If you want to have a space in the internet but you don't know how or where to start, then this post is for you. There are many ways to start your own website and I understand that it is overwhelming at the start. Now let's make it very simple. I am confident that you will learn how to run a website after you finish reading this post. So let's start.

Web host and domain

There are only two things you need in order to run a website: a host and a domain. A host is a computer where you save all your images, files, folders, and web pages. The host must be always ON so that it can serve request/s at any time of the day and night. The host computer is called server. Domain is the web address of your site, anybody can open your website by writing its domain at the browser's address bar. Example of a domain is rtfverterra.com, when you type rtfverterra.com at the address bar, the browser will land at the front page of this blog.

In my previous post, I discuss how to set up a local web server using XAMPP. Now that we have the local server running, we are now ready to install any web platform called Content Management System (CMS) to our local computer. There are tons of CMS available out in the internet. You can purchase one if you like but there are thousands or maybe millions that are free. We have DotNetNuke, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, Moodle, and MediaWiki to name a few. The most popular so far is Joomla. You can download them all if you want and try them all 'til you drop. But if you want to become a professional developer, master only one of the above because you have no enough lifetime to master all CMS.

This "how to" is intended for beginners and for those who want to learn to set up a website but don't have a professional web server. This is also useful for web developers, but this post is not for them, in fact I learned this from them. Some developers used local web server to develop a website and upload it when finished. This is also used by web designers in creating a new theme. You do not need this if you have no desire to learn beyond HTML.

About local web server

Web server is a computer that runs a program that accepts hypertext transfer protocol (http). To make these things simple, try to write in the address bar of your browser the address "rtfverterra.com" without the quote and noticed that it is automatically prefixed with http and the one you typed turned into http://rtfverterra.com/. Local web server resides in your local machine (your computer) with or without internet connection. You can have your own website, but this website is not available in the internet. It has an address of http://localhost/yourwebsite; the "yourwebsite" in the address can be any name.