any experience and feed back for hosting a website for a project I’m working on is appreciated. this is a site for my friends deli he will soon open up and he has granted me the opportunity to help him out. another question is do I have to buy the domain under the host that we choose. any recommendations is appreciated !!
I’ve read/heard of web hosts that hold the domain name hostage if the client wants to move away. So my advice is get the domain name from someone else, host the domain with someone else.
I have had a website with websitepalace.com for years and they have 24/7 support, it has been reliable.
Maybe my notes will help - https://trello.com/b/qCGXGhPT/free-hosting
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Yes, you have to buy a domain once. then you can host your web site using trusted web hosting services. bluehosting is the one of the best hosting services in world. Usually you can buy a domain and host the site both from web hosting services.
bluehosting : https://www.bluehost.com/
If you plan to use this as an educational experience, in addition to helping out your friend, I would recommend spending the time to learn how to publish a website to one of the better quality hosting companies. Do a bit of searching and reading, and pick one of the top ones.
I really like Digital Ocean. They have a $5.00 per month virtual private server, which they call a Droplet, that is very fast and works well, but it does take an effort to learn how to use it. But if you are getting into the web business the effort is well worth it. If this is only to help your friend and is a one time thing, well perhaps it is not worth the effort.
You should know that Digital Ocean doesn’t use cPanel, you learn to do your work using a SFTP client like Filezilla and a SSH terminal emulator like Putty ( I use ZOC7 and love it ). Digital Ocean does have a nice web interface to do some things like configure your DNS entries and monitor the droplet resources. One thing I really like is that as you work on a project you can take snapshots along the way so that if you screw up you can quickly revert to a previous state - very handy.
As for a domain, yes you have to purchase it and then renew it, usually annually.
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awesome these responses have been very helpful thanks everybody!
I am building this website for a friend for educational purposes free of charge to build up my portfolio I do think on occasion he will want to update some things here and there so I will give your method a try after doing some research any other tips would be greatly appreciated thank you
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I made myself a list of tutorials, so I can get you started. First, the configuration I chose to use on the Digital Ocean droplet is as follows:
- Ubuntu 16.04 for the operating system
- LEMP stack (Nginx for the web server, MariaDB for a database, PHP 7.1 )
- Phpmyadmin for database management
- WordPress and the Genesis Framework, Parallax Pro StudioPress theme
- Google’s G Suite for email with my own domain name
You certainly will want to use your own favorite technologies, for example I assume you will not want WordPress, Genesis etc.
So, first you need a simple terminal emulator and a FTP program to move your files around
Here are a few tutorial - Digital Ocean is pretty good about documentation:
- Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu 16.04
- How To Use SSH Keys with PuTTY on DigitalOcean Droplets (Windows users)
- How To Create SSH Keys With PuTTY to Connect to a VPS
- How To Set Up a Host Name with DigitalOcean
- How To Install Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP (LEMP stack) in Ubuntu 16.04
- How To Install and Secure phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 16.04
- How To Secure Nginx with Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu 16.04
- How To Add the gzip Module to Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04
That should get you started. They are approximately in the correct order I think, and there is some overlap between some of the tutorials.
If you want to see what a site looks like on Digital Ocean, click on my portrait picture and click Homepage. Just realize that this website is still a work in progress.
Just a note about speed on a cheap $5.00 per month droplet, it can be pretty impressive. Here is a report from the popular website testing tool Pingdom
Good luck! If you have questions I lurk here often…
@rickstewart, man, enough to post your DO ads here!
I also can suggest a better paid solutions for the same money:
- Linode
- Scaleway
- OVH
LOL I have NO bent to Digital Ocean except that it is what I finally decided to use. Many people will not like them because they are so bare bones, as I said, no cPanel or the like. But FCC is a place to learn, and DO is a top host if you google around, and I think, especially for the price, FCC students can pick up a $5.00 droplet to play with it to get some real world experience using tools like putty and filezilla.
But to your comment, my previous post was only made in responce to @perezvenegas request, that is " I will give your method a try after doing some research any other tips would be greatly appreciated thank you"
People are free to choose whatever they like. I like Digital Ocean - what can I say…
Also the links are to tutorials that can be generalized to more than DO, I posted no ads.
Just noticed that my original post in this thread replied to you @paulcarroty by mistake, I meant to reply to the OP, sorry about that…
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Github pages 
you can buy a domain name and you can host a website with a reliable hosting provider in the market. I have hosted my website with server basket free VPS hosting which was exact match according to my requirements. I suggest it will fulfill your requirements
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