Simply speaking, domain is a website’s address that ends with .com, .net, .gov, .edu, and so on.
For example: ebay.com, nasa.gov, tnt.tv, canada.gc.ca are all domains.
To have your own domain you need to register it with a registrar. Registrar is an organization or a company that has the right to register Internet domains. For domain registration you pay a small annual fee of $5-$25 per domain.
A web host is a company from which you can buy an Internet server space to place your website on. For that you pay a monthly or an annual fee which varies wildly depending on a hosting company and a hosting package you choose to buy. Some hosting companies offer to host your website for free with them, but impose various limitations on websites hosted with a free plan.
To make a real life analogy, to have a “brick and mortar” business you need to have a business name and a physical location where it’s headquartered. In the Internet world a domain is an equivalent of a business name while your hosting account with a web host is an equivalent of a business location.
Now days the difference between registrars and web hosts is kind of fuzzy. Because most registrars now offer web hosting services; and most web hosting companies offer to register domains on your behalf.
Still I do recommend to register your domains and buy your web hosting services from separate companies, although it requires an extra 5 minute step of pointing a domain (you can ask your webmaster to do this). Why do I recommend it? The main reason is that if you ever get unhappy with your web host and your domain is registered somewhere else, you can simply cancel your hosting account and move your website to another host without fighting with your old hosting company for the release of your domain name. However ridiculous it is, according to the official ICANN rules, web hosting companies can name their own price on a release of domains registered with them, and you’d have to wait 60 days after registering or transferring your domain before you can transfer it elsewhere.
For a registrar I recommend 1&1 (affiliate link). They have fair domain prices (even better: as of today, 05/26/10, they offer .com domain names free for one full year) and free anonymous domain registration. I do not, however, recommend using their web hosting services.
Thee web hosting companies with very good ratings, excellent prices and high customer satisfaction records that I do recommend are HostGator (rating: 4.9 out of 5), HostMonster (rating: 4.9 out of 5) , and BlueHost (rating: 4.1 out of 5) (affiliate links).
As a webmaster I do not recommend using and do not work with hosting companies that provide substandard services, such as GoDaddy (rating: 2.4 out of 5), DotEasy (rating: 2.7 out of 5), 1&1 hosting services (rating: 2.0 out of 5), and so on. I also wouldn’t recommend using overpriced NetworkSolutions (rating: 2.0 out of 5), which despite its claims of high security has been having hacker problems for at least half-a-year now.
