Web Hosting Explained

Web hosting allows you to have your own website available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your site could be a personal homepage about you and your family, an online diary, information about a club or group, or a web presence for your business.

We provide the servers and tools you need to make your site functional and available. You build the site, we give it a home.

What do I need?

You will need a domain name for your web hosting - the domain is the part after the http://www. in your website address. You have three choices when it comes to getting a domain name for your hosting:

1. Register a new domain - from as little as £7.50 you can have your very own domain name, giving you a memorable and professional looking website address and email addresses. Click here for more information on registering domain names with Purple Cloud.
2. If you have already registered a domain name, you can transfer it to us for use with your web hosting. Click here for more information.
3. If you do not wish to register a domain name, we can provide you with a Purple Cloud subdomain free of charge - for example, smith.purplecloud.net.

Once you have chosen your domain name, you need to decide what features you require. Each of our packages includes a different mix of features and are priced accordingly, but if none of our packages are quite right then you can upgrade them to create your own customised package. Click here for details of our packages and here for upgrades.

How do I build my website?

The web page you are reading now, like all others, is defined by its HTML code. Your browser interprets the HTML and draws the website based on the instructions it contains - e.g. what text to display where, what colours to use, and so on. Web pages can also contain images, video and other multimedia content, but how and where this appears is all defined by the HTML.

You can see the HTML for this page by selecting the "View source" option in your browser.

So the next question is, how do you create the HTML for your website?

WYSIWYG

The simplest way to create a website is to use WYSIWYG software, which stands for "what you see is what you get". You design you pages in a graphical environment, choosing fonts and colours, placing images and deciding where the links should go. The software translates your site design into the equivalent HTML code.

Popular examples of WYSIWYG packages include Microsoft's FrontPage and Adobe's Dreamweaver.

Writing HTML

HTML is not a complicated language to learn, so many people choose to write it themselves. This can often allow you to create more complex sites than WYSIWYG application would allow.

You can choose from many applications that help you write HTML code. Some, such as Dreamweaver, allow you to combine the speed of a WYSIWYG tool with the flexibility of being able to alter the HTML yourself.

There are several websites providing tutorials for HTML and other website related technologies - our favourite is W3 Schools. Alternatively you will find a huge choice of books covering website development, HTML and scripting languages.

Transferring your site to your servers

Whatever method you use to create your website, you will ultimately end up with a set of HTML files plus any images or other multimedia files that make up your site. You then need to upload these files from your computer to our servers in order to make your website accessible to the rest of the world.

You can do this via the following methods:

1. FTP - You use an FTP application to access your space on our servers and move files to/from your computer. There are many free FTP applications available to download.
2. Using our web based File Manager tool.

For help, please see our Knowledge Base.

Advanced tools

Advanced users can enhance their websites with interactive applications such as discussion forums, photo galleries and shopping carts.

These features require use of server side scripting. Instead of writing the HTML files and uploading them to our server, you write programs which themselves generate HTML. Whenever someone requests a page on your site powered by one of these "scripts", the code is executed and the HTML generated sent back to the visitor's browser. The most popular scripting language, and the easiest to learn, is PHP.

Many scripts make use of databases to store information provided by users, e.g. posts on a forum. Scripts can read and write information from/to a database as part of the process of generating the HTML for the resulting page.

Installing existing scripts

Even if you have no knowledge of scripting, you can install applications that others have made available onto your website. The process will generally consist of downloading the script(s) from the developer to your computer, uploading them to your webspace, configuring options and in some cases creating a database for the application to use.

We also have a range of scripts available for you to install from our Integrator tool. This will set up your chosen application in just a few clicks.