If you’re on this page, and you arrived here from a Search Engine, I’m more than sure that you’re in a dilemma about how to host your website! You might be planning to create a website, right?
Maybe you already got the domain, and now are unable to link it to your host? Or maybe you’re just not sure how to Host the files on your servers? Anyway, I know you already know that you don’t know how to host your own website. (Which is not a bad thing, to begin with, everyone starts at someplace!)
So hey that’s exactly what I’ll be showing you, step by step! Well yeah, you won’t be missing a single step about the whole process, but before that, let’s dive into the basics a bit huh? Not a bad idea, right?
Before you can host your own website, you need to have a “HOST” right? What exactly is the host? Or how would you be choosing the so-called “BEST” host with so many options available in the market?
What does Hosting a Website Mean?
Your website, mainly and broadly comprises two sections, right? The Domain, meaning the URL and the “content” of your website, right? The text/video/image files aren’t they?
So if you take your website to be your computer, think of the “host” as your Hard-disk. In short, it’s the place where all your files are stored. Your website is accessible all across the globe, right?
Now to make that happen, the files need to be online, don’t they? And to keep the files, do you need to have “space”? This “SPACE” is what the host provides you.
And hosting is the process of uploading your website files and content to the webserver.
Choosing the Best Host For Your Website:-
So okay, now you know what is a website host, how about choosing it for your website? I mean you need to know what you need to be looking for in your Webhost to make sure that you get value for your money, and stability for your website’s future, right?
- Uptime:- This is the most important factor when choosing a Web Host. It means the percentage of time your website is “Up”, or “Online”. For eg., most web hosts “claim” to offer 99.99% uptime! Which literally means that your website would (almost) never go down. But hey, don’t just trust them, go out and read other customer reviews about that company online, they are more than easily available.
- Space:- Well, just as I said, it’s going to be the Hard Disk of your website. So you need to make sure you’ve enough space for it, huh? So just check out how much space you’re getting with your server.
- Speed:- Well now this, is a ranking factor. If you want to keep Google happy, you’ve to keep your visitors happy, because the User experience is the first and most important factor for Google, and to ensure that, you have to make sure that you don’t have your visitors waiting in a queue for your website to load. Again, reading reviews online is a good option to verify this.
- Bandwidth:- It’s like the RAM of your system, just a bit different. It’s not so simple to explain it so I’d just say go for servers that have “Unlimited” bandwidths. (Most do so worry not!)
- PRICE:- The most important factor huh? So when you’ve compared the rest of the things, make sure that you’re not paying more than needed. To ensure that, shortlist some websites that meet your requirements, and then compare their prices. This should do the trick.
Misconceptions Regarding Hosting Your Own Website:-
Let me be bold and say these things out to you:-
- Installing WordPress isn’t “hosting” your website.
- Creating a blogger blog and writing blogs isn’t hosting a website either.
- You need to be an a-level coder/programmer to host your own website! (Nope, you don’t need to be!)
- Hosting your own website costs a Fortune! (Nope, it doesn’t! It’s not free, but it doesn’t cost a fortune! In fact, it’s cheaper than your yearly cup of coffee probably!)
- It’s a long and complicated process! (Nope again! It’s an extremely simple process, that takes less than 4 clicks in total, and 5minutes maximum for a general website with good Internet Speed!)
How to Host Your Own Website: Step by Step Guide:-
Now, there are two ways to Host your website:-
- Hosting through Cpanel.
- Hosting using an FTP Client.
Worry not, I’ll cover both!
Hosting Your Own Website Using Cpanel:-
So hey, here goes the exciting part!
Make sure you’ve got the following things ready before proceeding:-
- Files which you want to host! (It’s better if you can have them in a .zip file, speeds the process up by about 50times!)
- Cpanel (Server/ Host login).
Login to your Cpanel.
- Now scroll down to the File Manager, and then select the “Web_root” directory and click Go.
2. Now just click on the Upload button at the top.
3. This would take you to a page where you’d see a tiny little Upload button. You’ve used the Facebook photo upload process, right? It’s almost similar. Just click on the button and choose the file you want to upload. Leave the rest values as they are.
4. Done! It would take a couple of seconds or minutes depending on your file size to complete the upload.
5. Once the .zip file has been successfully uploaded, just come back to your “Web_root” directory. You should see the file you just uploaded available there. Considering it’s a .zip file, just right click on the file, and select “Extract”.
6. Done! If your website codes are up to the mark, your website will now be available at either the root URL, like www.yoursite.com, or a directory, like www.yourwebsite.com/directory “IF” you have placed those extracted files in a separate folder (directory) instead of just directly on the “web-root” directory.
So that was how simple it is uploading your files to your WebHost using the Cpanel! In case you’re having issues with your Cpanel, or just aren’t comfortable with it, there’s an easier way to host your own websites.
Hosting Websites using FTP Clients:-
First of all, you’d need an FTP client. I’d say download Filezilla, it’s free, and it’s the best simple as that.
Once you have downloaded FileZilla, again make sure you have the files ready. (Either in a .zip format, which will be faster, or just as their native formats in a folder or something).
You’d need the FTP login details to use this method. Which you can get from Cpanel>FTP accounts!
7. You’d be needing the 1. Host. 2. Username 3. Password. All of which you can find on the same page as shown below:-
8. So by this point you should have:-
- FileZilla.
- The files are ready!
- FTP login.
Okay so fire up FileZilla, and enter the login details on it.
9. Is that done? Now just drag and drop the files you want to host on the right sidebar.
10. Done! Once it’s successfully uploaded, you can close the FTP client. If you uploaded naked files (eg. index.html, images folder, js folder), you don’t have to do anything else.
But if you uploaded the .zip file, just head back to the “Web_root” directory again, and extract the .zip file in the same way as we did before.
So hey, mission accomplished! You just hosted your own website! Go grab a beer or something.
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Final Words:- How to Host Your Own Website?
Hey, so that was it! See? Not so hard to host your own website, right? I made every attempt to explain every step to you, so if you’re satisfied and got your job done, congrats.
If not, do leave a comment with the question and I’d be more than happy to answer it for you.
