Reference Page: Terminology
Below is common web terminology and what you’d need to go from no website to having your own space on the web!
Table of Contents
Domain & Hosting
There are two main ongoing costs that every website has in order to stay on the internet:
1. Domain name: this is the name of the website, e.g. CurlyGirlWeb.com
2. Hosting: where the website lives
You could host a domain on a computer in your house, but that would be impractical because hosting providers are much better at it. I use SiteGround for both my domain and hosting needs.
Basic domain names cost anywhere from $10-20 per year. Typical hosting costs about $10-20 per month.
ID Protect
When you purchase a new domain, you have to give information like your name and address. If you have a business address then great! However, if you don’t then you might want to consider purchasing what SiteGround, my hosting provider, calls ID Protect. This way if someone looks up your domain, they won’t see your personal address.
This protection is around $20-25 per year.
Email Account
Some hosting providers may charge extra for email accounts. It’s not a big deal if you keep using a generic Gmail account, for example, but it’s a nice touch to have hello@yourdomain.com.
SSL Certificate
If you want users to trust you then you need an SSL certificate on your website. This is a security certificate that allows your website to send data over HTTPS instead of the unsecure HTTP (the “S” stands for secure). It means that only you and the website you visit know what you’re communicating.
Some hosting providers charge extra for this.
WordPress
WordPress is a free CMS (content management system). This is one of the most popular ways to build and maintain a website– it powers over 30% of all websites on the internet. Once you have a domain, you’d install WordPress on it.
Cloudflare CDN
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN provides several advantages for a web site, one being cached content. Caching, i.e. storing, a website helps improve page load speeds. Additionally, if your server goes down, Cloudflare will serve your website’s static pages from their cache.
To help prevent spam, Cloudflare also encrypts email addresses on your web page from bots, while keeping them visible to humans.
What questions do you have? Please let me know!