B3-CH04 – Build Your Site – Host Your Domain

Once you have your domain – a process which takes only seconds to complete with the likes of NameCheap or GoDaddy – you must “host” your domain somewhere where it can be “propagated” and thus found all over the world. And that means you need a “hosting company”.

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Once again, you can Google the endless options, but my recommendation is either HostGator or BlueHost. They’re really cheap and really good. You can pay from as little as $5 (or even less) per month, even though I generally recommend that you take the “pro” hosting from HostGator for just under $19 per month at the time of this writing. Pro hosting allows you to have unlimited storage and unlimited number of domains and emails – and LOTS more. They also have a pretty cool “Baby” plan for about $6 and really good “Business” plan for about $10.

In fairness, there are also free hosting solutions out there (I even cover one of them in an attached video within this course), but I generally do NOT recommend free hosting solutions – they’re much more fiddly to set up and you never know how reliable they will be for you. And, finally, you won’t be in full control of your own domain!

Whatever you do on the web, always be in full control. This disqualifies some freebies like “free” hosting.

NOTE: Sometimes when you buy a domain (see previous step), the registrar will ALSO offer you hosting.  You may decide to take it, but watch out: many such hosting services don’t offer “complete” packages for the basic fee. For example the all-important “cPanel” (a superb little program that allows you to manage your domains and more) isn’t offered as standard by the likes of GoDaddy – and this may later give you some headaches! Unless you pay EXTRA.

So, typically, just use the registrars for domain purchases and hosting providers for your hosting.

Typically a brand new domain will propagate across the web within just minutes from setting it up (once you follow the steps below), but the standard disclaimer is that it MAY take up to 48 hours. I’ve had some sites where I waited for up to 4 hours before the domain name propagated sufficiently.

If you want to know about your web hosting options, I have uploaded a short but very informative course on just that to your Member’s Area: Web Hosting Explained.

Briefly, here’s how you set everything up:

1. Visit a hosting company. I recommend www.HostGator.com.
2. I suggest you pick a pro plan for around $19 per month – that’s because it gives you unlimited “everything”, though many of their cheaper plans are also great. If you follow my instructions, after a few months, you’ll be glad you have no account restrictions here. This said, you can also take an economy hosting (around $4 per month) and upgrade later.
3. When given the option to purchase a domain, skip it – you already have one (unless, of course, you really do prefer to have BOTH your domain and hosting under one roof). At this point tell HostGator you already have a domain and enter its name in the appropriate field.
4. Once the registration and purchase are completed, you will be sent to your HostGator account and you’ll receive an email with a confirmation. In that email you will see your two new “DNS” addresses. You’re almost done now.
5. Go back to your NameCheap account, log in, open “manage my domains” then select “change DNS” and enter both the new DNS addresses there and click on SAVE. You’re done.
   

If you have more than one domain, repeat the same process for each one. Additionally, you must tell your hosting company that you want all those domains set up. You do this (and many other things) through a cool little hosting management program called “cPanel” (“control panel”).

I have made available a detailed cPanel course for you here: cPanel, in case you want to get deeper into it.

It is VERY advisable for you to have an “FTP client” installed as well. That’s a program which allows you to download from or upload files to your hosting server. I use Total Commander which is also a superior replacement for Windows file explorer, but many more people use FileZilla or some others. You can Google that too. And you can also use your cPanel for this, although it’s not quite as flexible as a dedicated FTP client.

In your FTP client, set up an FTP connection which will generally use the same connection parameters as those you use to access your cPanel (i.e. your ftp URL which is typically something like ftp.johnsmith.com, your username and password).

In all cases, you will have received FTP setup instructions from your hosting company in your welcome email. If not – you can always look that up within your cPanel, and if you don’t have cPanel – you can get that information from your hosting provider’s support desk.

So now you’re all set – but you still don’t actually have a site up and running. We’ll do that in the next section.

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Book 3 – Chapter 3Your Domain	Course Overview	Book 3 – Chapter 5Your WordPress

Book 3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, , 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, Overview

Bonuses: templ, lib, tips, kwds, models  Link Res: aff, class, cpa, cpv, cpc, write, mob, outs, rss, soc, traff, var, exch, srcs, vid  Sub-courses: sens adw, aff, ar, bkm, cpy, cp, fb, fun, goo, lst, loc, mem, opt paid, ppal, sbox, prod,  seo, opt, socn, vidm, host, wp, lnch