[Closed] help with new web address/hosting

1. decide what you want to say, to whom.
2. understand why they would want to listen
...

Isn't that [i]why[/i] and not [i]how[/i].
Typical web designer, never listen. 🙄

Do you already have webspace? Has your ISP provided you with space to host pages in, that's your first question.
What do you want to put on there? A blog? Business pages? Static or dynamic?
All these questions lead you in a different direction.

far from it - unless you can answer these questions, you can't answer the question above - there are many, many different ways to "host a website" - how do you plan to decide which way unless you know the answers about the content? I mean, would you host an Apple keynote on free hosting?? no - it wouldn't last a second under the crazy load.

Rachel (actually quite pleased to be described as a web designer)

I assumed the OP's question was more about the physical side of hosting (who? where? and how?) rather than something as bit deeper like the content... 😉

Exactly - it's a bit like posting a question on here saying how do I bleed my brakes, without telling anyone what make they are. There is more information needed before an informed opinion can be given.

Rachel

You've won, I'm confused.
I'd say, and this is my confusion, that it would be closer to asking why they wanted to bleed their brakes.
Anyway, this is digressing from the OP's question, another time another place allthegear.

Sorry OP, as you were...

I am not any kind of expert, but will try to offer some helpful advice. 🙂

As said above, you are likely to have some free space available through your ISP. That would do you if you just need a little bit of space and don't need to run applications to do things on the server.

One problem is that you will be stuck with your ISPs 'user space' as part of your web address.

So if you are unfortunate enough to use BT as I do... it would be something like:

www.mywebsite.btopenworld.co.uk

If you want to have your own web address and some space from a host, then you essentially have to pay for the two different services, but you can often pay the same company to do it for you so you don't have to worry too much about the details.

I use hosthere.co.uk

I have to pay them every two years to renew the www. co.uk address, and then yearly for the webspace I want. You can decide how much storage space and how much bandwidth you want to pay for.

There are many other companies who do exactly the same as the one I use. They have always been helpful when I needed advice so I have stuck with them.

I hope that helps a bit.

I am VERY basic with this kind of thing, but hope my explanation makes it easy for someone else new to it to get the hang of things. 🙂

razor1548
thanks for the helpful reply.
If I host my web pages (abc.co.uk) with hosthere.co.uk will the address change to www.abc.hosthere.co.uk?
Phil

You've got two separate things here; domain name registration, and hosting.

Hosting is where your website physically lives. It's essentially glorified storage space. This could be provided by your ISP, or by a third party. The best approach, which where others here are going, is a different question.

Name registration is like a phone book. When you type a URL, eg www.abc.co.uk, the name in itself is as meaningless as and so it gets looked up in a big Internet phone book called DNS.

To follow your example, if your ISP is hosting they might well give you an address of www.abc.hosthere.co.uk. They should also give you a 'phone number' - an IP address - to use for DNS purposes. So, you'd then register www.abc.co.uk with a DNS service, and point it to this IP in their control panel.

So now when you type in www.abc.co.uk it will "resolve" - ie, look up in the phone book, to 123.1.23.45 or whatever. This will actually be the same address as www.abc.hosthere.co.uk, but you'll never see that so it doesn't matter. If it helps, think of two people flat sharing; Mr Smith owns the phone line, but if you ring Mr Jones instead it's the same phone number.

Hello Phil,

They wouldn't give you www.abc.hosthere.co.uk. It's only the ISPs who give a bit of web space as part of the package that do that, to avoid having to worry about registering names. Free webspace hosts tend to do the same.

If you are already paying someone else for the domain name registration, it ought to be transferable to your new host.

'Transfer' isn't really the right way to put it. It will just point to the new web space. Exactly how that happens in the background I cannot tell you... but an email to hosthere or any similar company I am sure would result in a quick answer saying 'No problem, just pay for the web space hosting and we will do the rest'.

I know that hosthere take the fee for domain name registration, but they actually get another company to do that bit... so I can't imagine they have any policy of only working with customers who register a name through them.

At least hopefully not. 🙂