Domains and Hosting and Email and Website

Helps With

Understanding Domains, Hosts and email
Understanding what the costs are

A domain name is just a pointer or set of pointers. It determines where you should look if you want the website, FTP site or email associated with a particular domain.

Website

In order to setup a website you need somewhere permanently connected to the internet (a fast connection) and ideally a domain name to point it to.

Hosting costs from £100 per year (for a site that is static page, maybe a feedback form) to £ 1200 per year for a site that uses lots of bandwidth and lots of the processor power of the server.

Imagine you have a server and it has the IP address 111.222.111.222. If yours is the only website that exists on that server then typing http://111.222.111.222 into any browser will show your website. It's not very user friendly so you can get a domain name e.g. mydomain.co.uk and point www for that domain to the IP address (an 'A' record). This means that when you type: http://www.mydomain.co.uk into the browser you get your website. As an aside, it also means you can tell the web server to deliver different websites depending on the domain.

Email - Incoming

There are several varieties of email:

Webmail (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo)
Corporate based mail
Pop mail

Small Companies & Personal Mail

The most common setup is that the domain is setup to forward the mail to a Pop 3 mail box and the user uses a client like Outlook or Outlook Express to collect the mail. This has three parties involved:

Setup the domain to send the mail
A provider of a Pop 3 mail box to store the mail (cost from nothing .....inc in domain????) to £10 per year
The client setup to receive the mail.

There is often a "Catch All" mail box for the domain that enables all mail to be sent to one address.

Corporate Setup