DreamHost Website Hosting: How To Set Up Web Hosting ...Yourself
I use DreamHost as my own web hosting and domain registration service because they are affordable, reliable, have excellent customer support, and they are fun to work with. I recommend DreamHost to all my new website clients:
If you want to set up hosting with DreamHost.com, follow these steps:
- Click on the icon above to go to DreamHost.com
- They recently started offering Free Trials, just continue with the process.
- Select whether you pay monthly, for 1 year, for 2 years, etc
- You won't need a private server.
- If you need an online store, you'll need a Unique IP and SSL Certificate, but skip the phone support and VPN access (their free email support is fabulous).
- Uncheck Google Apps unless you are sure you need it.
- Select the appropriate choice for "For my first hosted domain"
- Enter your domain name
- Choose a FTP/Shell Username ( anything you want )
- Choose a First Email address (like "info" or "contact" or "Jill")
- Fill out your personal info
- Promo Code or email of who referred you: Jill@AldebaranWebDesign.com
- Agree to terms and Pay
- They'll send you a bunch of emails, which you will then need to forward to me.
Transferring Your Existing Website Hosting to DreamHost.com
DreamHost has detailed the step by step process to transfer your existing website (that's currently hosted by someone else) to DreamHost. Please go here to read the details of how to transfer your website to DreamHost (I'm happy to do this for you).
- Sign up for hosting with DreamHost (see previous section)
- Upload existing website files to the specified server you received from DreamHost
- Set DreamHost to mirror the files you uploaded to preview your site.
- Add New Domain / Sub-Domain: nameofyourwebsite.dreamhosters.com
- Domain That Mirrors: nameofyourwebsite.dreamhosters.com
- Domain To Mirror: nameofyourwebsite.com
- Mirror With This Domain Now!
- (be patient, it will take several hours for this new subdomain to propagate)
- Preview the new mirrored site. This is how your website will appear on DreamHost's server. Look carefully, make sure everything is there and working.
- Set up email accounts on DreamHost.
- Make sure you have local copies of all your email from your current (soon to be old) hosting company. (Verify this by disconnecting your computer from the internet and making sure you can open and read all of these email messages - "local" means they are physically on your computer, not on the email server. This verification is a very important step.)
- Changed the DNS settings on your Domain Registrar to point to DreamHost:
- ns1.dreamhost.com
- ns2.dreamhost.com
- ns3.dreamhost.com
- Wait for DNS changes to propagate - might take an hour or a day.
- Reconfigure your email application to retrieve your email from DreamHost (see section below).
- Test out email (send and receive messages).
- If all's well, you can safely cancel your old hosting company.
How To Read Your DreamHost Email
There are two ways to read your DreamHost email:
1. Webmail: Read your DreamHost email directly from their webmail tool
2. Outlook, etc: Configure your email application to fetch your email from DreamHost
(You'll note that I didn't list "Forwarding" as a way to read email...and this is for a reason, many companies, like AOL and Comcast, will incorrectly label forwarded email as spam and not reliably deliver it - so I don't recommending forwarding for my clients)
1. Webmail: To read your email using DreamHost's webmail tool, simply go to:
https://www.webmail.yourwebsite.com , log in with your mail username and password, and that's it. This is especially useful for checking your mail when you're away from your own computer and have internet access (like from a library, internet cafe, etc).
2. Outlook, etc: To read your DreamHost email using your own email application, please follow these instructions:
General Email Configuration:
• Incoming mail server: mail.yourdomainname.com
• Incoming mail server type: POP3 or IMAP (your choice)
• Incoming mail server username: yourname@yourdomainname.com (use whole thing!)
• Outgoing (SMTP) mail server: mail.yourdomainname.com
• My server requires authentication: checked. (use same settings as incoming mail server)
• Use secure password authentication: not checked.
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How To Change Your DreamHost Email Settings:
Go to http://mailboxes.yourdomainname.com and you put in your domain name in place of the light blue writing. From here, enter your email address and password to access the mailbox control panel.
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How To Sign Up for a PayPal Business Account:
Need to receive payments online? Whether you need a complete online store or simple "buy now" buttons, creating a PayPal Business Account is pretty easy. Click on the image below to sign up for a PayPal Business account:
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Choose colors and fonts for your website:
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Select Royalty-Free Photographs and Graphics to use for your website:
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Referrals:
Virtual Tour - 360 degree Photography
Lyle Jansma from Jasma Design creates amazing virtual tours. Check out the work he did for the Olympic Flight Museum - like being inside the cockpit!
Sign Company - City Lights Sign Company
If you have a new business in the Seattle area and are in need of a sign for your storefront, contact Martha Davis at City Lights Sign Company.
Small Business Computer and Networks - Vital Information Technology
Vital IT designs, installs and supports computer networks. They help businesses reduce their overhead, get the most from their technology and plan for, prevent, and recover from hardware failures and data loss. They are experts with both Mac and PC, are Microsoft Certified and have a proven record of changing computer environments from cost centers to assets without breaking budgets. Vital IT, just a bunch of honest, hardworking, IT geniuses.
Yuen Li Portrait Photography
Several of my clients have gotten great photos of themselves for their websites from Yuen Li Portrait Photography. They have several locations around Washington, Oregon and California.
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Help! My Website is Down!
First thing, don't panic. Website hosting companies are not perfect and sometimes things happen that cause websites to go down for short periods of time. Aldebaran Web Design does not provide website hosting services, therefore if you are a client and your site is down, you need to contact your website hosting company immediately - do not wait and hope it fixes itself.
• If you don't know who your hosting company is, read this article.
• If your website hosting company is DreamHost, submit a support ticket immediately.
• If you can't reach DreamHost, visit their emergency status page. Note that DreamHost does not offer phone support, but do offer live chat if you've added that to your hosting plan.
And if you'd like to be notified automatically if your website goes down, please contact me about adding Web-Stat to your website.
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