What you Should Know About Domain and Web-hosting?

A Complete Domain and Web Hosting breakdown for hobby bloggers.

Are you a closet writer?

Do you want to streamline your blogging habits?

How would you like to write for your own website?

The corona pandemic has created worldwide havoc. People are confined to their homes without any scope for outdoor entertainment activities. It is necessary to stay indoors to protect ourselves and to prevent the spread of COVID. But it also gave us an opportunity to refine our hobbies. An empty mind is a devil’s workshop. Break your cycle of monotonous working and binge-watching. Refresh your mental health by honing your hobbies.

If you’re a budding writer, a wannabe blogger or someone looking to expand your horizons to reach more audience, let’s discuss the options we have.

Domain

What is a Domain?

You’ve arranged a party on the occasion of your birthday. You’ve conveyed this information to your friends and they are very excited to come. On the day of the party, you’ve cooked food for 40 people. Also arranged an open space for everyone to sit, relax and watch a football game. At 6 pm, You’re eagerly waiting by the door to welcome your friends. But nobody shows up. After an hour it struck that you’ve forgotten to give them your address. If they don’t know your address, how could they come.?

In simple terms, Domain is equivalent to your home address. Your friends can come to your house, only if they knew the address.

There are millions of websites out there. Amazon.in is a website. Theguardian.com is a website. We call the names of these websites, Domains i.e. your home address. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – ICANN regulates these domain names.

You may wonder.!! What’s the purpose of regulating domains?, What’s the need?

If there is no regulation over the handing out of Domains, people will register websites with the same name. People will register the same address for multiple homes. That would be a recipe for disaster. Wouldn’t it? ICANN exists to prevent this from happening. Facebook.com is a registered domain. So no one else can register that name again.

To publish your works, you need a domain. A home address. So that people could reach you.

We have completed step 1.

Extensions

Before we move on to hosting there is another term I’d like to discuss about. ‘Extensions’. You might have noticed it in the Domain paragraph.

Amazon comes with .in while it is .com for The Guardian. Amazon has a .com extension too. So what is it?

In this context, .in refers to the Internet country code of India. .com has its origin from the word ‘Commercial’. There are many such extensions. .uk and .us are the country codes of the United kingdom and the United states respectively.

We also have .net from the word ‘Network’. The companies which are related to the networking technologies register their domains with .net extensions.

.Org is used by non-profit organizations, .edu is used by universities. There are so many such extensions.

Does Extensions matter?

It’s not fair to judge a book by its cover. But that’s an utopian philosophy. People do judge a website from its name and its extensions. An extension can drastically change the website’s traffic. Keep this in your mind while choosing your domain and extensions.

Put yourself in the common man’s shoes. Whenever you’re surfing the internet, you’d tend to go to the website with legit domain and extension.

You have quality content. But if your domain looks like this ‘ whorepresents.com’ or ‘penisland.net’ you mightn’t get the traffic you deserve. A proper extension can increase your web-traffic by twice.

So choose your extensions carefully. There is a catch in this concept. The popular top level domain extensions will cost more.

Web Hosting

As we now have a domain, we need a hosting service to keep our website online.

Let’s go back to the Party scenario. To arrange a party we need manpower, decorations, food. Most importantly, cleaning the place after the party. We can do all this by ourselves. But it consumes a lot of our time and energy. What if we can outsource that part to someone else? That would be great. Right?

There is. That is hosting.

We create a website using our domain. But running a website requires a lot of things to taken care of. At this point, you may even wonder, can’t we host our own websites?

Yes, We can. But let me list some of the disadvantages of self-hosting.

1) You should have a medium to advanced knowledge about servers and securities. Also you’d need a working knowledge of hardware integration.

2) Hosting a website is a business activity. Even if we host our own website, we are not allowed to use our home Internet to power that hosting. Renting a business ISP (Internet Service Provider) is not cost-effective.

3) We’ll need additional hardware components, a safe place in our home to arrange the set-up and Uninterrupted electricity to power them. Depending upon the heat generated in these electrical components, we may need an efficient ventilation system.

4) Servers are attacked often. Backups had to be done often in cloud services. They add to our operating costs.

5) Server crashes can happen.

To work around these disadvantages, there are hosting services we could hire. They would take care of all the technical issues. We can concentrate our attention on writing.

We’ve completed step 2.

Web Hosting Jargons to consider

Before we discuss the hosting options available out there, it would be very helpful to understand some of the technicalities. Most people would blindly choose something without understanding their needs. Renting a hosting service costs us money. If we have some basic knowledge over the technical aspects, we can make a wise choice.

* HDD vs SSD

We bought a domain. We hired a web-host. Then what happens?

We update our website with images, articles, gifs, videos and more. Hosting servers save these files in their hard disks. Just like we save something from our pen drive to a computer’s internal memory. So, if the web-hosting provider uses an SSD, the speed would be higher than the HDD. Nowadays most of the hosting services use SSD in their servers. But this is an important technicality we should be aware of. If you want a cheaper alternative, HDD servers would be a viable option.

* SSL certification for web hosting

In the good old days when your parents got a call from your school on the landline telephone, you could hear what they were saying from the bedroom phone. Secure Sockets Layer -SSL overcomes this by encryption.

Whenever any information passes between a computer and the server, SSL encrypts the data. So, no one can sniff out the data. It’ll be protected from the man in the middle attacks and such.

*Storage and Bandwidth

Storage is a common term. While building a website, we upload many things. Hosting servers save them. According to our hosting plan, they give us storage space.

How should you select your storage plans?

It depends on what kind of website you’re planning to present. If you’ll upload high-resolution photographs and videos in a large quantity, you’ll need plans with higher storage. If the majority of them are word documents, you’ll be fine with a decent storage option.

How much bandwidth should you need for your domain?

Also depends on what kind of website you’re planning to build. But for budding bloggers, a basic plan would be enough.

*24/7 Support for Web hosting

Servers go down frequently. As stated in the second law of thermodynamics, machines are not 100 percent efficient. So, while choosing a hosting service, customer service is an important aspect to look into.

Now let’s jump onto the provider’s list.

Web-hosting providers

There are few kinds of hosting servers available out there in the market. Shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting, Cloud hosting. For beginners shared hosting is enough. So, we’ve concentrated on the costs of Shared hosting alone.

1) Hostsoch

Why is this first in the list?

Well. There are a few reasons for it. Do you remember the New year Resolutions? We follow them for a week and forget about them asap. Writing is not an easy task. It requires some serious discipline. In these days of PUB-G and Tiktok, we get distracted by silly things.

So do not go for the high end, high tech hosting if you are a beginner. Maintaining a blog requires constant attention to it. Subscribe for 1-year hosting service. Yes, there are some monetary benefits if you subscribe to a 2 years or 3 years plan. If you’re thinking about creating a business website, 3 years would be fine. Because you’d have a solid long-term goal.

But if the idea is to create a personal blog, I’d recommend the one-year subscription.

So Why Hostsoch?

This is one of the very few hosting services, which gives us a low-cost option for the 1-year plans. Their one-year plan costs Rs.99/month (1.32 USD). The other provider’s 1-year plans cost almost twice or thrice. Since it is a basic plan, we don’t get a free domain. Storage space is 1GB with 5GB transfer.

Their advanced plan costs Rs.149/month (1.98 USD). This plan covers almost all the features provided by the competitors.

2) Godaddy

Their starter plan costs Rs.99/month (1.32 USD). They charge the same for the 1-year plan. For the Economy pack, the cost is Rs.199/month (2.65 USD) if you buy the 3 years plan. They give a free domain for the whole subscription duration.

With 100GB storage and Unmetered bandwidth, it would be more than enough for the beginners.

3) Hostinger

Hostinger covers all the minimum requirements for a beginner. Their price begins at Rs.59/month (0.78 USD), if you subscribe for the 3 years plan. There are few drawbacks in their basic plan. We have to get our domain name separately and they don’t provide the backup option in this plan. If you want to test the water, this is a cheaper, quality option.

In their Premium Web hosting plan at Rs.119/month (1.58 USD), they cover all the features.

4) Bluehost

One of the largest web hosting services available in the market. The basic plan starts at Rs. 199/month (2.65USD) with 1-year free domain, 50 GB storage and the option for 25 subdomains. It comes with SSL certification. This is officially recommended by WordPress.

5) Hostpapa

What is so special about Hostpapa?

Instead of giving the software technicalities, Let’s talk about the infrastructure of Hostpapa. Entered into the hosting platform way back in 2002, they have state of the art server farms.

Seismic proofed racks and cabinets, HP hardwares and servers networked by Cisco’s equipment. With back-up power generation, a dedicated diesel generator for power redundancy, redundant climate control systems, dual pre-action fire suppression systems and more.

Hostpapa is one of the earlier platforms that went green. But they don’t use renewable energy for their operation. They buy ‘Green tags’ from companies that harvest their energies from renewable sources.

On the Software front, Hostpapa charges Rs.99/month(1.32 USD) for their startup plan. But it offers more features than the others.

While everyone else provides 1 website for their basic plans, Hostpapa supports 2 websites. It comes with free domain, 100GB of SSD storage, Unmetered Bandwidth, 24/7 support and free SSL encryption.

At this price, Hostpapa’s starter plan is a steal.

There are other few hosting providers like Dreamhost, Hostgator and Inmotion hosting. They all provide the best features but at a slightly higher price than their competitors. GreenGeeks is a hosting platform, which runs its servers through 100% green energy. If you’re a renewable energy supporter, check that out. It would be wise to check them all before making a decision.

Web Hosting–Plan comparisons

Before wrapping this up, there is another word we should be aware of. ‘Wordpress’. A decade earlier, we had to hire a professional web designer for our websites. They’d write the codes as per our needs. Even to update our contents, we have to rely on them. But today, the process has become so easy. We can just drag and drop our contents onto the website. And it is a totally free tool.

My best wishes

It’s not fair to judge a book by its cover. But that’s an utopian philosophy. People do judge a website from its name and its extensions. An extension can drastically change the website’s traffic. Keep this in your mind while choosing your domain and extensions.

Refining a hobby to achieve a professional status requires a lot of effort in a trial and error manner. It helps us crawl out of our comfort zone. In our busy day to day life, a hobby eases our mind and keeps our perspective fresh. So, try to neutralise the negatives you’ve felt about this lockdown by indulging into your hobbies.

Yes, this is a hard time for every one of us. Keep your morale, mental and physical fitness high. Stay healthy, think healthy. Wear a mask and follow social distance.

If you’re interested in getting Groovefunnels, the up and coming complete funnel kit, check here.