Here are some more familiar webhosting terms you need to know as you look for the best web hosting providers. These are very important, and once you understand the terminology, you can purchase from anyone with confidence. This article will concentrate specifically on domain names and related terms that describe how your website is recognized online.

Dedicated IP: Also known as “dedicated IP address” or “secure IP address” and sometimes “personal IP address” as well. An IP itself is simply the numeric address where your website is located online. For example, when surfing to www.google.com, you are actually going to 714.65.87.1 or some similar set of numbers that identifies google.com from all other websites around. To simplify this for consumers, we have “domain names” (see below) which take the place of IP addresses. Dedicated IPs are useful for ecommerce web hosting and business websites, as they assure yours is the only domain associated with that IP address. Dedicated IPs normally cost a couple bucks extra per month.

Domain Name: Also known as website address, website URL, and probably others terms, though with web hosting, it’s more common to say “domain”, “domain name”, or “domain name registration”. A domain is just the address where you can find your website online – for example, www.thebestwebhostinglist.com is this website’s domain name. Domain names are normally offered free with any webhosting purchase.

Parked Domains: Also known as “redirecting domains”, “URL forwarding”, and “URL cloaking”. Parking a domain simply means you are redirecting it somewhere. For example, if you own website1.com and website1.net, you want all your traffic from website1.net to go to the .com address. Setting up website1.net as a parked domain, you can redirect it to website1.com. This should be no additional charge from any affordable webhost.

Private Domain Registration: Also known as “private WhoIs Registration” or “anonyous domain registration” . It’s known as private Whois Registration because Private Domain Registration hides your information from the Whois search engines. For example, if you visit whois.com and enter any domain name, you can find out who owns that domain and how to contact them. Adding private domain registration will either black out these fields or populate them with the web host’s information so you can’t be contacted. Adding private domain registration normally costs several extra dollars per year.

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