Development, Web Hosting

I’m often asked how to set up a website, either for personal use or for a new business. Fortunately, it’s easy and very affordable to create a new web site, or to add a blog or forum to an existing web site. You don’t even have to know HTML or web programming, thanks to several free and powerful website templates.

Here are three steps to creating a new web site from start to finish.

Check if your domain name is available.

A domain is the name of your website, such as rickysays.com or dad-eblog.com. Domains normally end with .com, .org, .net, .biz, and .info – the most popular being the .com ending.

Here’s a link to check if your domain name is available: Check now (click “Domain Check” once you’re there)

Checking if a domain is available is completely free, and there’s no obligation to purchase the domain. However, if you think of a great idea for a website name, you’re smart to reserve it as soon as possible – before someone else snatches it for themselves!

In fact, most web hosting providers give you a free domain name when you sign up with them – read on:

Sign up with a web hosting provider.

A web host is a company that stores your web pages and makes them viewable on the Internet. They also provide email accounts, blogs, forums, and even online store fronts.

In a previous life I sold and delivered technical training for Jive Software for several years, traveling around the world teaching Fortune 500 companies how to enhance their business using social. I quickly discovered that an effective training program has to be flexible. What worked for one company missed the mark for another. So I adapted and built out more…

Centos comes with a powerful firewall called iptables, that gives you very granular control over access to your server. Iptables is basically a list of of rules that tells the system what connections to accept or reject, and can protect both incoming and outgoing connections on specific ports. Set up an Escape Route Before you do anything with iptables, make sure…