Domain vs web hosting, explained

You can get these from separate companies. Your domain doesn't have to come from the company hosting your site, and buying a domain doesn't mean you've bought somewhere to publish the site.

They're separate purchases. With a website builder, though, hosting can already be part of what you're using.

Buying and keeping a domain

You buy a domain through a registrar. When you're comparing options, look at the renewal price as well as the price shown for registration.

Porkbun lists .com domains from $11.81 a year including the ICANN fee, with free WHOIS privacy. From November 1, 2026, Namecheap charges $15.98 to register or transfer a .com and $19.98 to renew, before the ICANN fee.

Dynadot lists .com at $11.62 to register, renew or transfer. Spaceship lists .com at $10.38 (on sale for $9.48), renewing at $10.68, with free WHOIS privacy on eligible domains. Cloudflare Registrar sells domains at cost with no markup and includes free WHOIS redaction.

What should you compare? Registration, renewal, any listed fee, and the privacy option. Don't treat a sale price as the renewal price.

There are rules for the name itself: each part can be up to 63 characters, and the whole name can be up to 253, using letters, numbers and hyphens, but it can't start or end with a hyphen.

Choosing somewhere to host the site

Hosting is a separate choice, and a free hosting plan isn't the same thing as a free website builder. Look at what you're getting and what you'll use to create and publish the pages.

GitHub Pages is free. It supports sites up to 1 GB, with a soft limit of 100 GB of bandwidth a month.

Cloudflare Pages has a free plan with 500 builds a month, 100 custom domains per project and up to 20,000 files per site. Netlify has a $0 free plan with 300 credits a month. Those plans use different limits, so compare the actual allowances rather than stopping at the word "free."

A virtual server is another option. DigitalOcean's smallest Droplet costs $4 a month and includes 512 MiB memory, 1 vCPU, 10 GiB SSD and 500 GiB transfer.

But you don't have to rent a virtual server to publish your first site. A builder with hosting included is another route.

When the builder includes hosting

Website builders combine the tool you use to make the pages with the hosting that publishes them. Wix starts from $17 a month yearly, and Squarespace starts from $19 a month yearly; both include hosting in the plan price.

Heya is a no-code website builder at heya.page. You sign in with Google to publish, and hosting is included.

Heya Free costs $0 with no credit card and no time limit. It includes 3 sites, up to 5 pages per site, all 68 templates, a free yourname.heya.bio address with HTTPS and a small Made with Heya badge.

That free address isn't a domain you bought from a registrar. It's the address supplied with your Heya site (and you can publish using it).

Using your own domain with Heya

Heya doesn't sell domains. You bring one from any registrar, and custom domain support starts on Pro Standard.

Heya Pro Lite is $3 a month, with 3 sites, up to 20 pages per site, no badge, and links that are no longer marked nofollow. It isn't the plan for connecting your own domain.

Heya Pro Standard is $6 a month and includes 5 sites and 1 custom domain per account with HTTPS. Heya Pro Plus is $15 a month, with 25 sites, up to 10 custom domains, and the option to download your site as a ZIP of HTML files.

And check what you need the site to do before picking a plan. Heya has no built-in store, checkout or form builder. You link a button to your checkout or store page, use a Google Form or a Tally form, and use the Calendly embed for bookings.

Related guides: Best domain registrars, Website hosting cost, Good domain name and Get a free domain.

More from Heya: All guides, Templates and Pricing.