I’ve been hosting websites for 25 years now. I was a systems administrator in London and learnt how to host websites and everything associated with them.
What is hosting?
Hosting is the term for running a server that hosts websites and email addresses that are provided through a domain name.
A server (a type of computer) is permanently attached on the Internet and people who want to view your website enter your domain name in their browser and see your content.
What is a domain name?
A domain name makes it easier for you to show content to others on the Internet and make it personal to you.
Let’s say we are running a cheese shop website, we could could choose the name: johnscheese.shop
We use a registrar’s domain checker to see if the domain is available, and if it is we pay to register the domain for a period of time, the minimum for some domains is a year. The price varies a great deal on what type of domain you are registering. You must keep paying annually or the domain can be claimed and used by someone else.
Now we can set it up on the web hosting server so that people can go to johnscheese.shop in their web browser and buy some cheese.
Having your own domain name is more professional than using a shared domain name.
Setting up an email address is very simple, you just need to decide what you want it to be called, perhaps we want: sa***@jo*********.shop we can set this up with the host and you will be given some settings for your email program so you can see any emails sent to your new email address, and you can send out emails as sa***@jo*********.shop which looks far more professional than jo*************@ao*.com
Subaddressing
Subaddressing is really clever, if you gave out sales+ ch********@jo*********.shop , the server will see the email address is for sa***@jo*********.shop and it will save the email in the cheeselist mailbox instead of the inbox.
What do I do next?
Talk to me about hosting. I can register your domain name for you as well as set up the email addresses on my dedicated server.
You get more value for money when hosted on a dedicated server, compared to shared hosting offerings on the market. Your site is lightning fast and you can even host your own videos.
You also get access to over 200 programs to create your website your way, from WordPress to e-commerce and up to 20GB of space that is backed up every night.
Access is provided via a control panel where you can change elements of your site as you wish.
If you have a web designer, you can grant them access to your account to upload your content and manage any databases your account may require.
All this is available for just £12 per month (paid annually) *
* Additional charges for domain name registration. Costs of registration vary depending on the type of domain registered. For example, a .shop domain costs £30 per annum but a .co.uk costs £15.
Hosting cannot be used for any illegal purposes; pornography of any kind; offensive or controversial information.
If you are considering running an e-commerce store, Amazon have a link on what can be sold on their store, and apply that to your own store.
