Thanks for tuning back into my Adventure of creating this web site. Yesterday I concluded with the payment process. Shortly after finishing this process, I received an email with a number of login locations, username and passwords for my brand new web site. The most important login information was for my site’s cPanel. cPanel is software that you use to log in to configure and manage your web site.

cPanel has a number of sections. The first is a Preferences section. This includes a Getting Started Wizard as well as Video Tutorials. I would definitely suggest checking some of these tutorials out. Section 2 is Mail. You can actually create and manage email addresses based on the domain name that you purchase. For example, I created a blitwin(at)adventuresinhosting.com. The third section is where you can actually manage files, including uploading files that you can use on your web site and managing those files. The next few sections I am going to skip, mainly because I do not know much about what those contain at the time being.

I am going to skip down to section 8 called Software/Services. This section includes a feature called Fantastico De Luxe. Fantastico is a system which makes it very easy to install web applications to a web site. This is where I had to choose what sort of software I wanted to use to run my blog. My choices were b2evolution, Nucleus, pMachine Free and WordPress. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I have started free blogs before and was familiar with WordPress, so that was the blog provider I chose. After making my selection, I needed to choose “New Installation”.

The next page was a little tricky. It asks “Installation location”. I wanted my site to be actually located at http://AdventuresInHosting.com, so I left this blank. If I wanted it to be located somewhere such as http://AdventuresInHosting.com/blog, then I would have entered /blog under the field “Install in directory”. The next section was called Admin access data and this is where I put in my username and password that I would use to log into WordPress to edit my blog. I made sure to write this login information down as it is very important. The next section was called “Base configuration”. I just skipped this section. The final section was called “E-mail account configuration”. Above I discussed that you are able to create email addresses for your domain. It turns out that this was actually required at this point in the process. I needed to take a step back to create an email address.

I scrolled up to the top of the page and opened the Control Panel in a new page so I wouldn’t lose what I had already filled out up to that point. Once at the Control Panel home again, I selected Email Account under the Email section. I filled in blitwin to the email field as well as the password and a password confirmation. Once I had those fields filled out, I created my new email address. Now I could go back and fill the E-mail account configuration fields with my newly created E-mail account username and password. After that, I clicked “Install WordPress”. My blog software was now configured and I could edit my web site. Cool!

I need to wrap this up, but to log into your WordPress software, you add /wp-login.php to the end of the URL of what you selected for “Installation location” above. For example, if you chose your installation location to be http://1234.com/blog, you would be able to access your WordPress software at http://1234.com/blog/wp-login.php and log in with your username and password.

I know you have been sitting at your computer screen refreshing the page as you waited for me to come back to tell you how to set up your own website/blog. Well I am back! Seriously though, I hope this blog will one day become a nice resource for non-technical people who want to create/maintain their own website.

So today I thought I would write a post about how I set up this blog. I figured I would start from the beginning and see how far I could get in my explanation in a post that is of a reasonable length. I may have to continue tomorrow, so we shall see.

So the very first step was to go to A2Hosting.com. There are 4 main services that they have to offer, and I figured that Shared Hosting would be the best route because it is described as “The most affordable option, for small to medium sized sites”. The definition of shared hosting is, “multiple sites are hosted on a single server, so each account ends up ‘sharing’ server space with other accounts.” Simple enough right?

This was the most affordable solution and I could care less if this site shared server space with other sites. This was the option for me. Within the Shared Server page, there were 5 options. If you are planning to have a lot of “stuff” on your page, than you will want to consider purchasing hosting that allows you to hold more of your “stuff“. Right now I consider web hosting sort of like a hard drive on a computer. If you have a lot of documents and files that you store on your computer, you will want a computer with a lot of hard drive space. I didn’t need a lot of space because I was just planning on using the page for this blog, so the Super Discount with 200 MB of space for just $2.95 was plenty of enough space for me.

One thing that I didn’t know about A2Hosting was that you can register a domain through them. Domain registration is the process of actually purchasing the website address of where you would like to put your web site. For example, I had to register “AdventuresInHosting.com”. To purchase a domain name, it costs just $12.95/yr. Add on hosting costs, and it will cost just $48.35 to run this site for an entire year. The slogan for A2Hosting is “We offer affordable hosting without sacrificing service”. So far, so true.

So I have selected the “Super Discount” package and registered my new domain AdventuresinHosting.com for one year. The next step was to choose if I wanted to only register the domain name or if I wanted to “Build a Package” as well, which means if I wanted to include hosting. I selected Super Discount from the drop down menu because I wanted hosting and continued on in the check out process. The next page asks how long I wanted to purchase hosting for (1 year) as well as if I wanted to add on SSH Shell Access, Dedicated IP Address and/or 128 bit GeoTrust SSL Certificate. I can honestly say that I don’t know what these things are and did not choose these add-ons. I will have to do some research and figure out what these add-ons are and post my findings.

The next page showed me my total cost as discussed above, and finally I completed my order by filling out my billing information. I wish I could help you with this page, but I think you can handle this one on your own. As I had guessed, this post has become quite long, so I will continue my “adventure” of starting this web site tomorrow. Stay tuned!

So it may not be a big accomplishment to you to start a web site. However, I do feel accomplished as I have never done it before. I have started Blogger and Geocities websites before, but never one from scratch. I assume I am not the only one who has ever wanted to start a website before but doesn’t quite know how to do it because they are not the most technically sound people. I hope this blog can help people like that.

I was recently hired by a web hosting company called A2Hosting to start up new marketing initiatives for them. I would have to say that I automatically became the least technical employee by the company. From a fellow marketer’s viewpoint, I am very technically sound person. However, I know I must seem like I have been living in the stone age to my fellow employees. And I think that is OK because it gives me a chance to chronicle my learning experiences and all of the knowledge that I will gain working with such bright people in an industry that I am new to. This gives any readers of this blog the opportunity to learn alongside me because I know I am not the only one that is curious about web hosting and I can put the web hosting “lingo” into everyday language that all newbies can understand. So stop by from time to time and read about what I am learning.