Understanding Website Hosting, Domain Registration, and Support

Empowering your online presence

In today's digital age, establishing a strong online presence is crucial for businesses and individuals alike. However, managing a website involves several essential aspects, and it can be confusing to understand the difference.


In this blog post, we will delve into the differences between:

  • Website hosting
  • Domain registration
  • Ongoing support

Your virtual home


Imagine your website as a virtual house that needs a place to live, an address for people to find it, and regular cleaning and maintenance to keep it in good shape. Let's break down this analogy to understand the concepts of website hosting, domain registration, and support:


Website Hosting: Your website's virtual home

Just like a house needs physical space, your website requires virtual space to exist on the internet. Website hosting is the service that provides this space by storing your website's files and data on a server. It's like renting a plot of land to build your house. The hosting provider takes care of the technical aspects, ensuring your website is accessible to visitors around the clock.


Domain Registration: Your website's address

Every website needs a unique address for people to find it on the internet. This address is known as a domain name, like www.yourwebsite.com. Registering a domain is like renting a specific address for your house. You pay a fee to secure the rights to that address, allowing visitors to reach your website by typing in the domain name. Domain registration requires periodic renewal to maintain ownership of the address.


Website Support: Maintenance and updates

Just like a house needs regular cleaning and maintenance, your website requires ongoing support to ensure it remains functional, secure, and up-to-date. Website support covers a range of services, including bug fixes, security updates, content updates, and general maintenance tasks. It's like hiring a professional cleaner and handyman to take care of your house. The support team helps keep your website running smoothly, fixing issues that may arise and providing assistance when needed.

Let's get into the detail:


  • Hosting Costs: Just as you pay for the physical space your house occupies, website hosting involves costs incurred for the services that house your website. The hosting fees cover the resources, server maintenance, bandwidth, security updates and technical support. Captovate charges a monthly hosting fee.

  • Domain Registration: Similar to paying rent for your house's address, domain registration involves paying for the right to use a specific domain name. The fees ensure that your website has a unique online address that visitors can use to access it. Usually domains are registered for two years. Some of our clients already have domains with other providers, and we can just point that domain to our host. Other clients have had us register it for them, we have it set to automatically renew, and we will bill you when this occurs.

    IMPORTANT NOTE: scammers love using domain and hosting renewals to scam dollars from people. Do not pay invoices for renewals unless they come from us or you are certain you have registered your domain with a specific company. You are welcome to call us anytime to check.

  • Support and Maintenance Costs: Like the expenses associated with cleaning and maintaining your house, website support covers the costs of keeping your website in good shape. See below for what might be covered in a support pack.


Captovate provides our clients with annual support packs which covers the cost of our friendly team being available within business hours via phone or our support@captovate.com.au email address. 


Our support packs include

  1. General Updates: Our team can support you in making edits and updates to ensure you keep your website up-to-date with the latest information, such as new products, services, or company announcements. Regular updates ensure that visitors find fresh and relevant content whenever they visit your site.

  2. Graphic Design Changes: Enhance the visual appeal and branding of your website through graphic design updates. From tweaking colour schemes to creating eye-catching banners, the support team can assist in maintaining a cohesive and engaging design.

  3. Content Management: Need help adding, editing, or formatting textual and multimedia content on your website? The support team can guide you through the process, ensuring your content is presented professionally and optimised for readability.

  4. Improving Effectiveness: Leverage the support team's expertise to enhance your website's effectiveness. They can provide insights and recommendations on user experience, navigation, and conversion optimisation, helping you achieve your online goals.

  5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Enhancing your website's visibility in search engine results is crucial for attracting organic traffic. The support team can assist in implementing SEO strategies, optimising meta tags, improving page load speed, and ensuring proper indexing by search engines.

  6. Website Content Strategy: Crafting an effective content strategy is vital for engaging your audience and driving conversions. The support team can help you refine your content strategy, ensuring it aligns with your brand's messaging and resonates with your target audience.

  7. Adding New Features and Functionality: As your business evolves, you may need to integrate new features or functionality into your website. The support team can assist in identifying suitable solutions, such as e-commerce platforms, booking systems, or social media integrations, expanding your website's capabilities.


The support team ensures that your website remains functional, secure, and visually appealing, but we are also there for you if you have little oops moments, and break something. Please don’t be shy in telling us what you did, it’s not a problem, but better that we know then us trying to find needles in haystacks.


Our support packs typically expire after 12 months, encouraging clients to actively update and maintain their websites. Regular updates ensure that your website remains dynamic and relevant, providing visitors with fresh content and an enhanced user experience. Additionally, search engines favour frequently updated websites, reindexing their pages to reflect any changes and potentially improving their visibility in search results.


We hope this helps to understand that your website hosting provides the space for your website to exist, domain registration gives you a unique online address, and ongoing support ensures your website is well-maintained and up-to-date.


Just as you invest in your physical house or work space to keep it presentable and functional, investing in website support helps you provide a positive user experience and keeps your online presence thriving.

How to Maximise Your Website Partnership

18 Feb, 2024
In the dynamic landscape of the Northern Territory's transient workforce, change is a part of the game. If you're taking on a new role that involves website management, we're keen to connect with you to help you understand how we can support you.

Digital Trends for 2024 - What Territory Businesses are looking for

By Karen Hawkes • 28 Jan, 2024
With many of us thinking about what the year ahead might look like, it’s timely to look at the trends driving 2024.
Build verse web

Website vs. House: A Surprising Parallel

By Emeline Laurent • 10 Nov, 2023
Creating a website can be an exciting endeavour, much like building your own house. Just like home construction, the process requires thoughtful consideration and strategic planning to avoid pitfalls.

5 Things to Start Your Web Project Successfully

By Karen Hawkes • 29 Sep, 2023
Starting a web project is an exciting endeavour, but it can also be overwhelming if you don't have a clear plan in place.  To ensure your web project gets off to a great start, there are five essential elements to set you on the path to success.

How to Upgrade to GA4: Step by Step Guide

14 Jun, 2023
From July 1, Universal Analytics will stop processing. This means you will need to upgrade to GA4 to keep all of your data. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the newest version of Google's analytics platform, designed to provide deeper insights and enhance tracking capabilities. In this blog post, we'll walk you through how to upgrade to GA4, and also how to keep your historical analytics data. How to upgrade to GA4 Login to Google Analytics Go to GA4 Setup Assistant Click Open connected property Click Go to your GA property Select Data Streams on the left hand panel Select your stream Select View tag instructions and follow the steps to install the tag manually Now go back to Setup Assistant and complete the checklist to finalise your upgrade to GA4 How to save your historical data You will also need to make sure you download any historical data you want to keep. Go to your Universal Analytics Select the report you want to download. Note that you will need to download these individually, so under Audience you would need to download Overview, Active Users, Audiences etc separately. Set your date range Click Export and select your preferred file type

Top 5 Social Media Mistakes

02 Jun, 2023
Social media is a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their audience, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic to their website. But in order to see success, it's important to avoid common mistakes that can hurt your organic reach and engagement. Here are the top 5 organic social media mistakes to avoid: 1. Not having a clear social media strategy Posting without a strategy is like driving without a destination. You might reach somewhere, but it's unlikely to be where you want to be. A social media strategy should start with defining your goals. What do you want to achieve with your social media? Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, generate leads, or boost sales? Once you've identified your goals, you can then determine who your target audience is and what type of content will resonate with them. Always remember it's important to have a mix of content, so you don't oversaturate your audience with the same type of posts. 2. Focusing on quantity over quality Posting frequently is important, but not at the cost of quality. Posting low-quality content can lead to your audience disengaging if they feel like you are bombarding them with content they aren't interested in. Instead, focus on creating high-quality content that provides value to your audience. 3. Ignoring engagement and feedback Social media is all about engagement, so it's important to listen and respond to your audience. Ignoring comments or feedback can result in a loss of trust and decreased engagement. 4. Posting at the wrong time Posting at the wrong time can result in your content being missed by your target audience. Make sure to research the best times to post on each social media platform to maximise your reach and engagement. We also recommend taking a look at your stats to see if there are particular days or times of the day that your audience engages with you. 5. Not analysing your data Analysing your social media metrics is essential to understanding what's working and what's not. Without this data, you won't be able to adjust your strategy and improve your social media performance. Use analytics to identify your best-performing content, optimal posting times, and audience demographics. For example, perhaps you always thought that your core audience is women ages 25-35, but your stats show that 35-45 year olds are actually more engaged. This means you can adapt your content strategy to better serve that audience demographic. 6. Not adapting to algorithm changes Social media algorithms are constantly changing, and these changes can have a significant impact on how content is distributed and seen by audiences. Not adapting to this can have a detrimental impact on your social media efforts, so stay up to date and adapt your strategy as needed. For example, the algorithm currently favours reels and video content over static content, so try and incorporate these where possible.

Web Accessibility and Userway Widget

By Claudia Lee • 15 May, 2023
What is web accessibility and why is it important? Web accessibility is the practice of designing and developing websites in a way that makes them usable to people with disabilities. Accessibility is a critical factor in ensuring that everyone can use and benefit from the internet, including accessing information, using online services and participating in social and economic activities. It is estimated that over one billion people worldwide have some form of disability, and many of them rely on assistive technologies to navigate and interact with websites. Unfortunately, many websites are still not accessible, despite the significant progress that has been made in recent years. There are a variety of ways you can improve your websites accessible, which can include: Providing keyboard navigation: People with mobility impairments may not be able to use a mouse or other pointing device, so providing keyboard navigation options can help them navigate a website more easily. Ensuring sufficient colour contrast: People with visual impairments or colour blindness may have difficulty reading content with low colour contrast. Ensuring sufficient colour contrast between text and background can help improve readability. Using appropriate heading structures: Clear heading structures help people with cognitive disabilities or screen readers understand the content on a page more easily. Web accessibility is a legal requirement in many countries such as Australia, but it also helps to promote inclusivity and diversity, and is a critical factor in creating an accessible and equitable digital world. How to make your website accessible One of the tools that can help improve the accessibility of your website is the Userway Accessibility Widget. This widget helps you to put users first regardless of their abilities, and ensures your website is compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This widget is designed to provide users with a range of accessibility options to make it easier for them to access and navigate websites. For example, users with visual impairments can use the widget to adjust the font size, contrast, and colour scheme of the website. This can make it easier for them to read the content and navigate the site. Users with hearing impairments can also use the widget to enable closed captions for videos or adjust the volume of audio content. The Userway Accessibility Widget also includes features that can help users with mobility impairments. For example, users can use the widget to enable keyboard navigation or to skip directly to the main content of the website. This can be particularly helpful for users who have difficulty using a mouse or other pointing device. Another benefit of the Userway Accessibility Widget is that it is designed to be customisable. You can choose which accessibility options to include in the widget and can customise the look and feel of the widget to match your website's design. This means that the widget can be seamlessly integrated into any website without disrupting the site's aesthetic.

How to find good stock images

By Claudia Lee • 24 Feb, 2023
Stock imagery tips and tricks
Show More
Share by: