Simple, pure way to self-host web page?

Developer Community
#1

I read that to put up a website you need to have a web server and rent a domain name to point to your server when someone navigates to that web address.

Does that mean the purest way to host your own web page would be talking to your actual internet company? I know other companies sell domain names but I would like to try to do the most direct, bare minimum way to understand the underlying mechanics.

#2

Shared Hosting. Buy Shared Hosting, if it’s pure HTML only. If with CMS, you can use WP or Drupal or Joomla etc

#3

For maintaining a website You need two things.

  1. Domain name

  2. Hosting server

You can Buy a domain from any company (such as: godaddy, namecheap, namesilo etc), They will give you a domain name for a period of time. It will cost you on average $6 to $20. Price varies upon the company and the TLD’s (ex: .com, .net, .xyz etc)

You also need a hosting server, (A server is a computer with special software’s installed and always running). You can find many company who sells hosting packages. You can pick one based on your requirements. Usually these hosting package comes with 1GB/5GB/10GB Disk space with 10GB/50GB/100GB monthly Bandwidths. This is also varies upon the companies.

  • Disk space is the total storage assign to your website. suppose you have 1GB Disk space, This means you can host a website, whose size up to 1 GB. The HTML/CSS/JS/image/videos every page, code files, media all combined must be not more than 1GB in size.

  • Bandwidth is the data transfer between your website and the visitor. if you have a page which have size of 50 KB, every time a visitor visit the page will cost you 50KB Bandwidth. If your monthly total bandwidth exceeds the package plan, your website will not show on the rest of the month.

There are many type of Hosting. Some of them are:

  • Shared: The hosting server and its all resources (Ram, Storage Disk, Softwares, Processor etc) will be shared among many clients. Cost friendly, but not secured, not good performance. usually used by beginner level small websites.

  • VPS: A virtual server on a computer just for you. there are many clients on this computer, but your resources will not be shared. Ideal for small / medium websites.

  • Dedicated: A dedicated server is a server that’s literally dedicated only to your website. All resources only for you, Most secured and high performance.

If you want to understand the underlying mechanics, you can work on a Domain-Hosting company or ask for internship. :sunglasses:

If you have money, you can start your own domain-hosting business. You can start as a reseller, that will cost you less.

If you are able to take all the pressure and hiccup of errors, You can built your own server. Not recommended, not enough tutorial/solutions are available. :neutral_face:

I hope you find this answer helpful. Best wishes :grinning:

1 Like
#4

Hi julkhami!

For my own projects, I’ve used many option:

  • A domain from Hover pointing at a Wordpress-hosted site
  • A Heroku app using a Heroku-provided domain
  • A subdomain of a work domain pointed at a Heroku app
  • A Hover domain in front of a GitHub pages static site
  • A Django project running on a PythonAnywhere subdomain
  • A website running on an Amazon EC2 instance with a xip.io subdomain
  • A website hosted on a server from a local company that managed the domain name

My strategy changes based on the type of project, how long it is meant to last, and how many people will see it. I certainly haven’t tried everything, and there are many more options now than when I started.

This MDN page has some options:

If you are learning web development, I would suggest starting with Github Pages. You can create a “static site” (as opposed to a “dynamic website” with a database and a web server that generates pages on request) on GitHub Pages, backed by a GitHub repo. GitHub provides the domain name and the webserver, you provide the content and learn about git and static site generation as well.

There are many guides to using GitHub Pages, and you can try different ones and find those best suited to your current knowledge. Here’s a few, but search and find your own:

If you go this route, you’ll learn plenty of web development and source control skills, which will help you on the next steps, whether that is buying a domain name or learning a web framework to build a dynamic site.

#5

Thanks very much.
I’ve used GitHub pages a little bit but I felt like it was masking the process and making it too easy so I didn’t really understand what was really happening.

I think your suggestion of working with a local company is what I’m after. I’d like it to be simple and as DIY as possible. I wouldn’t want to buy a domain name from these big commercial companies like GoDaddy, it still feels like I’m just following suit without understanding what’s necessary or why. I might be interested in avenues if they feel ubiquitous in a way, like renting a server from Amazon, though.

Thanks very much.