Lectura:

When you’re signing up for a shared hosting account, which is probably what you’ll end up doing, all hosting companies operate in a very similar manner. Starting on page 28, I showed how to sign up with Hostmonster.com. Another hosting company which I happen to recommend is site5, so let’s try them now.

At www.site5.com, clicking on the Web Hosting tab and then choosing the Shared Hosting option brings up a variety of packages and price plans:

This book is designed to help you create web sites using PHP and MySQL. Reading further down the page (which I haven’t included here), both of these are included. Nothing else on the list of features is particularly crucial at this stage. As can be seen from the image above, the starter option includes unlimited disk space (so you can store lots of HTML and PHP files, and MySQL databases). It also includes unlimited bandwidth, which is important because you don’t want to be liable for additional charges if your site attracts more visitors than you had hoped for. Some hosting companies charge extra for bandwidth over a certain limit, which makes planning and budgeting difficult. It also means that, if you want to make large files available for downloading, you’ll quickly run out of bandwidth and will either have to close the site until the next billing period begins or hand over more money. Thankully, that’s not the case with site5.

Let’s go for the hostPro package. Unlike the starter option, it allows the hosting of multiple domains/sites, which might be useful later. Also, if you sign up for one month at $10.95 and use a coupon code of FREETRIAL, it’s free! (If you subsequently do decide to sign up and want to pay for 6, 12 or 24 months up front, in order to get the cheaper rates, you can do so).

Next, we’re asked if we want the Turbo option, for an extra $3 a month, to make it easier to host multiple sites. This might well be useful in the future, but for now we can probably manage without it.

Next, we need to choose a domain name. To register a new name, type the name into the relevant box and click the “check availability” button. In this example we’ll try for hamster- wheels.com and, as luck would have it, the domain is still available because no one else has registered it. Remember, though, that hamster-wheels.co.uk, hamste-wheels.org, hamster- wheels.de and all the other geographical variations may be taken, and you’ll need to bear this in mind when choosing the name for your site. Registering just one domain doesn’t give you worldwide exclusivity of the brand name. Equally, if hamster-wheels.co.jp turns out to be a major Japanese conglomerate, and they subsequently accuse you of cashing in on their image by setting up a similar business, you’re in for an interesting discussion with the legal profession. So it does pay to do your research before settling on a name for your site.

In addition to the hosting fee ($10.95 a month if you go for a 1-monthly contract), site5 charge a very reasonable $9.96 per year for registering the domain name. Note that the domain name rental isn’t part of the free trial so, if you don’t proceed with the site after the first month, you’ll still need to pay for (and will own) the registered domain name.

Next, you’ll be asked to register for an account on site5’s system, by specifying an email address and password. Y ou’ll also need to supply your credit card details, even if you’re signing up for the free trial (but you card won’t be charged if you cancel within the trial period).

Ullimately you’ll end up at the screen shown below. In this order, I’ve actually chosen to transfer one of my existing domain names into site5, rather than register a new one, so the total cost so far is $0. Had I registered a new name, the cost would be $9.96.

The screen promises that my Welcome email will arrive in a few minutes, which it does. It contains my login information for Backstage, site5’s own admin system and control panel. You’ll also receive a second email which contains FTP details and other associated information. In the case of site5, here’s an extract from that message:

We’ll need those FTP login details later. For the moment, logging into Backstage brings up the following:

The most important tab in the Backstage system is Site Admin, which is the area from which you’ll administer your site. Incidentally, if you sign up with site5 and your Backstage area doesn’t have a SiteAdmin tab, it generally means that your credit card payment is still being verified. Wait a couple more hours and everything should start to work just fine.

To manage your site5-hosted site, click on the SiteAdmin tab in Backstage and you get to the following screen:

The links down the left hand site of the Site Admin screen let you manage all aspects of your site. If you’re creating a site based around PHP and MySQL, then one link that you’ll use often is My SQL Databases, to create empty databases which your PHP programs can then access. We’ll cover such things in later chapters.