Evaluating hosting

When choosing the right hosting for your needs, there are a few ways to evaluate them. While there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” hosting company, drawing up a list of your needs will help you narrow down the requirements a bit. So what do you look for?

• Can you talk to a person? If you’re going to be setting up and supporting your own website, you should make sure the hosting company you go with provides good technical support! Great documentation and videos are fine, but chat and phone support are incredibly important as well.

• Will there be automatic backups? This isn’t a deal breaker as far as choosing the plan, but it’s important to know whether you will need to make your own backups or if they handle that for you.

• Will they help make your site secure? This can come in many forms, including site monitoring, free SSL (see the “Secure Domains” sidebar), protection from cyber attacks, and repairing your website if it’s hacked.

Pricing can also be a factor. You generally get what you pay for, and at this stage of the game, you probably don’t need anything too crazy, especially if you’re still honing your skills. There are two hosts I’d recommend:

• Web Hosting for Students: If you need something really cheap to $25/year (FIGURE 21.1): webhostingforstudents.com/.

  

• SiteGround: Once you’re ready to publish your site to the world (also known as “going live”), you’ll need to move on from a basic service like Web Hosting for Students. SiteGround is versatile and works well for lots of types of sites (FIGURE 21.2). If you use the link from this book, you’ll get a special offer for your first year: casabona.org/go/siteground/.

  

Choosing a domain

Usually, you can purchase domains from the same place you get your hosting, but it’s not always recommended in case one day you decide you want to change hosts.

Certain companies offer one free domain with an account, but if you’d like to purchase a domain separately, which I recommended, hover.com is a great service. They offer a number of different top-level domains (TLDs) from .com and .org to .io, .me, and .xyz.

Tips on choosing a domain name:

• Make it unique and easy to remember. You want your domain to stand out, but not so much that it’s difficult to remember when someone tries to visit.

• Make it easy to type and speak. A domain with a tricky name will send people to the wrong place or dissuade them from visiting at all. On that same token, try to avoid numbers and hyphens. They are very hard to speak (is the number typed out or is it the digit?), and hyphens are often forgotten about.

• Try to acquire a name in the .com domain first. About 70 percent of domains use the TLD .com, even as the number of TLDs grows. That means that most people will have an easier time remembering a .com domain and will likely try that first.

• Make it as short as possible. This goes back to making it easy to remember, speak, and type—joesbakery.com is easier to remember (and spell) than joesdowningtownbakery.com.

• Avoid copyrighted names. Make sure you’re not using a copyrighted term in your domain. The last thing you want to do is change it because you’ve infringed someone’s copyright. An example is wordpress. According to the WordPress Foundation, who holds the copyright for WordPress, you cannot use wordpress in a domain name.

• Be aware of word combinations. This sounds silly and somewhat juvenile, but you don’t want to accidentally create a vulgar domain.

• Snag the matching social media if you can. Matching domain names with social media accounts takes away the guesswork for users.

Keep in mind that this is not a checklist. If you have the perfect domain but it uses a number, use the number. Since you can point two domains to the same website, grab it spelled out and with a digit. If a .com isn’t available, buy the .org instead.

The goal is to do the best you can, and most of all make it relevant to your website’s topic.

To register your domain:

1. Visit hover.com.

2. Use the search box to type in your domain idea (FIGURE 21.3).

   

   You can include or exclude a TLD. Hover will still show you a full list of available domains.

3. Press Enter or click the search icon.

4. You’ll be taken to a screen of available domains. Click the plus sign next to the one you want.

5. Click the Shopping Cart button in the top right (FIGURE 21.4).

   

6. Go through the checkout process and create your account!

Connecting your domain

Once you’ve purchased your domain, if you haven’t done it through your hosting company, you’ll need to point it to your host. This will vary based on both your host and your domain registrar.

Your host should provide instructions for changing what’s called the DNS, Domain Name System. You can think of it as a big lookup table (or address book), associating servers with domains.

In Video 21.2, you’ll see how to do it with Hover and SiteGround.

Check each file

If you can, check the site on a computer other than your own to double-check that you didn’t leave any absolute links to files on your computer in the HTML documents. Those will still work for you (because they’re located on your computer), but they won’t work for anyone else.

The same goes for all links. You’ll want to make sure internal links are still going to your site, and that external links are reaching the intended destination.

Test in common browsers

You’ll learn more about testing in the next chapter, but for the purposes of making sure your freshly uploaded site is working properly, you’ll want to check in at least a few browsers, like Safari, Edge, Chrome, and Firefox.

As you’ve seen, browsers handle things differently, and checking your site in multiple browsers will increase the changes that you’ll find something that’s broken before your users do.