Understanding Domain Registration, DNS, and Web Hosting

These terms are often confusing because they are all important, but completely separate terms regarding the functioning of a website. To help give a quick primer, we have added these definitions here for you to help better understand these important concepts. 

Registrar - Where your domain is registered. GoDaddy, Google Domains, and Namecheap are examples of registrars we see commonly. This is where you pay for your domain name and many of our clients choose to keep these login credentials private. Although there are some exceptions, we typically only need access to this account during migration, but not to perform maintenance and support. 

DNS - Domain Name System - is the internet's equivalent of a phone book. They translate domain names to server (IP) addresses. There are various types of DNS records and some more common records are:

• "A records" tells visitors how to reach your website
• "MX records" tell people how to reach your email
• "TXT records" provide supplemental information (like authenticating ownership of the domain name to a 3rd party service)
• "CNAME records" are typically subdomains (like subdomain.mydomain.com)

Many domain registrars provide DNS hosting, but for a variety of reasons (including security and performance) we use Cloudflare for all of our DNS hosting. 

Web Hosting - There are many different hosting options out there with different levels of service (WP Engine is our favorite), but at its basic level Website hosting provides server storage space and an IP address for your website. 

These concepts are the main players when it comes to the technical details of how websites, domains and email functions. However, it is important to know that there are many different variations and advanced methods of using these tools. The concepts above are just the basics and if there are advanced configurations, the RadiateWP developers can assist with those specific needs.