I bought mylastname.com recently, and have an email service working, what can I do now? Like, if someone went to www.mylastname.com, what's the easiest way for me to put up a simple contact info page, with some personal links? I really don't know anything about web hosting or anything Pls halp?
The domain, is a name that is linked to an IP address. By default it's linked to the domain distributer. Basically the governments around the world provide a service, instead of typing an IP address in the address bar, you get to type a name. This obviously cost a fee, plus you have people/company who, for a small fee, will fill up all the forms for you, and make sure everything is registered properly and up and ready to go in 24-48h. IPS's are subscribed to this government service, where they get an updated list which they put in their server. This server, in the IPS side, is called a DNS server. As it does the translation between a name that the user type, to an IP address. Like the yellow pages, if you will. Right now, your domain is linked to the IP of whom you bought it (DomainShop.com, in your case). What you need now, is to get a web host, which is a company that provide pre-configured, supported, and maintained server space designed to be linked to a domain name, and ready to host your web site. You COULD do it yourself, but it's difficult, and costly, especially for 1 website. Not worth it, just rent. Once you have your web host, information will be given to, which you will need to enter at the control panel from your domain provider, which will link your domain name, to the web host that you acquired. Web host service are inexpensive, especially for your needs. You are looking at about 4-5$ per month (obviously you pay less if you go per year). The web host will provide it's own control panel which will provide you with plenty of options and feature to use, if you ever decides to build an advance web site. Also, you can also create your own or several e-mail address with your domain. Like in my case, I have my own e-mail, support and sales at my domain name. Doing a website is not that hard. All you need is an FTP program to connect to your web space from your web host and notepad. They are plenty of free FTP programs out there, like FileZilla. An FTP program, is like a web browser, but you can only download and upload files. Notepad is needed to write HTML files. The HTML file, is the scripts that form a page. If you right click on this page, and select "View source", you 'll see a window with HTML code (well Java-script and CSS as well.. but this is because this is a fancy page and needs fancier stuff to do what it does that HTML doesn't really allow by itself). HTML is what is called a formatting language. It does nothing more than formating text. Example: HTML source code: Hello, the following word is <B>Bold</B> Will display: Hello, the following word is Bold. To learn HTML, the best site, is this one: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp If you want a more involved site, and easier time coding HTML, and other web programming languages. Have a look at: Microsoft Webmatrix. It's free! http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/ If you need any help, just ask here, I'll be glad to help.
There is likely somewhere out there you can find HTML templates in order to make the site a bit attractive. Hosting shouldn't be a problem at all since you have very minimal requirements for bandwidth, disk usage, etc.
http://lifehacker.com/5911651/five-best-web-hosting-companies I use Total Choice Hosting, http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/, they are OK. Service is excellent, and server related problems are fixed super fast and transparent. The downside is that its sometimes not very fast, but it works.
I use bluehost, its not much annually, and is unlimited everything. comes with cpanel so you can just install wordpress and build a site on that.
I use Falcoda, it's pretty cheap (simple web hosting is £15 for a year or £30 for three years) and I've never had any issues.
I use InMotion Hosting. They're American, and are £95 for two years. I also have a higher demand on my host though, so it's likely something cheaper would be best for you. PM if you want a referral
Literally all I need is one page hosted, are there any free solutions which would let me use my domain name? Thanks for all the help btw, reps distributed.
The problem with free web hosting is that it doesn't work, in a business sense. People that put free web host put nothing of value to attack viewers or clicks on ads. So the hosting such web site end up costing more than what you get from ads. Yahoo Geocities is an example of such failure. I don't know of any free ones.
If you have a computer that is on 24/7 then you could possibly host it yourself. My media server is on 24/7, so have apache2 installed on it too.
You can use Google Apps to host a personal site for free. You can have up to 10 users and you get all the basic Google Apps stuff - email, web hosting, calendar, docs. I used to use a web host but they were unreliable and continually messed things up. I then started hosting on a server at home but after numerous hardware faults and a few power cuts realised there's a reason datacentres exist! So I turned to Google Apps. I was reluctant at first what with privacy concerns and all but in the end decided enough big companies are using it so I reckon there must be something in it, and who can say no to that price!
I use x10 hosting which is free. You just have to login to your CPanel once a month to keep it active. Comes with just about everything and will do a lot of installs for you (phpbb, drupal, wordpress, etc etc). I think it should let you use your domain name...
If you want good email, and just a basic site, use google apps free. We use it, best thing we ever did. Pretty much every google service you can think of, including google sites (basic website hosting) and it's free! (for everything else we use Domain.com and are currently trailing inmotion)
