What is a Hostname?

Many people confuse a domain name for a hostname, and vice versa. In many cases, they are somewhat interchangeable, but are describing a different function behind the scenes. If you want more information about domain names, see our article What Are Domains?.

A hostname is a network identifier, meaning the hostname is attached to a computer or server. It is used to identify the device in various forms of electronic communication such as the Internet or email. A hostname does not automatically mean that you are live on the Internet, it can also be used for a local network in an office to let other computers know where yours is.

So, as we learned in our What Are Domains? article, the .com, .org and .net identifiers in your web address are your top-level domain. It doesn’t resolve to an IP address and is merely a naming convention for user-ease. From here, we can discuss the prefix addresses before the TLD (top-level domain).

If we look at a non-existent hostname like yourhost.examplesite.com, we can break it down to get better clarification of what a hostname is.

Here, yourhost is describing your server, the domain name examplesite is describing the domain name for the site on the server yourhost.examplesite.com. Once DNS is set up, this also becomes a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). You can add multiple domains to this server, such as mysite.com, example.com and many, many more, but they will all be attached to the hostname because that is the server being used as their “home base” from which they communicate to the outside world via the Internet or email. 

Now that you know the difference between your hostname and domain name, you are ready to register a domain! You can follow the steps in our article Registering a Domain Name (Main URL) to learn how.