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 last dot, at least in most cases, is consider the Top Level Domain, or TLD. The most common one is .com, by far, 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, .info, .br, and so on. These organizations keep track of all domains that end 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 from ICANN if I haven't bought it yet.

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

For this reason, some people think it is a good idea to buy up the namespace 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, but it is by no means necessary for you to do this in order for your chose domain to work.

Once you have chosen your TLD 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.