Web Site Hosting Foundations

The pieces of a web site, aka the things you need to have in place to have you 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. Domain Registration and DNS hosting are the two basic and minimal services you need to acquire. And then the services you actally want on top of that

Domain name Registration is the process by which you secure ownership of a unique domain as a part of the world wide naming structure. Some common examples are; Google.com, NASA.gov, CBC.ca, etc...

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.

Website hosting is the part that holds your web pages and serves them up to visitors with a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc...)
Your webserver can be a basic one that serves up HTML pages you create yourself or have created, or you can use a content mangement system such as WordPress.

email hosting is the part that handles your email to send, receive, and store it, accessed via your email client(s) (Outlook, Thunderbird, your smart phone, 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 'Groupware' systems are GroupWise, Notes, and Exchange though all are evolving under impact of the many competitors available.