Web Site Hosting Foundations

The pieces of a web site, aka the things you need to have in place to have your place on the Internet.

Often these pieces are packaged all together, but when things go wrong, it becomes important to know what those pieces are and how they fit together. You can think of the pieces as if they were specialty Lego blocks, that build on each other. Domain Registration and DNS hosting are the two basic and minimal services you need to acquire. And then the services you actually want go on top of that, or more like DNS points to where they are.

Domain name Registration is the process by which you secure ownership of a unique domain as a part of the worldwide naming structure. Some common examples are; Google.com, NASA.gov, CBC.ca, etc...
If you have registered a Domain, remember that it has an expiration, after which someone else may grab it. Put that date in bold on your calendar to make sure you renew it or lose it!! Make sure you have a good password and MFA as domain hijacking is a common thing and very difficult and often impossible to recover from.
The tool for checking status is WhoIs, a general DNS tool to check domain registry. All Domain registrars run this, though not all show all the relevant information for this exercise. I primarily use DomainHelp, o

DNS hosting is the part that gives your domain meaning by linking the different sub names to IP addresses, as the Internet itself runs on just the numbers. This is the essential part that makes the Internet user-friendly for such applications as the Web and e-mail. All too often, a network problem either trips up DNS, or DNS was sloppily dealt with that it is the problem.
The tool for this is NSLookup. The particular one I use day to day is NirSoft's DNSDataView, and there are many website options as well.

Website hosting is the part that holds your web pages and serves them up to visitors with a web browser (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc...)
Your webserver can be a basic one that serves up straight HTML pages you create yourself or have created, or you can use a content management system such as WordPress. It all comes down to your budget, skills, and even how much power the server(s) use.

email hosting is the part that handles your email to send, receive, and store it, accessed via your email client(s) (Outlook, Thunderbird, your handheld device (or handbrain), optionally a web access, etc...). Many organizations will run this in-house for the greater control and options available on a local system. The big three on premises 'Groupware' systems are GroupWise, Notes, and Exchange, and many cloud options, such as several from Google and Microsoft, though all are evolving under the impact of the many competitors available.