One item that causes confusion for our clients, is the difference betweeen web-hosting and domain registrations. The two are tightly related (you generally don't have a website unless you have a domain name).

Some people navigating our website get confused because we sell both services but do not require clients to use both. Some people will have a domain registration with us and web-hosting elsewhere, others will have web-hosting with us and register their domain(s) somewhere else. The simplest thing is to buy both services from us :-).

What is a Domain Registration?

A domain registration is a "right to use and control" a domain name. It is _not_ related to any content or services associated with that domain. Domain registrations are quite simple. They are valid for a period of time, they generally have some contact information associated with them, and may have some DNS servers too. (DNS servers are often called name servers.)

Caveat: Our registration service includes (optional) web-hosting type services like forwarding web requests to an existing website and/or forwarding e-mail for the domain to an existing mailbox somewhere else.

What is Web-Hosting?

Web-Hosting is a set of services. We configure our web-servers to hand out web pages and handle e-mail for your domain name.

That sounds a lot simpler than it is. Web pages can be complex. They are often generated by programs which store and retrieve information from databases. The world of e-mail is not simple either. It can be as simple as forwarding messages to a mailbox at an existing ISP, or it can include multple layers of filtering (virus, content analysis for spam detection, challenge/response) before being stored for later retrieval. The message might be retrieved by our Webmail system, or an e-mail client on a home or business computer like Outlook or Eudora.