Editor's Note: This is a continuation of Patrick Hester's column on websites from Monday, March 20.
By Patrick Hester
Registering a Domain
By Patrick Hester
Registering a Domain
There are a lot
of places where you can register your domain name that can be independent of
where you host your website – remember how I said the two are different? These
places are called ‘Registrars’.
Here are some
examples of where you can search for and register your domain and the cost as
of this writing (presented in no particular order of preference):
o
$2.99
– $11.99 per year depending on what you want
o
FREE
domain registration when you sign up for webhosting
§
BlueHost
says in the fine print you retain ownership of your domain name until/unless it
expires and you choose not to renew it
o
$5
per year or more based on the services you choose
o
$12
per year or more based on the services you choose
This is a
simple cross section of some of the options out there. There are A LOT more. Many
of these companies offer to bundle your domain registration with the hosting of
your website, enticing you with discounts and deals if you do so. Before you
sign up for one of these, consider how you are going to build your website and
the software you’re going to use. More on that in a moment.
Your domain
registration is usually good for one year, but you can purchase more than one
year at a time in order to enjoy various discounts being offered. PPW’s
fearless leader, JT Evans, went ahead and registered his domain for 10 years!
It’s important
to note that you will have to renew your domain name eventually or your website
will vanish from the Internet (even though your hosting with all your pages,
posts, etc. is still there). There’s a grace period offered by most registrars
that allows you to renew your domain name and turn everything back on should it
expire. At the end of that grace period, your domain name will come up for
grabs and anyone can purchase it.
ANOTHER NOTE: When it comes to registering domains,
the registrar will require personal information about you like your real name,
address, phone number, etc. There are some international laws (ICANN) governing how domain names work that
require them to gather this information. Unfortunately, that information also
goes into a public record archive about domain names. If you don’t want any Joe
or Jane to be able to find that information about you, you can do an add-on to
your registration to add a privacy layer. This will hide your information from
public view, but keep it associated with your domain per the international laws
to allow rapid resolution of technical problems and to permit enforcement of
consumer protection, trademark, and other laws.
Web Hosting
Once you have
your domain name registered, you need web hosting for everything that makes up
the site itself. Companies charge a monthly fee for this and usually will give
deep discounts if you pay in advance quarterly or yearly. I’ve seen hosting for
as little as $2.99 a month, and as much as $300 a month, depending on what you
want.
Think of
hosting as the space where everything that makes your website up will live.
Most of the discount hosting out there is what we call ‘shared hosting’. The
host has a giant space and has cut it up into sections and rents out those
sections to each person who wants a website. The sections have walls between
them so you can’t see their stuff and they can’t see yours. But if someone else
gets a sudden influx of traffic to their area, yours can suffer and your
website might become slow or even not show up when people come to it. This is
rare, but it can happen and is worth mentioning.
Dedicated
hosting is expensive, and most everyone ends up using the shared hosting until
or unless they become famous and have a lot of traffic coming to their website.
Some examples
of web hosting companies and the cost as of this writing (presented in no
particular order of preference):
o
Starting
around $3.95 a month with discounts for pre-purchasing for set terms
o
Starting
around $3.95 a month with discounts for pre-purchasing for set terms
o
Starting
around $3.99 a month with discounts for pre-purchasing for set terms
Your webhost
will give you a set of numbers and/or letters, sometimes more than one – these
are called ‘named servers’. You take them to the site where you registered your
domain, login to your account, and type that into a specific spot. Boom. Your
website and domain name are connected, and your site will appear when you go to
your domain name in a web browser.
Usually, your
webhost also has an area where you can setup email addresses and then access
that email through your phone, desktop client and web interface.
CMS – Content Management Software
Every web
hosting company worth their snuff will include access to software you can use
to build your website and/or blog. Some, like Blue Host listed above,
specialize and offer support and services dedicated to specific CMS. For Blue
Host, it’s Wordpress. Now, I talked about Wordpress.com above, but in this
case, I’m talking about Wordpress.org.
When looking at
CMS software, the leader comes from Wordpress.org. Wordpress is split into two
projects - .com and .org. The .com is the paid side where you can setup a blog
using their domain and pay for extras as I described above. The .org is where
you can download Wordpress – the blogging software – for free and install it on
your webhost. You then have access to everything that is out there and being
developed for Wordpress, including tens of thousands (if not millions) of
design templates, plugins and widgets. These come in free and paid versions,
and are designed to make it easy for you to setup your site quickly and easily.
Blue Host
features a ‘one click’ install of Wordpress, taking away all of the heavy
lifting. Other webhosts have adopted this approach and usually have some sort
of quick and easy installation of Wordpress that doesn’t require you to do much
more than click a link – which is great.
I’m an
unabashed fan of Wordpress, which you’ve probably figured out by now. I think
it’s easy to install, easy to use and maintain. It comes very search engine
friendly out of the box, and with a plugin like the free version of Yoast, you can amp of how easily your site
works with the search engines by answering some questions and filling in the
blanks.
That doesn’t
mean Wordpress is the only horse in town. There are plenty of others. Some are
more complicated than others.
Here’s a quick
list of some of the options out there you can install and use for free:
If you have
published works out there, you need a website. When someone reads your stuff,
more likely than not they’re going to want to look you up online and see what
else of yours is out there. Not finding you is bad, and can turn readers –
especially young readers – off and make them look elsewhere.
This was wonderfully informative in a straight forward manner. It was so helpful. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteLaDonna Ockinga