Differences Between Domain, Email hosting, and Web hosting

Since there’s a lot of confusion around the topic of domains, web hosting and email hosting, we’ll quickly review these three types of online hosting.

Domain Hosting and Registration

Domain hosts store domain names and facilitate their registration. First, you register a domain like yourdomain.com with a domain registrar, and just like a street address, the URL directs people to your website's location. If you’re using a domain registered through a third-party provider, that company is your domain host.

For your website to appear online, you need actual file hosting. You’ll often find domain and web hosting offered as a package, with most companies offering domain, email, and web hosting as a bundle.

Web Hosting

Web Hosting is a service that provides computer resources such as server space, memory, and bandwidth needed for your website files to live on the internet. Users can create and store website content on a web hosts servers so it can be viewed online via a web browser.

If you imagine a website plus all its content as a store, a web host simply provides the physical space to display the store’s products—in this case, the website content including the text, images, videos and anything else that make up the site's content.

There are different styles of hosting available to reflect the needs of different websites. Web hosting plans range from shared hosting with multiple sites sharing a single server to dedicated hosting, in which one customer uses an entire server’s space and bandwidth.

Email Hosting

Email hosting is a service in which your email messages and associated files are all stored on a server. When you receive an email to your website’s domain address, the email is routed across the internet and stored on the recipient server. At this point, the server administrators will determine which action to take (reply or ignore) bearing in mind any spam filters, re-routing requests and if the sender is on any blacklists.

The server hosting email can be the same server that’s hosting your website content, a server managed by another host, or two different servers managed by the same hosting company. Email hosting providers might specialize in offering only email hosting services, but it’s more typical for companies to offer bundled emails and web hosting packages these days.