Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

If you’ve inherited or stepped up to the job of helping your nonprofit manage your website, your mail, your ISP or any of those sorts of things - you might find yourself wallowing in alphabet soup! Don’t worry - just because it is complicated doesn’t mean that you can’t find your way around! Here’s a very short primer on some of those terms:

• ISP: Internet Service Provider. This is the person or agency that actually provides connectivity to the internet. Somewhere along the way, this is bound to include a phone or a cable company - someone that has a connection to the actual wire or cable - but it doesn’t have to. A lot of agencies re-sell that bandwidth - so your ISP might be a local agency, an agency in another state, or the phone or cable company. You can read more about ISP’s courtesy of WiseGeek. Examples include Earthlink and Comcast.
• Domain Name Service or DNS: I tend to think of DNS as the translation service of the internet. Since the internet uses numbers for addresses and we’d prefer to use names - DNS acts as the match-maker - making sure that your name points to the right number. The folks at Webopedia can tell you more.
• Domain Name: This is the name that you use to identify your website. For instance, www.npowerseattle.org is the Domain Name for my agency. There might be a lot of different websites or internet addresses that point to that name. Webopedia will help you learn more about this one, too!

• (www.npowerseattle is the domain name - but there can be many host or sub-domain names, too, such as www.mailservices.npowerseattle.org or community.npowerseattle.org/patricks.

Putting it all Together

You decide that you want to build a new website. Your provider builds a new site and then needs a place to put it if they don’t host websites. You might choose to replace your existing website - or you might get a better deal hosting it somewhere else. Your new WebHost will give you a number - and you’ll need to tell your Registrar to point your name to that new site.

But you might really like the service you are getting regarding your email - so you’ll also need to make sure that your email “stays” with your current host, not your new one.

So - this can get complicated quickly. Make sure you work with a provider that understands all of these terms, and how to make them work the best for you - and don’t be nervous about asking questions!