What Is A Domain Registrar?

A domain registrar is where you purchase and register your domain name. This is not where your website is stored, this is only the domain name. You can purchase a domain to use for a website but you could also use a domain to create a custom email address. A domain registrar processes requests when a users enter your web address (domain name) and forwards that traffic to the correct location, your web host.

What Is A Web Host?

This is where the files that make up your website are stored and loaded from. Essentially a server is computer that is connected to the internet that has your website on it. When a user goes to your web address (domain name), the domain registrar points the user to your web host.

What Is The Difference?

The domain registrar and the web host really are two totally separate services. One is a place for your domain name; the other is the place for your website’s files themselves. Also very important to understand is the fact that you can have two totally different companies handling these different entities—just because you want to move your website hosting to a different company doesn’t mean that you have to move your domain name to a new domain registrar at all. In fact, we usually recommend that our clients simply keep their domain name with the service that it is currently at (unless there are ongoing issues with that company).