Q&A: How Do I Set Up A Website?
I often get asked this question, especially lately. Most of the people I know will tell me “I just bought my domain…but how do I get stuff to appear.” Well that is a very great question, and something I hope to clear up.
HOSTING
What is hosting exactly? Well without getting into the too much technical mumbo jumbo. I will say think of it like the car that holds all the stuff that your website will have on it, files, databases…etc etc etc.
Now I do have to get a little bit technical cause…well there are two different kinds of hosting, windows and linux. If you are going to be building a wordpress website, you have to go with linux cause wordpress plays a hell of a lot nicer on a linux based hosting platform. Just trust me on this, stick with Linux. I always tell everyone to go with the middle hosting server, or even premium depending on what they want to do. Never go with the lowest one cause well you get what you pay for lets just say that. When you have your hosting set up most hosting companies have one click installs that will automatically set up drupal, wordpress, joomla for you. ALSO one of the biggest things you can do that will make life easier is buying your hosting and your domain by the same hosting company cause if you don’t this can definitely give you some headaches later down the line.
DOMAIN
Now what about a domain? What is a domain? Going back to the car reference, a domain is the license plate of the car. This is whatever you enter into nav bar and enter to see your website pop up. Its quite that simple. Most websites are built on dot coms. But there are also dot org, gov, and soon there will be a lot more.
NOW WHERE THE CONFUSION STARTS
Many times I will have friends tell me “I bought my domain from INSERT HOSTING COMPANY HERE and it was only 3.99! why isn’t my website showing?” Going back to these commercials, many of them will post a big 3.99 and kind of not tell you that yes you can buy your domain for mega cheap but what they skip out on is hosting which usually comes out to 100 bucks a year. So if you plan on starting your own website you will be spending between 75-100 dollars starting off for just hosting and the domain.
DO I NEED A SERVER?
HA probably not. Unless you are actually a developer/company pulling massive amounts of data everyday otherwise nope you do not need one. Especially if you just have a basic company website that you will only update every so often. You seriously don’t need a server, those run about 200-500 dollars a month and those don’t usually come with assisted help. So you would be on your own. Seriously, you won’t need one, no matter what the hosting company tells you, stick with a hosting platform.
I really do hope I have cleared up some misconceptions about hosting and domain cause I do have a lot of people coming to me asking me this question more than normal and I hope people will read this and be enlightened.