So this in this article were going to talk a little bit about the different types of hosting organ will explore brand-new shared hosting a...
So this in this article were going to talk a little bit about the different types of hosting organ will explore brand-new shared hosting account and the cPanel interface recreating FTP account, upload website, create email accounts will create a subdomain will look at some of the auto installers for scripts like WordPress.
Basically everything you need to noted to deploy a basic website to the Internet in the easiest way possible. Now I know that a lot of you guys are professional developers and you build web applications and he deployed to serve cloud services like AWS and her Roku which are very very fast and scalable, but were not talking about large web applications here were talking about basic websites in this guide is for the beginner and for the beginner.
I would suggest managed hosting K, whether shared hosting or VPS or maybe even a dedicated server. The but that may be overkill you not to get the scalability and speed of a cloud service but the simplicity of managed hosting is well worth it for a basic website and were talking about lichen HTML, CSS, JavaScript site may be a WordPress website or maybe even custom PHP website.
So what will be doing. Like I said is is going through and navigating cPanel will show you how to do all the basic tasks that have to do with deploying your site and managing it now organ abusing us our service called in motion, hosting, and I chose this company because I've worked with them personally for years.
I have a VPS account with them and their supports great. They have great services, never had any problems with them.
So what were going to do first is just talk about the different types of hosting and you can see these different options here no matter what company you go to your gonna see these options now business hosting that's just what they call their shared hosting, shared hosting is where you basically have a server and there's a bunch of shared accounts on that server and your purchasing one of those accounts.
Now these accounts have cPanel included, which is the most popular control panel for for hosting accounts. This is where you'll do everything from create your email accounts your databases.
All that stuff. So basically you share a server with other people. And now, this is definitely the cheapest you can see this is 599. It starts at 599 per month. Usually it's going to be between five and in somewhere around $12 per month but usually you have to pay by the year or by two years or three years and you get a deal depending on the length of time.
You're paying for up front so that's a will be dealing with VPS hosting as it is a step up. It's basically a virtual server.
It's not quite a dedicated server where you have your own machine, but it is your own virtual machine. If you've ever used like VMware or virtual box or something on your computer.
We basically have a computer within a computer that's kinda like what a VPS is you do have complete root access to your virtual server and you can do what you want with it.
Okay so you have much more freedom than the shared hosting account then you have dedicated servers which are where you actually rent out a physical machine from the company so they'll have it, a data center with you know hundreds of thousands of servers and you'll get one of those and you can see, those are the most expensive hundred dollars per month is actually very very cheap for a dedicated server but again this is the introductory price so reseller hosting is a bit different.
It's it's basically like a VPS except your reader see selling shared hosting, to other people so usually will come with like a billing system and I used to resell hosting from host gator about six or seven years ago when I had my tech guy company.
It's it's not something I'd recommend for like a side business because there's a lot that goes into it, you really have to know what you're doing. So I would suggest if you going to do reseller hosting jump in and be a hosting company and really inform yourself and know what you're doing because having control of other people's hosting accounts is very overwhelming and you need to know what the hell you're doing and then WordPress hosting is basically just shared hosting optimize for WordPress right so I already have the accounts now if you were to order from in motion.
You just go through. You can see there's different packages for each type of hosting I actually have the power package which is 799 per month.
But if you go to order you have to go by two years. If you want that price, I actually did the one year, so it's 899 per month and it comes out like hundred and hundred and 17 nurse on hundred and $31 for the year.
Okay I'm sorry hundred and seven dollars for the year. Now in motion. Like a lot of hosting companies will include a domain name so over here looking to go through the entire process, but just to show you.
Do you pick your data center. You can choose if you want WordPress installed automatically to say no thanks and you continue and now you can pick a domain with this accounts in the Inyo get that for free at least for the first year.
I think after that you have to pay like 12 bucks a year, or if you have a domain registered elsewhere. You just choose this and you go ahead and add that domain and then you go back to that domain registrar and just enter that the custom in motion.
Name servers and that'll link your domain to your new hosting account now. My goal for thisblog post is not to focus on the in motion service. It's going to be very similar regardless of of what company you're using okay so I don't want this to be a blog post about a certain company, but of course I had to pick a company to use so on picking the one that I recommend right.
So once you go ahead and sign up, you'll get an email. It'll look something like this and you just have to set your pet. You have a login ID would to be your email address and then you'll set a password and then you, you'll be able to log into your account management panel.
Now this is not cPanel. Yet, this is just there. Basically there there billing system. This is where you can update your contact info.
Were you can view your domains. You can pay your bill. Things like that. And no matter what company you still have something like this case it's like the billing gateway now right here you see an icon for cPanel.
This is where you actually manage your website or your your web hosting account so will go and click on that actually have it open so that's why that didn't work so this is cPanel and this is offered with I don't know. I would estimate somewhere between 80 and 90% of of of managed hosting companies and it's very powerful you can do a lot from here.
I may be a little overwhelming. If you're not into this stuff. If your new web developer or if you're not even a web developer but you know your deploying your own site so amusing to go through some of the options here and some of the features and and properties of cPanel.
Now it may look different. You may have a different theme. In fact, you can see this uses the paper lantern theme.
Your company may have. It may look different, but you'll have most of the same options. Now this over here on the side.
Is your server information or your account information. The domain that I have set up for this account is traverse the stage in.com okay so that's my domain and then you also have a username which in my case is traverse 20 that was actually created from my domain and then the home directory is where you are account is located on the server which is in the home folder and then whatever your username K this is the last login.
This is the IP address of the last login. This is is actually is not my IP address. This is in motion support so I don't care about you guys seeing it down here.
We have some statistics, the add-on domains that would add on domain is if you want to do just that. Added domain onto this account.
Now if we go back to the ceiling to go back to the packages that they offer for shared hosting right here and you can see this package has said it, it allows six websites so basically this means that you can have if we go back to cPanel.
You have your main domain, which in my case is this, traverse the stage and and then you can have five more add-on domains. So that makes six websites you can actually have with this hosting account.
Now, if you have six kind websites on us on a small shared server like this or share account, then they should be very small. Websites are I you don't want even though it technically is is supposed to be unlimited disk space and bandwidth.
It's never truly unlimited and you should definitely read the fine print on that but I would suggest having one or two sites on a shared account so I yeah add-on domains. We have 0/5 aliases are autoresponder is all get into that bandwidth.
This is the bandwidth that I've used so far so 11 MB very very small I just did a little bit of testing but everything is pretty much default. I don't have anything like uploaded as a website or anything yet will do that in this article.
It also shows you your MySQL and post Rez databases post rises fairly new as far as I know I back when I was doing reselling and dealing with a lot of different companies. They didn't actually have post rises an option.
It was just MySQL. Here you see your disk usage. Your email accounts your forwarders. The number of FTP accounts looks like they allow up to 2000 on this package your CPU usage.
If we go down here number of processes that are running on your account, your databases, subdomains, a subdomain is is like let's say blog.traverse the state traverse the staging.com and will actually create a subdomain in them to show you how to easily install WordPress on that subdomain as well.
So let's take a look at some of these areas on the left. Now the preferences this is going to be stuff that is related to the company that you're working with.
So for instance in motion offers AdWords credit so we'll see that here you see your user manager your contact information. Your password and security a link back to the account management panel or amp so stuff that's dedicated to in motion so you might not have this area or it might be different options.
Now you will have email. This is all your email stuff you route your routing your forwarders your accounts domains. This is where you can add your add-on domains or subdomains aliases.
You can add redirects things like that. This is all applications that you can easily install on your account. You can either install them on your main root domain or subdomain or an add-on domain or justice subfolder. So things like WordPress, Joomla!, which is another content management system is a whole bunch of stuff and I'll actually show you some some of the other stuff that's that's available down here we have like PHP configuration.
If you want to change the version by default at 7.0, but you could updated to 7.1 or you could roll back to one of the version 5's if you wanted to write and then you can also configure like Pearl are peer packages.
The softer the softer the softer cellulose on the how to pronounce that soft delicious this is. This is basically where you can install all of these different scripts down here files so you have a file manager.
If I click that this is what is on your server on your account now public HTML that is the front end of your website, so anything that you want to display on your domain, which in my case is traverse the staging.com will be in this public HTML folder okay which for me is empty but you may have like a welcome page that comes with the with the hosting account or something like that okay and then you don't really have to worry about any of this other stuff.
You can also create subfolders in your public HTML and you'll be able to access like let's say traverse the staging.com/blog or whatever whatever folder that I want to create and you can actually put a separate website in that subfolder right so you don't usually want to use the file manager it's it's pretty crappy.
You do want to use an FTP account is what I would suggest for people just getting started for FTP stands for file transfer protocol and that's our actually can upload our website writes let's go back to cPanel.
Like I said FTP so this is where you can see your FTP accounts. Now you can create new accounts here. You can create the login and password and all that but you also have your your home FTP account, which is the user that that you created with your cPanel.
So my case traverse 20 and I would use my password for my for my initial cPanel account. I should be able to access into FTP with that account.
So I don't technically have to create another one. But you can if you want right so we keep going down here databases. This is where we can create MySQL databases or post Rez I'll get into that little bit metrics so you can see your visitors from here, like Google analytics, just not as in-depth stats will also show your analytics.
You can see your bandwidth usage or CPM CPU usage stuff like that security. So here you can set up for SSH access if you want to access your server from a terminal we can set up SSH keys.
That's a little more advanced than I want to get into IP blocker. So if you have issues with someone that has a certain IP address that you know of a certain range. You can actually block them from accessing your your account or your website right and then advance.
Down here we have like mime types and are really getting into this Cron jobs for automation so that's about it for the options here. So let's go ahead and let some let's create an email account.
That's usually one of the first things I do so many go ahead and just say I want Brad at traverse the staging.com if you have multiple domains in your account you'll be able to select the domain so password just put in whatever I apologize.
I'm using my mechanical keyboard. Usually I don't use this in blog post but should be too much typing so you can choose Unlimited if you want between 50 MB for this inbox is fine so go ahead and click create account and that's it.
We have now have an email account which is brad@traversethestaging.com if I go over to more and I go to access webmail working at three options so these are just different inboxes.
You can use are all pretty much the same and they're all pretty crappy. What I usually do is set up a forwarder to Gmail because I prefer the Gmail interface.
But if you want you can click on one of these like squirrel mail mail mail and this is your in your inbox and you can see we have just a what kind of a welcome email with configuration settings, but let's gladden test this out and let some let's send an email so will go to compose and nothing to send this to my Gmail account so check out info email and will just say hello and test and let's send right so now will do is go over to Gmail.
See, I actually forgot to put a subject in, but I could've and you can see it says hello and test it's from Brad traverse the staging.com and if I wanted to reply or say hello will just say hello there and send and now it's go back over to webmail and once reload our inbox and there is so if we click on that are click on the subject.
Hello and test. I'm sorry, hello there so you can see that this isn't really very nice interface to work with the least in my opinion so I would suggest doing is setting up a forwarder so we go back to our email block here and go to forwarders and you could set up choose the domain and will say and forwarder so the address to forward.
I want brad@and then traverse the staging.com again if you had multiple domains you could choose a different one and we want to send this to tech guy info@Gmail.com case will say add forwarder.
So now all email sent to this the staging email will go to my Gmail account I and we can actually test that out. So what I'll do is a menopause and the send an email to this this account from my traverse the media@Gmail account and will see if that goes through our guy so I went to my other Gmail account and I sent a message to the new email address and you can see that it was forwarded to Gmail okay so if we look at this it sent to earth sent from traverse media@Gmail and if we look here it's to brad@traversethestageand.com which is our new who are new email right so now you can work with Gmail instead of working with that the other interface and you can choose to see to send emails from your cPanel email from Gmail.
If you go into the settings and change some stuff up but I don't want to get into that I don't spend too much time on this. So let's go ahead and deploy our website now. Like I said we have a default FTP account because we can just use our cPanel login with this username now as far as your what you can use for FTP.
I would definitely suggest file Zillah case. If you go to the file Zillah project.org you want to download the client. Okay, not the server you want the client because you want to connect to your server through the client so download that I really have installed so luckily go through the capital go ahead and open it.
So just search for and use open that up okay so it's gonna look like this and what you want to do is put in your host, which is your domain name so I'm in a put in traversing state.com. Your username which mine is Trevor 20 and then whatever your password for your cPanel and then connect okay so now are logged into our account and again you can see pretty much everything you saw in the file manager public HTML.
This is your actual website and you can see minds completely blank. You might have some welcome pages and here just it just so they have something to display because right now if I go to my domain so traversing the state.com.
I just get index of an just a blank file listing so it's as easy as this to upload a file will go ahead and creates let's say index HTML K if your home page should always be called index that's what's got a load automatically when you go to your root domain sums can open this with a text editor and open it with sublime text and I'll just put an H1 in here and just say hello world and save and then we'll just drag this into the public HTML folder.
Okay now if I go to my traverse the staging.com and reload. We now get hello world right so it's as easy as that. And you can also upload PHP files.
If I were to say delete this and let's change this extension from in from HTML to PHP and will go ahead and open that with sublime text and this will still work because HTML can be used inside of a PHP file but just to show you I can use PHP organ open up some tags here and will just say echo. This will say hello from PHP and save will go ahead and upload that and let's go back to the domain and reload and we get hello from PHP I and we could put tags in there as well so we wanted to either just wrap this in an H1 like that sweeps so you could do that aggressive if you want to overwrite will say yes and then reloading you can see it's an H1 so you can build custom PHP applications using an account like this, so I want to do is I want to actually upload my traverse the media website to this domain, so I already have it all up, swing, delete this.
I really have it all compiled and all built out some to just grab it real quick. Give me a second right so production website and I'm just going to grab the files and upload it so down here you see cute files.
This is the files that are uploading us. He is discounting down. You can also see the progress right here for each file that's uploading right so once that gets down to zero. That means it's completely uploaded right so now it will do his will go back to traverse the stage in.com and reload and there is the website okay so it's as easy as that to deploy a site.
So now I want to do is go back to where our will to go back to cPanel and I in addition to our regular site, which is at the root domain. I want a subdomain that has a WordPress website so when I go to domains, subdomains, and want to create one called WordPress.traverse you staging.com and if I had multiple add-on domains.
I would be able to choose it from here as well so this will be our document root okay so this does subdomain will actually be the folder we upload to, will click create. And now we have a subdomain so let's go back to the cPanel angled down to WordPress and click on WordPress and from here we can go to install now actually before we do that, I just want to show you that this over here in the side you have all these different categories of scripts that you can install with basically just one or two clicks.
We have all types of blogs we have content management systems like Joomla! and Drupal. We have forums like PHP, BBN simple machines forum.
We have image galleries, even of e-commerce platforms full shopping carts like magenta ON OS commerce, so it's it's very easy to get any of these scripts up and running on your host, but working install WordPress so when you click that install button and let's see will go to choose a domain which only to choose my subdomain, they just created otherwise will overwrite the root domain and I want to do that will go down here to admin username and say password in and let's see if we click advanced options you'll see that it's going to creates a new database you can change the name if you want you could also manually create a database outside of here in your cPanel and then use that but were just gonna let it create a new one and then we'll just click install okay and she is going to take a couple seconds and it should set up WordPress on that subdomain soon.
I can see it says WordPress is been successfully installed. We have the front end domain here which is our subdomain in the admin domain, which is just the subdomain/WP admin so let's first look at the front end.
I'll go ahead and open that up and we have a brand-new WordPress website with the default theme.
If we go to our subdomain/WP – admin it'll take us to our WordPress login which will be admin ABC 123 exclamation and there we go. So we have our backend if you want to create a post.
Go ahead and say add new posts to my blog's my blog posts hands go ahead and publish now for go to the front end which we can get to go to my blog and then visit site and then scroll down. There is our new post okay there it is.
So you have a complete WordPress website now on a subdomain and at the same time we have our regular site, which is still@traversethestagein.com guy so very, very easy to do this stuff.
We haven't done any kind of programming or anything like that. You don't have to be a programmer to set up your own website like this you might have to have a developer create your site feet in less you know basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript, but then it's easy to upload.
So that's the mean those of the big things some other things we have our backups so we go to back up we can go ahead and exits go to the backup wizard that's a little easier. Which is right here backup wizard.
So if we click this button it'll backup the entire home directory so all of our files. All of our MySQL databases. All of our email forwarder configurations and all of our email filter configurations and we can easily restore it back as well right so another perk of cPanel and see what else.
So let's see databases so if you want to create a MySQL database there's a wizard you can use so for go ahead and click that now your database is going to be prefixed with your username and_so let's just call this test and will say next step so username will say Brad, which will also be prefixed with your username here.
Password will just to ABC 123 and say create user and we want all privileges for this user. Meaning, we want them to be able to create tables and delete records and stuff like that.
Rights now for go we could either add another database. Let's return to MySQL databases and if we go down here now.
You'll see both our WordPress database which was automatically created and then our brand-new test database that we just created.
Okay can see the WordPress database has 0.67 MB are new one is completely empty. Now if you want to manage the tables and stuff in your database.
You can go down to PHP my admin just right here and you can see both databases over on the side. If we look at the word press.
It has all the default WordPress tables. If we look at hours the test. It has nothing we can go ahead and create a table like users click go and we could put like say ID we can make it up auto increment primary key and name and save email and will choose bar chart for these unlucky to go over SQL but just to show you real quick that we can do this will say Max length 255 and save so now we have a users table with a couple different fields in our database, we can actually insert if we go to insert will put in the name here and email and click go and now for go to browse.
You'll see that we actually have a user in our database okay so we could build a custom PHP application to access this database are not just PHP but PHP is the easiest to use with these types of managed hosting accounts right so I think that's it guys. I don't really want to get into any new stuff that's to advance like SSH keys or anything like that.
You do have your error logs, so any error logs will show up here you have your van with usage so you can see the usage of our bandwidth and disk space usage and all that stuff stats can choose actually can choose your subdomain if you want to, or your main domain and this will show you your user activity so number of visits things like that kind like Google analytics just just not as good deftly suggest using Google analytics over something like this are guys that's good be it.
I hope you enjoyed this little guide I I know that a lot of you guys are like I said developers that already know all this stuff, but this is for the beginners. This is, I want to help people out that are trying to get into this line of work and giving them the easiest way possible to deploy a website and not even just people in this line of work, which is general.
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