Setting Up Your Web Hosting
With XSitePro

Finding a web-hosting company.

There are a bazillion web hosts out there today and a lot of them have a variety of good packages to choose from.  I personally use four different web hosts and, of the four, HostGator is the best one for me.  HostGator gives me tons of space and bandwidth for under $15/month.

Oh, did I mention that on my HostGator account I can have unlimited domains, so I can just keep adding websites on to that account and I still only pay $15/month.

So go do your research and find the best web-hosting deal you can find, and then check out HostGator - Click Here

For more info on web-hosting read - Inexpensive web-hosting 

How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat. 

Once you've chosen your web hosting, you'll often find that you're given a set of passwords and technical details in an email. The email you received should have contained the addresses of some nameservers. Name servers look like this: ns1.yourhost.com. If you can't find it, take a look at the Help section of your host's website.

Once you know your host's nameserver, go and log in at your domain name registrar's website. I use GoDaddy for my domain names, you can check them out here.

Registrars all work differently, but somewhere you should see options to configure your domain. Replace the registrar default DNS nameservers with your host's name servers.

Try going to your domain by typing www.yourdomain.com into your web browser. If it's working, you should see a page telling you that your configuration was successful. If it doesn't, then you should take a break for a day or two - nameserver changes can still take a while to spread across the whole Internet.

Testing Your FTP Account with XSitePro.

The next step is to try uploading a page to your website by FTP.  Before you can do that, though, you need an FTP program and a test page.  This is very easily done in XSitePro which has a built-in FTP program.

Once you have XSitePro installed, go to "Help" and click "Check for Updates".  This will make sure you have the latest version of XSitePro.

Now that you have the latest version installed, click on "Create New Project" and give the new project a name. (It can be anything, you can change it later to something more appropriate.) Now click on the project you just created and then click "Add Website".  Now you will see 4 choices for the type of website you want to build, browse through all the templates and choose one that you like.  Next, double click on your website and open it up. You need to create a test page by clicking on the "Add" icon.  Give the page a name like "Test" and then go to the "Info" tab and make sure that both "Publish This Page" and "This is the Home Page for the website" are both checked.  Click on the "Designer" tab and type in something like "This is a Test". 

It's time to fill in the publishing details.  Click on "Publishing Details" tab and fill in the following information:

• Domain Name: www.yourdomain.com
• Home Directory: (leave this blank for now)
• FTP Server: ftp.yourdomain.com
• FTP Username: (from your web host email)
• FTP Password: (from your web host email)
• FTP Directory: /public_html/ (this will work for most)

Now click "Publish" (the little arrow under "Help") or go to "Tools" and then "Publish".  After you have published the page, open up a new browser window and type in your URL (www.yourdomain.com) and you should see your test page.  If you don't see it, go back and make sure "This is the Home Page for the website" is checked marked. 

This whole process outlined above takes only between 2 to 4 minutes once you have done it a couple times. 

Testing Your FTP Account without XSitePro.

The easiest way to make a test page is to open Notepad and write "this is a test". Save it as index.html. When it comes to the FTP program, you have a lot of choice. There's something for everyone, some good free ones to consider are Cute FTP (cuteftp.com), Smart FTP (smartftp.com) and Bulletproof FTP (bpftp.com).

Once you've done that, open the FTP program and ask it to connect to your host's FTP server. This is usually ftp.yourdomain.com. Once you're connected, you should browse through the folders looking for any existing index.html file - it'll usually be in a folder called something like 'public' or 'public_html'. Upload your own index.html over this one, and say 'yes' when you're asked if you want to overwrite it.

Now, go to your website in a web browser. If everything has worked the way it should, then you'll see what you wrote in that file right there on your website! You can get started straight away writing real content to replace that little bit of text - it's always exciting when you realize that your site is out there and ready on the web right now. If you don't see the text, on the other hand, then you might want to refer to your host's support pages.

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