You can be making money online in a short period of time if you create a business online.
To create a web business you will also want to have a web presence. A web presence can be something like a webpage or even an email address and from there you can market yours or somebody else’s products. We are going to focus on creating our web presence with our own website or blog.

To have a website on the internet you need a Domain Name. You can have a free one or you can buy one. A free one won’t really be yours; it will be something like a sub-domain. A good example of this is Geocities.com (owned by Yahoo), which stopped approving new accounts and is scheduled to close down some time this year. There you could get a free domain that would look like this: www.geocities.com/yourusername. So you would want to buy your domain name, which is like the address of your business.

There are many domain registrars with very good prices; some of them are better known than others, but you want to be focused on quality, not only on price. If you look hard enough you can buy a domain for $1 or $2, but you might not have the security you can have with a well known domain seller company. I am going to recommend you the one that I am using lately, it is called godaddy.com. They also sell webhosting, but I prefer to keep things separate, so I only use it for buying domain names. It’s like if I want to buy a car, I would normally buy it from a car manufacturer and not from a clothing manufacturer.

Buying a domain name is very easy. Once you are at Godaddy.com check if your chosen domain name is available, if it is just buy it, if is not available, you can come up with another domain name or offer some money for the one you want, there is always an option. After you bought your domain name you can log in to your Godaddy Control Panel, once there, you will see your domain name displayed. You don’t have to do anything else at Godaddy for now.

Getting the domain name was the first step. You can see it like a license plate with your home address that you need to put outside your house. But wait, what about the actual house? A license plate with an address is not enough. That’s right, now you will need the real house, not just the license. That’s called hosting.
You need a hosting account. There are many webhosting providers, actually the competition is high in this niche, but my favorite one is Hostgator.com. As soon as you start using their services you will see why.
When you go to Hostgator you will be looking for webhosting. They have some other services, like dedicated servers and reseller hosting, but we won’t be using these. What we want is just Webhosting for our domain name, we don’t need a dedicated server and we don’t want to resell hosting either.

When choosing the hosting package I recommend you to go for the Linux ones. They actually have 3 plans; you can see all the options they offer and their prices. At the time of this post, the Hatchling plan sells for $4.95, the Baby plan sells for $7.95 and the Business Plan sells for $12.95. I wouldn’t go for the cheapest, I usually don’t, I would buy the Business plan, but you can go for the Hatchling plan and upgrade later if it is more convenient for you.
The biggest disadvantage of the Hatchling and Baby plans compared to the Business plan is that they share the same server and IP addresses with some other websites. Have a good look at the hostgator plan table to see all the differences.

When you buy a Hosting account you will receive an email from Hostgator with all your login details, but you won’t be able to access your hosting control panel using your domain name yet. This is simply because your domain name is not pointing to your hosting. We need to tell your domain name where your hosting account is.

We want our name servers to point to our Hostgator hosting account.

To do that, we need to login to where we bought our domain name (in our case Goddady) and change the name server of our domain name:

Login to the Godaddy control panel, on the left hand side you will see a sidebar; there you will see “My Products”. Under “My Products” you will see “Domains” and below “Domain Manager”. Click on “Domain Manager” and it will display a list of your domain names at Godaddy.

Select yur domain name and click at the top, on name servers. That will open up a window with 3 options: since we already have our own hosting account and we don’t want to park our domain name, we want to use our domain name for our website, so we select the last one which is the Custom name servers (I host my domains elsewhere) and below it, you will enter the name servers one and two according to the information Hostgator gave you along with the login details in their welcome email.

After you change the name server you will need to wait for some minutes until the change replicates around the internet.

Now you can login to your hosting control panel using your domain name and start working on your business.

Come back later for the next steps to have your business online and make money.

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