How to make a website

[lavendersparkle]

Oh wisdom of LJ, I am definitely not l33t and I am a bit confused about how to make a website. I can cope with how to do the HTML but I'm a bit confused about how to buy a domain name and connect it to my website. I've registered with the Student Run Computer Facility which I intend to use to host my site. They say that I can 'point' a domain to my website hosted with them. I'm a bit confused about what I'd need to buy from the domain hosting site. The FAQ on the computing service say I need someone to host the DNS server for my domain name but I'm worried that I'll do something wrong.

Comments

[nameandnature]

What you want is slightly specialised, since most people who want a small amount of web hosting end up with the same company hosting their site, registering the domain and hosting the DNS servers for it. What you want is what my web hosting provider seems to refer to as "DNS hosting" (I don't think I'd go to Gradwell for this, as £9 per month seems a lot for a single domain). DynDNS's free service used to be good, so their paid for Custom DNS thingy might be.

Once you've got control of stuff under your domain name, you can direct some names underneath it (www.example.com being the obvious one) to co-operating servers. See blog.noctua.org.uk, for example, which is currently pointing at LiveJournal (needs LJ's co-operation, which they'll give to paying users).

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

Hmm, do you think that it would be cheaper and easier to get the people I buy the domain name from to do the web hosting?

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I suspect that will always cost extra.

123-reg are a UK company that does DNS registration / hosting etc: http://www.123-reg.co.uk/

You can get an idea of how much it would cost by looking at their website.

I'm sure if you register the domain name you want, us friendly people from LJ / SRCF people will help you with what you need to do next.

[nameandnature]

Yes, their domain service looks good, because you get the DNS control panel as part of it. You could buy example.com through them and point www.example.com at SRCF fairly easily, I guess.

SRCF don't (and can't) handle email, I notice. Is that important, i.e. do you need to be able to get mail for someone@example.com?

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

Right, I've registered www.samandalecswedding.co.uk through http://www.123-reg.co.uk/. I'm not bothered about not being able to have email addresses with the domain name.

[nameandnature]

So I guess the next thing is to tell SRCF that you want them to host the website. Once they've set up their end, use the control panel thingy for 123reg to add something that says that www.samandalecswedding.co.uk is an alias for kern.srcf.societies.cam.ac.uk. I don't know what their particular control panel looks like, but for the Gradwell one, I ended up filling in boxes so that I got something which looked like this. The relevant line for this is the bottom one, which says that blog.noctua.org.uk is an alias (or CNAME) for livejournal.com.