If you are a geek or a techie you might know all of these already. If not go ahead read on. Be it for your photos or your articles or for a small business of your own. Here is a simple step by step guide to set up your own website.
Register the Domain:
What is a domain name?
It’s otherwise called as the URL (Uniform Resource Locater) and also referred as URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). In simple terms that’s your website address. Learn more about the Domain name here.
First thing you want to do is to go ahead and choose the domain (the website address) that you want. There are tones of domain registrars out there. Say like Network Solutions or GoDaddy. You might have noticed that Yahoo! also does that, If you like Google services you’ll love their latest announcement. Yes, Google can book your domain for a good deal; $10.00 with private registrations. More details here.
Oh speaking of private registration, for those who have no idea of what it is. When you register a domain name, you’ll be requested for your name, address, phone number and your email. Well I’m sure you’re already getting those dozens of junk mails and emails, not to mention those marketing phone calls that you get. Though the company you register the domain name might not sell your data, it’s available to the public. When you choose to have a Private registration, All your personal details is hidden.
Most of the domains registrars have their own domain search capabilities. They also suggest some of the domains that are available depending on the words you put in for your domains name. I like AjaxWhois.com for that matter, it’s fast simple and easy.
Choose your Hosting:
Now that you’ve registered your domain name, the next thing is to find a hosting company that can host your website and its content. Again there are thousands of hosting companies out there. Learn more about the Web Hosting Service
These services range from few cents a month to hundreds of dollars and sometime even thousands. For a personal or a brusquer like website (say less than 50 pages) you might only need less than 10MB of space (depending on the content). There are websites that gives web host search like FindMyHost.com. You’ll have to choose what you want. Usually you can get something good around $100/year or even less depending on what your needs are.
Update the NS:
NS (Name Servers) are servers that point a particular domain name / URL to a hosting server. Once you sign up for the hosting service, your hosting company will send you an email with the details of Name servers that needs to be updated on your domain registrar. Usually both hosting companies and domain registrar companies make it easy to do this by providing detailed online help.
Please note that it might take anywhere from 24 hours to 48 hours to get the Name Servers point to your hosting servers.
Setup your Website:
Once your domain gets forwarded to your hosting server, you might want to setup email accounts. Details of how to setup these are vary and are provided by each hosting companies.
Again, there are thousands of companies which can build your website. It all depends on what you need and how complicated your site could be. For a simple website which might have some static content you could do it yourself. Some of the hosting companies do provide their customers with templates and website building tools.
Google for instance does come with FREE hosting (sort of) Well
- you have up to 200 email account from Google with the capacity of 2GB each.
- a Calendar service.
- chat service that can work with Gmail and few others
- Pages, which lets you easily build your pages
Yes all with no extra cost. Now this does not limit you from having your own custom applications installed or built, you can change the NS to host your site somewhere else.
You are pretty much set, Now there are other free application that you can use build your site too. You can then upload the pages (if you have created some locally using client applications) to your website. The FTP (File Transfer Protocol) login details must be in your email that you got from the hosting company.