Getting Started
If you’ve thought about building a website of your own, or for other people, businesses, artists or whatever, the first things that you’ll need are two-fold: Hosting and a Domain. The two are competely different, but usually go hand-in-hand when getting started. You can get them both together at the same time, or you can get them at completely different places at completely different times.
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Domain Name
The name of your website, the part between the ‘www.’ and the ‘.com’ is called the DOMAIN. It represents whatever your website might be pertaining to, your business name, or your intentions. Or it can be a witty pun that spoofs what your goals are. This, surprisingly, can be the most difficult part of creating a website – deciding on a name for it. You might be lucky enough to find your own name available as a DotCom, or you may be blessed with just not caring too much about the name. Either way, this one decision can hold up getting started for decades. Just pick something that’s available, and that you can live with. Changing the domain name in the future, while it is do-able, is not a small thing to deal with.
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Hosting
This is the easier of the two, but it can become a challenge if you’re researching from scratch. Hosting is just what they call the service of storing your website on an actual computer that is connected to the internet 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. A ‘Host’ is just a computer that is always on, operating efficiently and with up to date security & software. Usually it will be running an enterprise version of Windows Server Edition, or Linux, or Unix. It must always be on & connected to the internet so that anyone looking for your website can find it, because that is where your entire website resides, in the form of files.
Your Website is literally nothing more than a collection of files that contain whatever you’ve created: a series of pages, posts and pictures. You’ll probably have text, pictures, legal disclaimmers, affiliate links & other hyperlinks that connect all of your pages together. Unless you have your own computer that is always on, running continuously and connected to a good fast internet connection, you’ll need to find one that is. This is where Hosting Services come in.
Companies that provide Hosting will have at least one such computer that is set up and equipped to safely and securely hold all the files associated with anyone’s website, no matter what kind of website it may be. Usually a single server computer will hold dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands of websites, all kept separate from each other and protected from all the dangers of the online experience. It will give access to everyone looking for all those websites in a very timely & efficient manor, so that all of us can browse the internet at our leisure. Most Hosting Service Providers are likely to have dozens or hundreds or even thousands of Server Computers, operating in one building, or in several cities or even on multiple continents, all working together to host multitudes of websites, all paying for Hosting services. And so, due to ‘Economies of Scale’, it would make sense that a larger Hosting company could have better pricing since they can afford to be more competitive. (That however, is also dependant on many other factors)
So, who are the Hosting comapies?
Luckily there are all sorts of pages and Youtube videos that compare and review almost every Hosting service available. Here is a list of the most common Hosts, and links to them as well. This is by no means a complete list, there are hundreds or even thousands more.
Of these, I’ve chosen Hostinger for all my Website hosting and Domain registration. With Hostinger, I’ve got hosting for up to 100 websites, up to 100 subdomains, one free domoain name, full service, free SSL & CDN and lots more. And their prices were very good for my needs.
More on that later ….
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