1. Introduction
Whether we are launching a tech product or blog, an online shop, or an online portfolio of our creative work, having a web presence is essential in this internet driven world. This article will introduce different key-terms involved in launching a website. We will de-mystify different terms that we come across when it comes to creating our website. We will go through all the steps involved in the process of launching a website. In this article, we will be taking different services from Bigrock hosting provider for illustration purposes. These concepts can be applied to other hosting providers equally.
2. Busting the jargons
World of the websites is full of jargons like domain name, hosting, DNS, hosting provider, etc. Let’s go through them one by one:
2.1 Domain Name
A domain name is the name of your website. As in real life, people are known with names like Narendra Modi, Elon Musk and so on. In the internet world, each website is known with the domain name. google.com is a domain name. Similarly, bootsity.com is the domain name of this website.
2.2 Hosting Space
Hosting is a kind of “living area” for our website. It is a space given to us by hosting space provider company on their computer. This computer is known as the server. We purchase get hosting space, it is generally given for a certain period in a certain amount.
2.3 DNS
DNS stands for Domain Name System. Think of it as a register which keeps a mapping of our domain name to the server where we host our website. DNS makes our life easy because remembering domain names like “bootsity.com” is easy than remembering an IP like “67.23.76.89”. DNS facilitates storing domain names against IP of the server where the website is hosted.
2.4 Hosting Service Providers
Hosting Service Provider is a company that facilitates registering domain names and acquiring hosting space. These companies charge for these services. Some of the best-known hosting services providers are Godaddy, Hostgator and Bigrock.
3. Launching your website
Now, we are familiar with different things and keywords involved in the process of launching a website on the internet. Now let’s create a simple website and make it live so that anyone can access it.
3.1 Creating Website
Website is a collection of one or more webpage. For this article, we will create a single webpage and put it on our domain name. Following is the HTML code of our webpage index.html
<html> <header><title>Our first website</title></header> <body> Hello world! This is my first website. </body> </html>
In the browser, it looks like:
3.2 Buying domain name
We can buy the available domain name from bigrock.in Here are the prices that we need to spend to register a domain name. Once we are done buying domain name, continue to the next step.
3.3 Buying hosting space
Once we have booked your domain name, we need to purchase hosting space. In hosting space, we will put our website. You can choose the different type of hosting provided by different hosting providers. For starters, it is suggested to take shared Linux hosting by bigrock. With shared Linux hosting we get many things like OS, web server, FTP etc pre-configured out of the box. We can choose Bigrock’s plan and buy hosting space here.
3.4 Change DNS
When we purchase hosting, we also get the name server information from bigrock via email. Now, we need to change our domain name DNS settings to point to our hosting space. We can change them after logging into your bigrock management panel – https://manage.bigrock.in/. For our reference, the DNS details of bootsity.com are:
Name Server: NS1.MD-9.WEBHOSTBOX.NET Name Server: NS2.MD-9.WEBHOSTBOX.NET
The DNS settings in the management panel look like:
You can find any website’s DNS details using https://whois.net/ service.
Also note that after we change the DNS, it can take up to 12 hours to reflect DNS changes over the internet.
3.5 Upload the website
When we purchase hosting, we get FTP details from hosting service provider. We can either use FileZilla with FTP details or we can use web-based Cpanel’s file manager to upload our website to the server. Once we upload our website and make DNS settings, our website will be available on the domain name like:
4. Conclusion
Now, we have seen how to launch a website and in the process, we also educated ourselves with different jargons involved. If you feel stuck in any step of this process, feel free to ask in comments or write to me on pradeep [@] bootsity [.] com.
Cheers and good luck with your website!
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