I figured one of the topics to cover with my site re-branding was to explain the process of acquiring a domain and the process of starting this new blog site. With my job experience, I surprisingly didn’t have full knowledge of the steps to get a website up and running. I always had knowledge on working with webpages. However, I never gave much thought of how to plan out the deployment and hosting aspect. There are surprisingly a lot of things to consider when starting out whether you’re a small business, independent developer, or simply a blogger. Let’s get to it.
Domain Registrar
The first thing I had to decide was where to purchase my domain. Usually, you would want to come up with a good name prior to this, but i’ve already taken care of this step. I talk about what went into my decision for modularlessons.com in this post. Anyways, what is important when it comes to a domain registrar is the pricing they offer for the domain, and the services they provide along with the domain. These services range from offering backups, email, technical support, ssl certificates and more. I would say the pricing is your main focus. The cheaper the domain price, the better. Keep in mind, you’re purchasing the rights to the name by default for 1 year. They do have longer contracts up to 3 years (possibly more). This bundle usually lowers the price overall, but means more upfront cost. the payment model is usually monthly or full price. You want to make sure you see the invoice and plan accordingly so you don’t get charge more than you expect.
Web Hosting
This term simply means where your web page is going to be stored. Your customers/visitors will be going to this server location when typing your domain name in the browser. This is important because your website could be awesome and attract visitors, but if it takes a long time to load up or doesn’t load up consistently then you will lose people going to the site. This decision has quite a range of options. The choice for this boils down to your expertise in development and technology, the resources needed to run the site, how much overhead you’re able to afford. The answers to these will determine what type of hosting you will use.
The options are Shared, VPS/Cloud, Dedicated, and Local. Shared is the cheapest option and provides minimum effort to maintain, but the speeds and resources for the site are less. VPS/Cloud option is more expensive but allows more control of what third-party services to use. It also has more bandwidth to handle high volume of traffic as well. Dedicated is very expensive but you have an abundance of control amongst the software (and even hardware) for your site and can handle high volumes of traffic. This tradeoff is the complexity of maintaining the infrastructure. And then there is Local… this one has always intrigued me. This option means you’re hosting the site yourself. This is for sure the most complex setup. It is arguably the most expensive depending how far you want to go with it. To elaborate, you’re buying the domain, the server, the networking equipment, the ISP to start off. On top of that, you have monitor these services constantly to make sure services are stable. For the other 3 options, they are similar that the hosting provider will have employees to either help or automatically monitor the site. Your time will be very busy focusing on the whole system.
My Recommendation
My decision came down to money versus time. I would like the site to be online as much as possible without the worry about hardware or a network configuration affecting a person’s ability to access the site. My focus for this site wanted to be focused solely on the content . I also am new to this adventure so I chose the Shared hosting option. It’s the most affordable and my website doesn’t pull a huge audience where I would run into the issue of high volume of traffic to the site. It’s also to keep in mind that you can scale up pretty easily with your domain/hosting provider.
When deciding on a company (there are so many), I used Hostscore that provided data on the performance on many known host providers. I decided to use Bluehost since they had great reviews, customer service, and hosting capabilities for WordPress (the CMS i’m using of course). Pricing was workable compared to others I looked at.
Takeaway
When first exploring this, I actually wanted to host my sites on my home lab i’m developing. It seemed like a great idea given I would learn a lot from the infrastructure and development side. I quickly learned that as much as I wanted to, the problems started to arise. I don’t have state-of-the-art equipment and would be working out of my residence (which poses IP issues since your ISP doesn’t give you a static IP which a site would need). More importantly, I pictured myself spending so much time making sure it works then actually enhancing. it.
I wouldn’t have known this if i didn’t do research ahead of time and reflect on what was important for me. For people new to this as well, go as cheap as you can and scale up if things go well.
The next post will be dealing my transition for WordPress.com to WordPress.org hosted by my Bluehost provider. I hope this was insightful and stay tuned!