What you need to know as a website owner

2 years ago
admin
4 minutes

Domain name registrars, Name Servers, DNS Records, Website Hosting, Email Hosting: What does it all mean?

Items that have fees

  • Domain Registrar $/yr – Where you lease the domain name (example.com / example.net) paid annually
  • Name Server $/yr – Where you host your DNS (Domain Name Service) Records. Can be at the registrar or a different service provider. DNS Records are a table of names to IP addresses or names to names that eventually point to an IP address. For example the full name “www.example.com” is set to IP address 12.34.56.78 and “mail.example.com” is set to IP address 22.44.54.77. The IP addresses are used like telephone numbers to route traffic to the place where the actual server computer is.
  • Email Server $$/mo – Where you host your email. The DNS MX records points to an IP address of your email server. These can be a single privately owned email server or a huge provider like Microsoft or Google. Basic mail service can be provided with your website hosting or can be part of a large software and service bundle like Microsoft 365.
  • Web Server $$/mo – Where you host your website DNS A and CNAME records point here. Web server computers need to store the files and databases that make up your website. These can be fractions of a server or can have many physical servers for really big websites. Caching and CDN (Content Delivery Networks) can speed up web servers even further for additional costs. Fast websites keep visitors viewing your site. Slow sites are ranked lower in search results and viewers abandon sites that are slow to respond.
  • SSL Certificate $/yr – Free/Paid certificate to make an HTTP website HTTPS (secure). Almost all web traffic is now encrypted to ensure safe surfing. Encrypted web traffic ensures you are seeing unaltered content from the server you are expecting to be connected to. Even if the content is not sensitive, bad actors could have interfered with benign sites putting your computer at risk. Web browsers now default to expecting encrypted traffic. To encrypt this traffic, a certificate issued to the server ensures you are connected to the server domain name “www.example.com” and not an imposter. These certificates may have a fee or may use some of the free certificate providers. They all require some type of validation of the website owner.
  • Web Developer $$$ – The company you pay to create and update your website
  • Website Administrator $$ – A company you pay to manage some or all of the above

Let’s start with your domain name. You need to lease a domain name from a domain name registrar. Lease terms are typically 1 to 10 years. You pay them an annual fee to use that domain name. Let’s use example.com for the domain name. The registrar that you lease the name example.com from pays the .com TLD (Top Level Domain) owner for example.com. They then register your DNS providers Name Servers on the .com master list.

Your DNS provider hosts the tables of IP Addresses that point to where you set where you want to host your websites and email servers. The DNS Name Servers can be located at your domain registrar and included with your annual fee or can be at a completely different provider. We have Name Server records set at the registrar level to allow that separation. ??That provider hosts the table of DNS records that help the users find where your servers are in the world.

Mail Servers like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 are then paid to be your email provider. You will setup what is called an MX (Mail eXchange) record at your DNS provider.

Similarly your website will need a Web Server. You will need a DNS A record to tell the world where to find your Web Server.

Additional website items

  • HTML/CSS – The base static website commands that make a web page display on your web browser. These are used to make text different colors or centered on a page and so much more.
  • PHP/Javascript – Some of the programming languages used to make websites have pages that are more than static. They allow websites to talk to databases, be interactive and very much more.
  • WordPress – The Free templating software many websites use to generate a website.
  • IIS/Apache/Nginx – The software that your web browser talks to. These programs send the web pages your browser asks for.