Web Hosting
Okay, the first thing we’re going to do is get you signed up to a web hosting company. Don’t worry, it’s not expensive! Your first month will only cost $0.01 (with the awesome coupon I’m going to give you) and $9.95 a month after that. At this point, if you have no experience making websites, you’re probably asking yourself, ‘What’s a Web host?’ Well the answer to THAT is below!
What’s a Web Host?
A Web Host, in layman terms, is a company that puts your website on the internet. That’s all that you really need to know about webhosting. You pay them a small fee, and they let you put your website on their servers, which are specially hooked up to the internet. Simple right? By the way, the word ‘Server’ is just a fancy word for a computer that’s designed for websites. There are three kinds of web hosting out there, and they are;
Shared Hosting – Shared hosting means that your website along with hundreds of other websites is hosted on one powerful server. You ‘share’ this server with a lot of other websites. This is the cheapest kind of web hosting and the most popular.
VPS Hosting – A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is basically the same thing as shared hosting, but with a few key differences. Instead of hundreds of other websites being hosted on one powerful server, only a handful of websites are on that server. The fewer websites that are on a server, the faster it tends to be.
Dedicated Hosting – As the name implies, dedicated hosting uses a single server solely for one customer. The benefits of dedicated hosting is that since the server is ONLY hosting your websites, which means all of the server’s resources are being used on one customer. Dedicated Servers are only necessary if you have a website that receives hundreds of thousands of visitors every day.
For the sake of this ‘guide’ we’re going to use the web hosting company called Hostgator. You could use another company, but I strongly recommend going with Hostgator, as I’ve personally been using them for the last two years and I haven’t had any problems with them. I really can’t recommend them enough actually, they have great technical support and solid prices, but the most important thing is that they’re reliable. Sure there are cheaper web hosting companies out there, but I recommend staying away from them. The phrase ‘You get what you pay for’ couldn’t be truer in the web hosting industry. Plus this guide is set up assuming you use Hostgator, so go ahead and signup to it by Clicking Here
and follow the instructions below
Step 1
From the Hostgator homepage, just click on the top where it says ‘Web hosting’.
Step 2
Now from this page just scroll down and click the order now button on the middle column. The reason we’re going with the $7.95 plan over the $4.95 plan is that the $7.95 one allows us to have an unlimited amount of different websites on the one account while the $4.95 one limits us to a single website. The $7.95 plan is actually $9.95 if you decide to pay monthly, which I recommend you do. It’s only $7.95 if you commit to 3 years in advance, which I don’t recommend. Remember, this is under the ‘Linux’ tab, do not select the windows servers, as when it comes to websites, Linux is easier to use and better. The operation system on a server is NOT the same thing as the operating system on your computer, so do not select the windows server. By default, the page leads to the Linux hosting packages, so just don’t click out of it and you should be good to go.
Step 3
On this screen make sure to select ‘I will use my existing Domain and update my Nameservers only.’, because you already bought your domain on Namecheap, so no need to buy it again on Hostgator. Then just fill out your existing domain area with the domain you bought from Namecheap, Like I did with the picture, but instead of ‘Yourdomain’ you have to type out the domain you bought.
Step 4
Lastly, on the last page, make sure to put in the coupon code HGC25 for the discount. It’ll make your first month’s bill $0.01. Not bad eh? If for whatever reason, you decide that the whole website thing is not for you, you can cancel your web hosting account at any time. Your first month is only $0.01 anyway, so the only thing you have to lose is that $0.01. Don’t worry though, if you follow this guide and keep at it, you’ll certainly be making more than enough to cover your hosting bill. Click next a few times and then enter your payment details and complete your account signup.
At this point, you’re just about done. Hostgator will tell you to login to their billing page and pay your $0.01 first month’s invoice. Just go to their billing page at https://secure.hostgator.com/~billing/ and log in with your email / password that you set up in the last step while filling out your payment info. From there just go to your invoices page and pay it.
Within the next few minutes, after paying your bill, you should receive an email from host gator with some valuable information. The email should tell you Your Username, Your Password, Your Site’s IP Address and your Name Servers. The most important thing here is your Nameservers. A nameserver is basically an address for your domain. Since we bought our domain on Namecheap, we now need to tell namecheap, WHERE to point our domain, and the place we’re going to ‘point’ it is our Hostgator nameservers, that way we can use our domain name with our newly purchased domain. This step is real easy, just follow the instructions below.
1. Log in to your Namecheap account at https://www.namecheap.com/myaccount/login.aspx
2. Go to ‘Manage Domains’ up at the top navigation bar
3. Click on your domain from the ‘Your Domains’ area.
4. Click “Transfer DNS To Webhost’ From the LEFT Sidebar.
5. Type in your TWO ‘Nameservers’ into the NS1 and NS1 spaces, [As pictured below] Your NS1 and NS2 MAY be different than mine, so refer to your Welcome email from Hostgator.
6. Click Save changes and you’re good to go!
Tada! That’s it! Your webhosting account is now set up and ready to go and you just updated your nameservers on Namecheap so your domain is ready to use! Take a breather and then move onto the next part of this guide. The next step will be getting Wordpress installed on your site.