Recently I was setting up new website for my non-profit initiative (www.gethandmade.com), and I thought of putting down all the steps required and related links. It might be helpful to make initial decisions for setting up website.
- Choosing Domain name: You would need to find a domain name, which should suitably identify your initiative. It should ideally put across the point in a word. Then choose proper extension .com, .org classifies the nature of website.
- Finding Domain Name Seller and hosting: There are several players out there, who claim to be providing the cheapest domain name and hosting plans, but be aware of *’s and small prints. There are plenty of catches to it. As per my research end of the day, they have same price. Bigger players tend to throw extra free features, which make them better deal. For example, I’ve hosted with www.godaddy.com, which throws in two months of basic hosting, couple of softwares and features.
- Which hosting plan to choose: I wanted to build my website on Ruby on Rail, so I bought ‘deluxe hosting plan’, which in advertisement supports Ruby on Rail and MySQL database. Later when I was trying to upload my website, I discovered its a Linux Web based hosting and it doesn’t supports ruby-on-rails. When I contacted customer support, I was asked to buy Only Linux based hosting, again. My recommendation would be to thoroughly look through what exactly do you want, and buy hosting plan accordingly.
I think, its better to buy domain name and hosting services from the one single provider, it may make life little easier and better deal of course.
I will later update blog with details of best way of building websites.
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