Welcome back, this is part 2 of a video tutorial ‘Build your own business website under 100$’.
In this video we will buy the domain and hosting for your business website from OVH hosting, and install WordPress on your website in 4 steps.
First step is to choose your website address, also called a domain.
If you already have a domain in GoDaddy, please see the bonus video about connecting GoDaddy domain with OVH hosting.
The easiest way to get a domain for your business is by going to ovh.com, and scroll down to find the field where you can type an address to see if it’s available and how much it costs.
So go ahead, type in your idea for your website and hit enter.
Choose one with .com address that is short as possible and easy to write.
Avoid using weird extensions even if they are cheap, because they look spammy.
And don’t waste money on expensive domain either, you will need it more elsewhere.
Once you are happy with your selection, click continue.
Next select DNS Anycast to speed up the site.
Second step is choosing a hosting service for the domain. Hosting is simply the online computer and disk space where your website lives, and people can visit it with their browsers.
If you did the previous step, OVH automatically offers you a hosting plan. Choose the Personal plan, because it has very good features that are more than enough for a new business website.
The Personal Plan is great to start with, because you get a free domain for the first year, 100 gigabytes of free space for your website, you can create 10 email addresses with your domain and you get a database for WordPress. Looking ahead, you can use the same hosting for 5 different domains, so the value is unbeatable compared to the competition.
Next, let’s not select WordPress to be installed to the website, even if we have the option here. I find it easier and faster to do it manually. You also have the option to pre-install Drupal or Joomla on the website, but these more complex content management systems are not covered in this tutorial.
And for now you can skip the CDN Basic if you want to save money. Later on when you want to optimize the loading speed, you can add it to your plan.
What is great about OVH, is that they offer a free SSL certificate for your personal plan. (GoDaddy doesn’t.) SSL is very important to get ranked as a secure website by search engines.
Third step is to create an account to OVH by giving your name, email address and a password. Open a notepad and write down your login information so you don’t forget it. Agree to the terms and click Create an account. You will receive a verification email from OVH, so go on and open your email to copy the verification code and paste on the field.
On contact details, give your information. For a personal plan, it’s ok to select private individual. Fill all the remaining fields to Create your account.
Now we get to the check-out, and from my experience it’s better to pay with PayPal to get your website online soon as possible. For some reason the credit card method has not been working when I tried it. If you need to use the credit card and it doesn’t work, you can ask for help from their customer service.
To send a support ticket, you can access the Help centre from the dashboard by clicking the button on the bottom right. Scroll down to select Contact Us, confirm your account, and next, select Billing and order, and then choose Create a ticket.
Confirm your account again, and now you are in you manager page. Click the open a support ticket button, and select the relevant information.
Scroll to the bottom and click No.
Now you can give your invoice number, write down the service you were trying to order, and give the additional information, telling what happened when you tried to check out.
To avoid this extra step, it’s faster and easier to use PayPal, so I recommend doing that.
To finish paying with PayPal, accept the terms, and click on the PayPal button. Once you have logged in to PayPal, click Pay, and you should return to OVH checkout page.
Now, click Continue Order and you should see this page. You can now wait few minutes for the payment to be validated, and then click on the Track my order.
And on My Orders page you can hit refresh, until you see that the payment has been validated. Now we are ready to use the OVH manager where we can setup and install WordPress manually.
Fourth step is to log in to OVH manager, if you haven’t already. and click on the Web cloud tab that is on the top row. Now you will see your control panel for your hosting service. Once the page opens, you’ll notice on the left-side menu the name of your hosting. Click on it, and browse to 1-click modules tab where you should see No Result.
Now, click the Add a module button, and select WordPress. Click the dropdown menu open, and select the short version of the domain where you want to install WordPress, that means without the www if front.
Select installation in Advanced mode and click next.
The database for WordPress should be automatically installed and selected. If not, go to the Database tab and see if it is installed. If you need to change the password, you can do it by clicking the three dots at the end of the line. Save these details in your notes.
Now let’s go back where we were.
Hit Next, and on this page, create your login details for WordPress. Make sure you also write the username and password to a notepad.
Select again the right domain from the list, and the language you want WordPress to be installed in.
Lastly, remove the last part of the installation path and leave it empty, to keep the url as short as possible.
Hit Next, and finally Confirm.
Now you will see a notification that the module is being installed. Give it about 10 minutes to finish, and click on the three dots at the end of the row. Choose from the drop-down menu choose Access the module’s administration interface and we are done here!
If you had any trouble at any stage of this part, write down your question below, and I will answer as soon as I can.
See you in the next video, where we will access WordPress and get ready to create our first website!
