The terms hosting and domain are often used together so it becomes a little difficult to understand as to what exactly is the difference between the two. Say you have designed a website and you want that to be visible all over the internet. What exactly are the steps needed to do that? To host any website what you need is a static IP address. The IP address of the system on which a website has been developed is usually a dynamic IP which can not be individually recognized. So what you do is, you contact a web hosting company and tell them the name of your website.
These companies have a collection of static IP addresses. The domain of a website is generally of the form www.xyz.com. WWW corresponds to World Wide Web which is the collection of hypertext materials available over the internet. The ‘xyz’ part depends upon the name that you have chosen for your website. The .com emphasizes whether your website is a commercial, business or an educational site. Thus the URL which is typed to access a website is just a small part of the big picture. This entire thing is what makes up a domain. When everything is set the web hosting company maps the domain name of your website to a static IP address. Thus typing URL of your website would be equivalent to typing that IP address preceded by ‘http://’. Hence the web hosting company has done its task.
Once the name of your website has been mapped with an IP address and the internet users are able to access your website by typing the domain name in the address bar of their browsers, you can say that your website has been hosted. Thus hosting and domain are two related terminologies involved while browsing a website.
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