Why do you need a web hosting to publish a website?
Some of the best and most common hosting companies are expensive, nearly 30 bucks a month for the most basic service.
Of course, you need to pay more for the cooler options. For example, if you want to have more than a gigabyte of space, you’ll probably have to pay for it.
However, you can usually find the basic services at cheaper prices. I use two hosting sites, one for cheap hosting and one for more complex hosting. For complex hosting, I use word-associates.com because of all the features it offers, including Perl, PHP, CGI, and database support.
Word Associates has a lot of features and a lot of memory. It also doesn’t cost too much just 10 bucks a month. (That’s in addition to the price of registering the domain name.) For cheaper and more basic hosting, I use E-RICE.net
It’s very good and very cheap. It doesn’t accept as much usage, though, so it shouldn’t be used for very popular or very large sites. Usage is the amount of traffic that your site gets, and the number of people that visit your site. For small sites, E-RICE should be just fine. Hosting with E-RICE is really cheap. For about 10 bucks a year, you get 100MB of Web space and 10 e-mail accounts. That’s an awesome deal. If you want more space, you can get the more expensive plans, which are only $10 or $20 more per year. If you’re not planning on using anything more complex on your site than HTML and maybe JavaScript, you can get a static account. This is a very basic account, because it only allows HTML. It’s a really good deal if you’ve got a basic HTML site.
In order to sign up for web hosting, you need to have a domain name registered already. Choose a username and enter your domain name.You then need to pay by using PayPal, a service that allows you to send money over the Internet.You need a PayPal account to sign up for E-RICE, so go to paypal.com and follow the instructions. What next? In a few hours, you’ll receive a welcome e-mail that tells you to update your name servers.These are simply references by your domain name to your hosting service that allow them to be associated with one another.
Once you’ve set up the name servers, your page will be associated with your hosting service. Unfortunately, this takes two or three days. In this time, you can get your site ready to be uploaded to the Internet. This waiting period is called propagation. It takes a couple of days before people around the globe can access your site because of all of the connections that need to be made, so you will probably have to wait a couple of days after changing the name servers to see the site.
What is FTP? It stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it’s a way to move files from your computer to the Internet. It’s easy to do and doesn’t take much time to learn. Pretty standard interface, huh? You need to enter three pieces of data to access your Web site your Web site address, your username, and your password.Your Web site address will probably be ftp.yoursite.com, so if you bought johnsmith.com, type ftp.johnsmith.com into the Address box.
Next you need to type in your username.Typically, this is the same as the username you use for your hosting company. However, with E-RICE, your username is your e-mail address.
Your password will be whatever you chose when you signed up for hosting. After typing in this information, press Enter to log in to your account.To move files to the FTP server, you just need to open up the files in Windows Explorer and drag them into the FTP window. Make sure that you upload the files to your mainwebsite_html directory, or whatever your www directory is (your welcome e-mail should tell you).
After you transfer the files, they will appear in the window. After the domain name has been propagated (about two days after you enter the name servers), the files will appear on your Web site. From then on, uploads to the FTP site will happen automatically. Congratulations, you’ve just put your Web site on the Internet!