Publishing Your Website

When you have built your embryo website on your hard drive you will probably want to publish it to the Internet. I call it an embryo website because you will probably be building on it to make it a larger website.

Before you can upload your website to the Internet you will need a domain name and a hosting company. If yours is a hobby website, a personal website or something similar you may be satisfied with using a free hosting service. Although you may not have to part with any cash it is probably not free; the hosting company will make their money in other ways such as advertising on your website for free. Also you may not be completely free to assume your own domain name but will use the domain name suggested, at least in part, by the free hosting company.

There may be other conditions that you have to take notice of; for example there may be a clause in your contract saying that if you're website remains unattended for a specified time it will be taken down.

Despite all that this type of arrangement is excellent for trying out your first website; dipping toes in the water so to speak. However if you want to get more serious then you will need to take up a contract with a hosting company that you pay for its services.

Selecting a hosting company

Hosting companies are almost as numerous and diverse as the sands in the desert and you'll need to search to find one that suits your requirements. I can guide you in this and make a firm recommendation but in the end you are the one that has to decide.

I have been building websites for some years now and have used several hosting companies, starting with quite a small one that gave me a good service for a low price. It was a shoestring company that seemed to be run by just two hard-working guys. But things move on and I began to feel the need to publish more websites.

I found a hosting company that seem too good to be true and I decided to give it a go. Whereas the small company would only allow one website the new company offered to host unlimited websites.I found all their promises to be genuine and, in fact, since I have been with them they have provided extra facilities for which I pay no extra. Please check them out here. If you decide to join them I will get a commission. I make no apologies for this because I believe I'm doing you a good turn.

Don't take my word for it; just go there and check it out and make up your own mind. There are clues to the name of the company on this website. At least you'll have a yardstick to measure other hosting companies by.

My requirements for a hosting company.

excellent uptime
a good support system
a fair price
unlimited domains hosted
use of subdomains
unlimited databases
cPanel
plus a lot more

Uptime

Uptime is when your website is visible to the world. The hosting company to which I belong guarantees an uptime of 99.9%. beat that!

A good support system.

A good support system is absolutely essential. My hosting company provides several ways of getting in touch; e-mail, telephone or you can have a written one-to-one with a technical advisor. This I have used myself and found it very effective

A fair price

I believe that the price that hosting companies charge is very reasonable. My hosting company charges me $6.36 a month but the facilities that they offer are, in my opinion, exceptional. There is a cheaper alternative at $3.96 which might suit you at the moment and you can always upgrade later.

There are also more expensive alternatives but my present arrangement suits me fine and will probably do so in the foreseeable future.

Hosting unlimited domains.

Some people own a large number of domains; I only have four domains but it's still very convenient to be able to upload them to one hosting company. Although not costing a lot, domains still have to be paid for. But sub domains can be used at no extra cost.

Sub Domains

If your website was called 'mysite.com' its URL would be http://www.mysite.com/. You could write a new folder called 'dogtraining', about training dogs, and, using Cpanel make a sub-domain named. http://www.dogtraining.mysite.com.

As well as not costing for a domain name there is the additional advantage that you can choose the name you want. I haven't checked but I expect that most names about dog training are already taken.

Provision of unlimited databases.

Databases are used for a variety of purposes. Examples are blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and databases are often needed when you install the script.

cPanel.

C panel is a third-party utility that is used by a number of hosting companies and hence a great number of facilities for use by Webmasters. I would never subscribe to a hosting company that didn't use C panel as I believe it offers so much and makes life so much easier.

Other facilities.

All hosting companies advertise facilities that they say may be unique to themselves. They may or may not be of use to you so you have to make a judgement.if there are terms that you don't understand such as PHP, JavaScript, Ruby and so on check it out on Google or another search engine. From the list that comes up I prefer to use Wikipedia as a reputable source of information.

Uploading your website

To upload your website files to your hosting company's server you will need an FTP client. This is a program that you host on your own hard drive. FTP stands for file transfer protocol; look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know more about it.

There are many FTP clients available, some are free some are not. A very popular free program is FileZilla. It is an open source program and there is plenty of instruction on how to use it. I use it occasionally myself. But when I first started making websites the free FTP clients were not reliable and I chose a program called Terrapin and I still use it more often than not because I have become accustomed to it. It is still available, and the company is still supplying the same version, so it has run the test of time. From their website the company seems quite wide-awake and have a number of other programs.

FTP clients have a number of facilities that you need to learn about. When you upload a complete new website there's not a lot to go wrong except that of course you have to upload it to the correct place on the server. This you will have to check with your hosting company. On mine it has to be uploaded to the file Public HTML or www.

It gets slightly more complicated when you want to upload files that you have added or have modified on your website. The FTP program will have one pane where it shows all the files on your hard drive and another that shows the files on your hosting company's server. You have to be careful that files on your hard drive are uploaded to the correct folder.there is usually a facility to allow you to upload and replace only “files that are newer”.

There is a facility in C panel files manager that allows you to upload individual files. This can be very useful at times when you only need to upload one or two files.