When buying small business web hosting plans you can opt to buy your domain separately from another company (typically known as a “registrar”) or with many you can both your domain and web hosting plan  together from the same company.

Let’s look at this a little deeper:

Your web hosting account has a unique number - just like your own personal telephone number. This number is called your IP (or Internet Protocol) number and will look something like 123.456.78.90.

If you type this number into your browser you will arrive at your website but people are used to typing in a website address not a load of numbers to visit a site.

Your website address is also easier to remember and helps tell people what your site is about before they even visit it.

So it’s important to have both.

What you do therefore is to configure your “DNS” settings for your domain to point to your small business web hosting plan IP number. That way, when someone types in your website address they’ll be automatically be taken to your small business web hosting plan.

So you *can* buy them separately and they will work fine together - no matter who you buy them both from. All you need to do if you buy them separately is to point your domain to your hosting account and you’re up and running.

It’s quick and easy once you know what you’re doing, but on the other hand it’s also one extra thing to learn how to do. It’s more time taken to fiddle around with the technical aspects rather than building your small business website.

I, for one, usually buy my domain and small business web hosting plans together but whether you decide to or not is up to you. Feel free to investigate some of the options out there (more links to check out below) and see which you think offers you the best value for money.

You see, some name registrars will charge less that your host would for a domain, though in that case you then need to keep two accounts in good standing.

By getting my web hosting and domain from the same company, and paying for each of them on average once a year both my hosting and domain come up for renewal at the same time each year so I just need to pay one bill and I can rest assured they’re both sorted for another year.