One of the journeys into the world of technology was setting up this Blog. A friend of mine advised me to use WordPress to create my site. WordPress is a dynamic HTML program. This means you don’t have to do coding (programming) to create a site. Because I wanted to set everything up and running all at once, I decided to do this during my summer holidays. In the past (about 10 years ago) I had a webshop in Magento (also a dynamic HTML service), but my skills are quite rusty so I knew I had to take the time to set everything up.
The first step was to get a domain name. But what is a domain name? To understand this, you need to know what an IP address is. IP is short for Internet Protocol and its address consists of a set of numbers separated by periods (for example, 34.249.138.199 which is the IP of this website). This set of numbers is a language that computers use to communicate with each other over a network. You can see the network as a big phonebook and all the IPs are in the phonebook. To reach a specific domain for a website, the network needs to find the IP number in that phonebook. Now let’s continue with the phone analogy. You’ve probably got a long list of contacts saved on your mobile phone. Each contact has a unique phone number. When you want to call someone, you usually click on the contact’s name rather than typing in the full phone number.
Domain names are just like contact in your phone. Rather than typing a complicated set of numbers (the IP address) into your browser, you type in a domain name. That domain name is human-friendly and much easier to remember than an IP address. All domain names are connected to a unique IP address.
Rather than typing a complicated set of numbers (the IP address) into your browser, you type in a domain name. That domain name is human-friendly and much easier to remember than an IP address. All domain names are connected to a unique IP address.
Domains are not for free. To get into the phonebook, you have to pay a hosting company. They are the only organizations that can create a “phone number” and hand this over to you. An IP is unique: once it has been handed out, you are the owner of that unique number. Nobody else is the owner of it.
I signed up with a hosting company and acquired the domain name I wanted. But after purchasing the domain I remembered there was a combo deal for both a domain name and a hosting subscription in which the hosting subscription was free for the first year. I had to click on the offer and provide the domain name I wanted to acquire to get the package deal to sign up. Great: I missed that. But no harm done: after getting in touch with customer support (I used “mijndomein”), I got the offer to get the hosting for free. Kudo’s to them: their service was very quick and efficient. There are many deals at hosting companies, but I gladly pay the full amount after a year. There are ways to bypass hosting through a hosting company but In my opinion, it’s worth the money to acquire all the required services from a hosting company. The costs of a domain and a hosting service are very cheap (€ 75/year without package deals) and you provide support to a professional company that can give you service in case of issues (like I had): I prefer not to be a cheapskate in this.
But why do you need a hosting company? When you build your website, you need to rent a space on a web server for your website to be stored on. I think you should only do this if hosting your website is one of your passions/hobbies. You should not do it to save money. Key reasons not to host your website on a local server:
- You want your website to be up and running 24/7. Issues with a server at a hosting company are always very quickly solved so the downtime with a hosting company is limited. In case you run things locally and something happens to your server in the middle of the night, your website can be down for a while.
- When the server of a hosting company breaks down, it’s repaired. When your server breaks down, you need to repair it yourself (including paying for the costs).
- Security: renowned hosting providers comply with all security regulations and limit the risk of being hacked. You increase your vulnerability by hosting your website locally which would lead to taking additional measures (and costs) to protect yourself properly from security breaches.
Like I stated before, the cost of a subscription with a hosting provider is at an all-time low. For both individuals and businesses, the benefits outweigh the cost and risks by far.
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