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About Hosting(2006)
So you’ve registered your domain name and found out that you need to get it hosted before you have a working website.
This article is a quick overview of the process of hosting, what’s needed, what it will cost and good and bad practices.
Question. How long does it take to get a website live on the web from registering it?
Answer. I’ve done it in five minutes. Seriously! From pressing the buy button to register a domain, setting up the server to host it and hooking up the DNS entries at the registrar and entering the domain in a browser and seeing an empty website. 300 seconds.
There are four parts to this operation.
- Register the Domain.
- At the registrars, configure name server and DNS values.
- Add the Domain to your server.
- Upload your website to the server.
For the record I use www.123-reg.co.uk for registering domains in the UK. I use www.aventurehost.com for renting a virtual server. For £190 a year I get 500GB of traffic a month capacity and 20GB of disk storage between all the domains.
Registering a Domain is pretty straightforward. Make sure you keep note of it somewhere and date of registration. 123 are good at reminding me when it approaches expiry but not everyone is.
They also provide an easy way to configure the DNS. Think of this as the plumbing that connects your website to its server. You need to configure the name servers, web access and mx records if your server handles mail.
Configuring a Name Server.
Type in two strings. You’ll get given these when you register for hosting. Mine are:
- ns1.xeonserver-five.co.uk
- ns2.xeonserver-five.co.uk
Configure A-Records.
These tell DNS how to resolve the domain name to an IP address. DNS is just a gigantic telephone directory built for very fast access- Domain Name in, IP address out. The domain of resolves to 82.195.136.135.
On the 123 control panel both * and www are pointed to 82.195.136.135. This means that www.dhbolton.com and dhbolton.com both work.
For the server to handle email, an MX (short for Mail eXchanger I believe) record tells the DNS where the mail server is found. Instead of an IP, the name of the server is used. (More accurately the Reverse DNS name) which for the above IP is keira.xeonserver-five.co.uk.
Cpanel for Configuration
The reseller account on aventurehost.com uses Cpanel and this makes setting it up a pretty painless task. Adding an account is a matter of specifying domain, username, password, memory and bandwidth requirements. After that it generates all the settings, restarts the server and as soon as the DNS resolves (minutes for a new domain), the site can be uploaded via FTP etc.
Costs
Registering a Domain. Between £3 and £10 a year. (Depends on if it's .com etc)
Hosting. £190 a year for hosting multiple websites with shared 500GB a month traffic. 20GB disk space.
That's It!
