Now you have your domain name, let’s go get some hosting.
If the domain name is your home address, then hosting is your house. A postman goes to your address to deliver a letter. He’d be pretty miffed if he tried to deliver that letter to your address, only to find there was nothing there.
Postie wants a house to deliver to!
We need to get a house for that letter. OK, enough daft analogies, we need a hosting company for your domain name to point to.
I use 3 hosting companies for my domains. For this example, I will be using Hostgator, simply because they’re big, reliable and it’s pretty painless to set up.
The others I use are Bluehost and SmartHosting. The latter being the newest one I’ve used and is where this very blog is hosted. But as I said, most people start off with Hostgator so that’ll do for me!
Head over to Hostagtor.com and find the Baby Hosting plan. This is where you can decide to pay for hosting for one month at a time ($11.95) or for 36 months all at once. This works out at $5.95 a month. There are other plans of length too.
Below is my affiliate link where it would be very nice of you to use the link. You will get 25% off your plan by entering my unique coupon code (further down) when you go through checkout.
Go to HOSTGATOR.COM
It’s up to you which plan you choose. I personally still use the $11.95 a month plan, just in case there’s a major blowout with Hostgator (not happened yet!) and my sites go bump. Although saying that, I wish I’d bought the longer plan when I first started…I’ve been with them for over 20 years! I would have saved a pretty penny there.
Ah, well.
So, clicking on the baby plan brings up the register and payment pages. Again, I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining it in minor detail here, it’s just a form.
But I will say register with your new domain instead of registering a new one with Hostgator.
Pick your plan, username, and security pin (any number between 4-8 digits long)
- Enter your billing info
- Untick the upsells in section 4 (if you want to)
- Enter this coupon code to get 25% off straight away – HIT25OFFGAZ
- Tick the Terms of Service and then checkout
That’s it!
Hostgator will now send you an email with your login details for cPanel. Save these in a folder inside your email client and call it Hostgator. Save everything you get from these sorts of deals. When you need the info in the future, you can just log in to your email account and find it.
Even make a hard copy of it with a good old pen and paper and tuck it away somewhere safe. I can’t overstate how important it is to keep any information you receive online, especially log-in details. Make sure they’re safe and backed up somewhere.
When you get your details through from Hostgator, click on the link that will take you to your cPanel…this is where the good stuff happens!
Now you have hosting and a domain name, it’s time to marry them up in cPanel so you can start building your wonderful new website!
In the next post, we will be changing the Nameservers from GoDaddy to Hostgator and wait for it…installing WordPress! This is where the contents of your house are held.
And the beginning of a beautiful relationship with your niche!