What You Need to Build a Website

There's a lot of information on this site and if you're a beginner, it can be overwhelming. I created this quick guide just to give you an idea of what's involved with creating a website.

I encourage you to read it through once without clicking on any of the links just so you can understand the big picture. Then after you've absorbed the info, go back and click the links for more info.

What You Need to Build a Website

1) Domain Name

The domain name creates the address of your site. So, mywebsite.com would be an example of a domain name.

Domain names are paid for yearly and you can register them here.

Looking for a FREE site?

I never endorse free webhosts. They are too unstable, you never really own your site and you do not receive a true domain name. Instead your address will be something like http://freesite.yourdomain.com. In some cases, the domain may be even longer.


2) Web Host

A website cannot exist without a web host. This is the company that houses your files and provides the environment for you to create and save pages to the Internet.

Web hosts are usually paid for monthly (some are yearly).

3) Web Building Software (Optional)

Some web hosts provide website building tools so you do not need any additional software. It's important you find out about this before you sign up with any host.

CoffeeCup & Dreamweaver are popular web editing software programs that people use to create and maintain their sites.

I used Dreamweaver to create this site.

If you don't use any software, then you will need to learn how to code HTML from scratch. All you do is open a text editor (Notepad or BBEdit for example) and then write the HTML that will create your page. It's pretty easy to learn.

Then you save the file as filename.html and save it to the Internet through your web host.

If you're not interested in learning HTML, I'd strongly recommend downloading some of my free HTML templates and buying a software program like CoffeeCup to edit and continue building your site.

Nvu and Komposer are two free editors you can download. As you might expect, they do have some limitations (free is not always best) but they can get the job done.

Other Website Features

Want a gaming site? Looking to create a message forum or chat room for your visitors to communicate? Maybe you want an online guestbook where people can leave you messages on your site.

This is where it gets a little tricky but don't let it discourage you. As the Internet matures, it's getting easier and easier to setup these kinds of things on a website.

Any kind of user interactive feature on a website requires some kind of script. A script is nothing but a file that contains a bunch of code that tells the browser how to behave.

Depending on what you want to create for your site, you'll need to go to your favorite search site (Google, for example) and search for the appropriate script (game script, message board script, etc.) Some are free, some are not-so-free.

Say you want a message board/forum, you can go to http://www.phpbb.com and get a free message board script. The trick is you have to install it yourself.

They do provide instructions and it really isn't that difficult but you'll need to get setup with your web host first.

Most web hosts will help you if you need some guidance and some even provide scripts to their customers for free. Powweb and Website Palace both do.

Important! Before you select a web host, make sure they support the kind of script and functionality you want to use.

Starting A Web Hosting Company

Rather than use the services of a web hosting company to host your web site you could start your own web hosting company. If your business is successful this could provide secondary income and lower the hosting costs for your own site(s).

Basically, there are two ways to start selling web hosting. The first way involves leasing business space, buying equipment, setting up servers, leasing T1 or T3 lines to connect to the Internet, finding clients, and hiring staff to provide 24 hour support. Quite complicated and not recommended for anyone without the technical know-how.

The second way is to become a re-seller for an established host. For a monthly fee you can have an allotment of disk space and bandwidth which can be used to sell to other people. Re-selling is usually anonymous – there is no visible connection to the parent host and you are free to set your own prices and develop your own ‘brand’.

All that is needed to become a re-seller is the ability to pay the monthly fee. All the technical details are handled by the parent company. The re-seller package usually includes everything – even name servers under your own name. All you have to do is to sign up customers and watch the money roll in. Easy – right?

Signing up customers, though, may not be as easy as you imagine. There are literally thousands of hosting companies competing for customers, and making your web hosting business stand out from the crowd is no mean feat. Just think about the process you went through in choosing your own web host. You probably visited several hosting web sites, maybe asked for personal references from your friends or business acquaintances, and then after narrowing down your choices, perhaps did more in-depth research on each of the companies. Or perhaps you just signed up with the first host you saw.

So, in order for your own hosting company to be successful it has to build up a good reputation or be easy to find. Advertising can make your company more visible, but advertising is expensive – especially in a competitive market like web hosting.

A re-seller account, however, may be ideal for certain situations. If you already have several websites of your own, your monthly costs may be similar to a re-selling account. For the same amount of money you could switch all your accounts to your own hosting company. Sign up a few friends or associates and you are ahead of the game.

If this sounds attractive, make sure you are going with a reputable hosting company. You will be entirely dependent on them for technical support. This relieves you of many of the headaches of running a hosting company but you are still responsible to your clients if their sites go down.

There are many types of re-seller packages. Some require you to operate under the name of the hosting company while others allow you to set up a shop under your own business name. Pay attention to the billing aspect of the package. Some re-seller accounts have everything you need to get started immediately, while others require you to set up your own billing gateway.

Web hosting service

Types of hosting

Internet hosting services can run Web servers; see Internet hosting services.

Hosting services limited to the Web:

* Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to paid hosting.

* Shared web hosting service: one's Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.

* Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server.

* Virtual Dedicated Server: dividing a server into virtual servers, where each user feels like they're on their own dedicated server, but they're actually sharing a server with many other users. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. This is also known as a virtual private server or VPS.

* Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.

* Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.

# Colocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of the web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.

# Clustered hosting: having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered Servers are a perfect solution for high-availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution.

# Grid hosting : this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.

# Home server: usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs.