Obtaining a Website Account on a Server

To make a webite available on the World Wide Web, the website must be housed on a computer that has software for receiving URLs (http requests) for a Web page and returning (serving up) that page to the requesting computer. A computer equipped with this software is referred to as a Web server, or just server. The computer itself is nothing special. Server software can be installed no virtually any computer.

Contracting With a Web Hosting Company

Although anyone with moderate computing skills can install Web software on her or his computer, the hassle of keeping the software up to date and managing security issues is a strong deterrent for doing so. Instead, most individuals and small companies use a Web hosting service.

To show how this is done, we use the example of the hosting service 000webhost.com. The following video describes how to acquire an account on 000webhost.com

Preparing for Using FTP

Having an account on a Web hosting server is necessary, but not sufficient, for deploying your website to the Web. What remains is to acquire File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software for transferring your portfolio website (or just individual files in your portfolio website) from your computer to the server. In order to accomplish this must determine what 000webhost.com requires for credentials for FTP connections from our computer.

The video below discusses how we determine the necessary credentials from 000webhost.com

Moving On

The next page in this series demonstrates how to use FileZilla to transfer website files to and from 000webhost.com and our local computer.