Running a Website

Tutorials and tips for managing your website. Topics include WordPress tutorials, website hosting guides, how to use FTP, and how to manage and control your web server.

Move a Website to a New Server – The Easy Way

16 November 2009 / 5 Comments

If you run a website for any length of time, chances are you’ll want to move your site and email to a new web server at least once. For example:

You may have exceeded the bandwidth allowance or disk quota of your current server (good for you, your site’s getting more popular!)
You might be fed up with your current host’s downtime or poor technical support
Your old hosting company may be going out of business (an all-too-common occurrence unfortunately)

Let’s assume you’ve chosen a new Web hosting company and you’re ready to transfer your website. Broadly speaking, there are 2 ways that you can move your site across:

The easy way. This is the approach I’ll cover in this article. Essentially this avoids messing about with DNS and nameservers too much, and is more suited to sites without too much user-generated content (forums, blog comments, user registrations, ecommerce, and so on).
The seamless way. This is more complex and involves working with DNS to ensure a quick, smooth changeover. It’s better suited to busy sites with lots of user-generated content. I cover this approach in Move a Website to a New Server – The Seamless Way.

In this step-by-step article I’ll try to give a general overview of the moving process, and look at some of the pitfalls to avoid along the way. I strongly recommend reading this whole article before you start the moving process.

Choosing a Domain Name

3 August 2009 / 6 Comments

Choosing a good domain name for your website can be tough. After all, most of the short, easy-to-remember domain names have been taken, right?

Don’t worry. With a little thought, and a few tips and tricks up your sleeve, you can find a great domain name for your site today. This article gets you started!

FileZilla Tutorial – How to Upload Your Site with FileZilla

20 July 2009 / 3 Comments

In this tutorial you learn how to upload your website using FileZilla, the popular free FTP application. FileZilla is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. This tutorial features Mac screenshots, but the techniques also apply if you’re running FileZilla on Windows or Linux.

How to Start a Blog

21 April 2009 / 6 Comments

What is a blog?

A blog is a website containing articles, known as posts, that are usually listed in chronological order (newest first). Originally, a blog (short for “weblog”) was a way of keeping an online diary, or of expressing your personal views. These days, there are blogs on practically every topic, from news and opinion blogs through to tutorial blogs, fan blogs, and product review blogs. If you can write it, you can blog it!

To add a post to your blog, you don’t need to code in HTML or use an FTP program. You just log into your blog, enter the text of your post, and hit a “publish” button. This ease of use has helped make blogs one of the most popular types of site on the Web today.

Another great feature of a blog is that anyone can easily comment on your blog posts. This helps to attract more visitors to your blog, and makes your blog posts more useful to readers.

So how do you start a blog? There are many options to choose from. This article walks you through some of the most common ways to create a blog, and helps you choose which type of blog is best for you.

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How to Set Up Your Own Domain Name

24 June 2008 / Leave a Comment

When you first start out with your website, you might decide to host it on someone else’s domain. For example, you might have a blog on blogspot.com or wordpress.com, or you might host your site on geocities.com, a low-cost Web hosting service provided by Yahoo!.

These hosting services are great if you only want to run your site as a hobby, and don’t care about attracting a lot of visitors or making money. However, if you really want your site to grow, it needs its own domain name. Here’s why:

It improves the image of your site. Hosting your site on a common domain name, such as blogspot.com or geocities.com, makes your site look — how to put it nicely? — low-budget. People are less likely to trust your site, and you’ll certainly have a hard time selling them anything. A site hosted on its own domain name looks more professional.
It makes your site more portable. If your site’s hosted on someone else’s domain, you can’t easily move to another hosting company. For example, if you want to move your site off geocities.com, you’re going to lose all the inbound links to your site. (It’s the same problem as having a 'myname@my-isp.com' email address; if you move ISPs, you lose your email address.) If you have your own domain, however, then you can move your site between different hosting companies while keeping the same domain name and URLs for the site.

In this article you’ll learn how to register and set up your own domain name.

Using Cyberduck

14 April 2008 / 15 Comments

In this tutorial you learn the basics of uploading your website using Cyberduck, the excellent and free FTP software for the Mac. It was written for version 2.8.5, but the tutorial should also be useful if you’re using a later version.

[Read more…] about Using Cyberduck

Getting Started with Your Web Hosting Service

14 January 2008 / Leave a Comment

You’ve done your research, you’ve picked a good hosting plan, and you’ve signed up. What’s the next step? You’ll need to orient yourself to the contents of your Web space, and learn how to upload Web pages. This tutorial shows you how.

Choosing a Web Hosting Service

19 June 2007 / Leave a Comment

If there’s one thing there’s no shortage of on the Internet, it’s Web hosting companies. There are thousands of them. Naturally, this makes your choice somewhat bewildering when it comes to getting your site online. Which one do you pick? What if they turn out to be unreliable? What sort of service do you need? Who can you turn to for help or recommendations?

In this article we’ll address all these questions, and more. By the end of it, you’ll be able to make an informed decision about which service to go with.

Making a Custom Error Page

16 October 2006 / Leave a Comment

Introduction

You’ve probably seen the standard Apache 404 error page many times, when you’ve visited a Web page that no longer exists:

Not very pretty, is it? It doesn’t help much either. Something like the following would be much more useful:

The second error page looks better, is more friendly, and gives the visitor some more options to try (as opposed to just going to another website!).

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to set up your website to serve your own error page rather than the default Apache one.

Running a Website

What is a blog?

Introduction

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