Domain names, hosting and updates: what you need to know
What a domain name is, where your website lives, and who keeps it up to date: the basics, explained simply, before you launch your site.
Domain name, hosting, DNS, updates: these words come up as soon as you talk about a website, and people don’t always like to ask what they mean. Here’s the essentials, without the jargon.
The domain name: your address
The domain name is your website’s address: wallstreetfrejus.fr for Wall Street, anglaisadistance.fr for Anglais à Distance. It’s also what your customers will remember and type.
A few tips for choosing one:
- Short and easy to spell out over the phone, ideally without hyphens.
- Your name or your trade, perhaps with your town.
- Which ending? A country ending (.fr, .co.uk, .it) reassures local customers and tells Google which country you’re aiming at; .com suits an international audience. Some endings have rules: .fr, for example, is reserved for people and businesses established in the European Union and a few neighbouring countries.
A domain name is rented by the year, from a registrar. We use OVH, a French provider. If you already have a domain, we simply connect it to your new site.
One piece of advice, whoever builds your site: know whose name your domain is registered in, and note its renewal date. A forgotten domain that expires means a website that disappears.
Hosting: where your website lives
Your website is a set of files that have to be served, day and night, to every visitor. That’s the host’s job. We host our sites on Vercel, which serves pages from servers spread around the world, so the site loads quickly whether your visitor is in Fréjus, Bristol or Milan.
What matters to you:
- speed, especially on phones;
- the padlock (HTTPS), which secures the connection and which browsers now expect;
- reliability: a site that always answers.
How the two connect
The domain name and the hosting are two separate services, linked by a few technical settings (the “DNS”). We take care of that: there’s nothing for you to set up.
Updates: who changes what?
A website is never quite finished: new hours, a new menu, a new service. There are two ways to handle it, depending on what you’d like:
- you update it yourself: your text, hours or photos;
- you leave the updates to us, as part of a subscription: you send a message, we do the rest.
And when the site needs to grow more, a new page or a new language, you call on us. We agree all this together for each project, before launch.
In short
| What it is | With us | |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | Your address | With OVH, or your own if you have one |
| Hosting | Where the site lives | On Vercel, fast and secure |
| Updates | The changes | You, or us with a subscription |
A question about your situation? Write to us, or start your project.
