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.

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. 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.