Domain hosting or domain registration is the process of reserving a domain name as your online identity. It will generally look something like this: www.yourdomain.com. This is also where you will be making changes to DNS settings and manage nameservers. DNS settings are the records that point towards external sources. Website hosting is where your website files are stored and served. It is what makes your website visible to the world. We can go into this topic in quite detail, but what you need clarity on, is whether your website can be delivered to the required location of your audience. As an example, let’s say your target market is in America – it doesn’t help that your website is hosted on a server based in South Africa. If this is the case, you would need something called a CDN (content delivery network). When in doubt, ask your developer to clarify! Email Hosting: Similar to website hosting, email hosting allows you to set up and manage email accounts associated with your domain name. This is where things can get tricky! In a perfect world, your website and email are hosted on the same platform – this eliminates any need for further changes to your DNS records. If they aren’t, it is important that your developer completely understands the current setup and knows how to set everything up before your website gets taken online.