Website visitors use your domain name to view your site when you have a website. As simple as it seems, there is a process that occurs from the time that the site visitor types in your domain and presses enter. When a website visitor enters your domain name into a browser, the domain is then translated into your server IP address, then the server sends that user your site files, which their browser represents to them as a typical web-page. You can see that, without each of these three elements, you won’t really have a website.
Computers usually communicate by using numbers, called IP addresses, to contact each other, much like you use a phone number to dial a specific person’s phone. Domain names on the internet are much like entries in a phone book. The phone book tells people looking for a business what the entries are just as a domain tells people (i.e. their computers) that a domain is hosted on the server.
The web-hosting or server is much like the space that you rent out to have your business in. It’s merely space itself. It does not include furnishings like shelves for your products, just as the web-hosting account doesn’t include a site for you to sell your products. Without the hosting services, you won’t have a place for your files to reside, so your domain would then become like a disconnected phone number in the phone directory, and your site files would have nowhere to stay.
The Website files are what your visitors and potential customers usually see when going they visit your website. The website files are the same as any other file you normally use, like a .jpg for photographs, or .mp3 for music files.
The Web Hosting Server knows how to read these files, which explains how the website looks or instructs the server to do a series of computations. These computations are things like figuring out what blog article it’s supposed to send back to the viewer, or what forum post it’s supposed to send back.
