A common query:
Can anyone give me a little know-how about starting up a website? Perhaps some step-by-step about how to go from knowing nothing about this, to running a website? I think alot of people would benefit from this information besides just myself. I need to know some of the steps that I need to take to register a domain name, and how to host it. Some of the terms I’ve heard associated with this were MySQL and cPanel (I think). Does anyone know what these terms mean? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks alot!
Answer: This is quite a popular question. Free hosting will not be the best hosting for aspiring website owner. Web hosting is one of the most critical thing for your business and can mean the life or death to your business.
To answer your query, here are 7 qualities to look for in a good web hosting. An excellent hosting:
- lets you try their service for free or at very low price,
- gives unlimited webspace,
- offers no limit on bandwidth,
- gives unlimited add-on domains,
- has friendly Site Builder,
- has Fantastico and QuickInstall to quickly install apps like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, OSCommerce, ZenCart and more
- can be easily upgraded to VPS or one of their best dedicated server plans if and when your business require.
Answering your question, 92% of Webmasters recommended to try Hostgator. If you are building your first website and needs a hosting plan, experts usually highly recommend going with Hostgator because they are the best cheap cpanel hosting around.
What if you find out that Hostgator sucks after you signed up with them? HG has 45 days, longer-than-industry-average money back guarantee so you have ample time to test them out. They are rated A+ by Better Business Bureau which shows their commitment to customer satisfaction. You also do not have to pay for the first month. You can just try their fully functional hosting service – you pay only $0.01 (you need to use the special coupon code). Do you know any other hosting company that can give you that kind of assurance? Anybody can grab an account from Hostgator for almost FREE.
How to Get an Unlimited Hosting Plan for Only 1 Cent
Click the coupon below try Hostgator cPanel hosting for almost free. If you already know that Hostgator is what you want, you can even save 25% off the normal price with the Hostgator coupon 2016 below.
Who Should Not Try Hostgator
To be honest, no web hosting service is perfect. Drawback of Hostgator includes:
- No free domain name – but you can easily get a domain name from the best domain registrar such as Godaddy or Namecheap for $10 or less. Would you agree that a website is not complete without a domain name?
- You need to pay full price after your first invoice – well, they need to make money too and all the support and great service do come with a cost
If you are still not sure if HG is right for you, or you have specific query about anything at all, try the Live Chat at HG. They are fast and knowledgeable. Just shoot them some questions before you decide.
Step 1:
Register your domain name. You can register a domain name at yahoo or at godaddy.com.
Step 2:
Get web hosting. YOu can get web hosting thru Yahoo or Godaddy, or a gazillion other web hosting companies on line. You will likely only need a teeny bit of disk space for your site, but you may want to make sure you have at least 500mb of space so that you have enough room to have email accounts associated with your website/domain. Get a UNIX/RedHat/Linux/Apache type account. You don’t need to pay for "windows" hosting. You should pay between $7 and $20 per month for hosting…. less, and you don’t know what kind of customer service you are going to get, more, and you are paying too much.
Step 3:
Go to the place where you registered your domain name and make sure your DNS is pointing to the place where you are hosting your website.
more explanation: if you register mycompany.com and your host is hostingcompany.com, you need to make sure your domain name is pointing to hosting company. your dns may look like this:
ns1.hostingcompany.com
ns2.hostingcompany.com
Often times your webhost will do the DNS transfer for you. You will need to tell them your regristrar account’s username and password. That’s their job. It’s ok to give it to them. You might want to change it afterwards though.
Side note: I recommend registering your own domain. Don’t have your hosting company register it for you, as you want to own your domain name and have it registered in your own name.
Step 4:
The next step, of course, is to create your website and then load it onto your server. You should learn XHTML and CSS to do a good job here. You only need a text editor such as notepad or textpad to create your site and the filemanager portion of your control panel (see below) to upload your files, but you can also go all out and get Dreamweaver, or other WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor. I recommend Thomsons book "New Perspectives on HTML, XHTML, and Dynamic HTML, Comprehensive"
Terms:
MySQL:
MySQL is a type of database. If this is your first website and you asked the question you did, you likely will never need to use it. However, it is good to get a hosting package that allows for at least one MySQL database. You will only ever need one database, as you can have almost unlimited tables in this one database.
cPanel:
cPanel is a control panel for webhosting. It’s a type of control panel… brand name. It is a really great control panel. WHat is a control panel? A control panel is a GUI by which you can control your website. It includes file manager, where you can upload pages to your website (uploading means putting files from your computer onto your website that is hosted by your hosting company you picked in step 2), control of .htaccess, which allows you to set up password protected directories, email, which allows you to set a default account for your site as well as create email mail boxes and email forwards.
I have mine with Yahoo. I love the ease of use.
Best sites to check out where you can browse for a host and get help on how to do stuff
http://webhostingtalk.com
http://webhostingchat.com
Take a looky here: http://www.godaddy.com .
STay away from fly-by-night hosting services.
They are suddenly gone and your site is gone along with them.
when you know everything about web hosting
I am more interested in giving serious useful info. See my other answers also please
I have already given two answers related to this topic. Please go to the link
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AhYgoIDs2pzH8.AKjhOdQF3sy6IX?qid=1006032015199
And see the answer given for "how do i get my web page viewed by more people?"
And the other answer at this link : http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=As2wg1SyIt43DtMKY5a8VuPsy6IX?qid=1006021802190
This is an answer to the question: "how do i build my own web page?"
I think this will answer the first part of your question.
The software widely used for developing simple websites are :
html (xtml which is advanced one)
on most occassions, apart from a simple website, people may require complex functionalities for their websites. Some times some programming may be required at this point, Java Script, php and other programming software come to picture.
Some times you may need some animation to be added, Flash comes to picture here (some develop website only in flas, but it is not recommended. Search engines do not recognise images and javascript much)
Some times you may need to collect the address and details of the visitors of the website (say yours is a hotel booking website.) Then you need to store these data in a database. There are several databases but MySQL is a freeware. And for small and medium business this is very useful and popular. (MS-Sql, Oracle etc are costly)
As you can see now, MySql is not used develop the website, but to store the info in the background.
—
Cpanel is nothing but Control Panel. Where you get several icons/options for different tasks.
After you develop a website, you need to store this in some server. So you go to the cpanel and click on the file manager and upload yoru files, Later you edit your existing page details here. (All the stuffs related to files are handled here.)
http://www.ihostdata.com is a very good hosting solution for beginners and this has uploading simplified. (it is like you attach a file to your email). But some other hosting solutions may be a little complicated. They may not be very userfriendly.
To simplify matters.
html is like Ms-Paint, and Notepad. (this helps you to create a new file.
MySQL is like your old DBASE, ACCESS, FoxPro etc (where you store your data)
Cpanel is like your Control Panel(to some extend windows explorer) where it allows to organize different activities.
Please understand the above examples are given keeping in mind to simplify the answer, so that any novice can get some idea.
All my answers should be verified for accuracy, the answers are only my suggestions.
If you are a true novice and don’t want to spend much time learning how to make a site, I would suggest the current super-popular MySpace. You can quickly get your information up for all your friends to see.
If you are interested in something more, but still fairly simple try GeoCities or Yahoo.
If you are willing to learn HTML I would suggest ATSPACE.COM. You can create a website for FREE up to 50MBs in size. I have two websites through them and the uptime is great. You’ll need an ftp program to upload your stuff. There’s a good free one for personal use called "FTP Explorer". Of course you’ll either need to learn HTML or use one of the WYSIWYG programs like FrontPage or DreamWeaver to actually design your site. e-mail me if you need some help…
If you want your own domain and have it hosted, I suggest ReadyHosting. You get 1GB of space unlimted e-mail accounts, FTP access and domain name registration all for $99 a year.
Web hosting site (FREE):
http://www.atspace.com
Web hosting site (COST):
http://www.readyhosting.com
FTP Explorer site:
http://www.ftpx.com
A couple of my websites:
Pioneer Baseball Website (ReadyHosting – Cost)
http://www.pioneerbaseball.org
My Son’s Travel Team’s Website (ATSpace.com – FREE)
http://tricountytitans.atspace
Family Website (ATSpace.com – FREE)
http://tim8w.atspace.com