.
I would be doing an exclusive video to actually explain what happens in the background when somebody types www.yourdomainname.com in the browser. This would ONLY be available as a video and NOT as an article.
The next article teaches you some tips on securing your online identity.
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