Recently one of my customers purchased a domain name for only $19 and then needed to to pay an extra $55 per year for "DNS hosting". The obvious questions were "What is DNS hosting?" and "Why do I have to pay extra for it?".
Your domain name doesn't really point too anything. The real address of your website is a four-part number that looks something like 203.55.121.227 (type it into your web browser and see what you get). It's like a telephone number. Obviously remembering thousands of those numbers is impossible, so your internet service provider maintains a list of Domain Name Server records that can translate each website name into a number that computers use to find eachother. It's like a massive, world-wide phone book for web browsers. DNS hosting effectively adds a record to this phone book for your website. There is some management required by the people maintaining DNS records, not least of which is making sure everybody has a copy or can access the contents.
This used to be included with your domain name. Now companies selling domain names are leaving it out and selling it to you as an extra. That means my customer's $19 bargain domain name really costs $74. Yes, you can buy separate DNS hosting. It will still cost you money.
I recommend that DNS hosting be handled by your domain registrar or by the company that manages your email. Websites do not need many changes to DNS, but email spam filtering often does.
