Hosting A Website

What could be a greater discount for hosting a website than spending $10-20 a year? You can get a free presence on the internet by signing up with Wordpress or Blogger and start immediately. But where’s the fun in that? Don’t you want a nifty website name and the ability to control and manage? If you do, then follow these instructions.

Here is how you go from buying a domain name to having a live website. The majority of costs is from purchasing a domain.

• Spend 9 dollars on a domain from Godaddy. Sometimes, there are domain coupons from Godaddy where you spend $0.99 to register a domain.
• Godaddy has free website hosting but they put advertisements on your website. You can choose this or wait till Dreamhost has their special $10 shared hosting for one year.
• Ask the hosting or check their FAQ for their nameservers. It usually looks something like dns.example.com and ns2.example.com.

If you have the Godaddy account, sign into your account and go to the manage your domains section. Set your nameservers by pasting the nameservers into the #1 and #2 text fields. The process can take a day or two for the domains to point to your hosting. Other times, it’s instantaneous.

Most hosting companies set you up with a FTP account, with a username and password. Download a FTP client to upload and download your HTML/webpage to their hosting servers.

ftp.example.com
username: example@example.com
password: thepassword

Design and create your website with web design program such as Dreamweaver or you can download website templates and edit them with notepad.

What is a domain in simple terms?

A domain name is like a telephone number and whenever someone wants to contact you, they call the telephone number (domain). The domain puts your presence on internet.

You can also imagine it like an address. If someone wants to visit you, they will go to 123 Main Street. Your house on Main Street would be considered the hosting and all the website content would be placed inside your house. In order to visit your house, I would have to go to that 123 Main Street address.

Domain tip to get free privacy

Whenever you purchase a domain, you are required to provide valid information such as your name, address and other contact information. Invalid information is grounds for domain termination. Some people get around this by starting their own business and using a private mailbox as their domain WHOIS ( Tool to query the details of a domain name). You can also use a privacy service.

At Godaddy, you can buy 5 domains or more and they will automatically allow you to add private registration for your domains. You have to make sure to buy all of them together. Use the bulk domain search or add domain to the Godaddy cart. This also works for other domain extensions such as .info. These .info domains are also considerably cheaper in price than .com domains. As long as you purchase 5 domains, this trick will work.