How to Set Up Your Web Housing for Your Website in 7 Minutes

You have your domain name and you are ready to get your website housed for the world to see. You've done your homework and have looked at many web housing companies. You've chosen one that's reasonably priced and very helpful. Let's call your housing company "besthousing". Once you've signed up, you'll be given a set of passwords and technical details from "besthousing". This can be intimidating but there is lots of help available so don't panic.

In the email from "besthousing", the housing company will be the addresses of some nameservers. They typically look like this: ns1.besthousing.com. Poke around in the email and look in the help section if you can't find it.

You now need to go to where you registered your domain name; we'll call this company "bestdomain". All domain name registers work a little different, buy somewhere on "bestdomain" you'll see options on how to configure your domain. What you are doing is basically replacing the registrar's ("bestdomain") nameserver with you host's ("besthousing") nameserver.

Once that is accomplished, bring up a web browser and type in your domain name. If it's working, you will see a page telling you that the setup was successful. If you don't, you may have to wait awhile for the nameservers at the respective companies to make the change. It may take up to a day or two so don't get discouraged.

You now need to put content on your website. This is done by FTP. You'll need an FTP program and a test page before you can do this.

For a test page, open Notepad and write "this is a test for putting stuff onto my website". Save it as index.html. The FTP program choices are numerous. Three often used free ones are; Cute FTP (cuteftp.com), Smart FTP (smartftp.com), and Bulletproof FTP (bpftp.com).

Open your FTP program and ask it to connect to your housing company's ("besthousing") FTP server. This is often called "ftp.besthousing.com". Once you are connected, look for a folder that's called 'public' or 'public_html'. Upload your own index.html over the one you found saying yes when asked if you want to overwrite it.

In your browser, you need to type in your website's name. If everything's OK, you'll see what you wrote on the Notepad file. In our example it was, "this is a test for putting stuff onto my website". You're ready to rock and roll. If you don't see the text, check your host's support pages.

You'll be able to configure your account with a program called cPanel. It' usually found at http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel. Once you've entered the password for the cPanel program, you'll be seeing a screen of icons. Look for an icon called "email" and create your email accounts there.

You need to add an account in your email program. Look for an option called "Accounts" in you email program's "Tools" menu. That's where you'll add an email account. You need the POP3 and SMTP servers, provided by your host, along with the email address and password that you configured in cPanel. Check your email by emailing your newly created email from one of your other accounts.

The key here is the program cPanel. You have complete control over your website by using cPanel. This program is designed to not allow you to mess up your website, so explore and enjoy.