OK so when I say website I mean your own website… not creating a page on blogger or wordpress. I am talking about your own domain name and your own hosting.
Starting a website is very easy. The first thing you will want is a domain name. There are many places to buy a domain godaddy, network solutions, but I highly recommend buythatsite.com since they have lower prices and privacy is cheap! Also be sure to get a .com if you can’t go for a .net and if you can’t get that go for a .info. Trust me keep searching you will find something that fits your niche.
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OK I have a domain name now what?
Awesome congrats! Having a domain name is half the battle. Lets just hope you have a good one. Having the right domain name can go a long way in getting traffic to your site.
So we have our domain name, but we need somewhere to run it right? This is what we call hosting. Simple enough, I am sure when you bought your domain name you were inundated with offers for hosting left and right! Here is what I have to say on hosting. Sure there are 100′s of places to host your website, heck you could even host it on a computer in your home if you were technical enough, but I still wouldn’t do that. With this site I want to speak from experience and show you how I have done things. This helps in two ways… 1 I can show you one on one how to set things up… and 2 I know they work, because i have 100′s of sites running via the same set ups.
OK if you are just getting started you will want to get hosting with Host Gator, you will most likely want a smaller plan, they offer hatchling, baby, and a business plan. I would highly recommend the business plan since that will give you a dedicated ip address. If you are going to be hosting many sites then you will want a reseller plan.
Why I like Host Gator?
There are many reasons, but here are just a few. Again this is from my experience. I have 3 reseller hosting accounts with them, so I would not stay there if they sucked.
- They have great support. There has never been an issue I could not have fixed in lest then 15-20 minutes.
- They have CPANEL. You will love CPANEL, it lets you set up everything you need to set up, Emails, backups, dns, blogs, forums, etc on the fly!
- They run on monster servers that are redundant (That means they won’t crash…well they won’t crash easily…)
- They are fast! You don’t know how many times I have moved clients off of other big name hosting companies because the sites were running so slow… Host Gator will run your sites smoothly… if they don’t let them know and they will make it happen.
OK those are just a few rants about Host Gator. Get your hosting set up with them and your good to go.
OK I have hosting now what?
Host Gator will give you some instructions on how to set up the account for your domain, depending on your Hosting Plan you may have to create the domain account in your WHM (Web Host Manager)
So after you have your account created, you are going to need to point your domain name to the name servers that Host Gator has provided for you. They will be something like ns55.websitewelcome.com & ns56.websitewelcome.com or something simliar. You will have to login to your registrar where you bought your domain name and change this to your new Host Gator hosting.
If its a new domain the changes should happen pretty fast. Give it about 15 minutes then check the domain url. You should prob just see some simple page with some info simliar to
Index of / cgi-bin/
Apache mod_fcgid/2.3.5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
That means your hosting is all ready to go!! But.. wait that doesn’t look like a website. I know I know, that is just showing you have your hosting running and your domain is pointed to the right place.
Setting up a site!
Here is where it gets fun. Since the majority of my sites run on WordPress I am going to tell you how to get WordPress up and running in less then 5 minutes!
OK first you need to login into your CPANEL (remember CPANEL… your gonna love it) Once your logged in scroll down to the bottom and look for Fantastico De Luxe.
- Click on Fantastico De Luxe
- Then look at Blogs, click on WordPress
- Click on New Installation
- Fill in your info – Click Install WordPress
- Bamm enjoy your new site!
Thats really all there is too it. You now have WordPress set up and running on your domain. You can also look at all the other cool apps that Fantastico will install on the fly for you.
Of course there is more for you to do to get your site running and full of content, but I just wanted to tell you the basic steps to get it up and running. I am going to work on a video and walk through this step by step so just bare with me.
Hope you enjoyed that… Hit me up via live chat if I am around or over on the forum or use the contact form!
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