Hosting Plan vs. Domain vs. Website
When you visit your website, you appear to experience a seemless experience of loading the website into the browser. In reality, there are 3 distinctly different aspects of your website that can all be interchangeable:
Read on to better understand the critical roles each of these parts play in delivering your website to your website's visitors.
Domain Name
The domain name is the address that your visitors enter in their browser, such as domain.com. This tells the browser which web hosting server to search for your files on in order to load your website. Domain names have to be purchased from a registrar and pointed to your web hosting server in order to serve your content.
In the PersonalClass Hosting Plan, we allow 6 websites/domain for every hosting account you own. This limit is specifically for how many domains you may use with your hosting plan, the domain registration is not included.
Once pointed to your server, you can create subdomains for your domain, such as forum.domain.com or blog.domain.com. You can create an unlimited number of subdomains for a domain you own that is pointed to our servers.
You may update any domain you own to point to any server you choose and are able to control, displaying different websites as you desire.
Hosting Plan
A Hosting Plan is the subscription for space on a web server, which remains online to deliver your content even when you are not available. It is possible to run a server on your local computer, however it would only be available as long as your computer is online and does not experience network errors.
In addition to high availability and uptime, a web Hosting Plan includes storage space to place the files that visitors will see when they load a domain that is pointed to your server.
You may change the files hosted on your Hosting Plan in order to display different websites (the files on the server), or you may point different domains to your server to display the website you have stored there on different domains.
Website
A website is a collection of files and possibly databases that are viewed by users who visit a domain which is pointed to your hosting plan. Depending on how a website is configured and what it's requirements are, a website may be hosted on most any server you choose (Hosting Plan), or be loaded by any domain you point to it.