Beginners Website Hosting Guide
Ok so you have a business and you have a name for that business so what’s next? “Let’s get a website” is the immediate reaction. Some of the questions on your mind might be: “How does it work?”, “Can I do it or is it too complicated?”, “How much will this cost me?” I decided to put together a guide for beginners website hosting accompanied by a video to show you how easy it is.
The Guide:
- Choose and pay for your domain name – This sounds simple but there are some subtleties to take into account. For example if your business is in the construction sector and your company name is something like “M&A Construction Services (UK) Ltd” then I would not recommend getting the domain “mandaconstructionservicesukltd.com”. The primary reasons for this is that it is too long and not necessary when it comes to a domain name. Just think of the email address when someone wants to send an enquiry (enquiries@mandaconstructionservicesukltd.com). They will get fed up half way into typing all of that and not even leave an enquiry. Instead I would choose something like “mandaconstruction.com”. This is shorter, concise and to the point without any unecessaries.
- Choose a reliable hosting provider – Price is an issue if your budget is limited, however it is better to spend a few quid extra a month and have the peace of mind that your website won’t be offline more than it is online because of price. The impact on your business will be far greater. (You can Contact Us if you require any hosting facilities for your website)
- Purpose of the hosting provider – In essence a web hosting company is a massive online storage company. It has hundreds if not thousands of servers connected online which store website data. All that happens when you open your browser and type in a URL (web address) like mandaconstruction.com is that you get directed to the server that contains your website data that is provided by your hosting company. This data (code, images, text etc) is then rendered by your browser and displays the website on your screen in a visually pleasing form.
The Process:
- Log into your domain name provider and change your nameservers to point towards your hosting company. (I am going to use 123-reg.co.uk to demonstrate)
- Log into your hosting provider and add your domain for hosting. (video coming soon)
- Once the process is complete, you will have a folder in your public_html folder with your domain name where you can add html documents.
This folder is where your domain name “points” to when somebody types in your domain name into their browser. The browser will display the html files that the folder contains. These html files are documents containing data about your website that the web design company made for your business.
We use WordPress as a content management and blogging system to build websites for our clients, but that topic is for another post.
We hope you find this guide useful in your website hosting endeavours. Please feel free to share it with anybody who you may think will benefit and let me know your thoughts.