A domain is the address people type to find you, while hosting is the service that actually stores and serves your website files. Think of the domain as the shop's street address and hosting as the building it trades from: you can own one without the other, but a working website needs both.
The core difference
A domain names your website; hosting stores and runs it.
- domain — the website address people type or click: we registered the domain last month before launching the site.
- hosting — the service that runs your site on a server so it can be reached: the company offers cheap web hosting for small businesses.
How to tell them apart
A useful way to keep the two straight is to picture moving house. The domain is like your postal address, registered separately and kept even if you move the actual building. Hosting is the building itself, where everything you own is physically kept. You buy a domain from a registrar and hosting from a hosting provider, and while many companies sell both together in one package, they remain two separate services under the hood.
The mix-up usually shows up when someone buys a domain and expects a working website to appear, only to find there is nothing behind it because no hosting has been set up. It also crops up when a site goes down: the domain can still be registered and working fine while the hosting has expired or failed, which is why the two need checking separately when something breaks.
