Part 6: DNS Settings – making your domain and your hosting account work together.

Having bought both a domain name and a hosting account, the next step of the process is to connect the two together.

That entails changing the domain’s DNS setting.

Whoa! Is that techie jargon creeping in?

A bit – but let me explain.

When you type a website URL into a browser, you use an address like http://www.kickstartdaily.com

That’s a nice, easy to use URL that we humans can understand, but computers work a bit differently. They prefer to look stuff up in databases.

So when you type that URL and click on enter, your browser sends a message to a special computer called a nameserver that looks up kickstartdaily.com and tells where on the Internet it can be found.

When you first buy a domain, from GoDaddy or anyone else, it’s nameserver is set to point to a holding page on the domain registrar’s server, but that’s not much good to us. We want to point our domain name to our own hosting account.

When you buy a hosting account, the company (Hostgator, in the case of today’s example) sends you an email giving you their nameserver address.

It will look something like ns322.somename.com

Make a note of it because you now have to go back to your domain registrar (GoDaddy or Namecheap or whoever you registered your domain with) and plug that new nameserver address in.

This is one of those things that is dead easy to show you, but complicated to describe in text. So here is a fast 3 minute video: http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video3/

This video shows the process at GoDaddy – but all domain registrars are similar.

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I’m going to start out today by answering two questions that have been asked by a few people regarding hosting and the various plans that Hostgator offers:
 

Q. 1: “How come the $24.95 Reseller plan gives 24gb of webspace and 250gb of bandwidth but the much cheaper $7.95 ‘Baby’ plan gives 600gb of webspace and a massive 6000gb of bandwidth? Is it is mistake on Hostgator’s web site?”

It did seem odd, but although I thought I knew the answer I asked Hostgator for myself. Their 24/7 live chat facility is very efficient and I had a detailed answer in seconds.

Here is what they said (paraphrased): “The Reseller plans are more expensive (and offer less in the way of storage and bandwidth) because they are intended for people who want to sell hosting solutions to their own clients. The Reseller plans include a lot of extra software and backend support for the reselling functions that are not included in the cheaper general hosting plans. In addition, the Reseller plans allow each domain hosted to have its own CPanel, whereas the general hosting plans administer all domains through one CPanel.”

The support operative then went on to confirm that yes, the low cost Baby plan is the best choice for a person who simply wants to host multiple domains and does not wish to resell hosting plans themselves.

So there you have it – save yourself money and opt for the cheaper – and far better value Baby plan. With 600gb at your disposal you’ll be able to host more websites that you’ll ever be likely to need.
Q. 2: “I just tried to buy the Hostgator Baby Plan but instead of being charged $7.95, I was charged $9.95. Is that right, and why the difference?”

I like Hostgator, and have most of my domains hosted with them, but I don’t like the way they (or a lot of other big companies) quote prices. There is a word missing on their price list: ‘from’.

If you buy the plan and pay for three years up front, then yes, it works out to the equivalent of paying $7.95 per month. But if you actually choose to pay monthly, then the price is $9.95 per month.

Clear? I don’t think so, and I wish they would express it differently. But the reality is that at $9.95 per month this is a great bargain.

Okay, I’m going to buy a Hostgator Baby Plan right now to use with the domain we bought in session three: www.imkickstart.com. I’ll video the process, so let’s hope it is as easy as I remember!

#~#~#

I’ve made a quick video showing the process – but rather than show it here (it is very straightforward) I’ll just put it on the blog for this course when it is set up.

The only thing that confused me, was that I thought the purchase process was finished, and went off to wait for a confirmation email, but nothing arrived. A quick chat with the livechat support person told me that I had needed to log into the Hostgator billing website to pay my invoice – something that for some reason hadn’t happened in the normal run of the sale.

Whether that was my mistake or their system, I really don’t know, but sorting it out took only a couple of minutes and all now seems to be fine.

HostGator: http://www.urlnex.us/hostgator/

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Part 5: The Perfect Host.

There is a glib, but often-repeated phrase that will be familiar to anyone who has any interest in Internet marketing: “All you need to get started is a domain name and some hosting.”

Those of us who take these things for granted often make the basic mistake of forgetting that that phrase might as well be written in ancient Egyptian for all the sense it makes to many people.

Hopefully the video (and text) in session 3 of this course explained about domain names and how to go about getting one, but what about hosting?

What is hosting?

Let’s start at the very beginning and explain what hosting is.

‘Hosting’ refers to a place where you can store all the files that make up your website, and where people who wish to view it can safely be allowed to enter.

In theory, you *could* store all the files that make up your website on your own home computer, but there a few difficulties with that solution:

1. In order for people to be able to access your site, your computer would have to be on, and connected to the Internet, 24/7.

2. If your site became popular your Internet Service Provider would not appreciate the traffic flowing through their service. Your use of bandwidth (see below) would be inevitably high and would soon exceed what they would allow.

3. There would be security issues: visitors would be wandering around inside your personal computer.

4. If everyone served websites from their own home computers the Internet would become even more chaotic than it already is!

5. The Internet would have to know where to find your computer if someone wanted to get to your website.

All told, while possible, it isn’t a good idea.

So early on in the days of the Internet, a system was devised that made Internet sites be stored on special computers called servers. A server is a very simple computer that is ‘on’ the Internet 24/7 by very fast connections. And the location of these servers is logged – so when you type a URL into a browser, it can find the server where the website is.

In the early days, servers were expensive – at least they were too expensive for the average person building a website to need to buy. So an industry grew up whereby someone who did own a server would rent space on it for other people to use.

In other words, they ‘hosted’ your site on their server, for a monthly fee.

What kinds of hosting are there?

Every hosting company offers a wide range of services, and reading their websites can be very confusing. For our purposes though, hosting options boil down to three main types:

- Shared hosting
- Reseller hosting
- Dedicated Server

In reverse order, with dedicated server hosting you will be given a server all to yourself. Nobody else’s websites will be hosted on it. It is effectively your own private server that the hosting company maintains for you. Naturally this is an expensive option with typical monthly fees in the $170-$200 range.

You would only need dedicated hosting if you have a really big and important website, so for most of our needs it is not something to consider – yet!

Reseller hosting came about because a lot of people wanted to be able to offer hosting services themselves, but didn’t want to go the the trouble or expense of setting up a hosting company.

The hosting company rents you space on their servers in the normal way, but you can then subdivide ‘your’ space up and offer portions of it to other people – and charge them a monthly fee.

While many people don’t really want to sell hosting plans, the other big benefit of reseller hosting is that by becoming your own client, you can can host many of your own domains in the one hosting account – all accessible through a main control panel.

Costs of reseller accounts vary wildly, but two I use are fairly typical: one costs $24.95 per month and the other $34.95.

Shared hosting is the cheapest option and for beginners, the best.

For a few dollars a month (currently $4.95 with www.urlnex.us/hostgator/) you can host one domain on a server that may be filled with hundreds or even thousands of other people’s websites.

More recently, hosting companies have realized that many people own multiple domains, but have no interest or need to sell hosting themselves. For these people, the reseller account plans are overkill.

To that end, companies like Hostgator now offer shared hosting plans that allow you to host multiple domains on a single account, and these can offer incredible value.

Hostgator’s ‘Baby’ plan (go to http://www.urlnex.us/hostgator/ then click on ‘Learn more…’ in the Shared Hosting panel) is exceptional value at just $7.95 per month. You can host unlimited domains up to the very generous hosting space and bandwidth limits (see below) and the added functions and facilities are top class.

What is all this web space and bandwidth jargon?

They are only shorthand for very simple concepts.

Web hosting space (sometimes called file space) is simply the amount of hard disk space that the hosting company is renting you. If the hosting space limit is 600gb (as with Hostgator’s Baby plan) that means you can store files up to that limit. ‘Files’ means everything that you put on the server – the files that make up your website, all the images, and video you store there and so on.

If you have a hosting plan that allows unlimited domains, that 600gb has to be divided between them. While you can host as many domains as you like, they can’t, combined, exceed the web space allowance.

Bandwidth is sometimes trickier to understand, but stick with me – it is quite simple once you get the idea.

If you have a web page that is made up of files that total 25kb and 1000 people come to view it, then 25kb x 1000 (25000kb) of data has been moved. Your bandwidth allowance denotes the total amount of data that you can move in a month. As you can imagine, video, audio, and some pictures can eat up your bandwidth allowance very quickly, so before you buy hosting it is a good idea to check how much you will be allocated.

That’s it for today’s session – I hope that hosting is no longer a great mystery for you and now, when someone says ‘All you need is a domain name and hosting’ the phrase will make sense!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you.

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