“Do you host our website?”
“Wait, you host our domain, but not our website?
Ok, and what about DNS? Also, what exactly is DNS?”
Our team at Faster Solutions answers these questions from our clients often. If you find yourself scratching your head at any — or all — of these terms, you’re not alone. And it’s not information you should necessarily feel bad for not knowing. That’s why your Faster Solutions team is here!
Learn more about these helpful terms below, but don’t just move on from this helpful refresher. Join us and move your website, domain, and DNS to Faster Solutions. That way you’ll never have to worry about your website losing its domain name, overpriced hosting fees, or trying to remember where one piece of your site lives over the other! Looking for a new website altogether? Get 20% off of a website build from November 27 through December 4 — and we’ll take care of all of the below, too.
To begin, you should know that to exist online, your website must include three parts: The domain, the DNS, and of course, the website itself.
The domain is, put simply, your website’s name. In our case, that domain is fastersolutions.com. That’s it. Our domain is just the words “fastersolutions.com.” Easy enough so far, right?
Now, we can point that domain to a website. The website contains files, databases, and code that work together to make your website exist. Those files live on a computer. This is what we call website hosting. You can purchase space on a computer to host the files and databases, as well as all of the bandwidth required to send this information across the world. When hosting your website at Faster Solutions, this also comes with 99 percent uptime and lightning-speed load times, not to mention daily backups of your website!
So this is where we arrive at DNS. DNS gets a bit more complicated. Think of it like this: Computers love numbers, but people prefer words. Now, remember what we said earlier? That each website is hosted on a computer? That computer has a number, and the location of the files within that computer has a number. These are very long numbers.
So, instead of making people type those numbers to find the website, we use DNS to convert the domain. In our case, we can convert fastersolutions.com into that long number, so the computer can find it. Fun fact! If you host your website on fastersolutions.com, we include your DNS for free with at least one website domain! Get started now.
This also works for email. For example, sales@fastersolutions.com is what you may use to reach out to our team about a new website build. But through DNS records, we convert that email address into another very long number to translate it into the computer’s language. In order for a website or email to function, you need the domain to give it a name, and DNS to translate for the computer. In order for a domain to be useful, you need DNS and hosting — otherwise, you just own a name.
Some of our clients have a great website already — but they’re ready for a career change so their current website won’t be relevant! Using Faster Solutions as our example, we can’t change fastersolutions.com to another name. But if we wanted to (no worries, we don’t!) we could buy another name. For the sake of the example, maybe we could purchase newdevelopmentcompany.com if it was available. Or, we could tweak the existing Faster Solutions website, and use the existing files to create something new, with a new domain.
In this case, we wouldn’t need to purchase a new website — just a new domain. We can then alter the website files to add things like a new logo, new keywords, and a new phone number to the existing site. Then we use DNS to point your old domain and new domain to the same files. How much time and work this takes will always depend.
From assisting you through a simple website transition to giving your website a full redesign, we are here to help!
