Although we have gone over most of this information, this chapter will provide you with an overview of the entire process of getting your website online.

Registering a Domain Name

If you want an online presence, you must have a domain name. A domain is a website address, such as www.yahoo.com or www.google.com. It is the address that visitors will use to get to your website. On the more technical side, a domain name points to a certain IP number, basically telling the browser which site, of the billions of sites on the Internet, to load.

IP Address

Every website has an IP address, which is a series of numbers. An example of an IP address may be 12.345.67.89. When you have a domain name, computers see it as a number, but to us humans, it looks like www.yourwebsite.com. A domain name must be registered through a domain registrar, such as Internic.

Internic is a subsidiary company of ICANN, which is the organization that certifies all domain registrars. When a domain name is ordered, it is put through the Domain Name Servers (DNS), which assign it an IP address. Most websites have both a primary and secondary name server, which point to the same website, making them more reliable.

Before you can register a domain name, you must first select one, and then make sure that it is available. The domain name that you select, so long as it is indeed available, is totally up to you. However, ideally, it will relate to the topic of your website and include your most relevant keywords. For example, a weight loss website might have a domain name such as www.weightloss.com, if that name was not taken.

Some characters are not allowed in the formation of a domain name. In fact, a domain name may only contain numbers, letters, hyphens, and underscores. However, it is always best to use text only and not numbers, hyphens or underscores. The length of a domain name is also limited to seventy characters. Shorter domain names are much better, as they are much easier to type, and to remember. It makes no difference whether or not you use upper or lower case letters for your domain name, as this is ignored by the DNS. Therefore, many people advertise their website in a way that distinguishes between the start of one word and the end of another, such as YourWebsite.com, which would also work as yourwebsite.com or YOURWEBSITE.COM – or even YoUrWeBsItE.CoM.

Dot com, or .com is not the only available extension. The extension is the end of the domain name. These days, there are a multitude of choices, with the most common being .com. Others include .net, .org, .gov, .biz, and .name. You can use what you want, but .gov is usually reserved for actual government websites. The extensions also designate certain things to visitors. For example, .org tells people that your site is an organizations website. Certain countries may also have special extensions. For example, .ca means that the site is a Canadian site.

Once you’ve selected a domain name, you can use one of the many available free online tools to check the availability of that name. Once you’ve found one that is available, it must be purchased through a certified domain registrar. There are numerous choices amongst registrars, and the prices do vary. You can visit Internic at http://www.internic.net/regist.html to see a list of certified registrars.

Selecting a Web Host

Once you have selected a domain name and registered it through a certified domain registrar, you will need a place to host it. For this, you need a Web Hosting account. This is where your webpages will reside, so that visitors may view them.

Once you’ve selected a Web Hosting Company, you must ‘direct’ or ‘point’ the domain name to the server. Your Web Hosting Company will provide you with a primary DNS and usually a secondary DNS. DNS is Domain Name Server. Your Web Hosting Company should also provide you with additional information, such as getting your account set up, uploading files, the various paths to your directories, and more. While all of this information is important, none of it matters until you have and use the DNS information.

A domain name is essentially numbers that are recognized by a computer – whether the actual IP number was typed in or the actual website address was typed in. While a website address may look like www.yourdomain.com, an IP number will look like 12.345.678.9. The DNS that is provided to you by your Web Hosting Company tells a computer where to find that IP number or website address.

Many Web Hosting accounts are on shared servers. Those accounts will all have the same IP number, and if there is not more designated, the computer trying to get to the IP number will instead be directed to an error page, or to a page that belongs to the hosting company. This is why DNS is so important. It further designates to browsers which directory to find a particular website address in.

The DNS is changed at the place where you purchased your domain name – not through the separate Web Hosting Company, in most cases. For instance, if you ordered your domain name through NameCheap.com, but have your hosting at Host Gator or Host4profit.com, you would go into your account control panel at NameCheap.com to change the primary and secondary DNS entries, which were provided to you by Host Gator or Host4profit.com.

After you’ve purchased a domain name, if you do not change the DNS, anyone who attempts to visit your website address will be directed to either an error page or some other page provided by the domain registrar. You can leave it like this for as long as you wish, and this is considered a ‘parked’ domain. While most people do purchase domains for the purpose of using them for a website, some do not. For example, someone may have found a domain name available that they feel could potentially be worth a great deal of money. They purchase the domain, and leave it parked, until such time that they wish to either use it or sell it.

A DNS entry looks like this:

Primary Name Server: NS1.YOURHOSTINGCOMPANY.COM (123.45.67.8)

Secondary Name Server: NS2.YOURHOSTINGCOMPANY.COM (123.54.67.8)

What the DNS entry looks like will vary from one hosting company to the next, but this is the general format. Again, this information comes from your hosting company, and is usually contained in the welcome email. If you are not able to locate it, contact the Web Hosting Company.

If you’ve purchased your domain name and your Web Hosting service through the same company, you usually will not need to change the DNS yourself. However, if you used separate companies, such as NameCheap.com for the domain name, and Host Gator or Host4profit.com for the Web Hosting, you will have to change it yourself. Don’t worry – it is very easy.

Once you’ve changed the DNS entry, you will usually have to wait 24 to 48 hours for the DNS to propagate. During this time, your site can be accessed with the IP number that the hosting company provided you with, but the rest of the Internet world will not be able to access your site without that IP number, and will have to wait.

If you have problems getting or changing your DNS entries, contact your domain registrar and/or Web Hosting Company, and they should be able to help you with this.

Uploading Your Website to Your Server

Now that you have a domain name, a Web Hosting account, and you have pointed the DNS to that account, you are ready to start uploading your webpages, graphics, and other files to your server. There are usually two ways to do this, with the most common being File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. Usually, special software, called FTP software or an FTP client, is required for this.

Another option, if your Web Hosting Company offers it, is to upload your files through a web interface. For example, you go into your control panel for your Web Hosting account, click a button that says ‘upload files’ and then select the files that you want to upload, and the directory you want them uploaded to – and then hit the ‘upload’ or ‘submit’ button. However, this method is usually slower than FTP.

File Transfer Protocol allows the transfer of files from one computer to another. In this case, you are transferring files from your computer to the computer that is your web server. The Web Hosting Company should give you the details that are needed to connect to the server using FTP, including your username, password, port information, and the FTP address. Other than this, however, they will not tell you how to use the software, since there are many FTP software titles available on the market.

In addition, your Web Host should tell you which directory in the account to upload files to. In most cases, this is the public html folder.

If you have a firewall, and most people do, you may have to lower the security setting on your firewall to allow the transfer of files with FTP. If this is the case, in most circumstances, the firewall box will pop up when you first attempt to transfer files.

When you are using FTP software, you will need to select whether the files that are being transferred are ASCII or binary. If you do not use the correct settings, the files can become corrupted during the transfer, and will not display properly on either end – whether they were uploaded to your server, or downloaded to your computer. Most of the newer FTP clients will automatically detect the correct setting for this, but some do not.

As a guide, remember that HTML documents and text documents, including those with the extensions of SHTML, DHTML, HTM, TXT, CGI, ASP, JS, and C, should be transferred in ASCII mode. Graphics, executable programs, and other types of media files, such as video, should be transferred in binary mode.

When you load the FTP client and connect to your server using the information that the Web Hosting Company gave you, you should see two ‘windows’ within the software. One will be displaying files on your computer, while the other will be displaying files on the server. Start by maneuvering to the file that you wish to upload, in the window that contains the files on your computer. Next, maneuver to the directory or folder that you want to upload the file to in the window that contains the files on the server.

All but one of your files can have any name that you want. Some examples may be order.html or order.htm, news.html, etc. The one that must be named a certain name is the very first page that you want your visitors to see when they arrive at your website. It must be named index.html, index.htm, index.shtml, or index with one of the other acceptable file extensions – but the word ‘index’ is essential. This is often referred to as your home page.

You must have an index page. Without it, visitors will be taken to a page that lists all of the files in your public html directory, and this does present security risks – it is also not a pretty sight.

Also note that many of the newer web authoring software titles now offer you the ability to upload your webpages directly from the software, to your web server. How this is done, and the availability of this feature, will vary from one program to another. FrontPage, offered by Microsoft, is one of these programs. However, if you use FrontPage to create your webpages, you will need to have FrontPage extensions installed on your Web Hosting account. Contact your Web Host support for further information on this.

Although there are many FTP programs you can use to assist you in getting your website online, WS_FTP Home by Ipswitch is one of the most popular. See the FTP tutorial for assistance in using this software to upload/download files to and from your web server.