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.
