How To Become A Blogger Step 3: Where To Get Web Hosting

Get your web hosting at www.hostgator.com

What is a web host?

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation. -wiki

You can think of a your web host like your own personal hard-drive that exists on the internet where you will store your website files.

Once you link your domain name to your web host, then people all over the world will be able to access your blog.

Why you need a web host?

1. Having a web host allows other people access to your website via the internet.

2. You could run everything from your own host right in your own home, but it is difficult to setup and even harder and more time consuming to making sure it is up and running 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.

3. It’s much more reliable to outsource the hosting of your website to a professional hosting company.

4. Over the long term it is more affordable to use a web hosting company and it will save you time, and many headaches.

How do you set up web hosting?

We use Host Gator to host all of our websites. They offer unlimited domains all on the same account. So for one price of ~$10 a month you may host several high end blogs and websites.

First go to go hostgator.com and choose “web hosting”.

Of the 3 packages offered you should choose the “baby” package (middle) just to get started. It’s very affordable and allows you to have unlimited domains, unlimited disk space, and unlimited bandwidth. A pretty great deal for only $7.95 / month

Once you are ready. You will choose the option “I will use my existing domain and update ‘My Nameservers’ only”

What is a Nameserver?

A name server is a program or computer server that implements the “name-service protocol”. The most prominent type of name servers in operation today are the name servers of the Domain Name System (DNS). The most important function of these DNS servers is the translation (resolution) of humanly memorable domain names and hostnames into the corresponding numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

Enter the domain name you have purchased earlier from step 2 and hit submit.

Continue to fill out the forms according to your preferences and hit calculate totals.

Next review your order.

When you’re ready hit continue, fill out your profile information and finish paying for the order.

Congratulations, you now have web hosting, but you still need to link your website domain to your web host.

How do you link your domain name to your web host?

1. Get the domain name server details from hostgator.com

The easiest way to get your new server details from hostgator.com will be to check your email right away. Host gator should send you an email with all the details you will need to setup your account right away.

Look for a section saying “Your name servers”

Typically it will look something like this:

ns967.hostgator.com
ns968.hostgator.com

Re-assign your nameservers to your web host.

Login to your godaddy.com account.

Click “My Account” at the top

Find the tab called “domain manager”

Once you are at the domain manager, you should select the domain you purchased before.

Find the section titled “Nameservers” and click “Set Namerservers”

This will bring up a pop-up window (make sure you allow pop-up’s from godaddy.com or else you may find yourself being unnecessarily confused.)

Select “I have specific nameservers for my domains.”

Delete the generic nameservers that have been set by godaddy.com and insert the ones we previously found given to us by hostgator.com

This re-directs your domain from the godaddy site where it has been sitting previously to your own web hosting providers

It’s important to remember that changing a domains nameservers, or any server side modifications to websites will update less than instantaneously. Sometime it may take up to a entire 5 minutes.(or 24-48 hours)

If you have trouble accessing the site right away then you may just have to wait a few minutes, get a drink, then come back and try again.

Now that you have successfully linked your domain name to your web hosting provider all that is left to to do is install wordpress, then you will be ready to start blogging.

Get Unlimited Web Hosting for only $7.95 / Mo at Host Gator

Next: How to install wordpress?