Creating my website
“Each student is required to buy their own domain name and serverspace (hosting) for this module at a cost of approximately £45. Please bring credit/debit cards on the first day. If you want to buy your hosting in advance the domain name & serverspace must have the following minimum specification:
- Your domain name must be http://www.yourname.co.uk OR http://www.yourname-photography.co.uk (other names and suffixes should be discussed with the tutor).
- Hosting should be 500MB, have at least one MSQL database, PHP 5 and a secure control panel – for example Visn’s HOME-PLUS package“
Jargon Busting – ( Still confused by the terms used)
- “Disk Space” – This is literally how much space you have to play with. Most of you only have 500MB available to you (I’ve had mine for 3 years and only use about 200MB) You will learn about ‘Optimisation’ next week.
- “Monthly Bandwidth” – This is the total that you can transfer from Server to Audience. E.g. If you have a 1MB file that gets viewed 200x a month, you’ve used 200MB for that one file.
- “FTP” – or File Transfer Protocol. This is what you use to upload to your Server. We’ll touch upon it next week.
- “My S Q L” / “SQL” / “Database” – These are essentially a group of Tables that contain Data. It’s what many dynamic websites run off, because they can easily populate entire websites saying ‘For Each row, do this…’
- Domain name – the part of a network address which identifies it as belonging to a particular domain.
- Hosting – store (a website or other electronic data) on a computer connected to the Internet.
- PHP 5- server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language
- Control Panel- web-based interface provided by the hosting company that allows customers to manage their various hosted services in a single place.
There are many companies on the internet that over website packages, for this module i am to research which would be the correct package for me.
Below are a few packages that I found:
- One.com- costs £10.45 for one year including domain name- doesn’t have industry standard control panel, must be confident that you can do it manually
- Go Daddy- the economy package is really useful- £2.99 month and comes out as direct debit. Go Daddy is prone to being attacked.
- 123.reg.co.uk- Middle up package- £4.99 a month
- Vision internet- home hosting and reliable UK host
- 1&1 hosting provides a good basic package
- Vida host- £17 a year- pay up front- 500gb of server space and all the necessary features required, good control panel, many plugins such as wordpress which is needed.
I have decided to go with Vida host like most people in my peer group, as at £17 a year it is an upfront payment meaning I don’t have to worry about having having the money in my bank each month a be it a small amount. Vida Host is also cheaper than I was quoted at the beginning of this module (£45 – visen home plus package). When looking closer at some of the other packages, they have catches such as having to pay for a two year contract, and as I don’t know yet if I will be carrying on my website after this year or creating a completely new one.
When creating my domain name I decided on http://www.jessicaoakes-photography.co.uk as it was avalible and jessicaoakes.co.uk wasn’t.
When paying for my site I paid via paypal when making the first transaction its said payment failed please try again, in which I did, this time payment went through. When checking paypal and my bank account I found that both payments has been sent through and approved. After two days of contacting vida host via service tickets I was refunded one of the payments.