October 24th, 2007 by choosetolive

The purpose of this guide is to walk you through, step by step, the purchase of a domain name and setup of a web host account. This is all you will need before you can publish your very own website!

I will be using a web hosting service called LunarPages. I’ve had several accounts with them since 2004, and have been very pleased with them overall. When I opened up my first account, for a large archive of data and media, I chose LunarPages because of their value. Since that time, they’ve consistently increased the number of features they offer, and have never raised the price (in fact, I believe they’ve lowered it). They’ve also been very easy to work with, promptly responding to any and all support questions I have, and have a very friendly and helpful message board that promptly responds to any additional questions.

No web host is perfect - we’ve had a couple of times over the years where hackers have attacked the servers, which resulted in some downtime - but any problems have always been swiftly resolved, and the staff seems to constantly work towards making every customer’s site run as smoothly as possible. This is why I’ll continue to remain a LunarPages customer, and why I’ll be using them to walk you through becoming a brand new website owner.

Your first step, of course, is to go to LunarPages.com. Under the Hosting Plans tab, you’ll see summaries of the six different plans that LunarPages currently offers.

I advise selecting the Basic Plan. Not only is it the most inexpensive, but unless your site has some specialized requirements, the Basic Plan has more than you’ll ever need for your website.

Once you’ve decided on a plan, click Sign Up!

On to Web Hosting: Step-by-Step Guide - Page 2 of 3

October 24th, 2007 by choosetolive

Enter your contact information as indicated. Next, you choose your domain name:

Unless you’ve registered a domain name through another company, you want to select New Domain. Then enter it in the box - remember, you JUST want to enter the domain, not the suffix (.com, .org, etc.) That is, you want to enter yourwebsite, not yourwebsite.com, and select the proper suffix from the drop-down box.

If you haven’t had a chance to see if your domain name is available, all you need to do is click ‘Check Availability’ and a pop-up box will let you know if your domain is available. If it isn’t available, you can try a couple of things - you can change the suffix (say, .biz instead of .com), or you can try a different domain. LunarPages will do a search for similar, available domains if you click the offered ’search for alternatives’ link.

Also, if you have more than one domain you’d like to register (LunarPages offers up to 10 domain names with the Basic package), click ‘Order Additional Domains’ and you can add them right away.

Account information on domain names is publicly available on whois.com, much like your phone number appears in the phone book. If you would prefer for your information to not be made public, you can select Make Your Domain Information Private for an additional fee.

Next, you select your billing cycle. LunarPages offers incentives for committing to a longer term, and they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee - so there’s nothing to lose and money to gain by signing up for a 1- or 2-year contract!

Finally, they offer a number of additional features for small monthly charges. Again, unless your site is rather specialized, you will have no need for these things. If you don’t know what they are, don’t pay for them!

Click Submit.

The next page asks for your billing and account information. Fill it in, click Submit, and you’re done! You’ll then be sent to a confirmation page.

On to Web Hosting: Step-by-Step Guide - Page 3 of 3

October 24th, 2007 by choosetolive

Very shortly, you’ll receive several emails from LunarPages, including an order confirmation, billing receipt, and critical account information. The Critical Account Information email is vital - be sure to save it for your records! Here’s the truly critical information:

Username and Password
You’ll need this to access your Control Panel (or cPanelX), which is where you control a lot of your website’s features and access statistics. To log in to your cPanel, log in on LunarPages.com. Once you log in, there will be a graphic labeled ‘Control Panel’.

Click on it, and in the window that opens below, click the button ‘go to cPanel’. That will bring you to your main cPanel page - you can bookmark the cPanel page for future use.

Also in your email, you’ll find your FTP information. This gets a little buried, it’s about 2/3 down. Make a note of the FTP Host Address.

Finally, towards the end there’s a paragraph on domain name instructions. If you registered your domain through LunarPages when you signed up, you can ignore it - everything’s automatically done to register your domain name!

Be sure to look the email over thoroughly - LunarPages offers many informative tutorials, and you can find links in those emails.

Congratulations, you now have everything you need to get your website online!