BuildHack

Why this guide?

Every company should have a website to answer questions and promote their business, every person should have a website to be their online presence and every project should have a website to connect with users and garner support. Once upon a time, getting a website online was difficult and required the help of someone with specialized technical skills. These days, it’s pretty easy to get online but it’s still hard to have an amazing website. This guide will help with the former (since it’s easy) and this site will help you achieve the latter.

Quick overview

The major steps to getting a website will be the following:

1. Determine what type of site you’re trying to setup
2. Pick a domain name for your site
3. Pick a hosting provider for your site
4. Purchase the domain and hosting provider
5. Start customizing your site
6. Make your site amazing

Before we get started

Okay, I’m glad we haven’t lost you yet. You’re on your way to setting up your own website. But let’s agree on a couple things before we get started:

• This guide isn’t going to answer every question
• This guide isn’t going to help you build the next Facebook or Google
• This guide will be focused on being simple for beginners

Step 1: Determine what type of site you’re trying to setup

The first thing we should all agree on is what type of site you’re trying to setup. This isn’t an exhaustive list but your site should fall into one of these major buckets:

Business Website

This is pretty straightforward, if you are a business owner of any type and you’re trying to have an online presence to acquire more customer, sell more stuff or rank on SEO, this is you.

Content Blog

This is a pretty wide category and could range from you wanting to have a personal blog to post thoughts and musing once a month to being an up-and-coming mommy blogger promoting products through daily posts generating thousands or millions of dollars (hopefully the latter).

Custom Web Application

And lastly, this category covers the aspiring entrepreneurs and folks who are working on side-projects (e.g. open-source, startup, hobby). What distinguishes this from the other categories is if you are going to be writing custom code (not just HTML/CSS). If you don’t know what this means, this isn’t you.

Step 2: Pick a domain name for your site

Picking a domain is either really easy because you already have a name of your company or your project or it’s going to be a challenge because you’re trying to come up with a name for a personal project/blog. In either case, you still need to find/pick the exact domain for your site. Luckily, we have a guide to help pick the perfect domain – How To Pick The Perfect Domain For Your Website. The tips for picking the right domain:

1. Be intuitive and avoid being too clever
2. Avoid confusing words
3. Avoid confusing words

As for purchasing the domain, I highly recommend Google Domains.

Step 3: Pick a hosting provider for your site

Once you have a domain name, you need to pick a web hosting provider. This is where the type of website you are trying to setup will help.

If you are setting up a business website, check out our guide for Best Web Hosting for Small Business from $2.75 a month.

If you are setting up a content blog, check out our guide for Best Web Hosting for WordPress from $1.99 a month.

If you are setting up a custom web application, check out our guide for Best Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting from $4.99 a month.

Step 5: Start customizing your site

Coming soon…

Step 6: Make your site amazing

Coming soon…

Disk space is the amount of hard drive space on your server necessary to house all your website files. A simple analogy is the same way you can’t take anymore pictures when your phone’s hard drive fills up, you can’t add any files to your server once it fills up. In addition to images, you wouldn’t be able to upload anymore movies, files or code once your server is full. The biggest variables to determine how much disk space you need are:

What kind of site do you have?

Depending on whether your site is a personal blog, a small business website or a new killer web app, you’ll be hosting either images, videos or lots of custom code.

How much unique content do you have?

Once you figure out what kind of content you’ll have, you need to figure out how much content do you have? For example, do you have 100 images or 1000 videos or maybe you have 10,000 PHP/JS/HTML/CSS files.

How much will your content grow?

While it’s great to count how much content you have, what you’ll also need to estimate is how much will that content grow over time. Think at least a year out as a good starting point – for example, in a year, do you expect the number of images you have to double or stay constant.

Hopefully you have the above answers handy. Once you have them, enter them into the calculator below to get an estimate of how much disk space you’ll need.

As you look at web hosting providers, pay attention to how much disk space they provide. On average, most basic shared hosting and VPS hosting will give you somewhere between 5GB and 20GB for basic hosting. That should be plenty if you’re starting a website for the first time. However, if you have an existing site, you might have already exceeded the basic allotment or you might have a better sense of how much growth you expect to see over the next 12 months. And lastly, if you need over 20GB of disk space, you might want to consider a CDN to host your files which could prove to be cheaper and faster.

The right domain name can make or break your website so be sure to take the time and pick the right domain. Once you’ve put it out there and start getting visitors, it will be a lot harder to change domain names (but technically possible). So whether you’re a small business owner or you’re a budding entrepreneur with an amazing idea, you’ll need to come up with a memorable domain name and more importantly, you’ll need to come up with a domain name that’s available. So let’s start with some basics:

Be intuitive and avoid being too clever

You want something memorable and easy to enter, so don’t try to be clever and come up with something complex that isn’t intuitive to visitors. For example, if you’re a pie shop – don’t go with something like www.getpi.com because you want it to be nerdy. If you end up being too clever, all you’re doing is sending traffic to someone else’s website.

Avoid confusing words

Avoid numbers because it’s not clear if you meant “7” or “seven”. Avoid using “to” since it’s hard to distinguish from “too” or even “two”. Same goes for words like “by” and “bye” and “bi”. Luckily, website names don’t have to be grammatically correct, so you can get away with phrases with improper sentence structure.

Be creative if your ideal domain isn’t available

I’m sure lots of people would love to have “foo.com” which isn’t available. However, you could try “getfoo.com” or “fooapp.com”. There’s lots of ways to add relevant words to your business or company name to increase your odds of getting it.

Still need help?

If you’ve reached this and you’re still struggling, you might want to take advantage of some of the online domain name generators. These are a great way to get some creative suggestions that you might not have thought of. Most simply ask that you provide a keyword or a starting phrase and they will provide creative suggestions of domains that are available. Some of my favorite sites for this are:

LeanDomainSearch – very straightforward search that provides a nice list of “creative” domains related to your keyword/phrase

Instant Domain Search – nice simple interface that shows you results instantly and even the price/availability

And lastly, once you’ve found the perfect domain name, you need to then secure it and purchase it before someone else. I have used multiple domain registrars and I have all of my domains currently with Google Domains.

DigitalOcean provides virtual private server hosting that is highly customizable with high availability at reasonable prices. Unlike other hosting providers that also provide shared hosting and dedicated hosting, DigitalOcean only provides virtual private servers which are referred to as droplets. A droplet is a resizable cloud server that comes in a number of configurations:

Some of the best features that come with DigitalOcean include:

Deploy in seconds – spin up a droplet in 55 seconds

SSD performance – all servers are equipped with SSDs

Highly available storage – attach multiple highly available volumes up to 16TB to a droplet

Fast network – each hypervisor has a 40Gbps network

Resize – scale your droplet’s resources up or down based on your usage

Backups and snapshots – enable automatic backups or take a snapshot at any time

Monitoring – keep track of your droplet’s bandwidth, disk and CPU levels

DigitalOcean has support for a number of different regions:

• New York City
• San Francisco
• Toronto
• London
• Amsterdam
• Frankfurt
• Bangalore
• Singapore

You can deploy a VPS to the region closest to your visitors in order to provide the best performance. In addition, you can setup a backup of your site in another region in order to have a spare site in case a region goes down.

Another big advantage to going with DigitalOcean is the number of one-click applications they provide. In less than 10 minutes, you can have any of the following applications up and running: Cassandra, Discourse, Django, Docker, Dokku, Drone, Drupal, Elixir, ELK, Ghost, GitLab, Horizon, Joomla, LAMP, LEMP, Magento, MEAN, MediaWiki, MongoDB, Node.js, ownCloud, Redis, Redmine, Ruby on Rails, WordPress.

And lastly, DigitalOcean is extremely developer-friendly. They do everything from provide extensive APIs so you can automate the creation and provisioning of droplets to hosting meetups so you can meet the team behind DigitalOcean. There is also an extensive community that includes user submitted questions, tutorials and projects that integrate with the DigitalOcean APIs.

The Merchant Marketing Corner is a great resource for small businesses created by American Express. The site provides resources to help attract new customers as well as get existing customer back to your store (both online and offline). And to help promote small businesses, American Express is incentivizing their card-holders with 2X rewards when they register their American Express card and use it at a registered small business. And if you’re a small business owner, they provide the following resources:

Promote Shop Small

As a small business, you can let your customers know they’re supporting a small business by having in-store signage, adding Shop Small logos to your websites and emails, and lastly promoting Shop Small through all of your social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc.). American Express provides a download with the digital assets that you can use to print and embed the relevant Shop Small images.

Attract New Customers

To help attract new customers, American Express has created an online Shop Small map. As a small business, if you have a physical brick and mortar, you should definitely register. Once you’ve registered, new customers will be able to find you in the online registry which will get a lot of attention Saturday November 26 for Small Business Saturday (also the day after Black Friday).  You can also reach new customers by posting ads online – American Express will even cover the cost of getting your ads on sites like CNN and Weather.com.

There are some pretty cool resources put together by American Express. But there are some gotchas to all these perks – the first one is that you have to be a small business that accepts American Express and have a verified merchant id. In order to have your business added to the online registry or get free advertising, you need to have an account and verify that you own a small business that accepts American Express. I don’t think it’s worth accepting American Express for these perks but if you already accept American Express, then I highly recommend creating an account and making sure your small business shows up.

InMotion provides a wide variety of products such as shared hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting.

Shared Business Hosting

Shared hosting is a great economical way to start a website. InMotion is well known for their shared hosting plans. A lot of people will pick a shared hosting plan and start a site using InMotion’s one-click WordPress/Joomla/PrestaShop install. You can build a site in PHP/Ruby/Perl/Python and create MySQL/PostgreSQL databases or just a static HTML site. You can get a lot out of a shared hosting plan.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

InMotion also has VPS hosting options that can give you more control over your server while being more affordable than dedicated hosting. One key advantage of InMotion is that all the servers have SSD drives instead of standard HDD. You avoid the risk of someone else on the server eating up the server’s capacity and you get dedicated CPU, memory and bandwidth. A VPS is a great solution if you’ve outgrown your shared hosting and want more dedicated resources.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is the ultimate in website performance, security and control. You get full access to the server and you can have more configuration options than a VPS. For the increased price, you get more CPU, RAID storage, more RAM and more bandwidth.

InMotion is a web host with an impressive track record that includes a A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau as well being a top rated CNET web hosting company for 13 years. In addition, they are big supporters of open source and have sponsorships with WordPress, Joomla, b2evolution and PrestaShop.

If you’re looking for PHP web hosting, I assume you’re actually building a PHP web application and not looking for a WYSIWYG site builder. I also assume you’re not looking for WordPress Hosting. Still with me? Great, let’s talk about PHP. According to one source, over 80% of the Internet uses PHP. Popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many more are known to use “some” PHP. I caveat with the term some because all the sites I mentioned use a variety of different technologies. But back to why you’re here, it is safe to assume you’re someone who is learning how to program and chose PHP or maybe you’re someone who has something that needs to be built and decided PHP is the easiest way to do it. The two scenarios might sound similar but are pretty different and we’ll discuss why later. For now, let’s get to what you need to know and what you need to consider when picking a web host for your PHP needs.

How much traffic do you expect?

The first thing to figure out if how much traffic do you expect. If you’re here, I’m going to assume you don’t expect millions (or even thousands) or visitors on day 1. If this is true, any shared web host with good PHP support should be sufficient. If you’re really curious, take a look at our bandwidth calculator to help you determine how much bandwidth you’ll need. On the other hand, if you’re expecting a lot of traffic (let’s say more than 10K a day) then you should go with a VPS web host.

What version of PHP do you need?

This should be another easy question that only matters if you were told that you need a specific version of PHP – the most common version is PHP5 which is what all web hosts support. On the other hand, if you’re using specific libraries or frameworks, it would be a good idea to investigate and see what version of PHP they require/support/recommend. Unless you’re using something either really old or really cutting edge, you will probably be using PHP5 go to the website.

For a Low Traffic, First-Time Developer, Side Project

BlueHost is a great shared web host that’s perfect for a first-time developer that wants to build their first website in PHP. The sign-up process is very quick and easy, the monthly price is extremely reasonable  at $2.75 and the overall reliability is decent (again, assuming your site has low traffic and this isn’t mission critical). After you have signed up, picked a domain and have access to cPanel, you can start coding your first pages and uploading the files. You might also need to setup a database if you want to store/retrieve data. If you need help getting started and want recommendations on tutorials or frameworks, check out our guide on getting started with PHP (Coming Soon).

For a Growing Site and Experienced Developer 

If you already have a site and/or you know you’ll get a lot of traffic, you should consider BlueHost VPS hosting. BlueHost is a well-known hosting provider and also has reasonable pricing for VPS hosts at $14.99. And if you’re an experienced developer or have built websites in PHP before, you’ll definitely appreciate the flexibility of a VPS compared to a shared host. You’ll be able to install specific packages, upgrade libraries, restrict/enable access or even use different technologies (Java, NodeJS, Python, etc.). Of course, with more flexibility, there’s also risks so you should only go the VPS route if there’s a need.

If you’re a small business owner, you probably don’t want to spend time figuring out where to host your website. In fact, you probably want to spend as little time as possible and focus your time on other things like spending time with customers, optimizing other processes and attracting more customers. But on the other hand, your website could help you interact with more customers, be a new channel for sales and help acquire new customers. So, it’s basically a catch 22 and you have to get a website up and running but you still want to spend as little time as possible. So let’s look at your options:

Hosting Provider	Best For	Monthly Price
BlueHost	Growing Online Businesses	$2.75
iPage	Low Traffic Business Website	$1.99
1 & 1	Budget Conscious Business	$0.99
FatCow	Free Marketing Services	$3.15
InMotion	Premium Business Hosting	$5.99

As a small business owner, you should focus on getting the minimal website up and running as quickly as possible. You want Google to start indexing your site and sending you traffic. You also want to start promoting your site on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, etc.). You want a website that answers the following basic questions:

1. What is your company name?
2. What do you sell?
3. Where are you located?
4. What time are you open?
5. How do I contact you (email, phone, etc.)?

You’ll notice I didn’t mention questions like “Why should I buy from you?” or “How much does X cost?” – these are hard questions to answer and something important but doesn’t need to be a priority. Answer these questions after your site is up and running. Most people tend to overthink things and try to solve or answer too many problems/questions. This can lead to analysis paralysis and basically stall a project. Don’t let that happen to you.

As far as pricing, look for something inexpensive, but don’t go with something too budget. If it’s too cheap, you’ll regret things when your site goes down when you get a surge of traffic. And since you also want your site to load fast, you’ll want to make sure you’re on good hardware with enough bandwidth. Look at reviews and feedback from other customers – it should be easy to spot unreliable hosting.

HubSpot’s Website Grader has been around for years and it really does a great job at keeping up with what’s important for a website and identifies potential problems. By just entering the URL for your website (your email is optional, so don’t feel compelled to provide it) you get an overall score for your website and a breakdown of its strengths and weaknesses. The areas that are evaluated are:

Performance
Optimizing your website’s performance is crucial to increasing traffic, improving conversion rates, generating more leads, and increasing revenue.

The main metrics to determine how your site’s performance are page size, page requests and page speed. In addition, Website Grader also checks for browser caching, page redirects, compression and render blocking.

Mobile
Traffic from mobile devices is growing fast. Optimize your website for mobile or you’ll miss out on valuable traffic, leads, and revenue.

For mobile, your site must be responsive (not only does the Website Grader look for this, Google demands this if you want to rank in SERP). In addition, you need to have a viewport specified so your page scales appropriately on mobile and tablet devices.

SEO
Make sure your website is easy for users to discover—and easy for search bots to understand—with better page titles, headings, and meta descriptions.

There’s a lot of things to make sure your site is SEO friendly (we’ll go into more detail later) but some of the basics include specifying page titles, meta descriptions, heading tags and a sitemap. Again, there’s plenty more, but you can’t go wrong by making sure all of these are specified.

Security
SSL certificates protect websites from attacks and give visitors confidence that your site is authentic and trustworthy. And security can also affect your SEO rankings since Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking signal.

So hopefully you get perfect scores in all of these areas, but if you don’t, Website Grader gives you next-steps on how to improve your scores. For example, some of the advice I got for BuildHack were:

Combine files to minimize the number of HTTP requests your site makes.

Speed up your site by lightening up your site pages, compressing images and video where possible.

Implement caching to speed up the loading of frequently used content.

Remove or defer any JavaScript or CSS that interferes with loading above-the-fold content.

So what are you doing still reading, go to https://website.grader.com and see how your website is doing project task tracking software.

Digital Garage is an online platform provided by Google to help small business owners develop digital skills such selling online, reaching more customers on social media and getting noticed online. Small business owners can sign up for specific courses and learn through video tutorials at their own pace. Whom better to learn from on how to optimize your online presence than the company that directs up to 50% of traffic on the Internet.

There are 23 topics currently available, some of the ones that I would recommend are:

Build your web presence
There’s more than one way to establish your home on the web. Understand your options and create an action plan to get online.

Get started with search
Discover how they work, why they’re important, how they’ll impact your business and why they are key to your online success.

Get noticed locally
Whether you’re a bricks- and- mortar shop or a localised service, find ways to use the web to reach customers nearby.

Get started with analytics
We’ll show you how to slice and dice data to answer real business questions, and to measure how you’re doing online.

And why are these things important to learn for small business owners? The testimonials are pretty compelling:

Adrian Simpson set up a basic website for his new speechwriting business and began advertising online through search.

Within 31 days, he’d sold 31 speeches.

And here’s another testimonial from across the pond:

Rachael’s Kitchen makes and delivers delicious cupcakes across the UK and Europe.

Since Rachael started marketing online, web sales have grown by 50%. She’s been able to take on new staff and to compete against much larger players.

And lastly, to show the value of understanding what your customers are doing on your website:

Cotswold Balloon Safaris runs hot air balloon flights over the picturesque Cotswolds countryside.

By analysing his web traffic, Captain Mike Jennings learned that his potential customers often browse at lunchtime and in the early evening. Now he targets them at those times.

So basically, more customers, more sales and more money – what’s not to like, right? But you still have to invest time which is a hard thing to come by when you’re running a business. So what should a small business owner expect? Here is how it works:

1. Create a learning plan by picking courses that interest you
2. Watch video tutorials and learn from other small business owners
3. Start applying what you’ve learned on your own website
4. Rinse and repeat – take more courses
5. For bonus points, complete all the courses and get a certification 🙂

Again, this is a great opportunity for a small business owner to invest time and grow their business online.