Registering And Hosting Overview

When a user types your arcade address in their browser, the browser goes out to the internet and locates that requested domain name from the host computer. The host will then send your arcade files to the visitor’s computer and your arcade will be displayed in their browser. Figure 1-1 displays this concept.

Figure 1-1 A basic representation of how a users’ computer accesses a hosted website 

Before we begin registering and hosting your arcade. I would like to make sure we have clarified the simple definitions of registering and hosting your arcade.

• Registering Your Arcade – The easiest way to define this is to rephrase ‘registering your arcade’ to ‘buying your arcade .com name’. When you buy your .com name you buy it for a certain time-frame such as one-year, two years, ten years, etc. You can always renew your .com name before it expires. Since you are buying the domain name for a period of time it is called a registration; therefore, buying a domain name is referred to as registering a domain.
• Hosting Your Arcade – The best way to describe this is to say by ‘hosting your arcade’ you are storing your arcade files on another computer called a host. This computer is managed by a hosting company; in our case, we are going through a company called ‘HostGator’. A small monthly fee is required for storing your files on their computer server. It is usually fairly cheap and very simple as you will soon find out.