There are two ways of doing this. One is from scratch, i.e. you have
nothing except a dream, the other is you already have a domain or
domains hosted somewhere and would like to transfer it.
"I have a dream..."
So you want a website. Easy!
- Pick a domain name for it. You can use a site like Register.com to fish for names.
Don't for god's sake buy from them though – they are expensive and will
spam you mercilessly.
- Tell me and I'll buy it from my spam-free ethical provider, BulkRegister. They charge
$12/yr/domain which I'll pass on at cost. (You own and control the domain but I can change things in
the event of an emergency.)
- I do a whole bunch of stuff and then let you know.
- You can then upload HTML to it, check mail, then ...
- Profit!
"I have a domain..."
This is a bit fiddlier as it means setting up here as well as moving
bits over. I need to know,
- the name of your various domains,
- and anything that might be running on them, like PHP or CGI or whatever.
- A list of email addresses you're expecting to get mail as, e.g.
Paul.Makepeace. This can include if you like, "any of
them". Bear in mind spam companies have the obnoxious tendency to
try to guess names so you'd potentially be exposing yourself to way more
spam that way.
FTP
To get the site data uploaded you can use a variety of methods but the
simplest is FTP: I will give you one or more FTP accounts. These
accounts are restricted ("jailed" in technical parlance) to
the site's root directory, so when you log in over FTP you'll be right
in the site's area, and see index.html etc. You can share this account
with anyone who needs access to the site, e.g. so your mom can update
her page.
If you have multiple sites, you can either have one FTP account that
spans all of them, or one each, or some combination. Just let me know!
In the case of an account that spans multiple sites, when you log in
you'll instead see the domain names of the various sites instead of
being right in the site's root directory.
In a Nutshell
- I give you an account, typically that starts
with "
www" which you can use to FTP
to those sites.
- You or I decide on a password and tell the other, in code
like a mutual friend's age and their dog's name (a
"shared secret"). Or do something over the phone.
- I set up the webserver for those domain names plus any other
monkeying about like PHP or whatever.
- You FTP the data up to the server. If it's easier,
feel free to dump a zip file in there and I'll unpack
it. You can even use this handy upload form -- no
FTP required!
The DNS
If you or your previous host is running DNS (the
paulm.com
to
195.82.114.220 name translation system) then you need to point
each of the sites at
195.82.114.220. Once that kicks in
you'll find your sites magically being hosted! Yay!
This method is less reliable though since if the IP address of the site
changes there is a time lag for that to happen. If I do DNS (which I'm
happy to) I can change things over if necessary. This allows me to
provide a complete backup machine in the event of some catastrophe.
To that end, in your DNS control panel for your domains at your previous
ISP or domain registrar set the nameservers to:
ns1.realprogrammers.com 195.82.114.220
ns2.realprogrammers.com 216.228.5.185
ns3.realprogrammers.com 208.57.107.155
Links
Please put a link on the home page to my site:
Hosted by <a
href="http://paulm.com/">Paul Makepeace</a> @ <a
href="http://realprogrammers.com/">Real
Programmers</a>, or something to that basic effect.
I'll also add you to the users directory.
Let me know if this makes sense, or not!
Shell accounts
You can either have a shell account or not, depending simply on whether
or not you need it. Here's
what I think about
shells.
