This article reviews the basic steps of:

1. domain name setup
2. login to a control panel to manage the hosting account
3. set up of new email accounts
4. upload of a website to a hosting plan.

These are the first things a new web hosting customer needs to accomplish, and in a lot of cases they will not need to adjust their account again, except to view website traffic statistics. This article covers these four steps, as well as a couple of other important tasks needed to get a website up and running with your hosting plan.

Let us start by defining what a hosting plan consists of: A hosting plan is memory space on the hard drive of a server, it is internet bandwidth, and it is a control panel of features to manage your site.

Step 1: Domain Name Setup

The first step in getting your website up and running is to purchase a domain name. Current prices range between $8 to $20 per year. This will be the actual name of your website. No one else will be able to use your name once it is registered. Examples of common domain names you have heard of may include ebay.com, mapquest.com, etc. Once you have chosen a domain name, it needs to be pointed to the server that holds your hosting account, so when someone types www.yourdomainname.com into a browser, it will find the website files you will upload to your hosting plan.

Every domain name has at least 2 DNS settings that map the domain to an actual computer. The Domain Name Server (DNS) is a server that has a look up table of domain names and the IP address they belong to. The IP address is the internet address of a computer connected to the internet. There are thousands of DNS