How does a hosting plan work relating to your account, domains, and public_html folder?
Posted March 9th, 2010
When you have a hosting plan with a hosting company you can have 1 or unlimited ‘domains’ (depending on your plan) on your ‘account’. But what is such a ‘domain’? And how does this domain relate to your ‘account’?
Is that ‘account’ of yours a little bit space on the harddisk of the hosting company’s web server on which you get a folder which is your home directory like: home/usernamex/public_html?
And how does this home directory of yours relate to your different domains (in it? on it?) and their, if any, IP addresses?
Domains are simply ‘yahoo.com’, or espn.com, whatever name you purchase to use is considered a domain name. Yahoo for example you can manage multiple sites on one account, and the account is simply saying they belong to you, for management and payment. Servers are just like regular computers, but have better or multiple processors, and tons of storage capacity. and yes, data is just stored in paths just like your computer, but bigger. that’s why when you search for items within a database from a webpage the address bar has 100+ characters. (that and the php references as well)
happy learning.
I will try to answer your questions:
Question: “When you have a hosting plan with a hosting company you can have 1 or unlimited ‘domains’ (depending on your plan) on your ‘account’.”
Answer: You can have only one domain, but many subdomains. Which are derivatives (subdomains) of the main domain.
Question: “But what is such a ‘domain’? And how does this domain relate to your ‘account’?”
Answer: It is the name of your URL/Address by which people find your host that has your web site.
Question: “Is that ‘account’ of yours a little bit space on the harddisk of the hosting company’s web server on which you get a folder which is your home directory like: home/usernamex/public_html?”
Answer: Most paid for hosts have space alotments of up to 10 + GB. Hosts like those from a cable provider usually are limited to 10MB only. On a cable site (such as Wide Open West or WOW) it usually goes something like; http://www.wowway.net/~whatyoucallyourpage/ then it will be followed usually by default.htm, home.htm, index.htm as an opening page.
Question: “And how does this home directory of yours relate to your different domains (in it? on it?) and their, if any, IP addresses?”
Answer: It is the page that you want visitors to see. In a free site, the domain name is whatever the name of sponsor what with your named home page.
I have seen some sites, such as Godaddy that will let you buy space for as little as $3.95 per month. It includes having your own free domain name with the cost of the site. There is a problem; if the domain has a catchy name they can and will take it from you. After all they gave it to you. Payment is usually by the year. You get help via email if needed.