This article reviews the basic steps of: 1. domain name setup
2. login to a control panel to manage the hosting account
3. set up of new email accounts
4. upload of a website to a hosting plan. These are the first things a new web hosting customer needs to accomplish, and in a lot of cases they will not need to adjust their account again, except to view website traffic statistics. This article covers these four steps, as well as a couple of other important tasks needed to get a website up and running with your hosting plan. Let us start by defining what a hosting plan consists of: A hosting plan is memory space on the hard drive of a server, it is internet bandwidth, and it is a control panel of features to manage your site. Step 1: Domain Name Setup The first step in getting your website up and running is to purchase a domain name. Current prices range between $8 to $20 per year. This will be the actual name of your website. No one else will be able to use your name once it is registered. Examples of common domain names you have heard of may include ebay.com, mapquest.com, etc. Once you have chosen a domain name, it needs to be pointed to the server that holds your hosting account, so when someone types www.yourdomainname.com into a browser, it will find the website files you will upload to your hosting plan. Every domain name has at least 2 DNS settings that map the domain to an actual computer. The Domain Name Server (DNS) is a server that has a look up table of domain names and the IP address they belong to. The IP address is the internet address of a computer connected to the internet. There are thousands of DNS throughout the internet, which help with its flexibility. When you order a new hosting account with a web hosting company, they will send you 2 DNS settings. There are at least 2 DNS settings for each domain. This allows for a backup in case the primary DNS setting is unavailable. This is one of the beauties of the internet. Each DNS contains only a handful of domain names, and each domain name has a backup. This makes it virtually impossible for a hacker to bring down all websites, or the entire internet for that matter. You will need to login where you registered your domain name and change the DNS settings to the ones that the web hosting company has given you. Note that you will have a control panel to manage your domain name, as well as a control panel to manage your hosting plan. New customers to hosting are often confused about the difference between registering their domain name and hosting the website for that domain name. Once you make these DNS changes, it will take 24-72 hours (1 to 3 days) for your domain name to propagate, at which time your domain name will start pointing to our servers and to your new hosting account. The time delay is caused by the distributed nature of the internet. A hosting company cannot tell you exactly how long it will take for your domain name to propagate across the whole world. It is dependent on all of the Internet providers in the world picking up the new results. Step 2: Logging in to your Control Panel You'll want to login to your control panel to do such things as view web traffic statistics, set up email addresses, set up databases, do backups, etc. Every web hosting company offers a control panel to manage your account (cPanel, Plesk, Helm, and Hsphere are the most popular control panels offered by web hosting companies, but some have even built there own to customize it to their services). They all offer basically the same features. In the control panel you can read your email, or set it up to be read through an email program like Outlook. You will also manage databases here, view your websites performance, backup your website, install pre-built scripts, etc. You can use the control panel to upload your websites files, but a lot of programmers prefer to do this through a separate FTP program. There will be more on this later. You should have a way to login before your domain propagates. This will allow you to get started on your control panel while propagation is occurring. Step 3: Setting up Email accounts Once you are logged in to your control panel, you'll want to setup at least one email address. Even if you do not want one, it is good to at least define one as a catch all to make sure you do not miss any emails sent to your domain. Email Forwarding- If you want to simply "forward" all email to an outside email address (like your ISP email address), then simply set your Default Address (a tool in the Mail Management section of your Control Panel) to your ISP email address.... or to any email address where you want the emails to automatically be forwarded to. That way, any email sent to 'anything'@yourdomain.com will be automatically (and immediately) sent to you. If you want to forward some emails to one address, and others to other addresses, you can do this with the Email Forwarders tool in your control panel. Email Accounts (POP3 Accounts)- If you want to create a new email address with its own account (or email box; this is called a POP3 email account), then use the Add / Del Email Accounts tool in your control panel. From there you can add POP3 email accounts, assigning each one it's own unique password. You will then want to go to your own email program (like Outlook, Outlook Express, etc.) and configure it to receive the emails sent to the new account you created. For example: let's say your new hosting account is yourcompany.com and you created an email address in your control panel called you@yourcompany.com and assigned it a password called yourpass. The details you'll need to setup your email account(s) are as follows: Account name: you@yourcompany.com
Password: yourpass
Incoming POP3: mail.yourcompany.com
Outgoing SMTP: mail.yourcompany.com Here is a video tutorial that shows setting up an email account in Outlook, http://www.roundberry.com/tutorials/email/email_outlook2002.htm. Step 4: Uploading your Website/Files Once your domain name has propagated, you can upload your website and files to your account using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program like WS_FTP. If you do not have an FTP program, you can download a free version of WS_FTP... it is one of the most popular FTP programs in use today. FTP is the most common way to move files around on the internet. If you are going to build and publish websites you will become very familiar with FTP. It is a simple protocol and there are a number of good FTP clients available for free. With FTP you connect to another computer and drag and drop files between them. In this case the other computer is the server where your hosting plan is located. Microsoft FrontPage- If you are using FrontPage to build your website, then you do not need an FTP program. Instead, use FrontPage's "Publish" feature to publish your website to your hosting account, using the username and password for your account (provided in your welcome email). Prior to Domain Propagation- Another way to upload your files to your hosting account is by using the File Manager tool in your control panel. In fact, you can do this prior to your Domain Name propagating, so that your website will be functional prior to your domain name working. All of the common control panels have a File Manager tool or at least an FTP client. Viewing your Website/Files Prior to Domain Name Propagation- You may want to view your website prior to your domain name working, to make sure that it looks and works the way it should. You can immediately view your website prior to your domain name propagating by using the following link: http://IPaddress/~username Where IPaddress is the primary nameserver IP address given to you by your hosting company, and username is the username for your new account which is also given to you by your web hosts. So for example, if you are assigned the IP address of 12.123.12.123, and a username of "youracct", then you would simply browse to: http://12.123.12.123/~youracct If you want to view a specific page in your website, say contactus.html, then you would browse to: http://12.123.12.123/~youracct/contactus.html Of course, you will first have to upload your website to be able to view the pages.... and you can do that from within your Control Panel. Congratulations! After completing the above steps, you will have setup your domain name, created email accounts, and uploaded your website to your web hosting account. You are now in business! |
