Let’s come to the point. You want to start a website/blog and you are looking for a guide to learn how to do it. This article is an ultimate beginners guide to start your own website.
To start your own website, you need to know more about the following 3 topics.
1) Domain Names
2) Website Hosting
3) Software to Power Websites
So lets begin!
1) What are Domain Names ?
You just look at the address bar of your browser now. You see www.dollarfry.com right ? Well, that’s the domain name of this website. A domain name is the name by which a website is publicly known. Just like our names (My name is Jojo Joson), every website must have a name to be identified publicly. These names are technically called domain names. They can be coined using English alphabets, numerals and certain allowed special characters. The purpose of a domain name is easy identification of the website by humans. Hence a domain name is usually coined using words in dictionary (by combining them). Hope you got a good basic idea of domain names. Some examples of domain names are Google.com , Yahoo.com , Msn.com , Facebook.com etc.
You might have observed a .com at the end of every name right ? This is called the extension of a domain name. There are different types of extensions for a domain name. The most commonly used extensions are called (gTLD) Generic Top Level Domain Extensions; and they include .COM, .NET, .ORG, etc. There are other extensions too. The next popularly used ones are country specific domain extensions. These are two letter extensions like .US, .IN, .SG, .UK etc. These extensions represent a specific country, say .us represents USA and .in represents India.
So how easy was that learning ? You finished the first part of registering your own website. As next step, you should learn how to come up with a good domain name. I have written detailed article on How to Find a Good Domain Name for Your Website. In this article, I have analysed many excellent domain names and how those names are coined. There is a scientific approach in naming good websites. Once you have come up with a good domain name, the next step is to register that name. I have written another detailed guide on the registration process of a domain name. Registering a domain name is a step by step procedure which is very easy to understand. So here read – How to Register a Domain Name to learn about the steps involved in registering a domain name.
Okay! Now you perfectly know about domain names. Find your best one and register it. Let’s move to next topic, website hosting.
2) More on Website Hosting
When you access a certain website, say a news website like Yahoo.com ; have you ever wondered where those images, videos and content (texts) are stored ? Lets come to our website DollarFry and this article you are reading. Do you know where this article content, its images and all other contents in this website are stored ? Here is the importance of website hosting. We need a storage space (a computer obviously) to store our websites files (text content, images and videos etc). These files should be stored in a computer that is always connected to internet. This computer is technically called a web hosting server. I hope you got a basic idea of website hosting.
Now let’s see how to get a hosting server for your website. There are thousands of website hosting companies in our world. They all have different plans – say they differ in price, differ in server capacities (like Memory, Hard Disk Space, Processor etc). We have to analyse these different hosting companies and the plans offered by them. Based on our best judgement, we can buy a suitable hosting account from a company of our choice. Once we buy a hosting account, we will get an access to our server computer (using the login details provided by hosting company) residing at the hosting company’s data center.
There are different types of website hosting servers. We can divide them into 3 types – 1) Shared Hosting 2) VPS Hosting and 3) Dedicated Hosting. A beginner is always supposed to start with a shared website hosting account. Now lets see the basic difference between these 3 hosting servers.
Shared Hosting – is a central server (a big single computer) divided into many segments. There will be 1000 such segments on a single computer. When you buy a shared hosting account, you buy 1 segment of these 1000 segments in a single computer. So we buy a share of single server computer and that’s why it’s called shares hosting account. Since you are a beginner, I assume you are here to start a website/blog from scratch. A shared server space is more than enough at this point. From my experience, a blog can be run smoothly on a shared hosting server upto a point it receives around 6000 to 7000 daily unique visits (this will differ from case to case, say it depends on the software you use to run your website; more on that later). Once your website reaches the limit, you can switch to next hosting plan called VPS hosting.
VPS Hosting – is known as virtual private server hosting. This is an intermediate hosting account, that stands between a shared hosting and dedicated hosting account. Its a little complex to explain this technically. To give you a better idea, this is a single server computer divided into only 100 segments. (You may note that a shared server was divided into 1000 segments). So in a VPS hosting you get much more resources like more memory, more bandwidth, more processing power etc. The major difference between a shared hosting and vps hosting is that, in a vps hosting your resources are guaranteed. You got confused ? I will make it simple. Let’s say you have two hosting plans in hand. One is a shared server with 2 GB RAM and other is a VPS with 2 GB RAM. You see no difference between them right ? Both are 2 GB RAM’s ! Well, in a shared server this 2 GB RAM is shared among the 1000 different segments of a single computer. In a VPS this 2 GB is available to your own single segment. This is what I mean by guaranteed resources in a VPS. In a shared server you will get full 2 GB RAM access only if the other 999 segments are inactive. You got it ?
Dedicated Hosting – is a single computer to host your website’s software and its files. The resources (RAM, Hard Disk etc) available in a single dedicated computer is used to power your website. A dedicated server can handle very large number of visitors at a single point of time. Very popular websites and blogs are running on dedicated servers. As a beginner, you don’t need to think about buying a dedicated server at this point. So I hope, I don’t need to write about it in detail as well.
3) Software to Power Websites
In the olden days, a website was created using HTML pages. Each page was written as HTML and then uploaded to server. Now the situation has changed. Most website are now powered by content managing software called CMS (Content Management Systems). The most popular CMS out there is WordPress – which is an easy to use web publishing software. Other popular CMS are Joomla, Drupal, Concrete5 etc. If you are looking to start an e-commerce store, there are specialized e-commerce CMS like Opencart, Magento etc. Based on your requirements you can choose the suitable software to power your website. All these software’s I listed here are open source products and comes with a GPL license. So you can download this software for free. Once you select the software, just download it from the official website and install it in your server computer. Detailed instructions are available with every software (and with your hosting company’s help guide) on installation and setup.
So that’s enough as a beginners guide. Read this article and follow the links have given in this article. All the best with your websi
