10-13-2009, 02:33 PM
There are many of you out there that are wanting to make a website, but, you don't know how, or maybe you're a little scared at something that, to a beginner, may seem like a daunting task. And, in all actuality, it really is, at least to make it successful and attract viewers.
The very first thing I want to say is just get the paid hosting, they're much more reliable because they really have an incentive for you to stay happy. And just pay for a domain name. If you aren't willing to fork out $10 for a domain name, and $5-$10 per month for hosting, you need to get away from this area now. It shows the average person you are not committed to the site, even if you are. Not only that, all the backlinks you build through advertisement on sites, people linking to you, etc. will be gone when you finally decide to actually pay for a domain. There is a lot of people out there that say things like "I'm not going to buy a domain until I know my website is successful." That's really the wrong answer, it's just like any business venture, you have to invest and spend money to make money. If you're just making a family site to let mommy and daddy back home know what you did today, then it's ok. But, if you plan on making it a successful site that actually makes any money, you'll have to spend the money first.
First, you will need a domain. I recommend you do not get your domain from your host. Why? Well, there are horror stories all over the web about people purchasing a domain through their host and getting it hijacked by the host when they close their account to move hosts. A lot of these come from 1 and 1 host and a lot of the smaller hosts run by kids. On top of that, they're usually much more expensive, sometimes as much as twice as expensive.
So, where to get domains? Well, I'll give you a link to several domain registrars. Prices will vary depending on the TLD (top level domain, .com, .net, .org, etc.). There are many many domain names to choose from out there. But, on top of that, there are many many that are taken, and really most of the good ones are taken. When registering you need to keep in mind trademark law. If you plan on making a site about shoes, you can not register something like nikeshoes.net. You need to make sure there is not a likelyness of confusion and they can't show you are riding their name notoriety.
You should try to register something that is close to what you want the site about, try to keep it as short as possible without any hyphens (-). Try to make it easily pronounceable and easy to remember.
Some good domain registrars are:
Name Cheap. I use them for most of my personal domains I purchase. Right now they are offering a free SSL and Whois protection with each domain registered. More than likely you won't need an SSL unless you are dealing with personal information being sent over the web such as credit card/banking information.
Name.com Haven't really used them.
Domain.com I have one domain through them as of today.
GoDaddy Good domain registrar, stay away from if you want real hosting. If you plan on getting into the domain selling business, I recommend them for your domains you are purchasing and selling. That is the registrar most people use.
That is enough to get you off the ground with registration. Make sure you google around for coupon codes, everyone likes a little discount, even if it's only 10%.
Domain prices may vary from registrar to registrar and TLD to TLD.
Domains are available for registration for 1-10 years. Think of it as renting, if you don't pay when the registration is over, you are going to loose the domain. You'll have about a 30-60 day window before it becomes available for registration again, so you have a chance of getting it back. But, the thing is, most registrar's will charge you an average of $200+ to get it back.
Is the domain already taken you want? Well, that could spell bad news for you. Because more than likely it's either being used by someone on a site already, or a squatter has gotten to it first, and will generally require a hefty sum for payment. If you're looking for 4 letter (LLLL) .com's you're out of luck unless you have a minimum of $100 you're willing to spend. Most of them average high $xxx to low $x,xxx just for the domain with no content.
Next, on to web hosting. I can't tell you who is the best, but, I can tell you how to find the best one for you. And for that I will direct you to another tutorial I have, it is located in my sig. Read it thoroughly. before purchasing, and make sure you do your own due diligence when searching. And don't trust those hosting top 10 sites, they are crammed with affiliate links that will gain them $100+ for your signup, they only put the top paying hosts there, some are ran by smaller hosts, and will have their hosting company up there.
Stay away from GoDaddy, their stuff is all sorts of weird lol. They aren't bad...per say. But, they are not on any type of standard like the rest of the hosts are, they use a proprietary control panel (which could prove troublesome when moving away from them onto a server of your own should you grow)
Make sure you actually sit there and read your hosts Terms of Service/Acceptable Usage Policy thoroughly before purchasing.
Odds are you should be purchasing the smallest shared hosting package, no matter how large you expect your site to be. There is always an easy way to have your hosts upgrade your account. Just submit a ticket to them to tell them you want to upgrade, place the order, pay. They'll do it for you. Even moving you to a VPS or dedicated server down the line. Don't pay more than you need to. The vast majority of sites out there use less than 10GB of bandwidth (data transfer) and less than 150MB of disk space. Stay away from unlimited disk space/bandwidth plans.
Now that you have purchased a domain and purchased your hosting, you are almost all set.
Now, log into your domain registrar's control panel and look for something along the lines of DNS management, name server management, or something to that affect. Your hosts welcome email/account information email should have something called name servers on there. You need to update your domain to the name servers. This way the vast reaches of the internet will know which specific server the files are hosted on. Without the name servers being updated to the right one, no one will ever see your site. Be advised, it may take up to 24-72 hours for it to propogate all over the world, this depends on how often your registrar updates things, and how often your ISP's DNS servers update. As well as your own computer. Sometimes you may have to open up the command line (on Vista you need to right click it and run as administrator) and type: ipconfig /flushdns
Now that you have all that, it is time to start uploading your files. Don't have any yet? Well, what type of site are you wanting? A blog? Forum? What? Are you going to be selling things for your personal business? Maybe try to make a little extra mullah online? Just want a blog to tell your family what's going on? You should have already had this all planned out, if not, well, you're a little behind the power curve.
After you have all your files, you are going to need to upload them to the server. How do you do that? Well, you need to look at that email your host sent you, and look for FTP (File Transfer Protocol) log in information. Then, you're going to need an FTP client, I recommend FileZilla Client. You need to upload all the files to the proper directory. When you log in with FTP you will see quite a few folders. The majority of hosts have something like public_html or www there. If you don't see them, contact your host's support department and ask which directory you need to upload. Make sure there is a file named index.php, index.html, etc. in there otherwise you will need to set up a redirect which gets tricky if you don't know what you are doing.
Next is getting people to come to your site in the first place. You need to have original fresh content. The best way is to optimize your site for search engines (SEO), and get indexed high on Google for some nice key words. To do that...well, that's a whole different tutorial and I'm not a SEO expert.
You need to get word out that your site exists. Submit to directories, place a link to your site in your signature and post quality content. Exchange links with some sites that already have visitors. You may even have to pay for some online advertisement. This can be expensive. Some hosts give Adwords credit out, use it!. Do anything and everything you can to get your site out there. Posting on forums and commenting blogs is good, because it give you some semi permanent backlinks to your site, which, also happens to help with your SEO, especially if you can find a site that's somewhat related to your site. All the search engines will see is a bunch of related links to your site from a related site, it's like a gold mine for your page rank. Just be careful, a lot of webmaster's don't like you advertising competing boards.
This is the bare bones basics to getting a site up. I will go ahead and throw in that I use http://www.mddhosting.com for all of my websites that I own. I recommend them to anyone. As a matter of fact I know the owner from when I ran a web hosting company, so, IMO, if I trusted him enough he must be ok right?
The last but not least (Actually it's about the single most important thing) BACKUP YOUR DATA. It is your responsibility, I say again, it is YOUR responsibility to maintain a backup of your data. Just because the host says daily backups, or they perform regular backups, whatever, does not mean that they will be there when you need them. The amount of backups you make should be dependant on the frequency of changes your site receives. If it's a forum, it's probably a good idea to backup daily, and as you grow maybe even twice a day or more, but, if it's a static HTML page where you talk about your vacations, it's not going to be as necessary to backup daily and you could get away with only backing up when you add/change content.
The host is not responsible, and if you read their TOS you would know this, for your data. The responsibility of data is yours and yours alone. Don't be "that guy" that looses all his data. If you go over to www.webhostingtalk.com you will see threads nearly daily about a person that looses all their data because their host disappeared, server died, or they got suspended/terminated. I can not stress this enough, and you're probably thinking "it won't happen to me". Well, so did the people that have lost their data. You should back it up as often as it is valuable to you and changing.
The very first thing I want to say is just get the paid hosting, they're much more reliable because they really have an incentive for you to stay happy. And just pay for a domain name. If you aren't willing to fork out $10 for a domain name, and $5-$10 per month for hosting, you need to get away from this area now. It shows the average person you are not committed to the site, even if you are. Not only that, all the backlinks you build through advertisement on sites, people linking to you, etc. will be gone when you finally decide to actually pay for a domain. There is a lot of people out there that say things like "I'm not going to buy a domain until I know my website is successful." That's really the wrong answer, it's just like any business venture, you have to invest and spend money to make money. If you're just making a family site to let mommy and daddy back home know what you did today, then it's ok. But, if you plan on making it a successful site that actually makes any money, you'll have to spend the money first.
First, you will need a domain. I recommend you do not get your domain from your host. Why? Well, there are horror stories all over the web about people purchasing a domain through their host and getting it hijacked by the host when they close their account to move hosts. A lot of these come from 1 and 1 host and a lot of the smaller hosts run by kids. On top of that, they're usually much more expensive, sometimes as much as twice as expensive.
So, where to get domains? Well, I'll give you a link to several domain registrars. Prices will vary depending on the TLD (top level domain, .com, .net, .org, etc.). There are many many domain names to choose from out there. But, on top of that, there are many many that are taken, and really most of the good ones are taken. When registering you need to keep in mind trademark law. If you plan on making a site about shoes, you can not register something like nikeshoes.net. You need to make sure there is not a likelyness of confusion and they can't show you are riding their name notoriety.
You should try to register something that is close to what you want the site about, try to keep it as short as possible without any hyphens (-). Try to make it easily pronounceable and easy to remember.
Some good domain registrars are:
Name Cheap. I use them for most of my personal domains I purchase. Right now they are offering a free SSL and Whois protection with each domain registered. More than likely you won't need an SSL unless you are dealing with personal information being sent over the web such as credit card/banking information.
Name.com Haven't really used them.
Domain.com I have one domain through them as of today.
GoDaddy Good domain registrar, stay away from if you want real hosting. If you plan on getting into the domain selling business, I recommend them for your domains you are purchasing and selling. That is the registrar most people use.
That is enough to get you off the ground with registration. Make sure you google around for coupon codes, everyone likes a little discount, even if it's only 10%.
Domain prices may vary from registrar to registrar and TLD to TLD.
Domains are available for registration for 1-10 years. Think of it as renting, if you don't pay when the registration is over, you are going to loose the domain. You'll have about a 30-60 day window before it becomes available for registration again, so you have a chance of getting it back. But, the thing is, most registrar's will charge you an average of $200+ to get it back.
Is the domain already taken you want? Well, that could spell bad news for you. Because more than likely it's either being used by someone on a site already, or a squatter has gotten to it first, and will generally require a hefty sum for payment. If you're looking for 4 letter (LLLL) .com's you're out of luck unless you have a minimum of $100 you're willing to spend. Most of them average high $xxx to low $x,xxx just for the domain with no content.
Next, on to web hosting. I can't tell you who is the best, but, I can tell you how to find the best one for you. And for that I will direct you to another tutorial I have, it is located in my sig. Read it thoroughly. before purchasing, and make sure you do your own due diligence when searching. And don't trust those hosting top 10 sites, they are crammed with affiliate links that will gain them $100+ for your signup, they only put the top paying hosts there, some are ran by smaller hosts, and will have their hosting company up there.
Stay away from GoDaddy, their stuff is all sorts of weird lol. They aren't bad...per say. But, they are not on any type of standard like the rest of the hosts are, they use a proprietary control panel (which could prove troublesome when moving away from them onto a server of your own should you grow)
Make sure you actually sit there and read your hosts Terms of Service/Acceptable Usage Policy thoroughly before purchasing.
Odds are you should be purchasing the smallest shared hosting package, no matter how large you expect your site to be. There is always an easy way to have your hosts upgrade your account. Just submit a ticket to them to tell them you want to upgrade, place the order, pay. They'll do it for you. Even moving you to a VPS or dedicated server down the line. Don't pay more than you need to. The vast majority of sites out there use less than 10GB of bandwidth (data transfer) and less than 150MB of disk space. Stay away from unlimited disk space/bandwidth plans.
Now that you have purchased a domain and purchased your hosting, you are almost all set.
Now, log into your domain registrar's control panel and look for something along the lines of DNS management, name server management, or something to that affect. Your hosts welcome email/account information email should have something called name servers on there. You need to update your domain to the name servers. This way the vast reaches of the internet will know which specific server the files are hosted on. Without the name servers being updated to the right one, no one will ever see your site. Be advised, it may take up to 24-72 hours for it to propogate all over the world, this depends on how often your registrar updates things, and how often your ISP's DNS servers update. As well as your own computer. Sometimes you may have to open up the command line (on Vista you need to right click it and run as administrator) and type: ipconfig /flushdns
Now that you have all that, it is time to start uploading your files. Don't have any yet? Well, what type of site are you wanting? A blog? Forum? What? Are you going to be selling things for your personal business? Maybe try to make a little extra mullah online? Just want a blog to tell your family what's going on? You should have already had this all planned out, if not, well, you're a little behind the power curve.
After you have all your files, you are going to need to upload them to the server. How do you do that? Well, you need to look at that email your host sent you, and look for FTP (File Transfer Protocol) log in information. Then, you're going to need an FTP client, I recommend FileZilla Client. You need to upload all the files to the proper directory. When you log in with FTP you will see quite a few folders. The majority of hosts have something like public_html or www there. If you don't see them, contact your host's support department and ask which directory you need to upload. Make sure there is a file named index.php, index.html, etc. in there otherwise you will need to set up a redirect which gets tricky if you don't know what you are doing.
Next is getting people to come to your site in the first place. You need to have original fresh content. The best way is to optimize your site for search engines (SEO), and get indexed high on Google for some nice key words. To do that...well, that's a whole different tutorial and I'm not a SEO expert.
You need to get word out that your site exists. Submit to directories, place a link to your site in your signature and post quality content. Exchange links with some sites that already have visitors. You may even have to pay for some online advertisement. This can be expensive. Some hosts give Adwords credit out, use it!. Do anything and everything you can to get your site out there. Posting on forums and commenting blogs is good, because it give you some semi permanent backlinks to your site, which, also happens to help with your SEO, especially if you can find a site that's somewhat related to your site. All the search engines will see is a bunch of related links to your site from a related site, it's like a gold mine for your page rank. Just be careful, a lot of webmaster's don't like you advertising competing boards.
This is the bare bones basics to getting a site up. I will go ahead and throw in that I use http://www.mddhosting.com for all of my websites that I own. I recommend them to anyone. As a matter of fact I know the owner from when I ran a web hosting company, so, IMO, if I trusted him enough he must be ok right?
The last but not least (Actually it's about the single most important thing) BACKUP YOUR DATA. It is your responsibility, I say again, it is YOUR responsibility to maintain a backup of your data. Just because the host says daily backups, or they perform regular backups, whatever, does not mean that they will be there when you need them. The amount of backups you make should be dependant on the frequency of changes your site receives. If it's a forum, it's probably a good idea to backup daily, and as you grow maybe even twice a day or more, but, if it's a static HTML page where you talk about your vacations, it's not going to be as necessary to backup daily and you could get away with only backing up when you add/change content.
The host is not responsible, and if you read their TOS you would know this, for your data. The responsibility of data is yours and yours alone. Don't be "that guy" that looses all his data. If you go over to www.webhostingtalk.com you will see threads nearly daily about a person that looses all their data because their host disappeared, server died, or they got suspended/terminated. I can not stress this enough, and you're probably thinking "it won't happen to me". Well, so did the people that have lost their data. You should back it up as often as it is valuable to you and changing.
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