Having a website is important because this site can be a one stop shop for all the information that your clients or potential clients need to know about you, your business and your services. You can also include links to related sites, like links to your social media accounts. Also, people looking for services would usually search for a business’ website mostly to ensure that the business is legit and credible.
There are platforms where you can build your sites for free. Yes, for free! However, your site will be under a subdomain of these free sites. We’ll have more of this later.
The other option is to go for a self hosted site. Which brings me to:
How I was able to set up my self hosted site. But before I go into details, here are some caveats.
- I am from the Philippines and I availed the services of a local provider from here
- Providers will have different processes in doing their business. Therefore, what I’m sharing with you is purely based on my experience – decision making about domain names and hosting, communications with the service provider, up until my website went online.
Domain Name and Hosting
Step 1: Choose a domain name
A domain name is the web address that you will register. Your domain name should be something that represents you or the business where you are going to use it for.
Step 2: Choose your domain name and/or web host provider
Most service providers have both domain name registration and web hosting services. You also have the option of registering your domain name with one provider, and the web hosting with another provider. You have to know which one works for you, depending on your personal or business need.
In my case, I went for the same provider for both my domain name registration. This is because I know I’m keeping my new domain name for several years and that it’s more cost effective in the long run. There are available discounted domain name registrations actually. However, this is only applicable usually to new registrations but the succeeding years will have the regular rates.
My current provider is coffeemags.com (no, this is not a paid advertisement but you can mention to them that you came to know about them through this blog). I sent them an email inquiry first and I made sure that all my questions, no matter how stupid I think some of the questions were, were answered and that everything is clear to me. Feel free to ask all your questions as well, before committing to anything.
When everything was clear to me, they just asked me to login to their site (create an account if you don’t have one yet) and went ahead and placed my order. Payment can either be via BPI or Paypal. I used Paypal so that it’s faster.
Right after I ordered, I received several emails to confirm my purchase, including confirmation from Paypal since it was what I used to pay.
I also received an email from CoffeeMags admin that contains all the details of the services I availed, including login credentials for my WordPress admin site and the control panel area.
Step 3: Validate Setup
Given the URLs and login credentials, I went ahead and logged in to WordPress admin.
Upon logging in, this was my default WordPress view.
And my site is up!
The control panel, or more known as the cPanel contains all the backend stuff for your site. It’s mostly technical but it’s also interesting to have a look at it. Here’s a screenshot of some of the available tools. There are a lot but if you’re feeling geeky, then you can start exploring them as well.
Pricing
So how much does it cost?
These information are all from my provider’s site.
Domain name registration:
Web hosting:
And that’s it.
So, are you getting yours too? 🙂 🙂 🙂
P.S. If you’re wondering why I did it at this point where I don’t have an established business to promote, because I think it’s cool to have a yourname.com LOL. Half-kidding aside, I am an IT professional and I’m naturally curious about stuff that involve websites and programming, even though I said goodbye to programming eons ago. My site will serve as my “development environment” because I want to play around with all the plugins which involve input forms, order forms and payments! Also, I just want an online portfolio under my name.
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