I found that as I wanted to customize my website, GoDaddy was more restrictive for what I wanted to do on their servers. In particular, I use WordPress (blogging platform) on all of my websites and certain plugins require access to your web host’s server so they can alter some files and I wasn’t able to use a few plugins that I wanted because of the GoDaddy restrictions.
After reviewing many web hosts and reading reviews of others, I decided to use HostGator. For a low monthly fee you get everything you need from a web host and they allow greater customization on their servers. So far every plugin I’ve wanted to use has worked on the HostGator servers. I also found that my websites loaded into browsers and ran faster than they did on GoDaddy. I have no clue why, but it was significantly noticable and that’s why I’m sharing that little nugget of wisdom.
Also, if you choose to follow my instructions and use my ebooks, I will be using HostGator as my web hosting provider so that’s what the instructions and pictures will refer to so it might be better for you to use HostGator as well.
It’s also important to note that you want to steer clear of “Free Web Hosting”. They often give you a subdomain (like: weebly.yourbusiness.com) and they have much more restrictions on what you can do on their servers. If your website gets too much traffic suddenly (say from a special you’re running or a news story done on your company) then the free web host companies have no problem just shutting down your website and there’s nothing you can do about it. Think of all the possible lost sales and disappointed potential viewers of your website. It’s far better to skip the free hosting and all the potential problems they might entail by paying a small monthly fee for a true web host.
Once you’ve chosen your web hosting company and set up your hosting package, you’ll get a welcome email with all of your account information. Make sure you keep this email and flag or label it indicating it’s importance.
This welcome email will have instructions of what steps you need to take in order to get your website setup and ready for adding content. If you’ve followed my advice and gone with HostGator, then you’ll need to change your DNS name servers at whichever domain registrar you used.
The HostGator welcome email has these instructions:Change Your DNS
In order to get your web site working, you must change your name servers. This is an easy, but necessary step you must follow to get started.
- If you registered your domain name with HostGator during signup, we have taken care of this step for you.
- If you have registered your domain name with another company (i. e. GoDaddy, NameCheap, etc.), you must follow the steps outlined on this page (http://www.hostgator.com/dns.shtml).
Regardless of which company you chose as your hosting provider, just follow the instructions in your welcome email to complete your website’s setup steps.
You can also download this wonderful ebook “Create Your First Website” from Chris Farrell which has better details about the website setup process. He also uses GoDaddy as a domain registrar and HostGator as his hosting provider so all the examples in the ebook correlate to them.
Visit my CreateOnlineGold/blog website, and sign up to the email list to get the ebook for free. The email sign up form is at the top right of the website.
From this point on, I’ll be focusing on design in these articles, so please refer to his ebook for technical setup instructions.
Next up, you have to determine your WordPress Blog Design: Pages.
Here’s your map to all the posts in this series.
