Start a Website Already
Well we have jibber jabbered long enough about getting ready to start a website, today is the day our precious new baby is born, because we are going to turn that awesome domain name we bought into a bright and shiny piece of virtual realty called a website.
Before we start, we should probably double check and make sure we have everything we need to get this done.
So what is a checklist that we should have in place before we can officially launch?
- Secure a domain name (example www.mynewdomainname.com)
- Decide and sign up with a hosting company(examples godaddy or Themescapes hosting)
- Sit down at a computer with internet access
That’s it, in its most basic form you can launch a website once these three things are done. So lets go over how to do it.
The first thing you are going to need to do is find out the nameservers your hosting company wants you to use. Don’t get scared by the word nameserver it is just a fancy way of telling the world where to find your website.
Think of it as if you rented a space in a shopping mall and your store space that you rented was labeled by the mall as suite #36. Your address in the phone book and post office would be something like:
My Cool Store
Some Shopping Mall, Suite #36
YourTown, TX 99999
Now lets pretend a year later you grew out of that space and wanted a bigger one. The same shopping mall had a great space just up the path from your current space. So you move your shop to that new space, space #48. Your address would now be:
My Cool Store
Some Shopping Mall, Suite #48
YourTown, TX 99999
Nameserves are the Internet version of your address and They are stored in the DNS (Domain Name System), which functions some what like a Yellow Pages on crack for the online world.
So, taking a deep breath, now that all that is said we need to find out what nameservers our hosting company would like us to use and make those changes on our domain. Usually your hosting company will send you an email or notify you through your account once you sign up what those nameservers are to be. If you can’t find them, a quick email to their support should do the trick.
Most nameservers look something like:
ns#.somedomain.com
As an example, one of godaddy’s nameservers is NS43.domaincontrol.com. Although a more typical one like at our parent company Themescapes is ns1.blogiology.com.
To change the nameservers you will need to login into your domain hosting account and find where the area for domain management. This may be called Domain Manager, Account Manager, etc. If you can’t find it do a quick search for nameservers on the company’s website or once again send a quick email to their support folks.
Once you locate it you will want to make the necessary changes. Important! Almost always there are multiple nameservers you will need to assign. For instance all customers at Themescapes.net hosting use two nameserver entries. ns1.blogiology.com and ns2.blogiology.com. It is important that you only use the nameservers you were given. Your domain manager may have spots for three nameservers. If you were only give two from your hosting company, place them in the first two spots and leave the third one blank.
When you are all done and click “enter” or “save”, you most likely are going to get some kind of warning like, “Are you sure you want to do this?”, feel free to ignore it and carry on there is no danger of unintended explosions!
Great you officially have a domian being hosted on the Internet! Woo Hoo!……
Uh oh, not so fast! Just because you have a domain hosted does not mean you have a website. All you have done is direct the world to your store in the shopping mall, now you have to build a store for them to come to!
And that’s where we will leave it for today! Next time we will work on building our website.
Searching Out the Host with the Most
Picking a web-host is a very important part of any online venture. While it is not a make or break piece of the puzzle and switching hosts is really not that difficult to do, as a new blogger there are few things more daunting than trying to migrate your sexy existing blog to a new host after becoming frustrated with your current one.
So what is the moral of the story. Spend some time researching various web hosts, look at the features, and do not necessarily go with the cheapest.
Here is a quick tip to find out the dirty little secrets about various web-hosts. Make good use of Google and Yahoo. In the search bar type “Whatever web host you choose“ and “problems or troubles“. You will usually find links to several forums in the first few pages of your search discussing what issues your web-host may have a history of. Keep in mind any company of any size is going to have some upset customers, but if you find fifteen pages of ticked off webmasters it is probably a good sign to consider moving on to someone else.
So at this point you may be scratching your head and asking, “What the heck is a web-host and why do I need one?” So lets discuss this a little bit.
Web hosts are companies that provide customers space on the web host’s servers and Internet connectivity to “serve” the customer’s websites to the World Wide Web. Technically one does not need a web host to “serve” their website, but the cost and technical expertise required to do this adequately make it cost prohibitive for the majority of website owners.
There are several types of web hosting options available and we will discuss most of the major ones in order of increasing expense.
- Free Hosting: As this describes free web hosting is usually provided by a company that offers free web hosting. The “free” usually comes at the price of embedded advertising on your site, and often severe limitations in one’s options. Examples of free web hosts are the blogging platforms of Blogger, and Typepad.
- Shared Hosting: This is the most common form of hosting for small to medium websites from companies you have heard of like Go Daddy and Dreamhost . With shared hosting your website is hosted on a server that you “share” with many other customers. The benefit of going with shared is that it is very inexpensive. The major drawback (there are others) is that eventually your website may grow beyond your agreed upon resource allocation and you may be forced to consider other options.
- Virtual Dedicated Server or Virtual Private Server (VPS): This is our favorite and how we host blogiology, themescapes, and our other websites. VPS is somewhat like shared hosting in that you are sharing a server, but that server is set up in such a way to prevent the resource competition associated with the latter. It is more expensive, but much more stable and usually includes much more resources than it’s “shared” counterpart.
- Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated hosting is the big-time baby! You simply rent the server, utilities, and Internet access. The catch is that you are responsible for all the management of the server, such as resource management, troubleshooting, and security!
- Managed Hosting: Managed hosting is just like dedicated hosting with one big difference! Your web host “manages” your server. Think of it as dedicated hosting for us dumb people. This management comes at a price making it a little more expensive than dedicated hosting.
- Home Server: Technically this is not the most expensive as in reality you could do it at home with an old computer and a broadband connection. The “cost” is associated with all the trouble trying to keep it up, safe, and secure. It also can affect who can see your site, as some ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) have measures built in to block home based servers for security reasons.
That is all useful information, but if you were like me when I first started you are asking so which one should I choose. To help let us make a few recommendations.
If all you need is a drink of water, do you care if it is poured from another glass, a pitcher, or a water spigot attached to a tank the size of a small car? No, it is a silly question and you would not even think about it.
For some reasons when webmasters go looking for a web host they get sucked into the whole “disk space” and “bandwidth” battle. To be honest, these are pretty well worthless numbers. Trust me, you are just drinking a cup of water from these guy’s spigot when it comes to these resources.
When choosing a host look at who is giving the most of the important stuff! That important stuff is CPU usage, RAM usage, allowed MySQL databases, and domain names, should you choose to start another website after your first one becomes a huge success and the next greatest thing since opposable thumbs.
I hope this helps you understand a little better what your web host does and what your choices are! Enough of this boring stuff, let’s build a website already! In the next article we will turn our sexy domain name into a shiny new website!