People ask what is domain hosting and get a straight answer from nobody, because it is three seperate things sold as one line item: 1. the registrar, who holds the name and renews it, 2. the dns, wich is the phone book that says where the name points, and 3. the actual hosting, the box with your fiels on it. GoDaddy sells all three and never draws the line between them, which is why people think moving hosts means losing the domain.
they do not have to live together. mine are split three ways, namecheap holds the names, cloudflare does dns, digitalocean runs the box. costs me about 16 a year per domain and the dns part is free.
The reason to split them is the day your host goes bad. if dns lives somewhere else you repoint the a record and you are back in ten minutes instead of arguing with a support chat abuot
Source: r/SiteManagement · by /u/petra_ops