How do I get my own website?

Doing it yourself may be easier than you think—and asking us to do it for you would be easier still. Read on if you want to understand the process, but if you just want a website and domain name, feel free to send us an email with the details, and we'll be glad to handle the registration and setup process for you.

Get a domain name

Register (or have us register) the domain name you'd like to use from the registrar of your choice (you can find a list of registrars at http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html online). We'd be happy to make some suggestions regarding which registrar to use.

The process is pretty much the same for all of them. Enter your domain name, your contact information, the nameservers the domains would be hosted on (confusing? More on this below), and your payment information.

The registrar would process the request, check the validity of the nameservers, and within about five minutes, you'd have your domain name.

Nameservers are the computers that would "serve up" your domain name, should anyone on the Internet request it. Basically, the nameservers have a database of all of the domain names they're responsible for, and that information is propagated through the Internet so it's available anywhere in the world. The whole process is (of course) quite a bit more complex than this, and we'd be happy to explain the whole thing if you like (but we find most people are happy knowing as little about it as possible—after all, that's what we're here for, to handle all the technical stuff).

All you'd need to know to get your domain name registered would be the names and IP addresses of our nameservers (some registrars just ask for the names), and we'll be happy to provide those to you ahead of time.

Sign up for service

You'd then choose a level of hosting and let us know you'd like to sign up. We'd set your account up, contact you to make arrangements for payment, ask you to review and agree to the acceptable usage policy (you can take a look at it at here, it's basically just a "don't try to hack our servers, don't use your website as a clearing house for pirated software," sort of thing) and within a short while (usually a couple of hours), we'd be sending you your login and password information along with a fairly exhaustive email running down the features of your hosting account and how to go about accessing them.

You're ready to start using your account at this point, even though it will take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours for your domain name to be available over the Internet (domain name propagation takes that long, as the information is handed off from computer to computer, world wide). You can still log in using the IP address of the domain and begin to ...

Set up your website

If you have HTML pages (HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, the "behind the scenes" formatting that's applied to any content people want to put on the web), you can begin to transfer those pages (along with the graphics that appear there) from your computer to the web server that your domain will "live" on via FTP (or File Transfer Protocol, which is just a way of getting files from one computer to another via the Internet).

If you don't have any web pages written yet, we can recommend a course of action or two. It used to be that you had to code all of your webpages by hand, which was about as much fun as taxes and jury duty rolled up in one tedious task, but there are so many excellent "What You See Is What You Get" HTML editors out there now, either free, shareware, or commercial, that it has become a lot easier and a lot more fun (even we don't do much web design "the old fashioned way" anymore). We'd be happy to make some recommendations. At that point, you'd have your own website, lock, stock, and barrel.

Or, let us handle it for you …

If you'd rather focus on the creative aspects of designing and maintaining your website, we'd be happy to handle the technical details you didn't feel like doing yourself and explain the ones you did want to tackle but might not understand fully. All you really need to do is send us an email telling us you want a website, and we'd be happy to take it from there, freeing you to give your full attention to the aspects you'd prefer to spend your time on.

If you have any questions or concerns about this process that aren't addressed here, feel free to ask us as many questions as you like.

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