Between Registrar and Host who does what?

July 13, 2007

The services you need in order to have a working web site on a domain are:

a) registration of your domain - provided, naturally enough, by a registrar. Many web hosts will handle the interaction with them on your behalf. You need (b) lined up to set this up.

b) DNS hosting - often provided by your registrar, often provided by your hosting provider, could be provided by a third party, though I’ve never heard of anyone actually doing it that way.

c) web hosting - some registrars provide very basic web hosting, but I don’t know of any that provide web hosting suitable for anything more than a temporary or personal site.

You probably also want some form of e-mail hosting, whether it’s forwarding or real pop3/imap mailboxes. Many registrars offer this, as do many web hosts.

If you are changing hosts, your registrar should provide some means by which you can either specify new IP addresses for your domain, if they provide the hosting, or by which you can specify new DNS servers, if your web host provides the DNS hosting.

A word of caution: some hosting services, and even some registrars of lesser repute, will register your new domain in to themselves rather than to you. If that’s the case, then you may find moving to a new hosting service either difficult or impossible. I think this slimy practice is less common than it used to be, but when I registered my first domain just a little more than a year ago, about half the registrars I considered were doing it.

I don’t know how much I can help beyond giving you this information, since in my set-up, everything except (a) is provided by me on my own personal servers. That means I know a lot about how it works technically, and not so much about the vagaries of dealing with hosting providers.