Hello, World! This is the first post of my brand new personal website, using my own domain danielafanador.co. As you may know, I already have my personal blog www.mirincon.co (in Spanish) in which I write in a weekly basis some thoughts about tech, education, economy, media, startups, among other things. The objective of this new website/blog is not to write opinions like the former one, but to post in a non-weekly basis about technical stuff I use in my daily work and personal projects. Just in case, I’ve worked with technology, advertising and Internet for more than 5 years and I started writing mirincon.co in 2008.
Now that you know what to expect, I want to talk in this first post about something I had to actually do to setup this website. So, if you are planning to create your own website or blog, be sure to read until the end of this post. Questions and comments are very welcome!
Where are we and where do we want to go?
OK! You have an idea of having a website but you don’t know anything at all on how to have one, do you? Probably you’ve heard you can create one with WIX.com, WordPress.com, Google Sites or even create a Facebook Page (one client told me once that this was free). STOP! If you want something professional, I’d totally recommend you to invest in:
- A domain (I recommed GoDaddy.com or mi.com.co).
- A hosting (I recommed WebEmpresa and HostMonster). –
- A WordPress theme (I recommend ThemeForest).
In this post, we are talking about the first and the second one: hosting and domain. There we go! So, if you are willing to have an idea of how much it cost a domain, I bought danielafanador.com for $11 USD (paid with credit card). That’s an average price for most of the common domains. In my case, I’ll have to renew my domain after 12 months, once a year (forever), but as you may see, domains are not expensive. You can check how much would cost the one that you want in www.godaddy.com (just don’t try to buy visa.com or twitter.com because they are not available). Buying a domain is as easy as creating an account in godaddy.com, associating a credit card and complete the whole check-out process like any other purchase in Amazon or Mercado Libre. This is a 5-10 minutes process until you receive a confirmation email.
After you have a domain, you only have a web address you can use. But if you type that URL in a browser and you don’t set it up, you won’t go anywhere! It would be like having an address in your neighboorhood, but not having a door to access a place. You need that place to exist, and it’s called a hosting. This is where your website will have all the information your visitors will see. It’s like a hard drive containing all the information of your computer. This one I’m using to store this site you are reading currently hosts www.vanpc.com.co and danielafanador.co, 2 websites and it costed me and my brother $40 USD per year in webempresa.com. That’s enough for us, and we can even host more websites. The thing is we should not do this if we don’t want our visitors to have their speed reduced when visiting one of our websites: the more websites you have in a hosting, the more the speed goes down.
Associating your hosting and your domain
If you bought your domain in one place and the hosting in a different place, you should set a custom nameserver for your domain so your hosting recognize your domain. This is a setup you will apply within your domain registration company (GoDaddy in my case). Before that, you need to ask your hosting company (WebEmpresa for me) what are their nameservers. In my case, I opened a support ticket and they told me I should use these domains:
- NameServer1: ns1561.webempresa.eu
- Nameserver2: ns1562.webempresa.eu
After having this information, I opened my GoDaddy account, and next to Domains I clicked in Manage. Then I followed the instructions mentioned in the link below:
- Select the domain name you want to use, click Text Icon (Settings) and select Manage DNS.
- Under Nameservers, click Change.
- Under Choose your new nameserver type, select Custom.
- Enter the custom nameservers your hosting provider gave you and click Save.
Then, you ought to wait up to 4-24 hours until the worldwide propagation of the domain pointing to a new server finish. You can check the status of this request by using the link below and changing the last part of the URL by your own domain. In my case, I changed xxxxxx.xxx for danielafanador.co
- https://www.whatsmydns.net/#NS/xxxxxx.xxx
- https://www.whatsmydns.net/#NS/danielafanador.co
Be patient and if you don’t see immediate changes after 48 hours, open a ticket to request support to your hosting and domain companies. I did it because after 5 days the process was not over. I knew it because instead of green check marks like in the first image of this post I was seeing red cross marks. After I did this, GoDaddy applied a reset on the process and WebEmpresa explained me how to go from there.
Finally, there’s a last step in which we will park (just like a car) or add the domain in our hosting. You should go to your cPanel (yourdomain.com/cpanel) and click in domains section you will click in additional domains. There you will fill with the name of our domain and a new password.
And that’s it! After 24 hours, you should be ready to start your brand new website in your own hosting, using your own URL! Let’s talk about that in a future post!