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Plain-English explainer · 4-min read

What's a domain name, anyway?

Honestly fine if you don't know. Most business owners we work with don't. Here's the whole thing, in plain English, with zero jargon — and what we do about it when we build your £200 site.

The 30-second version

A domain name is your website's address. Just like your shop has a street address, your website has a web address: things like yourbusiness.co.uk or my-plumbing.com.

You rent a domain — usually about £10 a year — from a company called a registrar. While you're renting it, nobody else in the world can use the same address. Stop paying and someone else can grab it.

That's it. Everything below is detail.

"But what does the website actually live on?"

The domain is the address. The files that make up your website — the photos, the text, the design — live on a computer somewhere called a server. When someone types your domain into a browser, the internet looks up which server is at that address and shows them the files.

That second thing — renting the server — is called hosting. Hosting also costs money (anywhere from £5/month to £50/month depending on quality).

If you take our £25/mo care plan, we handle the hosting for you on Cloudflare's UK network (fast, secure, no fiddling). If you skip the care plan, you'll pay a separate hosting company directly.

"I already have a website. What happens to its address?"

Good news — nothing changes. We point your existing domain at the new site. Visitors typing yourbusiness.co.uk still get a site at that exact address; just a much better one. Zero downtime. No "we lost our Google ranking" panic. Your reviews and SEO follow because the domain is the same.

This involves changing two settings inside your domain account (called DNS records). We talk you through it in 5 minutes on WhatsApp — or you can give us temporary access and we do it for you.

"I don't have one. What should it be?"

For a UK business, pick a .co.uk or a .com. Both work fine; .co.uk reads slightly more local-trustworthy in the UK, .com reads slightly more "real company" globally.

Rules of thumb for a good domain name:

  • Short. Easier to remember, easier to type into a phone, easier to put on a van side.
  • Easy to say out loud. If you can't tell a customer your address over a noisy phone call, change it.
  • Avoid hyphens if you can. plumbcareleeds.co.uk beats plumb-care-leeds.co.uk. People forget the hyphens.
  • Match your business name where possible. If you trade as "Plumb Care", buy plumbcare.co.uk rather than a clever one that requires explaining.
  • Don't overthink it. If the perfect domain is taken, just add your city: plumbcareleeds.co.uk, plumbcare-yorks.co.uk.

"Where do I buy one?"

Plenty of UK registrars — all roughly the same, ~£10/year. Three reputable ones:

  • Cloudflare Registrar — cheapest (sells at cost), but you have to use Cloudflare. Easy if we're managing your hosting.
  • 123-Reg — UK-based, fine for first-timers, slightly more expensive.
  • Namecheap — popular, easy interface.

If you're not sure: we'll buy it for you when you order the £200 site, in your name, your account. You own it from day one. It just means one less thing to figure out before paying.

"What if someone else owns the one I want?"

Two options. Pick a slightly different one (add the city, swap .co.uk for .com, etc.) — costs £10. Or, if the perfect one is held by someone who isn't actively using it, you can sometimes buy it off them via a domain broker — could be £100, could be £20,000. Almost always better to pick a different one.

"Will I lose access to my emails?"

If you use an email address tied to your domain (like info@yourbusiness.co.uk), no — we move the website over without touching the email setup. The MX records (the email part of DNS) stay exactly where they are.

If you're on yourname@gmail.com or similar, your email isn't connected to your domain at all and nothing changes for you either way.

"What's SSL / HTTPS?"

That little padlock icon you see in your browser bar means the connection between the visitor and your website is encrypted. Required by Google (sites without it are ranked lower and labelled "Not secure" in Chrome). On every site we build, SSL is set up automatically — it's free and handled for you. You'll never have to think about it.

The bottom line

You don't need to understand any of this to order a website from us. Tick the box "I'm not sure what a domain is" on the brief form and we'll handle every bit of it on WhatsApp. The whole thing — domain, hosting, SSL, DNS, the lot — takes about 10 minutes of your time over a couple of messages.

Start my £200 website