The Wellspring

Okay, so, now that you understand how the different components work together, you’re ready to choose your providers and sign up for the services.

This part of the tutorial is pretty technical and tiresome, but doesn’t actually take that long. You’ll only have to complete the tasks here once, when you sign up, so don’t be discouraged!

Though you can sign up for your services separately, the process of doing so is rather complex (all those usernames and passwords!), and doesn’t actually provide that much of a cost saving over being prudent with selecting a provider that does it all. Just be sure to look around.

My domain name registration, domain name service (DNS) and web hosting are all provided by one company: NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. I’ve been with them for over a year, and found them reliable, attentive (support requests are generally answered within a few hours), and exceptionally cheap: top-level domain name registration is USD$7 / year, DNS is free and automatically set up for you, and web hosting is charged at USD1 cent per megabyte-month (meaning that you can store a megabyte with them for a month and it will only cost you one, single cent), with bandwidth charged at USD$1.00 per gigabyte of data transferred. And just for the record: I receive no consideration for this recommendation. They truly are a good service.

Of course, you can choose any provider you like: I’ve also heard good things about Dreamhost.

Signing up for these services is simple. Visit NearlyFreeSpeech.Net and select ‘Sign Up Now’ from the left navigation. Follow the instructions to choose a username, create a membership, and confirm your (existing) email address. Once this is done, log into the member area, set up your personal bandwidth account and follow the instructions to fund it with a credit card or PayPal. If you’re just starting out and want one domain to play around with, USD$10 should be adequate (NearlyFreeSpeech.NET will deduct $0.90 as a deposit fee, which will leave you with $9.10 on your account).

Once you’ve got an operational, funded account you can get down to business.

First: register your domain: after signing into your account, click on ‘Domain Registration’ in the bottom left navigation, then ‘Register a New Domain’ from the resulting sub-navigation on the right. When choosing a new domain name, consider something that you’ll be able to use far into the future. Whilst you should probably try your first and last names (they’ll probably already be taken) - you’ll probably have the most luck with your full name. Remember to check .com, .org and .net (the other top-level domains, such as .biz, .info and .name, are probably not adequately recognised by most people to be attractive options).

The steps for registration are all very straightforward: when asked about assigning name servers (DNS), select ‘Set up DNS and name servers automatically.’. Once completed, USD$7 will be deducted from the account into which you just deposited USD$10 (which, after the deposit fee, should leave you with a total of USD$2.10), to cover the cost of registering the domain. (If you are not using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, you will have to manually add a CNAME record pointing www.yourname.com to yourname.nfshost.com or wherever else it may be directly accessed - you can find this information from your hosting service.) Upon confirmation, you will have registered your domain name. Congratulations!

Next, you’ll need to set up web hosting and DNS so that when people visit www.yourname.com they’ll be able to see something. To do this, go back to the main member page, and click on ‘Create New Site’ under your funded account. Pick a short name (yourname is usually a good option), and when asked whether you’d like to add an alias, select ‘Yes’, and type in the domain name you’ve just registered, preceded with ‘www’ (ie www.yourname.com). The click ‘Create Now’.

In a few minutes, when NearlyFreeSpeech.NET’s servers have finalised setting everything up, you will have a live website. It should be immediately accessible via the short name address (usually yourname.nfshost.com), and in a few hours, will be available at your domain name (www.yourname.com). Granted, there won’t be anything up there (visitors will see a notice saying that your website is not available), but at least it will be live on the global interweb!

The other good news is that once you’ve set up your website, you won’t have to go through the process again. For the most part, you won’t have to deal with this interface again. Hurrah!

Next: setting up some content (a blog) on your website and your email hosting.