How To Host A Website On Server?
The availability of many drag-and-drop, free website builders has made it possible for anyone to build a professional-looking website. The problem occurs when it comes to answering the question, “how to host a website on server 2022 in the most effective manner?”
Without hosting your website properly, you won’t be able to make it live accurately. And without making it live correctly, you won’t be able to achieve your goals for building it.
Many people believe that it’s a must to possess some technical skills to host a website. However, the reality is you can do this with zero to little technical knowledge, providing you choose the right path.
In this guide, we’re going to explain how to host a website on server step by step. Once you learn how to host a website, you’ll see that it’s quite similar to opening a social media account.
Let’s get started!
How to Host a Website On Server? Step By Step Guide 2022
Here’re the instructions you need to follow step by step.
Step 1: Purchase a Domain Name
If you’ve already bought a domain name, you can skip this step. If you haven’t, you need to purchase one first. If you are a beginner and/or looking to get a better offer, it’s generally a smart idea to buy the domain name and hosting service from the same provider. It’ll also help simplify the process of any additional customization required down the road.
However, some hosting service providers don’t have domain name registration services. If your chosen web host belongs to this league, you’ll need to buy the domain name separately from another company.
Step 2: Select a Web Host
With a huge number of web hosts available out there, it sometimes becomes difficult to select the right one. Despite the overall simplicity of how to host a website on server process, this step requires you to consider some vital factors.
Here’re the factors you need to consider when choosing a web host.
- An uptime guarantee
As the most important thing, your website needs to be available around the clock, throughout the year. If your site visitors cannot access your site frequently, there’s no point in having a website live. Ideally, you should select a web host that offers at least a 99.5% uptime guarantee.
It’s also a wise idea to select a web host that’ll give a refund if its server experiences downtime beyond the specified threshold. And it’s almost a must if the site is your main source of revenue.
- Bandwidth
Bandwidth stands for the amount of data that gets transferred between your users’ devices and your website. To decide on the bandwidth you’ll require, you’ll need to consider your site’s type.
For instance, if your site mainly has text-based content and depends on additional platforms to store other types of content, a basic bandwidth should be enough. However, if your site has different types of content, including audio and video clips, you’ll need to choose a large bandwidth quota.
- Scalability
When selecting a web host, it’s important to consider your future plans and goals with your site. Many new site owners start with an average web host but need to switch to a better one to meet their growing requirements.
Nevertheless, you can save yourself from the hassle of switching to another hosting service provider by ensuring that your present web host will be able to provide you with all the required support in the future. This means letting you switch to a better plan or increasing the specifications of your present plan conveniently.
- Backups
It’s always strongly advisable to choose a web host that offers periodic backups. There’re two key benefits of doing this. First, your web host will be responsible for taking the backups. And second, as all the files will be stored in a remote location, you can easily retrieve all the information even if your entire system gets affected.
- Security measures
If you want to process online transactions through your site and protect your users’ sensitive financial information, such as credit card details, you should choose a web host that offers a number of security measures. These commonly include firewall protection and an SSL certificate.
Note that the security measures that’ll be available to your site will depend on your web host and chosen plan. Having your site secured by using an SSL certificate will also help improve its SEO performance. This is because security is considered one of the ranking factors by search engines.
- Customer support
Web hosting is a fully technical field, and hence, many different things can happen that you may never imagine. This is the reason you must select a web host with a good customer support reputation. The support team must be available around the clock and should be reached through different modes of communication like phone, live chat, and a support ticket.
In addition to these, if you need email service from your hosting service provider, remember to check that in advance. Although the majority of web hosts offer email service with unlimited plans, it’s best to confirm its availability.
Step 3: Select Your Hosting Server
If you have a static HTML website (a simple website with just one or a couple of HTML pages), you can use the majority of web servers to host it. However, if you have a web application, you need to choose from two kinds of hosting platforms to host it.
Your options include:
- Windows hosting
You can run ASP scripts using .NET and other technologies available from Microsoft. The platform supports Access Database and Microsoft SQL Server.
- Linux hosting
You can run scripts written in Python, Pearl, PHP, and other Unix-based languages. This is the sought-after hosting platform these days and generally supports MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
You can choose either Windows hosting or Linux hosting, irrespective of the operating system you presently use. However, if you don’t require any scripting support for your site, choosing Linux hosting will be a more cost-efficient option. But if you require database and scripting support, you should go with the platform that’s compatible with your present technology.
Step 4: Choose Your Hosting Type
Choosing your hosting type is another vital part of the how to host a website process. Perhaps you already know that different types of hosting solutions are available in the market. But they’re designed to serve different purposes and are ideal for users with specific needs.
Here’re the common types of hosting solutions you can choose from.
Shared hosting is ideal for small business owners, small websites, and blogs. By choosing a shared hosting plan, your site will share the same resources of one hosting server with many other sites.
While this option will help keep your hosting costs significantly low, your site may become more prone to cyberattacks and other online hazards. Additionally, your control over the hosting environment will be limited to what’s offered by your hosting service provider.
With a VPS hosting plan, your site gets to use separately allocated server resources, so it’ll be like having your own private server. Naturally, the cost will be slightly higher than that of a shared hosting plan but much lower than that of a dedicated server.
You’ll also get much better control over the hosting environment together with better performance and reliability of your site. As for the downside, you’ll need a good amount of technical knowledge if you choose a self-managed VPS hosting plan. However, with a managed VPS hosting plan, all the hosting-related tasks and activities will be carried out by your web host.
With a dedicated server hotsing plan, you get a server fully dedicated to your website. As your site will be the sole user of all the server resources, you can expect to get top-level performance and maximum reliability and customizability.
Dedicated server hosting solutions are generally preferred by large websites and e-commerce sites. The cost of a dedicated server hosting plan is also significantly higher than that of a VPS hosting plan.
Another important thing you should note is that dedicated servers are often offered as self-managed servers, meaning you need to have the technical expertise to customize them. Although some web hosts offer managed dedicated servers, the cost goes even higher in that case.
- Managed WordPress hosting
If your site is built using WordPress, you can choose managed WordPress hosting solution. Your hosting service provider will take care of all the tasks such as caching, backups, and updates of your site.
You can also select a shared hosting plan to host your WordPress site, but as managed WordPress hosting is a specialized hosting service created for WordPress, your site will deliver better performance.
The cost of a managed WordPress hosting plan is usually much higher than that of a shared hosting plan. Moreover, you’ll have less control over the hosting environment.
- Cloud hosting
With a cloud hosting solution, your website is hosted by a virtual server (cloud). In recent years, this solution has gained outstanding popularity due to its notable advantages. Some of these include fast scalability, better performance of the site, easier and faster disaster recovery, and reduced hosting costs.
Major downsides of cloud hosting include vulnerability to security issues, your accessibility to your data becomes dependent on your ISP (Internet service provider), and increased possibilities of downtime if your cloud hosting service provider is a reseller.
Often, people start by choosing a shared hosting plan and then switch to another type of hosting depending on their requirements. However, you should define your requirements and budget first before making any changes to your hosting plan and/or hosting service provider.
Step 5: Change Your Nameservers
You need to complete this step if you buy the domain and the hosting plan from two different companies. At the time of buying the domain, you’ll get the option to update the nameservers for your website. It’s important to note that the nameserver used for a site is always available with the company from which you buy the domain.
For instance, GoDaddy is one of the sought-after domain name registrars. Although it offers web hosting solutions, many individuals prefer to buy the domain from GoDaddy and host the site using another company.
So, if you register with GoDaddy and host your site using ABCHost, you must update the nameservers on GoDaddy. You’d need to log in to your GoDaddy account and change the nameservers to ns1.ABCHost.com and ns2.ABCHost.com.
Once you update the nameservers, the information is spread across all the DNS platforms. This helps them know the exact place to send traffic, which is trying to access your site.
Step 6: Upload the Website
You need to upload your site to the server so that it can go live. While there are various tools available to upload a site, the sought-after ones include FTP (File Transfer Protocol), File Manager, automatic website importers, and WordPress migration plugins (for WordPress users).
You can utilize an FTP program to connect to FTP. Once you connect to your FTP, you may be able to drag and drop all the files and folders of your local computer and the web hosting service, depending on your web host.
The File Manager can be found in the control panel of your web host. Go to the public_html directory and click the “Upload Files” icon available in the upper-right menu. On your computer, select your website archive file and upload it to your web host’s server. Finally, extract the archived files by right-clicking on the uploaded file. Be sure to keep the public_html folder as the folder for the extraction of the .zip file.
Note that if you have a database for your site, you’ll need to import it as well together with your website files.
Step 7: Do a Final Check
In this final step, you only need to check whether or not your site is live now. If you have pointed the domain name to the web host already, you can see your website live by typing the domain name in your browser.
Note that DNS changes may take up to 48 hours to propagate across the globe completely. Therefore, if you have just changed the nameservers, you may need to wait for some time.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, the process of how to host a website on server may appear a bit complicated initially, but following all the steps mentioned in this article carefully will make your website online easily. We hope this step by step guide has been helpful to you, and good luck!
Also Check:
What are the Different Types of Hosting Servers
Web Hosting Benefits For Businesses
How to Install WordPress on cPanel
