I was leaning towards Hover for my domain registrar, but now Google’s domain registrar service looks tempting. Simple, free WHOIS privacy service, no attempts to upsell a bunch of other stuff, inexpensive, and no worry someone will buy them up. Someone said they even have real tech support (beyond a forum!)
OK - Looking at domain registration on Google’s domain registrar, web hosting for the site on Arvixe. Wordpress and Blubrry I think for the podcast media hosting.
Since I have NO idea what I’m doing, could someone who knows this stuff look at the signup page and tell me what options I need?
http://www.arvixe.com/linux_web_hosting
It’s $3.20 per month, which seems pretty low. So I wonder what I am missing, LOL!
You don’t need any of those options.
And yes, generic web hosting is generally fairly cheap. Google for bad reviews of any given host tbh.
(I for instance actually /use/ the stuff that Dreamhost offers, and I need to pay at the $8/month level…but you won’t, at least for some time)
Thanks. When I actually add it to the cart, it comes up as $4.00 per month. Not much more but no idea where the $3.20 comes from.
It shows for me on the page as $4/month. (And that’s only for the 2 year package…well, it’s still not a huge enough amount to be worried about and they have a reasonable rep, so…)
OK! So - bought a domain on Google’s domain registrar. Took a while to find a name that wasn’t taken. For the purposes of this, let’s call it newbie.com.
Then I purchased the standard account on Arvixe.com. It asked for my domain name (not for me to purchase it) and I gave it what I just purchased, newbie.com.
Went through the pages to pay, it asked if I wanted it to go ahead and set up a script and showed a lot of popular scripts, so I said sure, Wordpress. It said OK.
Now I’m at a page that shows this (changing web site name)
Your current balance after this payment: $ 0.00
Your account (newbie.com) has been automatically setup with WordPress.
Software Name: WordPress
Homepage URL: http://newbie.com
Admin URL: http://newbie.com/wp-admin/
Admin username: admin
Admin password: Your hosting password
newbie.com’s setup details and hosting control panel login links are below:
Domain:newbie.com
Username: xxxxxx
Server Name: capybara.arvixe.com
Login to hosting control panel
Plan:
PersonalClass
View your setup email
Expiration:
2017-04-11 15:33:44
And I have NO idea how to proceed. How do I enter the domain I purchased and registered with Google Domains? If I click on the homepage or admin URLs I get an instant “Server not found”.
Now what??? LOL!
Okay.
Edit: Just read their screed, you should have had an email from them with the hosting details. This should include your nameservers.
It’ll be something like ns1.name.arxive.com and ns2.name.arxive.com.
Copy those to notepad
(Alternatively, if it’s not, log in and poke round the arxive control panel for your site, it’ll be there)
Now log into the domain registrar.
There will be an option there to set the “nameservers”. You want to then paste those into there.
Your domain should then be up within 2 hours, maximum 24 hours.
(PS, at this point as you’ve bought it you can tell people what your domain is :P)
OK - Did that. Google had it set to “Use Google Name Servers” but I changed that to the two that were very similar to what you guessed up there.
In the Google Domain help there is this comment about switching away from the Google Name Servers:
“Set up new resource records with your DNS provider. (The Google Domains resource records only work with the Google name servers.)”
What does that mean?
On the Arvixe account page, I have this (sorry for the poor cut and paste:
"You don’t have any domains under this billing account. If you’d like to order domains, please go to our main page and place an order. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call us at 8889278493.
Your Domains
Click on your domains(s) above for more information.
Mass Nameserver Update:
Update all of the domains listed (newline delimited) to use the provided nameservers. Only two nameservers are required. This may take a couple of minutes with many domains.
Nameserver 1 Nameserver 2
Nameserver 3 Nameserver 4
domain1.com
domain2.com
Register Nameservers
Register a nameserver for your own domains. In most cases you can use the IPs provided for your Arvixe nameservers you would have received when you first signed up. Nameserver IP
Do I need to enter something here on the Arvixe account page? Or is this just if I purchase a domain name from them?
Thanks a LOT.
Google’s saying clumsily “oh hey you can’t use our special services”, I think. That’s fine, you don’t want to.
And on Arvixe, that’s right, you haven’t registered domains with them.
You want “Your Web Hosting”, “Manage domains” or similar, which should have the details. From the earlier email, I strongly suspect it’s already set up and we’ll see it pop up in an hour or so, though.
If it’s not listed, then under that setting there will be something like “add domain / add hosting”, enter your domain name there. Wait an hour…
And cool. I went to my site, and there is a very basic Wordpress page, and my admin page is working.
I assume this is the point at which I need to now purchase Blubrry; is Powerpress part of that?
Right :)
And hmm…looks like Powerpress is a free plugin, it’s just the hosting with Blubrry which costs.
Yep, installed Powerpress. Now I have this really barebones crappy looking Wordpress page. Time for learning Wordpress!
Step 1. Find a theme you like
Step 2. See if you can customise it for what you want.
Step 3. Swear and go back to step 1, repeatedly.
^^
So, I now have set up my website/blog, know how to post a podcast via Powerpress/Blubrry, have installed the plugins I like, am still trying out themes (surprisingly the biggest hurdle has been most themes don’t let me put our square graphic logo up in the header next to the title) and we’re in the process of getting things set up for submission to iTunes. Ran into a hurdle with feedvalidator.org not validating the feed and not even being able to connect with my server and dug in and figured it out. I.e. Well on our way.
Question though - don’t want to disclose our domain name at this point, but let’s say it is twoparentsjourney.com. And let’s say our Twitter name for this is @2parentsjourney because @twoparentsjourney is too long. So even though we have the web site on the Twitter profile we worry that some people who follow our Twitter account may go to 2parentsjourney.com because of our Twitter name.
So - we also purchased the second domain. Is there is simple way to set something up so that people who go to 2parentsjourney.com end up on twoparentsjourney.com?
Thanks.
If there was ever a quoted for truth, this is it.
Yes, you just need to go to your domain registrar and set up where 2parentsjourney directs to.
for instance
eightiespodcast dot com
eightiescast dot com
all point to
bornintheeighties dot net
Is how I have done things.
Edit:
Actually talking about that, It looks like they still point to an older re-direct partyplatypus dot com. Need to update that.
Ah. Ok that makes sense, so I just cut and paste what I did into my domain settings for the web site into the second domain. I didn’t know you could do that. Easy/cool. Thanks
OK, I went to my google domains set up pages and cut and pasted the two name servers that are in the settings for my main web site into the two spaces for the name servers in my second domain so it will take people to the main web site.
That was at around 3 PM on the 24th - it’s now the morning of the 26th, and when I enter the new web name (e.g. www.2coolforschool.com) into my browsers it just immediately comes back with server not found. In Chrome the error message basically says name not resolved.
How long does it take for the DNS settings to take effect? Or did I do something wrong here?
Generally 24h; and funky, that SHOULD work. Maybe the hosting doesn’t support multiple domains? (I don’t even know if that’s a thing). Or maybe you need some kinda redirect on the server itself, setup in the backend tools (I think I had to do that to get people to bounce from MYDOMAIN.com to MYDOMAIN.COM/wp, for instance).
My thinking is that your hosting server is getting a request “from” ALTERNATEDOMAIN.COM, because your name registrar told that URL to point to that IP, but the hosting server isn’t properly “prepared” to provide content for such a request. It says, “well, I know that for MAINDOMAIN.COM requests, I’m supposed to display things from this /wordpress/ folder in the server, but what folder should I serve from for the ALTERNATEDOMAIN.COM requests?” And probably the backend tools have something in there to correct that. Apologies that this is all vague and possibly wrong; I haven’t actively dug in those guts for months/years. If you’re using CPanel and your host supports the functionality, it might work like this: https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/ALD/Redirects
Well, I tried an alternate approach. Went back to this alternate domain setting on my google domains, set it back to the Google name servers, then used a tool they have that forwards domains to the URL of your choice. It isn’t working on my PC yet; I assume my ISP hasn’t refreshed their cache yet - but it works on my phone using cellular.
Do I need to somehow tell my web host that I have domains with a different name coming in to my name servers for my web site? I’m guessing though I didn’t see where to set that up, but Arvixe seems to support it.