Launching Your Own Personal Website - Websites 101
Step-by-Step Guide to setting up your website from domain purchase to website launching: https://jesstin.com/launching-your-own-personal-website-setup-guide/
What You Need To Know To Get Started
As more & more of our lives shift to a digital medium the need to have a digital presence is growing. While most individuals will go with a much simpler setup of creating social media accounts on sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. One of the things to stand out amongst the crowd in this case is to have your own website.
Having recently setup & launched my own website, I thought about sharing what I have learned both about the technology itself and the process of launching. In this blog I will be going over the knowledge & technology that go into your website and the wider internet. In a later blog I will go over a proper step-by-step guide in you are interested.
Here is a quick rundown of the basics that go into how your website operates & why you might want to start your own website:
Domain Overview
- Domain Name System
- Domain Registrar
- Nameservers
- DNS Records
- Web Servers
- Content Management Systems
With that out of the way let's explore what happens when you make a request, to let's say https://www.facebook.com. Your computer sends a request to your ISP DNS server if it knows where the website is it will respond to your computer with the IP address of the website. If the server doesn't know where the website is it will make requests to other DNS servers till the website's records are located, then it will respond to your computer with the IP address of the website.
Domain Name System
Now that we know who maintains the protocol that your devices use to access the internet, let's learn a little about who sells domains.
For starters you won't be buying a domain from ICANN or IANA, instead you will be being from an accredited business that IANA recognizes known as a Domain registrar. While there are other types of sellers that vast majority of people will be getting their domains from a registrar. To clarify something though, you don't technically 'own' the domain, domains are reserved for you for a period of time & domain registrars hold them for you.
Now that you have a domain it's time to get your domain attached to servers. In order to do that you need to have a server that keeps the records of your domain, that server is a Nameserver
Nameservers
While domains are the name of a website, a nameserver is the servers that determine the direction that website traffic needs to go to. If you want an analogy; where domains are the location, nameservers are the directions.
When you purchase a domain, Domain Registrars come with their own nameservers already setup for you. They make it easy for you to modify the records of your nameserver to setup your website how you would like. It is possible to setup your nameserver outside of your domain registrar if you want. For example, I have my nameservers with my web hosting currently as an example.
There are a multitude of records that configure not only where the traffic goes, but also more specifically what kind of traffic goes where. A nameservers records are known as DNS Records.
DNS Records
DNS records hold the information about which IP addresses match which domains. Their several types of records you will enter, each one requiring different information in order for them to work. Here are the most common to use for most people:
- Address Mapping record (A Record)—also known as a DNS host record, stores a hostname and its corresponding IPv4 address.
- IP Version 6 Address record (AAAA Record)—stores a hostname and its corresponding IPv6 address.
- Canonical Name record (CNAME Record)—can be used to alias a hostname to another hostname. When a DNS client requests a record that contains a CNAME, which points to another hostname, the DNS resolution process is repeated with the new hostname.
- Mail exchanger record (MX Record)—specifies an SMTP email server for the domain, used to route outgoing emails to an email server.
- Text Record (TXT Record)—typically carries machine-readable data such as opportunistic encryption, sender policy framework, DKIM, DMARC, etc.
Web Hosting Servers
You got your domain, you know how DNS works so how do we get a website?
Servers are simply programs/devices that provide a service that another computer can access. A singular physical server might have multiple program servers on it. To get a website you need to allocate resources, their are services out their that do the allocation for you or you can host it yourself at your place of business. Here is a list of how you can host your website:
- On Premise
- Small to Medium Business Servers
- Data Warehouses
- Web Hosting
- Shared Hosting
- Virtual Private Server
- Dedicated Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
- Amazon Web Services
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform
For the vast majority of people they will go with getting the allocation done for them. This means they will mostly go with the second option and go from there. If you are a little more confident in you in your technical skills and don't mind a little grunt work you can go with a Cloud Hosting/Computing option like I did with Amazon Web Services.
To connect your web hosting with your domain you will provide the relevant records to your nameserver.
Content Management Systems
Your almost done, while having a website is nice, unless you want to build your website from the ground up & how it handles content management, it might be simpler to go with something that already exists.
Content Management System or CMS is software that helps users create, manage, & modify the content on a website without the need for specialized technical knowledge. Instead of building your own system for creating web pages, storing images, and other functions, the content management system handles all that basic infrastructure stuff for you so that you can focus on more forward-facing parts of your website.
There are free options and paid for options for CMS:
Free Open Source Software
Paid-Options
Here is how my website is setup if you are curious:
Domain Registrar: Namecheap
Web Hosting: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Content Management System: Ghost
I know that this was a lot to take in & you probably still have questions, but this was mostly meant to be a quick overview. I also didn't go over how to set it up, this was meant to clarify what is happening from a high-level overview when you are setting it up.
Step-by-Step Guide to setting up your website from domain purchase to website launching: Step-by-Step Guide [LINK]
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