In the first part I wrote about Joomla in general, now let's get started to get our own website online. We need

• a webhost (a place where your website is stored)
  
• a domain (i.e infoxenter.com)

Webhost

You should look for a webhost with the following features:

• PHP4 and PHP5 support
• MySQL database
• CPanel (not essential but this is a well known frontend to configure and maintain your website. It is easy to use and also this tutorial will tell you how to change things using CPanel).
• Shared web hosting: This is the most cost efficient solution, you are actually sharing one server with many other websites. The disadvantage is of course that you share the server, so if another website on this server has very high traffic, your website will also get slow. If you want your own server you have to go for a dedicated server, but this is very expensive and usually the solution for bigger companies.

If you google these keywords you'll get about 258,000 results... So which one is the best?

As we started InfoXenter I asked myself the same question, so first I tried Hostmonster (aka Bluehost). Many people will tell you it's good, many will tell you it's bad. Well my experience was quite bad, it went smoothly for about a week, but then  my website was unreachable for many hours and also on several days. So I looked for alternatives and asked Hostmonster for my money back, which they did without any hassle.

So here my short list, there might be better ones, feel free to leave a comment.

• Hostgator (USD 4.95 per month for 350GB space for the website)
  
• Lunarpages (USD 6.95 per month 1,500 GB space) (sometimes cheaper when they have a promotion)
  
• iHubNet (USD 8.95 per month for 2GB)
  

The actual price might vary depending on how long you subscribe.

Currently I have websites hosted by Lunarpages and iHubNet, and for both it has been a quite good experience. iHubnet seems to have a faster connection/server but you have to pay more for much less space. Space matters if you want to have videos and thousands of pictures on your website.

Domain

The three webhosts I mentioned are all US companies, so they only offer domains which are widely available in the USA, e.g .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, . name, .us. If you want another domain like ".hk" you have two choices:

1. You look for a webhost which has the above mentioned features and can offer you the domain you like,
2. You register the domain with another registrar. You can look at the IANA Root Zone Database, which lists all available Top Level Domains. Click on the one you like and on the bottom of the following page you'll find a headline "Subdomain information".
   For ".hk" you will find this Link: URL for registration services: http://www.hkirc.hk.

For other domains you will find similar entries. Follow the link you found and check below things:

• Can I register domains directly?
• Am I allowed to register this domain? Some domains have some requirements that must be met, e.g. live in the country where a certain top level domain belongs to.
• How much does it cost? Sometimes it is cheaper to find a provider.
• Are there any subdomains that might be interesting? For Hong Kong you can get .hk, .com.hk, .org.hk, .gov.hk, .net.hk , idv.hk and also some Chinese, but some of these also have certain requirements, e.g. .com.hk is only available for companies registered in Hong Kong.
• How do I set my DNS records? You must enter two DNS entries to your domain, so that the domain entry points to the right server. First ask your webhost which DNS records you should use and than enter these for your domain. If you're not sure how to do this ask your webhost and domain registrar for help. Usually they are very helpful.

How to check if a domain is still available

Your webhost or domain registrar usually offer a form where you can check availability. You can also use the Whois command which is directly available in the command line of Mac OSX or Linux, just type "whois domain". You'll get a text answer which shows you either the domain owner or it will say something like "No match found", meaning it is still available.

Alternatively you can also you http://www.whois.net/ which offers a similar service on the Web.

If you find a suitable domain you can go ahead and register it and also subscribe to a webhost.

If all the domain names you liked are used, you can try to write to the owner of the domain if he would release it, you can find the domain owner with Whois as mentioned above.

Whoo, this got longer than I thought, but it also the most troublesome part, because it is really difficult to find reliable information, which webhost is good or bad.There are quite a few comparism lists available but sometimes I got the impression they are sponsored by the webhosts themselves.

In the next part I'll show to to install Joomla (finally!).