Hosting Your Website
You've bought a domain name, that's the address to the website you want to build. Now you somewhere to put that website so your address will take people there.
A website is a sizable bit of data, you need someone with big computers to store your website and provide the software to enable people to visit and interact with it.
There are companies which will rent you space to store your website and provide all the software (bandwidth) necessary for people visiting and interacting with your website at the same time (your traffic).
These companies are called hosts, because they will be hosting your website on their servers.There are many companies providing hosting services, as with all industries there are good ones and bad ones.
If you are using our recommended free website providers: The Google Business one page website builder or stock websites from Site123 or WordPress.com, they will be hosting your website as part of your free package. If you are building your free bespoke website with WordPress.org you will need to find your own hosting package see our article on getting a free website.

A host in action. The worlds 1.2 billion+ websites are stored on computers like these.
Choosing website hosting is like choosing an energy supplier, lots of providers, lots of diffrent packages and lots of diffrent rates. Just like finding an energy provider you need to do your own research on finding the best hosting packages for your needs.
Hosting Review & Comparison Sites
Some of these are genuine and give great comparisons, some link to hosting companies only because they pay affiliate commissions to the review site. No matter how good the review take a good hard look at what you are buying and find geniune user reviews before you commit yourself.
The two things you need to check when looking at any hosting plan are the storage space (is it big enough for your website) and the bandwidth (this limits how much traffic your site can handle). If you exceed the allocations your host sets you're charged an extra fee.
Do your research because typically most companies will ask for a commitment of at least a year for hosting your website. Hosting is not expensive but having to change hosts after a few months is a hassle you really don't need and can be avioded by choosing carefully in the first place.
Who Our Hosts Are.
To find out who hosts a website go to Hosting Checker, type in www.mekatrig.com and you will see we use GoDaddy, this is the host have used for many years and the one we recommend, they are the worlds largest web hosts with over 17 million customers and employ about 6000 people worldwide.
Visit ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) WHOIS lookup site, which lists who owns websites and gives all the owners details (which is why we recommend buying privacy when you buy your domain) and you will see that this website has been with GoDaddy since February 2006, that's 11+ years and we've never had an issue, down time or any other problems with any of our sites.
In addition they are cheap and have a 24/7 telephone support line so if we do need some info we can always speak to a real human being (even at 4am).
We recommend GoDaddy because we use them, they work for us so they should work for you too.GoDaddy have an easy WordPress installation wizard called the Installatron which makes publishing your website a quick and easy process. Take a look at the video at the end of this article.
Click here to get 50% off hosting plans now at GoDaddy!
Getting A Hosting Plan With GoDaddy
Go to the GoDaddy Website! open the account you created when you bought your domain name.
Click on hosting and click the get started button, we recommend the deluxe hosting package. At the time of writing it's £7.99 a month but GoDaddy has frequent discounts so you may get it cheaper.
Choosing this plan allows you to increase the size of your website without worrying about storage or bandwidth and you have the option to add more domains and build more websites in the future without buying any more hosting. Choose the period you want it for then go to the checkout.

To give you an idea of costs: Registering our demonstration domain name, www.mikesgaff, for 2 years and buying one months deluxe hosting would cost £26.63, then £7.99 a month for the hosting if we renew monthly.
If we took out a hosting package for 2 years in advance it would cost £143.98 which works out at £6.00 a month.
Installing Your WordPress Website
Once you've got your hosting package your ready to install your website. WordPress will automatically upload a default ready built website theme for you which you can immediately start editing, or you can choose from thousands of free themes.
Have a look at our articles on Creating your website for a guide on getting started with planning your website and how to build world-class websites for how to get the very best performance from your website.
There are two ways of uploading WordPress into your GoDaddy hosting account. The really easy way, or if your happy with something a little more complex, the easy way
The Really Easy Way:
Once you've bought the hosting follow the steps in the installation video below, don't worry about terms like c-panel, as you follow the instructions on-screen you'll find it surprisingly easy as long as you don't fiddle with the default settings.
The only adjustments you make are:
Under Location: Check that the directory box is blank, if anything (such as "blog") is in the box delete it
Under settings: You need to change the administrator user name, for security reasons do not use admin or the site name as your user name, make it at least 10 digits. Your name with a few numbers and a symbol (*, !, £ etc... ) tagged on should be OK.
Don't change the password given (unless you choose something equally secure), use the show password button and carefully copy and save it.
Administrator E-mail. Change this to your own e-mail. With your hosting account you can easily set up free e-mail accounts such as info@yoursite.com or yourname@yoursite.com.
You can find out how to do this in the GoDaddy help section. We recommend setting up an admin@yoursite.com later on and switching your admin account to it.
You can change the website title and tagline to what you want..... "My new Website"........ " Buy my stuff now"
Do not change anything else
Then press install and wait, This may take a while so take a well-earned break, maybe a coffee and a few biscuits?
The Easy Way:
This is the traditional method, have a look at The WordPress five-minute install. It looks complex but don't over think it, just follow the instructions you will find it is a quick & simple process. There is also an easy follow guide at GoDaddy GoDaddy guide to manually installing WordPress.
If you can it's worth doing this as it introduces you to terms such as FTP (a way of moving files between your computer and your web host) and MYSQL (the name of the data base management system your website uses) so you wont be confused if you meet them later on.
Just to show how confusing computer jargon is, MYSQL is actually named after its co-founders daughter. Luckily website building is so simple today that don't have to worry about how these tools work, as long as they do the job when you click on the button.
You will need a FTP (file transfer protocol) client to up load your WordPress files to your host (this tool it does just what it says, uploads or transfers files from your computer to your hosting account). We recommend the free CORE ftp Client for windows you can download it here:
Core FTP client for windows homepage
Like everything else we recommend it's very easy to use and comes with a full set of instructions.