How to buy a domain name and set up a website on itA friend asked me today how to go about buying a domain name and setting up a website on it. Here's the process:1. Buy a domain name from a registrar. There are tons of different places you can do this. I recommend GoDaddy.com because they're cheap and popular (aka no bankruptcy). On their site you can play around by entering different domain names and they will tell you what's available. When you find one you want you can buy it online using a credit card. One thing you should know about GoDaddy is that they keep their prices low by trying to sell you all kinds of other services in addition to the domain you want. Just click 'No thanks' for all the stuff they offer you and it will all go well. The price of a domain name there should be $10 per year or less. You can buy it for 2 or more years at the start if you want. This means you won't have to bother renewing it in a year, and sometimes there are further discounts for buying many years at once. 2. After you buy a domain name you need to get a webhost to serve a website on it for you. If you have a friend with a server then you could ask him to host it there. Otherwise there are a million commercial webhosts out there. I have only had shitty experiences with cheap webhosts, so I can't recommend any personally. I've heard some good rumblings about DreamHost though. A cheap webhost will probably charge from 5-20$ per month. Once you have a friend or company ready to host your site you will have to login to your registrar's control panel (this would be at GoDaddy) and change your nameservers to whatever your webhost tells you to. This way the registrar knows to point everyone looking for your domain to your webhost, and your webhost then serves up the content. That pretty much wraps up the lesson. Any questions?
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Written by dustin
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