web dev//provider

A provider is a company, and a website depends on three separate jobs that a company can do for it. The word hides that separation: *the provider* may mean whoever rents out the name, whoever answers the questions about the name, or whoever keeps the files, and those can be one company, two or three.

A provider is a company, and a website depends on three separate jobs that a company can do for it. The word hides that separation: the provider may mean whoever rents out the name, whoever answers the questions about the name, or whoever keeps the files, and those can be one company, two or three.

The registrar rents the domain by the year and controls the delegation: its panel is where the nameservers are written.

The DNS provider holds the zone and answers for it: the A, CNAME, MX and TXT records live with whoever manages the DNS of that domain, and nowhere else.

The hosting provider is where the site lives. Hosting keeps files and DNS keeps addresses; a record for a subdomain is never stored at the hosting, even when the same company sells both.

A company that sells the three (a registrar with its default DNS and a hosting plan, a site builder that also registered the name) makes them look like one product. They still separate cleanly: each job can be moved to another company without moving the other two, and most confusion about where do I change this is a confusion about which of the three jobs the change belongs to.