Damon Royle
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Setting up your own domain

So you want to get into the world wide web, have a page of your own, here's how it works:

You purchase your Domain name, from a Domain Registrar, and you find a Host for your pages.

Domain Registration
A website has a [domain] name and the pages related to that name. When people enter a domain name the computer they are on asks computers 'up the line' for the whereabouts of the pages of that domain.

DNS, Domain Name Serving, is like a telephone directory, all the domain names are here and information regarding the location of the pages they refer to is here; the owner of the domain logs into the Registrar of the domain and can enter the location of the HOST computer(s) of the domains web pages. So, like a phone book, requests regarding the domain name go to the Registrar, receive the identity/location of the hosting computers and head of there to request pages.

The DNS info is in fact shared globally around many large computers, not just kept at the Registrars, this means that everyone's requests for pages do not all have to go to the one computer. But when the domain name owner modifies details at their registrar it can take up to 48 hours for the new information to propagate around the internet as all the DNS computers share the information with each other.


Hosting
The Hosting of your site is sometimes done by the same company that you've done the Domain Registration with. making initial setup substantially simpler, but when your hosting is elsewhere it involves another contractual obligation with a company offerring storage space and access (data traffic/usage) limits.