There are potentially 6 major services involved with each domain/website:

  1. Domain registration - who has the exclusive right to use a domain (for email, for website, for whatever).  Pinnacle manages this through a company called NameCheap, and generally costs about $10/year/domain.
  2. DNS hosting - the "phone book" that tells senders/visitors where should email be routed for a given domain, where www can be found, etc.  This service is often included for free with domain registration (including ours).
  3. Web hosting - in order to publish a website (i.e. www.pintechfw.com), a server needs to respond to those requests with the proper data.  Pinnacle operates a server running software called WordPress for the benefit of our customers. WordPress powers approximately 1/3 of Internet sites (and growing) at last count.
  4. SSL certificates - most websites these days are published securely (via https:// instead of http://).  That requires an SSL "certificate" issues by a globally trusted certificate "authority" (i.e. a globally trusted company).  Usually these are free, but occasionally some firms still charge $20-$50/year for this service.
  5. Web design - this is a firm that specializes in creating the design for the website referenced in #3.  Web design firms are usually artistic/creative in nature, and may work on a project basis to build a new site and then the customer updates content themselves, or the web design firm may provide any/all of the other services listed here on an ongoing basis.  Pinnacle does not do any web design or content management work - we highly recommend Joshua Vandercar at Typewheel for excellent work at a reasonable price.
  6. Email hosting - if somebody sends an email to [email protected], there needs to be a server set up that will accept that email, filter for spam/malware, etc.  This is usually the same company you use to check your mail and send new mail.  Pinnacle-managed customers usually use Microsoft's Office 365 service for this.

Hopefully this helps you understand the various pieces and how they fit together!