This is a little technical, but it’s handy to know about. If your eyes are glazing over, stay with us.

A domain is separate to any services that you run on it.

Whether that’s a website, blog, forum, email, or a bunch of other stuff like remote logins, VPNs, or file servers.

So once you’ve registered your domain, you can use it for all sorts.

A big one for business owners is email

We often see vans displaying their website and email in big letters down the side.

carolscupcakes.com carolscupcakes@gmail.com

Unfortunately Carol doesn’t know that she can easily set up a personalised email using her domain and existing gmail account.

hello@carolscupcakes.com

As a sole trader, Lucy didn’t know this either. Until Johnny came along and did some DNS magic.

DNS means domain name system

It’s the internet’s address book for all the services that can run on your domain.

For example, our domain johnnydecimal.com is registered at Porkbun. But we use other services to provide the website, email, and blog.

Porkbun is where we point our domain to those services.

So when someone wants to visit our website at johnnydecimal.com, we’ve told Porkbun to send them to our web hosting service.

When someone wants to send us an email to hello@johnnydecimal.com, we’ve told Porkbun to send them to our email service.

We could make an ops manual to help with this kind of thing. Let us know if that’s something you’d like.