Setting up a web site for your craft business: Part 3 - Hosting
You’ve got your domain name now. What the heck is hosting, and why do you need it? Sadly, a domain name is just a name. As of this writing, when we type myspiffynewsite.com into a browser, we get a page that seems to have little to do with what we’d like people to see when they get there. It simply says: “This page is parked free, courtesy of Reddihost Network”
How nice of them, to provide free parking. But, what we really would like now is to be able to show relevant information for our potential customers. When someone gets to myspiffynewsite.com, I want them to see some spiffy new products, some spiffy descriptions, and maybe some spiffy new prices. Yep, that’s what I’m talking about.
Through some computer magic, your domain name connects your potential customers to the information on your web site. But we don’t have a website yet, just a parking page.
That’s where “hosting” fits into the equation. It provides space, out there on the internet, where we can put all of our spiffy information. It’s a computer out there that stays on all the time and delivers the pages of information we want our web site visitors to see whenever they go to myspiffynewsite.com.
There are many options for hosting providers… tons of them. You can register your domain with one company, and select another company to host your site. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to stick with the hosting solutions offered by reddihost.net since that is where we registered our domain name. (If you haven't already registered a domain name, check out part 2: domain name selection.)Reddihost has a few different hosting options. Our budget, as stipulated in the first segment of this article series is $15 per month. To stay within that budget, we can choose from the following (prices current as of this writing):
WebSite Tonight - $4.99/mo – This will get you a website right away, but it lacks a shopping cart. You can add a shopping cart at any time though. $4.99 gets you five pages. That may be enough for an online “brochure” for your company. This deal also lets you upgrade to other plans as needed, for instance unlimited web pages for $12.99/mo. The cool thing about the WebSite tonight package is that it includes a very easy to use website builder. The website builder is important if you don’t already have the skills for building web sites. It’ll help you design pages and assemble a web site that look professional in as little time as possible. It includes a bunch of customizable professional themes to choose from. So this option isn’t just hosting, but it includes a tool to help you build your site. You can find out more about it here: Link to WebSite Tonight
Quick Shopping Cart - $9.99/mo. – This option also has a free website builder that is super easy to use. $9.99 only lets you list 20 products on your site, but you can upgrade at any time. So you can get started for very little, and pay as you grow. Again, this option isn’t just hosting, but includes a website builder to make things easy. And it lets you sell online, accept credit cards and paypal payments, and calculates shipping… all the things you’d expect from a shopping cart. You can find out more at: Link to Quick Shopping Cart
- Then there are the regular hosting plans starting at only $3.99/mo and going all the way up to $300/mo. They have a lot of features for those who are experienced in building websites, or wish to gain more experience.
For the purposes of getting a site up and operational for a craft business, we’re going to keep it really simple and go with the Quick Shopping Cart mentioned above. The Quick Shopping Cart has the website builder and the features required to sell online.
So, with the Quick Shopping Cart plan chosen, I proceeded thru checkout. After paying, when I went back to My Account, and looked under the My Products pane, I saw Quick Shopping Cart.
Click on Quick Shopping Cart and you'll get a screen that looks like the following:
Then open the control panel. You’ll be prompted to provide the domain name or subdomain name for the shopping cart that you are setting up.
We’re selecting “Domain” here because we want the shopping cart to be our website. Then we just enter the domain name of the site we’re going to build.
After a few clicks, we get to the Wizard Builder. The wizard builder will take you through a few steps to get your store set up and published.
After messing around for about an hour, here is what myspiffynewsite.com looks like. It's not much to look at yet, but it is a start.
Expect to take a few hours of experimentation to get a feel for the workings of the website builder. There are a bunch of themes to choose from, and a bunch of colors to apply to those themes.
Alright! We started out with an initial budget of $50 to get started, and $15/mo for maintenance. So, far we've only spent $8 for the domain name registration, and have a maintenance cost of $9.99/mo for hosting and a shopping cart. We're on our way!
