Domain name, hosting and email explained

Getting online sounds technical, but it's really four simple things. Here they are, using a house as the example.

Your domain name is your street address

It's the web address people type in, like yourbusiness.com.au. You rent it for a set period (usually a year at a time) and renew it to keep it. The most important thing: it should be registered in your name, with login details you can get hold of. If a web designer registered it in theirs, you could lose control of your own business name online.

Australian domain names have some eligibility rules, and we check them for you. You can search for a domain name to see if yours is free.

Hosting is the land and the building

Your website is a set of files. Those files have to live on a computer that's switched on and connected to the internet all the time. That's what hosting is: renting space on a server. Good hosting keeps your site fast and available, and it's the thing that keeps working in the background while you're on the job. See our web hosting plans.

Your website is the shopfront

This is what customers actually see: your pages, photos and contact details. It sits on the hosting and is found at your domain name. You can have a domain with no website yet, but you can't have a website without both a domain and hosting.

Email is the letterbox

Business email looks like you@yourbusiness.com.au, which customers tend to trust more than a Gmail address. It uses your domain name, and it can sit with your hosting or separately. Our business email hosting works on a phone and a computer.

Why it matters that they fit together

The four pieces connect through your domain's settings. When one changes, such as moving to a new website, it's easy to accidentally break your email. That's why it helps to have one person looking after all four, and who'll tell you plainly what's going on.

If you already have a domain or email somewhere else, that's fine. We can work with it. Send us a message and we'll explain what you've got.