Most of you will have at least two products with Hosting Australia, one will be a domain and one will be hosting for web, email or both.
These are generally billed on different cycles, as domains are billed every 2 years on most occaisionss and hosting is either monthly, or annually.
For an explanation of the difference, please continue reading below :
Domain
A domain name works in a similar way to how a phone book works. A phone book tells people how to find your phone and address details and a domain name tells your computer(simplified via a web browser or email client) how to find your website files or email. This is done via the sites IP address, which is located and assigned via our hosting server.
So, whilst your domain may be "mygreatdomain.com.au", nice and easy to remember. Your site is actually located via an IP address. But IP addresses are long and hard to remember. For example, your IP address assigned via our server, combined with your account name may be something like "123.245.123.100/~myaccountname". So its much easier to use a domain name to direct your sites visitors to our servers.
REMEMBER - A domain, is no good without a hosting server!
Hosting
As mentioned above, your domain, via the IP address we assign, will allow visitors to reach your web site located on our servers, via a memorable address.
But what is hosting really?
Once a visitor puts an address into their browser, the domain will convert that request to an IP address. Via that IP address, which is unique to a server or computer, the visitor is served your website files, images, videos, text etc. Our server runs special software that allows things to be displayed all nice and neat in a browser, and also converts and delivers the various clicks and links on your page. Of course we also have other software that handles emails, and allows you to send and receive mail.
The easiest way to think of hosting, is to draw comparison to you leasing an office space to run a business. You lease the empty floor space, but you still need to fill the space with desks, computers, shelves, phones and other bits and pieces, which allow you to run the business. Hosting space is simillar, in that once you set up a hosting account, you still need to build a web site to put on the hosting account and show visitors what you do, or what you sell.
