Can anyone give me a little know-how about starting up a website? Perhaps some step-by-step about how to go from knowing nothing about this, to running a website? I think alot of people would benefit from this information besides just myself. I need to know some of the steps that I need to take to register a domain name, and how to host it. Some of the terms I’ve heard associated with this were MySQL and cPanel (I think). Does anyone know what these terms mean? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks alot!
Step 1:
Register your domain name. You can register a domain name at yahoo or at godaddy.com.
Step 2:
Get web hosting. YOu can get web hosting thru Yahoo or Godaddy, or a gazillion other web hosting companies on line. You will likely only need a teeny bit of disk space for your site, but you may want to make sure you have at least 500mb of space so that you have enough room to have email accounts associated with your website/domain. Get a UNIX/RedHat/Linux/Apache type account. You don’t need to pay for "windows" hosting. You should pay between $7 and $20 per month for hosting…. less, and you don’t know what kind of customer service you are going to get, more, and you are paying too much.
Step 3:
Go to the place where you registered your domain name and make sure your DNS is pointing to the place where you are hosting your website.
more explanation: if you register mycompany.com and your host is hostingcompany.com, you need to make sure your domain name is pointing to hosting company. your dns may look like this:
ns1.hostingcompany.com
ns2.hostingcompany.com
Often times your webhost will do the DNS transfer for you. You will need to tell them your regristrar account’s username and password. That’s their job. It’s ok to give it to them. You might want to change it afterwards though.
Side note: I recommend registering your own domain. Don’t have your hosting company register it for you, as you want to own your domain name and have it registered in your own name.
Step 4:
The next step, of course, is to create your website and then load it onto your server. You should learn XHTML and CSS to do a good job here. You only need a text editor such as notepad or textpad to create your site and the filemanager portion of your control panel (see below) to upload your files, but you can also go all out and get Dreamweaver, or other WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor. I recommend Thomsons book "New Perspectives on HTML, XHTML, and Dynamic HTML, Comprehensive"
Terms:
MySQL:
MySQL is a type of database. If this is your first website and you asked the question you did, you likely will never need to use it. However, it is good to get a hosting package that allows for at least one MySQL database. You will only ever need one database, as you can have almost unlimited tables in this one database.
cPanel:
cPanel is a control panel for webhosting. It’s a type of control panel… brand name. It is a really great control panel. WHat is a control panel? A control panel is a GUI by which you can control your website. It includes file manager, where you can upload pages to your website (uploading means putting files from your computer onto your website that is hosted by your hosting company you picked in step 2), control of .htaccess, which allows you to set up password protected directories, email, which allows you to set a default account for your site as well as create email mail boxes and email forwards.