Start a Website with a Domain Name & Web Hosting

Revised June 2019.

This is part 2 of the Start a Website series, where we’re going to go through piece-by-piece how to start your first website. The first two items you’ll need are Web Hosting and Domain Names. This article will help you select a provider for your web hosting – called a host; and for a domain name – called a registrar.

Start a Website with the Right Web Host

Look for a host that supports WordPress hosting.
Ask if PHP and MySQL are the most recent stable versions. You’re looking for a simple “yes” here.
Ask if you’ll have your own SSH access? Again – look for a ‘yes’. This is not a requirement, but is nice to have.
Do they look after backups and how often?
Do they provide round the clock support – by phone? or chat? or email?

Selecting an Account

For a simple website that is brand new and doesn’t expect a huge amount of visitors, you can expect to pay $4-$8/month for a ‘shared hosting’ account. As soon as your site gets too full of content, or you get too many visitors you’ll notice the site getting sluggish.

At that point, you’ll need to upgrade to a “Virtual Private Server” or VPS. These usually start around $20/mo and go up.

When it’s time to get your own dedicated server, you’re looking at $175/mo and up.

The company that I recommend without a doubt is WPB Hosting!

We offer hosting for $15 – $29 per account for those with 25k hits or less. We also develop packages unique to those with larger sites – up to 1.3mil hits per month.

All packages include our brand of Customer Service – you’ll always speak to or email a real person, from Canada or the US who understands WordPress, hosting and most likely can solve your issues immediately.

Also included:

Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate, automatic renewal
initial migration service (up to $250 value)
Genesis Framework & Child Theme of your choice
CDN through Cloudflare, or custom for larger sites
Malware removal, if requested
daily backups off site
Geeky Stats: running NGINX, PHP 7.3

Start a Website with a Domain Name

Anyone can start selling domain names! Anyone can open an account and purchase domain names wholesale and sell them retail. In fact, that is exactly what we do! However, behind the scenes there is a lot going on to make sure that there is only one owner to each domain and that all the computers all over the world know where to look for the accompanying website. The regulating body of all of this is known as ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. You need to know this for this very important legal tidbit:

There are three contacts on each registration: Registrant, (Aux Billing) Administrative and Technical. You have to have YOUR name in the Registrant contact or the domain is not legally yours. It is a good idea to be sure that you have the ability to check and edit the contact information and “Name Servers”.