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!