Thank you for visiting WebMasterKnowHow.com - If you can suggest things that should be added to the site I would like to hear about them. Anything regarding hosting, HTML, attracting traffic, problems and mistakes. I intend to make this site as useful as I can, and with that in mind I'm trying to add at least one new topic every week.
Your website - how to put it on your host computer and make it work
FTP - File Transfer Protocol
You will need an FTP program. Your hosting company will email you your username and password information, which you will put into the FTP program. Once the program knows your information it will be able to connect directly to your host computer, and you can drag files from your computer to the host computer. Your hosting company will tell you what directory (folder) to put your files in.
There are a lot of FTP programs available, some free, some not. I don't know what the benefits of the various programs are, since I have always used WS_FTP, from http://ipswitch.com. It costs $39.95. You can go to any search engine and ask for "Free FTP client" and you will find a lot of them.
DNS - Domain Name Servers
DNS information makes it possible for everyone to get to your website by typing your domain name.
Once you have your domain hosting service, you have to make it possible for the world to know where your domain can be found.
The hosting company will email you the DNS (Domain Name Servers) information you need to supply to the people who registered the domain for you. I'll explain in detail how it's done with 000domains.com, and it will be a similar process with other companies:
Log in to your account, and go to "domain manager"
Select "Manage Name Servers"
There are 2 (or more) boxes with name server information. Replace what you find in the boxes with the information you got from the hosting company. It will be something like ns1.domainhostingcompany.com and ns2.domainhostingcompany.com - and possibly also ns3 and ns4. When you click on "save configuration" the numbers following the names will also change. If you need to add more nameservers than there are boxes for, do it in the section below and follow the simple instructions.
Once the DNS information has been changed it will take a day or more for the information to be known throughout the whole internet. After that, anyone who types your domain name into their browser address bar will be taken to your site.
