Hi, and welcome to this Dreamweaver tutorial. My name is Daniel Walter Scott,  and I'm a trainer here at Bring Your Own Laptop. In this little video, we're just gonna discuss, um,  what hosting is, uh,  and what a domain name is, why you need it,  and cost those type of things. Um, if you're already familiar with that type of thing,  you can skip through to the next tutorial, right? So, um, essentially to get your website from  where it is at the moment on your desktop to our website,  um, we're gonna have to look at two things. Domain name and hosting.

So, at the moment we've got  what we call a local site. That means that it only exists on our hard drive. So that's called a local website. Now we wanna may move it to a remote website,  which means uploading it to a host. So to have a website, you need two things. A domain name and hosting domain name is the little URL,  so BO l.com au is one of my ones.

Another one is bring your own laptop.co nz  bring your own laptop.com. They're all domain names  or URLs, so you need to buy one of those. They're relatively cheap. Um, you pay, I'm paying probably, what is it, about $15  or $20 us, um, per year to have these. Okay? Um, with these by themselves,  they don't do a whole lot.

Okay? You need these things,  these domain names to point to a host. Now, the host is a slice of hard drive, um,  on somebody else's computer. So essentially you've got your website residing on your hard  drive, on your laptop,  and you want to give it to a hosting company  and they'll store it on their computer  and connect this domain name to it. The nice thing about that is that they guarantee  that their computer's never gonna go offline. So when people search for, um, bring own laptop dot coda nz,  they will be redirected to their slice of hard drive.

Now, um, they're, yeah, so  that's essentially what hosting is. They'll hold it for you on their, um, computer,  which is essentially called a server. Um, and yeah, it means that when people access your domain,  they go off to their computer  and pull up, uh, your index page that they're holding  for you and all the images that they're looking  after for you and yeah, display them now. Um, so picking a domain name,  there's a million different ways to buy a domain name. It's pretty easy. Now my advice is whoever you buy your  domain name with, try  and get the hosting with them as well,  can be a bit of a drama.

Setting up domain names from one  company and hosting on the other. They both, each other wants to look after both services  and it sometimes can be, um, a bit of a pain. So, um, pick a host. Now you've got kind of three sets of hosting. I'm gonna look at one of the hosts that I use. I'm gonna use, um, I'll use this one here,  which is hosting my New Zealand site free parking.co nz.

Okay? Now, I love these guys in New Zealand,  in Australia. My favorite one  Is I've just switched over  to a company called Digital Pacific. Um, so these guys are really good in Australia. These guys are really good in New Zealand. In terms of the us uh, I use a site called, um,  a place called Luna Pages or Luna Pages.

They're okay, okay, um, support's reasonably good,  they're dirt cheap. Um, so, um,  but have a look around Google Top 10 hosting companies  and put your country in and, um, work that out for yourself. So I'm gonna look at, uh, free parking just  because I'm gonna look at, um,  that's where you can buy the domain names. I wanna look at their web hosting options. And pretty much all web hosting have these  kind of rough guides. They'll have a basic, a standard, a premium,  and then they start getting into kind  of small business options.

Okay? So essentially for a website  that we're building in this tutorial,  all you need is this basic one. Okay? So they're roughly the same sort of prices. New Zealand dollars. Um, hosting can get down to like 30 us.

It can be quite cheap. Now remember, the cheaper it is, um, generally indicates,  um, the type of hosting you're gonna get. You're gonna get something called, uh, virtual hosting here. So you're gonna share your bit of hard drive with a bunch  of other people and that can be awesome  'cause it keeps the cost down and it can be, uh, painful  as well because the other people  that are sharing your hard drive can be, um, abusing  what they do, running malware  and storing viruses and all sorts of other things. It doesn't affect you, um, essentially your website, but  because you're coming through the same hard drive,  it can slow things down. Okay?

So, uh, when you're getting started, just start  with a, a basic, um, basic hosting. Um, I met kind of something like this now  for the two websites that I just showed you there, purely  because I don't have a lot of, um, database driven data. So I don't need a database for my websites. They're quite, um, uh, um, front end only. Okay? Um, during we've created, so, um, I've got this one just  'cause I've got a few different websites  hosted on the same account.

Okay? But this one here will do just fine. Have a look. There'll be a basics medium and a premium,  and you start getting to business solutions. And yeah, it really depends on  what you're looking to do with your website. But if it's not getting too big  and too fast, start with the basic.

You can always upgrade once you've signed up,  say I picked this saver option, you'll get an email, okay? And that email will have something called FTP details. Now, FTP, um,  is the way you connect Dreamweaver to that host. So we will go through that in the next tutorial  and show you how to get your website connected from  Dreamweaver on your machine to your host so  that the world can see your website. Exciting.