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Forgive me if this is too obvious, but I figure it can't hurt just in case somebody with the same questions stumbles on this thread later.
First of all, "registration" just means that the central organizing bodies of the Internet know that the code "www.barbelith.com" points to something owned by Tom Coates, for instance, whether there's "real estate" there or not.
Whenever you go to a site and it says "THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION. REGISTRATION BY POOPYPANTS.ORG" that usually means that Poopypants has handled the registration, but since there's nothing for the registered address to point TO, Poopypants has just pointed it to a generic placeholder page that also advertises Poopypants.
So registration is like a phone number in a huge virtual phone book, and hosting is the actual phone, the stuff you connect to when you "dial the number" -- hosting just boils down to actual space on a hard drive with some simple file organizing software, somewhere on the Internet.
Once you have hosting, you have actual hard drive space. So you need to tell your registrar "okay, point my name at this IP address (the DNS info)." Your registrar propagates the information, so (torturing the metaphor) every time somebody types the "phone number" www.smoothly.com into a browser, that "phone number" gets transferred to the IP of the host computer, and www.smoothly.com appears. But the registration isn't anything but a listing in a huge virtual phone book, and the hosting is what that phone number connects to when you dial it.
The 123-thing is probably them forcing the hosting issue -- they "give you a free Web site" but then you have to pay to host it, or it probably goes bye-bye.
Whois information is thoroughly self-entered. Your registrar will slap whatever you give them up on your whois, but it's a good idea to have at least a bit of real contact info on there in case something happens.
And Egg, ZoneAlarm is awesome. The free version is all the firewall an average user will ever need. |
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