When you’re just beginning to setup a website, it can be difficult to understand how a domain name and hosting work together to connect your website to the rest of the world. After all, there are no ‘domain names’ nor ‘hosting space’ outside of the virtual realm of the Internet. Here are a couple analogies that may help clarify things.

Real estate and mailing addresses

You can think of hosting and a domain name like a building and a mailing address. As a building is a space that holds all of your stuff, hosting space is where you house your website files and other digital information.

But without a mailing address, the building (or people residing in the building) cannot be contacted by the outside world. In a similiar way, people cannot easily connect to a website if it doesn’t have a domain name associated with it.

People with name tags

My friend Micah sent over this analogy.

You can also think of hosting and a domain name as a person with a name tag. Without the name tag, other people can not address that person. In a similiar way, without a domain name, an Internet user can not easily find a website.

Also, just as a name tag can be swapped among different people, a domain name can be swapped between different hosts. For instance, if you own a domain name and have hosting, you can take that domain name and use it with a different host.

I hope those help (and don’t cause any more confusion)! Do you have your own analogy? Feel free to submit it as a comment below.