Domain and Hosting: What They Are and Whose Name They Go In

What are a domain and hosting in plain language?

Two ideas that get confused all the time, although the difference is simple.

A domain is the address of the site, the thing a person types into the browser: example.uz. You do not buy it forever, you rent it - usually for a year, with renewal. As long as you pay for the renewal, the address is yours.

Hosting is the place where the files of the site physically sit: texts, images, code. The server that hands the page to the browser when someone arrives at your address.

An everyday analogy: the domain is the address of a flat, the hosting is the flat itself. An address without a flat leads nowhere, a flat without an address cannot be reached from outside. You need both, and these are separate payments, often to different companies.

How much does it cost?

It is worth knowing the order of the figures, so you understand what you are paying your contractor for.

A domain is a payment once a year. Zones differ: international ones like .com are inexpensive, national ones, including .uz, are usually dearer and sometimes ask for documents. Nice short domains on the secondary market can cost anything at all - that is a separate story.

Hosting is paid monthly or a year in advance. An ordinary company website needs the simplest plan: a few dollars a month. Expensive plans make sense for load, which a corporate site or a landing page usually does not have.

A sanity check: keeping a typical website running costs on the order of a few dollars a month plus the annual payment for the domain. If you are being charged noticeably more "for maintaining the site", ask what exactly is included - it is probably not hosting any more, but services.

Whose name should the domain and hosting go in?

The short answer: your own, paid with your own card. This is the most important point in the whole article.

The domain must be registered to you or your company, the hosting account must be in your name too, and the payment must go through your card or account. You give the developer access, but the owner is you.

Why this is critical. If the domain is registered to the contractor, you are effectively renting your own address. You fall out, you lose touch, the person moves away or stops answering - and you cannot move the site, or renew the domain, or take the mail on that address. And all your advertising and all your business cards point to that address.

This is not some rare exotic case. The situation "the contractor vanished and the domain is in their name" is one of the most common and most painful in small business, because what is lost is not a file but the recognition of an address built up over years.

What to do if it has already happened. Check the owner details of the domain through whois services. If you still have contact with the contractor - ask them to transfer the domain to you, this is a standard procedure at any registrar. If there is no contact, there is nothing to wait for: register a new domain and plan the move with redirects while the old one still works.

How do you check whose name your domain is in?

Three steps, about five minutes.

Look it up in whois. Enter your domain on any whois service - it shows the registrar, the expiry date and, if the data is not hidden, the owner. Hidden data is not a problem in itself, but then you need the second step.

Check whether you have access to the registrar's account. Not through the contractor, but your own login. If you have no way in - you do not control the domain, whoever is written down there.

Check whose card the payment comes from. If it is not being debited from you, then the renewal does not depend on you either.

Check separately where the expiry notice goes. A domain whose term has run out is switched off along with the site and the mail, and after a certain period it can be bought by anyone at all. That happens regularly and always unexpectedly.

Which hosting should you choose?

For a typical company website the choice is simpler than it seems.

Ordinary shared hosting covers the job of a landing page and a corporate site. You do not need any server power.

The location of the server matters. If your clients are in Uzbekistan, a site on local or nearby hosting will open faster than one in America. Speed affects both convenience and search.

Pay attention to the details, not to the plan: whether there is a free SSL certificate (without it the browser marks the site as insecure), whether there are backups, whether support answers in your language and how quickly.

Take the payment method into account. For a business in Uzbekistan it is often important that the host accepts local payment and issues documents - foreign hosting may be cheaper but awkward for the accounts.

A separate detail for those planning to grow: ask your developer whether your site needs any special conditions. Some modern technologies do not work on simple hosting, and that comes to light at the worst possible moment - when you try to put the finished site online.

How is this handled with me?

The domain and the hosting are always registered to the client and paid for with the client's card. I help to choose and set them up, I get the access I need for the work, but the owner stays the client - from day one and without exceptions.

The reason is simple: the site should belong to whoever owns the business. If tomorrow you decide to work with a different contractor, you simply hand over the access and leave together with the site, the address and the mail. No negotiations and no hostages.

At the end of the project I hand over the whole set: access to the hosting, the domain, the admin panel and the analytics, plus instructions on what is where.

If you do not know whose name your domain is in, or you want to get it straight before launching a site - write to me, I will check and explain what you have right now.