Web Hosting and FTP

Once you're ready to make your website accessible to others, you'll need to find a good web hosting company to, obviously, HOST your website. A host rents out space on their webserver to store the website and make it available to the Internet. To get it onto the webserver, the site owner first needs to upload the html files (more on this below).

There are literally thousands of web hosting companies to choose from, so do a Google or Yahoo search and start comparing prices. You may want to start out with a low cost plan, as long as it offers plenty of space for your site and sufficient data transfer. These plans are available for only $4 or $5 per month and often come with 5 gigabytes storage space, 250 gigabyte monthly data transfer, free email accounts and a number of other features.

When you "publish" your website from it's WYSIWYG format to HTML, you can add up the file sizes as well as the sizes of images and any other associated files that are a part of the site. This total will tell you how much storage space you'll need. As an example, a 100 page website with lots of images might add up to only 5 or 6 megabytes. Obviously, there is a lot of room for expanding a website of this size when you're renting 5 gigabytes of storage space. As for the data transfer, it probably isn't an issue unless you offer a lot of downloads on your site.

When you acquire your hosting plan you'll be asked for the domain name you wish to use with the account (this would be the one you previously obtained). You can also set up your email account(s) at this time. Once everything is set up, there will probably be a short wait (up to several hours) before you can upload or "FTP" your published files to the web server. "FTP" stands for "file transfer protocol" and is the language used for moving files from one computer to another on the world wide web.

Most website builder software has an FTP function or separate FTP software included so you can upload the pages of your site to the host's webserver. When you first set up your hosting account you were either asked to supply or were given a username and password for your FTP account. You'll need to enter this information in the FTP software.

If your software doesn't have a built-in FTP program you can always manually upload your files to the host's webserver using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox web browsers. Just publish your software's created website to a folder on your hard drive. Then you can open the browser, type "ftp://yoursitename.com" (using your domain name of course and no parentheses) into the address bar and wait for the logon window to appear.

Next, enter your FTP username and password, then click the "okay" button. Now, simply drag and drop your published folders and .html files into the browser window and you're all set.

Note: Some web hosts require you to upload your .html files into a specific folder on the webserver, such as "public_html" for instance. You'll find out this information when you establish the account. Read my free e-book for more information on this entire subject.

Web Hosting and FTP