Well I am not writing this article to promote any hosting company or a web-design company. The true purpose of writing this article is to merely help people who have no idea about how a website functions and how it is setup. So if you are already familar with this one its best that you ignore this article and try surfing through other interesting articles that you may find here.
It was being asked a lot of times from me, from my friends, relatives and many others, how did I go about setting up a website? what all is needed to setup your own website and how much will it cost me to run website? what are the skills needed to run an effective website? well there are lots of questions coming to my mind I am just stopping this one here.
So how did I setup a website or a blog?
Three years back I just wanted to setup my own website and run it for fun, but I have no idea how anyone would setup a website, what and all is needed for me to setup a website on my own under my own independent domain. Of course I started to learn how its done gradually. It was hard for me initially because no one was there to teach me. But don’t worry I am here to teach you how its done basically.
Primary need to run a website is a domain, yes you need to buy a domain and there are some sites like www.co.cc which offers a free domain for life, well you can give them a try if you are interested just for study purpose, I wont recommend using co.cc domains for commercial or business purpose but again its your choice, you are free to do whatever you can on internet.
I would recommend you buying a new domain with your credit card or paypal account (verified) on www.godaddy.com, www.namecheap.com and there are many other similar sites where you can get your own domains, those two were the ones used by me. So after you are through with buying a domain second step is to buy a hosting account.
Buying a website Hosting:
You need a host or server from where you will be displaying your webpages, so you need to buy a hosting account. Again there are many free hosting providers out there but from my own experience most of the free hosting providers are crap so its better to buy a paid hosting account and you dont have to pay much for a paid shared hosting account. There are lots of people in forums.digitalpoint.com who offer shared hosting for a cheap price, so you are always free to approach them and get yourself a cheap shared server or host.
Setting up nameservers for your domain:
Initially I thought its a big deal to setup nameservers for your domains, but actually its pretty simple than anything. When you register a hosting account, the hosting company where you got hosted gives you nameserver details, if they dont give you just ask them to give you those because they are very important. Normally two nameservers is the minimum requirement but you can have to six or even eight but two nameservers will do.
Where I have to configure my nameserver?
well if you have purchased your domain under godaddy you can just go to domain manager and select the domain and at the top you usually have an option becoming active called nameservers, just click on it and make sure you enter your nameservers on the first two place and click ok.
Moving To your server again:
So now after you have got your server, you will get a set of information like cpanel access details, ftp access details. these both are the important ones. If you just want to load up some simple HTML pages in your server its enough to use the ftp access although ftp access will play a major role, but as a beginner just know that what ever you want to show up in your website, all of them are transferred through ftp, reason is its quicker and effective.
Choosing a right ftp software:
For a long time I am sticking to flashfxp its not a free ftp software but I must say its a very good ftp program and works very good for my taste. But there are free ftp programs out there and there is even an addon for firefox. So try to google them and get one.
How to use ftp software?
So again how are you going to go about using a ftp software? its pretty simple once you open any ftp software you will have area for username and password. Also a area for port, if you have no idea what port it is just leave it to default, try to login after you login you must see a folder called public_html, that is where your webpages should be stored. For example you made a html page called index.html then try to tranfer that index.html to public_html folder by dragging and dropping there and go to your domain and lookout for this page “www.yourdomain.com/index.html” replace the yourdomain with your own, you will see your html page is displayed in your browser and of course anyone around the world can access it from any location.
My pages are not loading on my browser what could be the problem?
There can be several possible reasons for this. I will try to specify some of them which I can recollect for now.
1. Nameservers might not have been propagated yet to your server, normall it takes from an hour to 48 hours for your domain name to propagate to your server, so if you find that your pages are not loading dont panic just wait till your nameservers to get propagated.
2. Nameservers specified might be wrong, just try to check the nameservers exactly reflect what is provided by your hosting company, otherwise nameservers may not work properly and your site may not get displayed.
3. you might have specified a wrong url, please check your url and check whethere your domain is correctly spelled and your specified a right location on your address bar or else your pages may not load properly. Many people do typos error and eventually end up in a blank page.
4. Check whether the file you specified is in public_html folder of your server otherwise the file wont open.
I have checked everything but still my website is not loading and I have even waited long enough for the nameservers, what should I do now?
This is a rare case if you face this situation just try to contact your hosting provider with the problem you face and they might guide you to a proper solution to get your pages displayed.
Now I know how to display my HTML pages on my domain, how do I go about setting up a blog?
I am not going to discuss in detail about this and I will do it in a separate article and link at the bottom of this article so that you can check it out easily.
I will just give you a small tip, if you have cpanel access just check you got something called fantastico in it.
Many think setting up a good looking blog is a difficult thing to do, but its not really. You just need to find a good looking template and there are lots of free templates available on internet just try to google them and you may stumble across many websites which offers free templates.
I will discuss about blogs in detail in my other article. if you have any other questions regarding setting up your domain, website and HTML pages to your hosting just feel free to drop a comment and I will be more than happy to answer any of your questions regarding it.
And yes do you need HTML knowledge to run a website? I would say not necessarily plus HTML is simple to understand and execute and even small kids can design beautiful websites nowadays using simple HTML, I would say why not you?
For your knowledge I have discuss about the topic Is it really essential that you need to know designing knowledge to start a website just follow the link.
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Great site, how do I subscribe?
thank you mate, you can use the subscribe box to the right.
thanks !! very helpful post!
hh.. amazing.