Web Hosting : In Layman’s Terms

“What are these charges?” Mom asked me looking at bank statement.

“They are of hosting and domain name renewal charges.” I tried to explain.

“Hain? What’s that?” Mom asked raising eyebrows.

At that time, I couldn’t come up with an easy-non technical explanation that mom could understand. Somedays later, I came across an infographic, that has explained web related terminologies in so intuitive way that anyone could grasp. I iterated the easy explanation to mom, she looked pretty convinced!

So, that brings down to the point of this post, web related terminologies – in layman’s terms.

A Housing Analogy

(As you read along, try to visualize the theme…)

Web hosting is like a house.

Most people rent house or room to stay. (Subscribe to hosting packages)
We call owner of the property as landlord. (Hosting provider – like GoDaddy, Bluehost)
Same way, we put our website content/files in one of properties provided by the hosting providers.

Website is everything in your house.

Furniture, interior design, accessories.
Visitors will see this and might leave your house if it’s stinky and ugly. (Badly designed website)
If your house is too good, visitors will get addicted and visit it over and over. (Facebook, for example)

Visitors are the people who visit your house.

Or in technical terms, clients/bots who visit your website.

How did they find your house by the way?

Domain Name is like a street address.

You need to register one so that people can find you.
For example,
https://darpan.blog or google.com

Web Browser is like a car.

You enter the domain name and the car will get you to the right house, i.e. website.
Just like cars, some browsers are fast (Chrome) and some are really slow and may not even work. (Internet Explorer :)).

Internet is a collection of houses.

A huge group of various houses is internet.

Search engine is your travel guide.

Guides, like Google and Bing, keep track of everything happening on internet. You ask them any question and they tell you where to go.

Now, I’m pretty sure that you will be able to explain above technical terminologies to your 90-year-old grandma even! 🙂

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