There have been situations where Customers get confused about the difference between domain registration and a hosting account. Today, we're going to try to enlighten you on the differences.
Let's pause the tech-talk for a moment, and switch to a metaphor. Your domain is like your SIM card. When someone wants to get in touch with you, they call the phone number which is tied to your SIM, get connected by the Telecomms, and then your phone rings. Your phone, on the other hand, is like your hosting account. It is where your store all of your things: your contacts, your messages, your pictures and your videos. If you one day decide to get another SIM or switch networks," your phone would remain the same, but your phone number would change. Makes sense, right?
Like your phone, your hosting account is where you store your website's files. It's where you keep your posts and pages, your photographs and comments. You can move to a different hosting account, just like you can move all of your contacts and files from one phone to another.
Your domain name and your hosting account do not have to be the same company. For many people, it is more convenient to keep all website costs in one place by buying their domain and hosting their site through a single company. Some people may have registered their domains with one provider and gotten their hosting from a different, for these people, their site is registered and hosted through two separate companies.
Hosting, Domain Mapping and Nameservers…If you register a domain and also purchase your hosting account with ExtraHostPro, that means both your host and registrar are the same. However, if you've already bought your domain through a different registrar or want to use a different top-level domain (TLD), like .pw, you will have to point your domain to your hosting account, which I would like to call Domain Mapping.
With Domain Mapping, you're managing your website's content and your domain name separately. To map a domain to your ExtraHostPro hosting account, you change what are known as domain nameservers. Your nameservers resolve, or connect, to the IP address of your site's host server, thereby bringing visitors to your site specifically. When you change the nameservers of your domain to those of a different hosting provider, you're letting your domain know, "Hey, when you type in
http://mydomain.com/, this is where you can find my site."
When you update your nameservers, it takes some time for the domain resolution system of the Internet to catch up. This process is known as propagation. Domain propagation may take a few minutes or hours, depending on your location and ISP but would usually take a maximum of 24 to 48 hours (but usually much less than this).
