DazzlinDonna » How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas

How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas - Part Five

The next step in our series is to purchase a hosting plan with a web hosting company. Your web site has to “reside” somewhere, and that’s the function of a hosting company - to provide you with the space for your site on one of their web servers. There are tens of thousands of hosting companies out there, all vying for your business. In some ways, that’s a good thing as more competition means more choices and better prices for you. But trying to find a good hosting company in all of that is very difficult. I’ve been through dozens of really terrible hosting companies, and there’s almost nothing worse than a bad hosting company. Your site disappears and you also can’t get in touch with the host. Now what? You wait, and worry, and sweat, and swear. I have several hosting companies that I use now that I love, but some of them are for my high-end sites (that means they cost a lot of money). You may eventually need to upgrade to a high-priced host, but only when your site is so popular and bringing in enough revenue to justify the extra cost. For now, you need a low-priced host that is reliable, has good customer service, and gives you everything you need. For that kind of hosting plan, I recommend HostGator.

HostGator hosting plans
HostGator, like most hosting companies, has several plans to choose from. The cheapest is $6.95/month (called the Hatchling plan), but you have to pay for a year in advance for that plan. If you’d prefer to pay monthly, or in 3 or 6 month chunks instead, the next best plan is $9.95/month for the Baby plan. With the Baby plan, you also get to host as many sites as you want for the same price, so in the future that may come in very handy for you. If it were me, I’d choose the Baby plan, but the Hatchling plan will work as well. (Don’t worry about what all those numbers mean right now. Basically, that’s just letting you know how much space is available for your site under each plan. Any of the plans have plenty of everything for you right now, so that’s not a big consideration at this point).

Just click on the Order Now link in the column of whichever plan you choose.

HostGator existing domain
You can see that the Order Wizard will ask you to choose a domain option. Since you already have your domain name, you’ll want to select I will use My Existing Domain and update My Nameservers only. Then, you need to type in the domain name you purchased (such as flykites.com) into the space that says Existing Domain:. Click Next and proceed to fill out the information requested to finish the purchase.

Once you’ve completed the transaction, you’ll receive an email from HostGator with information about your account. You definitely want to save this in a safe place. I usually save the email AND print it out. In any case, within this email will be the nameservers that have been assigned to your site. You’ll need to tell GoDaddy about these nameservers so you’ll want to look for them in the email that HostGator sends you.

Ok, now let’s go tell GoDaddy about your new nameservers. Log in to your GoDaddy account and choose Domains / My Domain Names from the menu near the top of the page.

click nameservers
Select the domain name and click on the Nameservers button.

Copy and paste (or manually type in) the two nameservers that you received in the HostGator email. Save.

That’s it. You now not only own a domain name, but you’ve given it a place to live. It can take up to 24-48 hours for the rest of the world to be told about about your new domain name, so typing www.whatever-your-domain-is.com may not do anything yet. Eventually it will. (This is called “propogating” throughout the net).

The only thing missing now is an actual web site. In the old days, that would have meant hiring a designer and spending lots of money and time developing a nice-looking site. Those days, luckily, are gone. You can have a site up and running very quickly. You’re going to do this by installing a free WordPress blog. We’ll discuss this in the next part of the series, but rest assured that this is very, very easy to do. Once you’ve done this and a few more little things, you’ll be ready to roll.

Just a reminder. I’ve tried to make this process easy enough for anyone to understand, but if I still wasn’t clear enough, you might want to purchase a set of instructional videos that really step you through it as though you were watching it happen live.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

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