What is Hosting?

Visionary Communications provides a full suite of hosting services. With our Hosting Personal or Hosting Business packages you get full hosting coverage for the following services: DNS Pointing, Hosted Email, and Website Hosting. We offer standalone versions of each of these services, so no matter if you need only one or the whole package we have you covered!

Visionary also offers Domain Registration services, and can register the domain name of your choice automatically for you to ensure your domain never expires. Domain Registration is sold as a separate service from our hosting packages but is commonly purchased at the same time.

Below is a breakdown of each service we provide; if you are unsure of what services you need or have you can always contact us for further assistance.

DNS – Domain Name System:

DNS is the glue that makes the web work. It translates a name (www.vcn.com) to an IP address that tells which web server is hosting the website. It also tells other email servers where to send email for a domain name using what is called the MX record.

Without DNS, when someone types in www.vcn.com in a web browser, there is no conversion of the name to an IP address and your web browser will return an error. Even through your website may be running fine, without DNS the web browser doesn’t know where to go to get to the site.

In the simplest terms, DNS let’s us use names like Yahoo or Google instead of strings of numbers like 172.217.12.14 Think of it as telling the Internet to “call Bob” instead of “dial 555-123-4567”

Hosted Email:

Email hosting provides server storage space and an IP address for your email. The email addresses on that server can then be accessed from webmail or an email client on your device. Your hosted email provider is who gives your domain an IP address that is entered into DNS as an MX record. When someone sends an email address to someone@vcn.com their email provider goes to the hosting providers web server to deliver the email to your mailbox that you have stored on the server. Think of this like having a PO Box that you can receive your mail at.

Hosting:

Website hosting provides server storage space and an IP address for your website. The website on that server can then be accessed from a web browser. Your web hosting provider is who gives your website the IP address that is entered into DNS. When someone types www.vcn.com the web browser goes to the hosting providers web server to pull up the pages for your website that you have stored on the server.

Registrars:

Domain registrars register a domain and enable it’s use on the rest of the internet. There is an annual recurring cost for this service. The one and only thing this service actually provides is to tell the rest of the web which DNS server to use for your domain.

Web hosts provide DNS hosting with web hosting accounts and will usually register domains for you at their preferred domain registrar. The upside to having your webhost provide DNS registration is typically they will renew the Domain for you each year at the registrar and send a bill with your hosting bill. So you will get nice fast reliable hosting, with friendly service, and a convenient all-in-one billing for your website and domain name needs.

You also have the option of managing it all yourself, or choosing a combination of options, like the webhost only hosting the website and the registrar providing DNS hosting.