All right…. you have done your research and acquired your domain name or url. Now you must decide upon the hosting that you will need. We will keep this basic and at a 30k view.
Choosing the right server
– The first thing is, will you be selling directly off of your website you build? If you are then you will need to get a secured server or an SSL certificate for your website. You have seen these and have used them to do banking on line. Here is an example: https://bankofthewest.com/ It has an s after the http. This indicates the site is secure to make transactions… most of the time. There is never a 100% guarantee except taxes and death…. one must have faith. If you won’t be selling or having any transactions done from your site, then the SSL certificate is not needed.
If a standard hosting set up is what you need then any of the hosting company’s will be able to help you with choosing the right plan. Just make sure you get enough server space… because if you set up your email on your server you will run out of space… at some point. Which is why choosing the right way to run your email will simplify your life. Email is free for the most part and server space is not.
Email choices
Server is set up, the url is pointing to the right DNS accounts… you are ready to choose how to run your email. When building your own website you can, and should use your domain name or url as the email. Example being… [email protected]. This is my email off of our server, but I have it go to my Yahoo email or Gmail account. Yes it uses my domain name, but we don’t store our emails on our server, but send them to our respective personal email accounts. There are a couple of reasons for doing so. One is … you guessed it save server space. The other is, so you can view both work and personal email from one account.
Now to back up just a bit… This is for small/medium businesses. If you have a larger business or use Outlook then things would be different. You can use Outlook or Google Apps email. We will stick to helping the small/medium business in this article. So going forward we will use gmail in this example.
So you have a gmail account set up. The next step is another decision… duh! Do you want to just forward your server email, imap it, or Pop and keep on server/Pop and delete from server. Okay this sounds difficult but it’s not really. The server company should have tutorials on the set up of either of these choices. Forward is the simplest way to go. Period. When an email is sent to [email protected], it just passes through the server with no saving on the server what so ever. And then shows up at your gmail email account. Sweet! With Pop email, it stops in your server, then either deletes when it goes to your personal email or is saved on your server and then sent to your personal email. Imap is a setting that allows to to look at your email from your personal email to your server email. What ever you do with your email will affect it on the server. Example, you click on the latest email and then you don’t delete it or touch it. It will remain on your server email till you delete it. This will take up space on your server. I know this can be as clear as mud at times. So, if you have questions, please give us a call… or send us an email.
Next time we will cover the platforms to which you can build your new website upon…
