Setting up home on the web need not be a daunting exercise. With a little patience you could be renting your own server space for very little money and have full control of whatever you wish to publish.
First off you have to buy a domain name. These are typically purchased, or more accurately "leased", in periods of a year. You could choose to lease your domain name for a year or 10 it’s up to you. Domain names follow the format "domain.extension", such as google.com, or ebay.co.uk. Anything that comes before this, like maps.google.com, is still part of the same domain name.
All the best names are taken. That’s a fact. This has lead to the recent crop of Web2.0 sites having to resort to the badly spelled: “Flickr”, the highly constructed: “del.icio.us”, or to the nonsensical: “gravee”. Nevertheless, if you think you’ve found a blinder that no-one has registered yet then you can find out for definite by visiting
Allwhois. This online service will tell you if the domain you want is registered or available, and if someone does have it – you might even be able to find out their details.
So you’ve found an available domain name that you like? The next step is to register it. There are a vast number of “registrars” out there. These are the people that will secure your domain for you and will tell it where to point. Not all registrars are alike. This is spoken from bitter experience, when you need to contact your registrar in the future, and you will, some less-professional providers can be very difficult to deal with. Instead, opt for one of the bigger players in this field.
Now you may want to consider a hosting package. It has to be said that some hosting companies also provide domain name registration, so this might be a good option if you want the whole package. You can spend as much as you want on hosting. Various plans range from a few pounds a month to the thousands; however, unless you are planning some sprawling online retail empire in the next few weeks, you can probably get a way with spending very little. We recommend
Easily. They have proven to be straightforward, reliable and cost-effective.
If you think you might need to phone a support desk regularly then it might be a good idea to use a UK-based hosting company, however you get more bang for your buck in the USA. For the UK try
Fasthosts or
WebFusion, in the US,
Pair and
A2Hosting have good reputations. At this point you will have to decide what kind of server you want: Windows or Linux. My advice is to go with Linux, it’s reliable, open-source and cheap. There are plenty of reasons to choose Windows, but if you are starting out with a personal or small business website, Linux is an easier route. All the main hosting providers come with some form of control panel to manage your server space. cPanel is one of the most popular interfaces, but there are others. Again,
Easily offer great deals.
Once you have rented your server space, if you have opted to register your domain name with another provider you will need to “point” your domain at your server. This is done by either asking your registrar to do this for you, or by configuring it yourself. Essentially you need to make sure that your registrar has the correct namespace server details, these tell visitors to your domain where on the web your site is hosted. These namespace server addresses look like this: NS1.GOOGLE.COM, and usually you will have 2. If you have any problems with this your registrar will be able to help.
Once you have configured your domain to point at your server then don’t panic if your site isn’t showing - it can take a day or 2 for this to “proliferate”. Now it’s just a question of building your site, but that we will tackle another time.
Published on 24th January 2007
