time goes on, you may decide you have the need for more than one website—or, when you really hit the big time, your publisher may decide to establish sites named for your individual books. But for now, focus your energy on developing your author website.
Most hosting companies will register your domain as part of your hosting fee, but before you agree to that, read the fine print and confirm that the domain is registered in your name (not the hosting company’s). If you don’t own the domain you select, you cannot change hosts and keep the domain.
You can also register your domain directly with an accredited registrar. GoDaddy, ENom, and Network Solutions are among the more popular U.S-based registrars, but comparison-shop rates and inclusions before committing; you can find a comprehensive list of registrars at internic.net/regist.html. Typically, domain name registration costs $10–$30 per year, and once you sign up you’re often offered incentives for renewing early or for multiple years.
Theoretically any computer on the Internet can be a host, serving up web pages to any browser that “asks” for them. In fact, we’ll be showing you how to set up a web server on your home computer later in this chapter. But if you don’t want to host your website on the same home computer as your financial records, works-in-progress, and other personal information, you’ll want to find a different host computer that will store your website, make it available to the public 24/7, and protect it from bad guys who try to take advantage of the openness of the web.
There are lots of companies out there who will provide hosting services, some more reputable than others. Many of these companies offer “free hosting” accounts, but if the server your site lives on goes down for whatever reason, you may have trouble getting help. Paying customers always come first.
Your Internet service provider (ISP) may offer you free or low-cost web hosting, and that may be the right thing for you.
Three things should factor into your choice of web host:
Amount of disk space: When you shop for a computer, you probably look at the amount of space that computer has to store your data. It’s the same for a web host. Fortunately, the text files that account for most of the content of a website are fairly small. Where you can run into storage problems are with graphics and audio and video files. Even so, with most sites, you can easily get by with three gigabytes (3GB) of space.
Bandwidth: This is the size of the “pipe” that brings data to and from your site. What you use in bandwidth depends on the size of your files and the popularity of your site. As with disk space, audio and video files take up the most space, and if you’re Stephen King or Stephen Hawking, millions will quickly download every bit of audiovisual material they can suck up. Hosting companies generally offer 25GB to 75GB of bandwidth every month. Some offer “unlimited bandwidth,” and if you pursue this option ask them how they handle sudden spikes in traffic (as when someone with millions of Twitter followers posts a link to your site). You don’t want the best day for your blog traffic to be the worst day for your bank account due to hidden charges or downtime as a result of a traffic surge.
Support for third-party software: Many hosts offer automatic installs of popular web content management systems like WordPress and Joomla. If you use one of these systems (this book will focus on using WordPress for your website management needs), you will also need support for the PHP scripting language and MySQL database management system. If you want to install WordPress yourself, you need to make sure that your host supports PHP and allows you to create and manage at least one database.
If you’re not sure where to start looking for a web host, the WordPress site offers a few recommendations at wordpress.org/hosting. These hosts handle a variety of website types (not just WordPress-based sites) at a reasonable price.
If you want special attention to WordPress issues and want a host that can easily handle large amounts of traffic, you might consider a hosting site like WPEngine that only hosts WordPress-based websites.
WordPress started out as another tool for blogging but has increasingly become a go-to platform for all kinds of websites. It really makes it possible for even the nontechiest of writers to create a professional-looking site, with zillions of choices available to you. Once you have your domain registered, a hosting contract agreed to, and some content ready to publish, you can have your WordPress site on the web and attracting visitors within an hour or two.
The fastest way to create a stable environment for your WordPress site is to select a host with an automatic, one-click WordPress installation tool. Many of the bigger hosting companies have this option. The trade-off for the convenience of having WordPress installed for you may be a lack of control. The host may limit the number of themes or plugins you have access to, or otherwise limit your ability to manage your site. Check into this before signing a contract.
In this section, we will show you how to set up WordPress on your host site; you won’t have to wonder how much control you have, and it won’t cost you a dime. If the very idea of setting up a database scares you, you may want to skip ahead to the section titled “Choose a Design Theme.” But we mean it when we say the technical stuff can be done in about an hour. Give it a shot!
Before you set up your site on the host’s computer, you will need to download some software to your own computer:
1 You need a program to upload your files to your host. FileZilla is a bit of free software that can handle that. Download it at filezilla-project.org.
2 You need the latest version of WordPress. Download it at wordpress.org/download. This will be a Zip archive, which you will need to extract into a separate folder on your computer.
WordPress stores much of the content of your site in a MySQL database. Before installing WordPress on your host site, you need to create a database that WordPress can access. Go to your web hosting site to manage this.
The following instructions are for the popular cPanel web administration application. Your hosting company may use a different application, but the process should be pretty similar:
1 Click MySQL Databases from the main screen. Under Create New Database, type in a name for your database. Technically, you can name it anything. While it’s common to name this database “wordpress,” you run a security risk in doing so. It’s best to use a name that you won’t forget on those rare occasions when you have to change a database configuration setting, but hard for evildoers to guess.
2 Click Create to add your database. Write this name down, as you will need it during the WordPress installation.
3 Under Create New MySQL User, use the drop-down menu to select your newly created database.
4 Add a name under MySQL User and type in the password twice. Make sure you use a very strong password, one that’s easy for you to remember but hard for others to discover. All the Privileges should be checked.
5 Click Add. Write down the name and password of the new user, as in Step 2.
Your database is now set up. You can now upload your WordPress files.