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Hosting is basically the place where your website exists. Whenever someone visits your website they download it from your hosting provider and that is how they are able to see your website. Without hosting your website is not visible to the world. In this article I am going to show you exactly how to set up hosting for your website.

Finding a Hosting Provider
The first step is obviously finding a hosting provider. Basically when hosting your websites you want to keep your costs to an absolute minimum, because the less you spend the more profit you are going to make.

There are some hosting servers that offer month by month payments and some you have to pay for a full year at a time. Neither are better than the other, it is just personal preference. Choose the hosting provider you feel most comfortable with.

Directing Your Domain Name
You should have already bought your domain name so when you set up hosting you will then need to direct your domain name to your hosting account.

When you register for hosting you will be sent an email with all of your login details. In this email they will give you your Name Server numbers. These will look something like ns1.yourhostingprovider.com.

You will then need to login to your domain name account and change the nameservers of your domain name so they point towards your hosting. You can do this by first going into your account and clicking on the domain you are working with (generally it will be hyperlinked). Then somewhere on the page you will see your nameservers (these will also be hyperlinked), click on them. Delete the old name servers and enter in the new nameservers.

Remember that this can take up to 48 to change over so be patient with this, it will happen eventually.

Setting up a My SLQ Database
Now you will need to set up a database where all of your data from workpress will be stored. Simply login to your control panel (yourdomain.com/cpanel) and click on the My SLQ and follow the prompts to create a database. You will also need to create a database user and add the user to the database (giving them all access/privileges).

I am not going to go into detail with this. Your hosting should have some great tutorials if you get stuck, and also a really helpful support team so you can always ask them your questions.

Accessing Your Files
The last important thing to note about hosting is how to access your files. There are two major ways to access your files… through an FTP program on your computer or through your ‘file manager’ on the internet.

File Manager
File manager is the most simple and straight forward one to use (though not the best) and it is great because no matter what computer you are on and what programs they have you can access your files and edit/update them. Basically all you need to do is login to your cpanel and click on the file explorer button. That is as easy as it gets.

FTP Programs
FTP programs allow you to access your files from a program on your computer. This is a much better system because it is a lot easier to upload and download files and it is just simpler to use. Though I have found that, for simple editing jobs, it is easier to use the File Manager than FTP, but in every other scenario FTP will be the best.

So as you can see hosting is fairly straight forward (and cheap) and I just wanted to explain it so that newbies could get a grasp about hosting and directing your domain name etc. You need to get a grasp on this to be able to successfully create your website. So if you are struggling then read this section again or search for more tutorials online. We are now getting close to your website going live.