Getting Started with Hosting

Introduction

Hosting is a pretty general term that is often used to refer to a number of services related to hosting, in addition to the hosting itself.

Specifically, when someone hosts for you, they are providing you a hardware, software, or service that you and/or others can access over the internet. It could be a website, and most often is, but can also refer to email, files, databases, software, or connectivity, among other things.

As it pertains to this page, Hosting is the service that Computerisms or other companies such as GoDaddy or Canadian Web Hosting provides, and is related to your domain name and the related services linked by it.

Domain Name

Before any hosting can take place, you must first own a domain name. Own is a strong word, since really you can only buy one year at a time, so maybe rent might be a better word for it. Regardless, it needs to be registered in your name.

Domain names are parsed from right to left. Every thing to the right of the right-most dot, at least in most cases, is consider the Top Level Domain, or TLD. Everything between the rightmost dot in the domain name and dot to the left of that is considered the 2nd level domain, and this generally the namespace that identifies you most specifically. In our case, computerisms is the 2nd level domain, and .ca is our TLD.

The most common TLD is .com, which is run by the organization called ICANN, but another very common TLD is .ca, which is run by the organization CIRA. Many other countries and organizations also have TLDs, such as .org, .tv, .pro, .info, .br, and so on. These organizations keep track of all 2nd level domains in their respective TLD, so for example, once I have registered computerisms with CIRA, computerisms.ca is now taken, and nobody else can take computerisms.ca unless I let it expire. However, someone could go buy computerisms.com if I haven't bought it yet.

For a full list of all the TLDs that are available, consult This Page

In order to prevent others from occupying your 2nd level domain namespace, some people think it is a good idea to buy up the 2nd level domain in as many TLDs as is reasonable, so they might buy domain.com, domain.ca, domain.org, and domain.net. Overall, this is not terribly expensive in the big scope of things, and it can prevent problems in the future; for example a company who bought a 2nd level domain in the .ca TLD later found out that someone else had bought the same 2nd level domain in the .com TLD to host a porn site, so some of their clients ended up at the porn site instead of the company web site because they went to the .com version of the 2nd level domain. But it is by no means necessary for you to do this in order for your website and related services to work.

If you want see if your chosen 2nd level domain and TLD combination is available, you can use a site like This One.

When people are talking about domain names, they typically combine the 2nd level domain and the TLD, and refer to that as their "domain name". So computerisms.ca and computerisms.com would both be considered as 2 separate domain names in conversation.

Once you have chosen your domain name and made sure nobody else has taken it already, then you need a registrar to get your domain name(s) registered for you. A registrar is basically any organization that is authorized to sell domain names, so companies like Computerisms can do this for you, but there are a virtual plethora of registrars available online where you can register it as well.

Each TLD has its own rules, but generally you can own any domain name for up to 10 years, and they are sold by the year, so if you are sure you will still be using the domain name in 5 years, you can buy all 5 of those years in one block.

To do this, you will need to pay a company such as Computerisms to register your domain name with a Registrar.
The first step is to choose which Top Level Domain (TLD) you would like your domain to be in.