domains

Ok so we've lightly covered hosting and we will cover it more with a hands on approach later, but first let's discuss domains.

What is a domain? A domain, or "domain name" is basically the address of your website.

For example the domain name of this turorial site is byogeek.com, it's what you type into the address bar of your browser to tell it where to browse.

Generally most websites have a numerical address which if typed into the browser will take you that website. That numerical address is linked directly to to the server that is hosting your website.

Apart from the fact that a numerical address is niether easy to remember nor aesthetically pleasing and is totally uncustomisable, it will also change if you took your website from one hosting company and hosted it elsewhere. So what we have is a domain name, much easier to remember, plenty to choose from to suit the content of your site, and portable if you ever change hosting companies.

In order for you to use a domain name, you must first register it just like you would a business name only much easier. I won't go into all the details of how to do it as it's fairly self explainatory. Generally when you sign up for a hosting plan, the hosting provider will have an option to register a domain name at the same time, it's simply a matter of finding a name you like that isn't taken, filling out the form with your details and paying the registration fee. Generally you can register a domain name for about $20 give or take. There's plenty of domain registrars out there, some are cheaper than others so if you want to save a few bucks, it may be worth shopping around. You don't have to use the registrar your hosting company recommends.

Usually you will get an option to register the domain name for a year or two years at a time and once registered and payed for, that domain name is yours until that year or two expires, at which time you will have have to pay another annual fee to renew the registration.

As I said, it's a simple matter of filling out a form, and I'm sure you don't need a tutorial on how to do that.

After registration of a new domain name, it can take up to 48 hours before it's usuable. During that time, your domain name goes through a process called propigation, which without getting into technical details, means it gets itself recognisable as an address on the world wide web.

Once you have a registered domain name and a web host, you will need to "point" your domain name to your hosting company's name servers.

In a few cases when you sign up for a hosting plan and register a domain name at the same time, this will done for you by the hosting company. If however, you already had a domain name before signig up to a webhost, or you registered a domain name elsewhere, you may need to do the "pointing" yourself. This also is a simple a process, your webhost will provide you with a nameserver or two, this is usually something that looks very similar to a normal domain name or sometimes comes in the form of a string of numbers. Once you have obtained the nameserver from your webhost, it's simply a matter of logging into the registrar where you have registered your domain name and entering the name servers there.

When you've done that, you are ready to publish your website and make it available to public.

subdomains

Allrighty, now we have a bit of an understanding about domains, lets take a look at subdomains.

If you'll remember back in html lesson 46 - the index, we had a folder called "mywebsite_root". When you upload your webpages to your web host(we'll discuss how that's done later), those files will normally be uploaded into a folder commonly referred to as your "root directory" and once that's done, if you type your domain name into the address bar of your browser, you will get the same results as outlined in html lesson 46 with your index.html page being the default file that is displayed.

You may also remember we discussed sub-directories. If you were to type www.byogeek.com/examples into the address bar of yor browser, you would browse the contents (or the index by default) of the sub directory examples.

If I wanted to, I could a setup a subdomain www.examples.byogeek.com which would take you to the same place.

Many free web hosts do not allow the use of your own domain name, instead, thy give you a subdomain of thier own domain so if your host was something like www.somefreehost.com, you would end up with a web address like www.yourwebsite.somefreehost.com which is a just a way of personalising your directory on thier site instead of giving you an address like www.somefreehost.com/yourwebsite.

So a sub domain is like an extension to a domain name which points to(or directs your browser to) a sub directory of your website.

Many hosting providers allow you to set up subdomains, though some do have limits on how many you can have.

Subdomains come in handy when you want to make multiple websites with different names under the same main domain.

Lets move along to publishing lesson 5 uploading your files where we'll get your website published and available for anybody on the internet to browse.

Lesson added Friday 1st May 2009