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Question: I’m having someone build a website for my art business. Now they say I need “hosting” and a domain name and that it’s going to cost me $99 per month? I just want to show some of my sculptures, share any gallery showings or festivals I’m attending and let people send me email.
Answer: If you hired someone to write a book for you, their output would be a digital document, a massive bucket o’ words. Those words might be beautiful and the stuff of a Man Booker Prize or even a Nobel Prize, but if they’re not on paper, there’s no “book” and there’s certainly no way to have someone at a bookstore pick up and read that wonderful prose.
Your website is similar; there’s the design of the site and its corresponding content, but it has to “live” somewhere on the internet, too. The companies that offer data homes in the digital world are “hosting companies.” There are thousands of them, ranging from local Boulder businesses like indra.com to massive corporations like 1&1 and GoDaddy.
There’s another layer to this, too, because all websites need to have a unique name. That’s your domain name. The analogy is phone numbers: Plugging in a telephone to the old phone network (or powering up a cellphone) without a phone number assigned means it’s going to be really hard for people to call you.
All sites on the internet have Internet Protocol addresses. An example: 104.106.220.247. That’s the IP address of the White House website. But you can’t really use the IP for much as a regular user, so somewhere there’s a mapping table that says whitehouse.gov = 104.106.220.247. Much easier to type in whitehouse.gov to your web browser anyway, right?
That’s a domain name and yes, you’ll need that, too, so people can navigate to your webpage on the internet. The only alternative is that some hosting companies offer what are known as subdomains. If you’re fine being something like joeartist.godaddy.com or janeartist.wix.com then you might be able to skip your own domain. I do not, however, recommend that. Get a domain and you’ll have much more control over your digital empire, however tiny it may be today.
And finally, that $99 a month That’s pretty excessive because most entry-level business hosting is $10 to $25 a month and domain names cost $25 to $50 a year. Is your developer offering ongoing maintenance, search optimization or something else to justify the additional cost? If not, it might just be overkill.
Hope this clears up all the confusion. Good luck and remember you need a site + content + hosting + domain name to have a viable online presence.
Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since before the launch of the Internet and runs the popular AskDaveTaylor.com tech help site. You can also find AskDaveTaylor on Facebook and check out the AskDaveTaylor YouTube channel too.
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