If you haven’t purchased a domain name yet, you might want to read my article on purchasing a domain name. Or go ahead and sign up for hosting without a domain. (Just leave that field blank on the sign-up form.)

Our favorite service, Hosting Rails, is ideal for websites built in Ruby on Rails. But regardless of how we build your site, HR is a great host with top-notch customer service.

Step-by-step sign-up

1. Go to the Hosting Rails sign-up page.
2. Select “Shared” as your account type.
3. Select “Basic” as your plan.
4. It’s up to you whether to get 1 or 2 years of service. You’ll save about 20% by purchasing 2 years up-front, but if you needed to change hosting services after a year (for whatever reason), you won’t be refunded payment for the second year’s service.
5. The next page has a few technical questions. These are my recommended answers:
   • You don’t need extra dedicated memory.
   • You don’t need a dedicated IP address.
   • You don’t need nightly backups.
   • You don’t need a Rails application installed.
   • You don’t need to tell them anything special about your site.

The rest of the sign-up process is personal and billing information, which you and you alone can answer.

The welcome e-mail

Once you’ve finished filling out the forms, you’ll receive a welcome e-mail with a boatload of technical information about your new hosting service.

Save this e-mail. Save it in a couple of places, and then save it again. It’s not the end of the world if you lose your welcome e-mail, but it has a lot of important technical information, and it’s a pain to recover this information via support e-mails and phone calls.

Last of all, forward that e-mail to me, and we’ll get to work on your site!

Just the beginning

Now that your site is hosted, we’ll create a private URL where you (and anyone else you include) can monitor its development.

Get in touch if you have any questions, or head on over to Hosting Rails and sign up!

You’ve decided it’s time to set up your first website. Great! So…now what?

Our short list of discovery questions gives us a basic starting point. After going over the answers you provide, we’ll begin with the more technical side of setting up your site:

• Registering a domain
• Signing up for hosting
• Creating and configuring your e-mail accounts

Let’s get to it!

Register a domain

First things first: you need a domain. Your domain name will be on business cards, in Google, maybe even on billboards and television ads, so you need to make it count.

Choose a good domain name

Make your domain name memorable and descriptive. If you own Robert’s Plumbing Company, people will more likely remember robertsplumbingcompany.com than robsplumbco.com or thebestplumbingaround.com. Don’t sacrifice memorability for brevity or cuteness.

Try to get a “.com” domain. People tend to assume all domains end in “.com” and might not remember that yours is actually a “.net” or “.biz”.

Check availability of your domain name

Once you’ve got a few ideas for domain names, visit a registrar to check their availability.

Here are a couple of registrars we recommend:

• Aplus.net
• Network Solutions

If your favorite domain name isn’t available, the registrar may offer suggestions for similar names, or you may be able to use a different top-level domain (for example, “.net” instead of “.com”). It’s up to you to decide what works best for your business.

Purchase your domain

When you’ve settled on a domain name, it’s time to buy it. Normally, you’ll purchase a domain for a few years at a time, and some registrars may offer discounts for longer-term purchases.

Now that you have your domain registered, you’ll need somebody to host your site. Onward!

Sign up for hosting

Hosting services are responsible for serving your web site’s content to your visitors and managing your e-mail accounts (among many other things).

Our recommended hosting service

We recommend Hosting Rails for affordable, reliable, and flexible hosting. I’ve also written a guide to signing up with Hosting Rails.

Domain Name Service

One important (and confusing) aspect of hosting is Domain Name Service, or DNS. When you type a domain name into your browser — say, www.example.com — a DNS server tells your browser where that domain is hosted and how to get content from that domain.

When you sign up with your hosting service, you’ll be given one or more DNS name servers, and you’ll be responsible for entering these name servers into your domain registrar account. This process varies with each domain registrar, so I’m afraid I can’t go into detail here.

Just remember this:

• Your hosting service provides you with name servers.
• Your domain registrar needs to know what those name servers are.

The rest is cake.

Know your billing schedule

Many hosting services offer discounts to customers who sign up for longer-term contracts — e.g., a 12-month contract may cost $6/month, but a 24-month contract only costs $4/month.

Make sure you know when your hosting contract expires. If you don’t set up automatic payment, or if your credit card on file is no longer valid, your site will be taken down until you reactivate your account. You shouldn’t lose any data, but you will certainly lose the confidence of your customers.

Set up your e-mail accounts

Once you’ve signed up for hosting, you’ll be able to set up e-mail accounts and optionally configure a mail client like Outlook to check your e-mail.

Mail servers and mail clients

Before you can receive e-mail at your domain, you’ll need to create e-mail accounts. Typically, you’ll log into your hosting service account and create your e-mail accounts there.

Each service is different, so I can’t provide many details here. I have written more about setting up e-mail with Hosting Rails, our recommended hosting service, so that’s a good place to start.

Once you’ve created an account, many hosting services will help you configure a mail client to check e-mail for that account. You’ll need several bits of data:

• incoming mail server
• outgoing mail server
• account username and password
• account type (POP or IMAP)

You might also refer to your e-mail client’s documentation if you still have questions.

Using webmail

As an alternative to an e-mail client, hosting services also offer webmail, allowing you to read your e-mail from anywhere you have access to a web browser.

For many hosting services, you can access your webmail though a sub-domain of your domain name. For example, if you own the domain example.com, you could visit webmail.example.com to check your e-mail.

Next up: the creative process

Now comes the fun part! Once all the drudgery of domain-registering and hosting-providering is out of the way, we’ll work with you to create an engaging, informative, beautiful site.

Angie is writing an article discussing the creative side of our work, and I’ll post a link here as soon as she’s finished.

In the meantime, head over the the contact page and get started today!