Hi everybody.
Today we're going to talk about hosting your site.
And what I mean by hosting your site is how you take pages that you've been
working on so far and put them up on the Internet for everyone else to see them.
In order to host your site, you need two things.
You need, first, a domain name.
That's the name that people look at in your URL.
The second thing you need is a hosting company, usually called a hosting service.
And they are gonna be the one to act as a server for
your files to let other people see them.
So first, let's talk about domain names.
Usually, when you go to buy a domain name, you're gonna purchase it for
multiple years at a time.
Cuz it really doesn't make that much sense to own your domain name for
only a single year, unless of course maybe you're running for an election or
doing something where you know you only want it up for a short time.
The most common domain names have the domain ending of .com.
But more and more the other extensions are getting acceptance.
So if you're go to buy a domain name, and the only way you can get the name
you really want is to use .net or .biz, that's okay.
I recommend that you still go ahead and do it.
The important thing to know is that domain names by themselves,
they're really pretty much completely useless.
You can own it, but unless you have files there that people can look at,
no-one's going to be able to go there and see anything.
So this is where the hosting services come in.
So if you were to look at your url right now on your page, when you make a file and
you right-click and you're looking at your site, in Chrome or Internet Explorer or
anything like that, you're probably gonna notice that the protocol is file.
We don't want that. We don't want it to be file or C: or
my documents.
We want it to be something that looks like www, and
that's where the hosting company comes in.
So, what you need is a registered IP address to connect your domain name
with the Internet.
So, hosting services are going to vary.
They go from free, to what I call midrange, to really full service.
And so, you need to decide what kind of hosting service best fits you.
To be honest, I usually recommend free when you're getting started, and
then make your way up.
But let's talk about the pros and cons of each one.
So with free services, you really have little or
no control over your domain name.
So if you go and look at some other people's, particularly from your school,
your work, things where people are not really there just for the domain name,
and you're gonna see things like wicks.whatever.whatever and
then your name.
You're going to have really limited tools.
Sometimes when you pay for a site, you're gonna be able to have
email registration and different things like that.
Free services don't really wanna give you too much freedom
because they're a little worried about what you're gonna do.
Probably the worst part about free services is that there's a lot
of advertising and redirects.
If somebody goes to your site and
makes the smallest little typo, rather than getting a nice friendly warning,
they're probably going to be redirected to some somebody trying to sell something.
The nice part about free services is that they have a very familiar look and
feel across all of them.
If you sign up for one service and
learn how to do your hosting on it, you can pretty much rest assured that you're
gonna be able to manipulate your files on any other free service as well.
So let's talk about paid services, both the mid range and the full.
With paid services, you tend to have much better tools for manipulating your code.
It's not just about putting your files up on the web.
You can do things like have email filters, send out special, what we call cron jobs.
Cron jobs are different files that you can run at different times of the day.
So if you wanna have a database, you wanna have a list server,
you wanna have emails, then you might wanna pay for the paid services.
The other really nice thing about paid services is that there's technical support
available to you.
So you can go ahead and email, chat, anything you need.
You're not gonna find that with the free services, or
it just won't be quite as good.
But before you go for the paid services, I really recommend that you check for
free services through work or school as well.
A lot of time these free services still have the really great tools and
the support, but you just don't have to pay for them.
So, if in the end you're not quite sure what you want to do,
if you want to go with free or
paid, I know it can be overwhelming when you decide what you're gonna do.
So I've simply recommended one site that I know a lot of my students use and
that's Byethost.
You go ahead and go to this url, byethost.com.
Notice that it's b e y t h o s t .com.
Once you get signed up, you're going to want to make sure that you remember
the password that you type in because they're not going to mail it back
to you and if you cannot remember it, it's really going to lead to a lot of problems.
In fact, you'll probably end up giving up and signing up for a new account.
Once you've done that and you've filled it out,
you're probably gonna need to check your spam because in that spam,
they're gonna send you an email that tells you all the details that you're gonna need
in order to connect through either cPanel or some other type of FTP device.
So, I hope you're excited, and I hope you're gonna take that next step, and
that you want to go and post your work out on the web.
Good luck.