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Publishing Your Website
Publishing is the act of actually putting your web pages up on the internet for everyone to see. Before you can do that you need 2 things.
You will need a domain name and a web hosting company.
Choosing Your Domain Name
Your domain name could be your company name. For example: If your company name is Discount Widgets you might purchase the domain name discountwidgets.com if it is available. If the name was already taken you might try discountwidgets.biz or discountwidgets.us. There are most likely several options that you could purchase successfully.
Most SEO experts will advise you to choose a domain name that includes keywords related to the content of your website. There is evidence to support the assumption that keywords in a domain name are factored into your ranking equation.
For example: If your company name was Brady’s Confections, but you sold dutch chocolate candy, you might get better rankings in the search engine results is you chose the domain name dutchchocolatecandy.com or dutch-chocolate-candy.com or some configuration of the keywords.
Most web hosts today offer your domain name free for as long as you use their service. Experience has taught me to refuse the free domain and purchase your domain from a third party like GoDaddy.com.
You should at least make sure that if you accept a free domain name with a hosting service that you have the option of buying the domain name if you leave the web hosting service.
The average life of a relationship with a web host is about 3 years. Most people make bad decisions when buying their web hosting and transfer to a new host when they get dissatisfied.
If you can’t buy your domain name when you leave a service, you are pretty much up the creek.
If you buy your domain name from a third party, it is a very simple process to point the name to the servers of the company that you buy your hosting from. Then if you change hosts, you just repoint to the new server location.
Choosing a Web Host
The web hosting companies of today do a lot more than just store your website on their servers.
The good ones supply your email services with security and anti spam protectiion. They also supply features for the security of your website.
The good ones also give you enough resources like storage space and bandwidth, so that you aren’t making extra payments each month when you run out of space or have too many visitors.
They also offer access to your stat files (access and error logs), so that you can keep track of visitors and other information related to your website.
There are still a lot of companies out there that are gouging people with prices of $20 to $30 a month. Very often they offer fewer resources and half the services of hosting companies that charge one half to one quarter of their price. Shop around!!
If you are going to pay $30 a month for hosting you should go the extra $20 a month and purchase dedicated hosting. This involves leasing an entire server. More expensive, but the best choice if you have the money.
Most of us with smaller budgets purchase shared hosting. You can find good shared hosting for $4 to $12 a month. See our recommended web hosts.
Putting Web Pages on the Internet
Web pages are published on the internet via a process called File Transfer Protocol or FTP.
When you sign up with a web hosting company you’ll be given access to a Control Panel where you can access your web storage space.
All web hosts will supply you with a File Manager that can be accessed from your control panel. Included in that file manager will be a tool for uploading your web pages.
Be sure your website is complete before you start uploading pages.
You can also use third party FTP client software to upload your web pages. These tools will speed up the process of transfering your pages to and from your web space. See some recommended FTP software.
