How to make a site? What do I need to make a site?

Many who find themselves in a situation where they need a website don't know where to start. What do I need? Those who start researching, again, come to the part of what is a domain and where to register. What is a server and what is hosting? How do I connect it? Where can I get it, buy it? It sounds complicated.

To save you hours or even days of research, I decided to share the most important information in the simplest possible way. All you need to get the site up and running is a domain and hosting.

As with everything in life, it's always easiest to hire a professional and let them do it for you, sometimes it's necessary. In any case, it is extremely useful to know what you are paying for and how it works.

What is a domain and what is hosting?

A domain is the site address that you and your visitors around the world use to visit a website. For example, vavok.net is the site address.

What is hosting? When you or someone else creates your site you will receive one or even thousands of files. Simpler sites usually have a few to a few dozen files.

Hosting is, in fact, a web server (computer) that works 24 hours a day and is constantly available online. You will transfer all site files to it and thus you will have access to your site 24 hours a day.

If you understand what hosting and domain are, you have completed half the job, well done. Let's move on.

Where to rent hosting and domain? Is there a free option?

Free hosting and domain

There are free options, but they are more for people who are starting in web design or programming and want to practice. Most of the providers who provide you with a service for free do not guarantee the availability of your files, backup copies of data are often not mandatory, and various functionalities are blocked and similar. To save you headaches, I recommend paid domains and hosting. Problems can also happen on paid hosting, but far less.

Paid hosting and domain

Now that we understand what we need, and what hosting and domain are, we come to the hardest part - where to rent it?

You need a hosting provider to rent hosting and domain from them. You can rent a domain from one hosting provider and hosting from another, which is nothing complicated, but if you are coming into contact with this topic for the first time, I recommend that you rent everything from the same hosting provider, you can change hosting provider whenever you want and there should not be any problem with that.

Spend some time searching for hosting providers at your favorite search engine. Most hosting providers have several different offers (hosting packages) for different prices. So you will see that each hosting package has a certain amount of disk space that you can use, a certain amount of bandwidth, a certain number of databases, etc.

One tip if you want to be sure. Logically, every hosting provider tries to make its users happy, but once you have chosen a hosting provider you might want to look for reviews and comments on the internet about the chosen provider to make sure that you will not have any problems with support, that the servers are working well and so on.

You can register a website address on .com, .net, .org, .rs, and many more different domains, there are a lot of options. So, the website address can be my-site.com, or it can be my-site.net. You must bear in mind that, perhaps, the domain you would like in this one is currently already leased, ie. that a website already exists at that address. If that address is taken on a .com domain, check if it is available on a .net domain, etc.

It is very important to know that you are renting hosting and domain, not buying them permanently! You must keep track of when your lease expires and renew regularly.

For all questions and help, you can contact me here.