You’ve decided you need a website. And you’ve registered your website domain name and it’s perfect, it’s one that clients can easily spell and one that you’ll love for many years to come.
So now it’s time to get hosting.
Hosting is basically when you pay to rent space on a server somewhere and that server is going to hold all the files that make up your website. All the html files, images, your demo files - that’s going to live on a server, that you’re renting and that server is going to be available online 24/7, so anytime someone visits your website, that server is going to show your site.
I’m going to explain how to get hosting, set it up and make it faster in this video, in case you are a do it yourself. But a quick note upfront that some of this is technical.
So if you’d rather take the easy route, I recommend getting the VO Website Template.
Not only do you get a professionally designed voice-over website setup and customized for your brand, and support, you also get fast hosting included - so everything I talk about in this episode is done for you.
If that sounds good and you want to see everything you get, head over here.
If you want to do it yourself though, here’s how to get going with hosting.
You can buy hosting wherever you bought your domain name. For example, if you used PorkBun, like me, they also sell hosting.
But since you want fast, reliable hosting so your website will actually be online when someone visits it, who you choose for hosting matters.
Pretty much all the domain registration companies offer hosting packages as well. But I don't typically get hosting from the same place where I bought the domain. And it’s really just one extra step you have to do.
The reason I use 2 different companies is because the one company may be great for domains but not so great for website hosting. It might be overpriced or slow or complicated to use.
A lot of the big companies like GoDaddy, WIX, and SquareSpace usually have expensive upsells and add-ons, poor customer service, slower hosting and limited tools.
So it’s a good idea to shop around.
I recommend NameHero.com for hosting.
Their hosting is reliable, they use newer technology so their servers are fast, you get free SSL certificates which is something other hosting companies charge for, their support is helpful and quick to respond, and their prices, especially introduction pricing is very affordable.
A few other great options are Cloudways, SiteGround or Vultr if you know your way around setting up servers.
Namehero is my top choice, and if you only have 1 website you can go with the least expensive option which is less than $5 per month to start.
We’ll be using WordPress to build the site, but you don’t need to get any wordpress specific hosting package.
Once you have hosting, you’ll want to find and copy your nameserver info that your hosting company gives you and add it in your account where you registered your domain.
So in my case, this tells Porkbun (where I registered the domain) to send traffic to NameHero (where the website is hosted).
When you change your nameservers, it usually updates quickly - but it can take a day or two to finalize.
You can check the status using a tool like WhatsMyDNS.net
If your hosting plan is for just 1 site, you may have already added the domain in NameHero when you signed up, if not, then just go to CPanel, click domains, and add the domain there.
That’ll automatically give you the SSL certificate for free. Which just means your site will be more secure and Google will like you.
Finally, one more tip for hosting.
Namehero servers are fast to start with, but with just a couple clicks you can make it even faster. Which means your website will load faster, your demos will start sooner, visitors won’t have to wait and Google will probably rank you slightly higher in search results.
If your host has LiteSpeed technology, like NameHero - you can do this.
There are 2 parts to making it run faster, server side changes and site changes.
I’ll cover the site changes next time once we get into the site design, but for now, we’re going to go into our control panel and goto to Select PHP Version. and make sure memcached is checked and ReDis is checked. That’s it.
And just like that, your hosting is set up and now ready for you to start putting together your website.
I don’t want this to get too long, so I’m going to cover the tools I use for website design and inspiration next time.
I hope that this helps make it easier for you, I know it’s a lot but hopefully it simplified it for you as much as possible.
And don’t forget, if you want to save time and not deal with setting all this up and just want a beautiful voice-over website done-for-you, in just days, check out the VO Website Template.
