Step by step instructions to host your Linode website

With a website, you can take your home-run business online.

But, for a newbie internet user, things may look expensive and complex.

Luckily, with cloud hosting solutions like Linode, that’s not the case.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from customers to help them setup their personal websites in Linode as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, we’ll see the steps involved in running a website from your Linode server.

Initial requirements for a website

As the first step, we need to set up a Linode server. Although there are many preset configurations available, our Dedicated Engineers recommend customers to choose the right server configuration.

This depends on the type of website that you want to build, the amount of data in it, expected number of visitors to your website etc. Again, the choice of programming language of the website also matters in the server selection. For website newbies, there are options to create website using popular software like WordPress, Joomla etc.

Based on the customer requirements, we setup the webserver on the Linode server. Usually, the popular choice will be Apache or Nginx webserver.

Steps to create your first website in Linode server

From our experience in managing Linode servers, we often find that customers have difficulty after web server setup. The real dilemma sets in publishing the website to the Linode server.

We’ll now see the steps involved in this.

1. Get a domain name

First and foremost, to make the website online, customers need to own a domain name. For this, a domain purchase from the domain registrar is done first.

Again, its ideal to have this domain name match up your business type. That would attract more visitors to your website. However, some domains will be already taken by others and may not be available for purchase.

In that case, we help customers to choose domains from the available pool. When the domain name is ready, we add proper nameservers for the domain.

Some may prefer to use their domain registrar’s name servers or Linode’s nameservers. Either way, our Dedicated Engineers ensure that domain points to the correct IP address in the Linode server.

2. Build the website

Secondly, we need to develop the website. This website should contain all the details about your products, or even a shopping cart based on the business type.

Customers usually build the website in their home computers and have a thorough checking of the features and utilities.

3. Transfer the contents to Linode server

You have built the website on your computer. Now comes the question,

But, how will the world view my site at www.example.com?

For this, we need to make the website contents online. There are many methods to transfer the website contents to the Linode server. Our Dedicated Engineers recommend customers to copy the files using popular FTP clients like FileZilla, CureFTP, etc. The advantage is that you can just drag and drop the file from your home PC to the Linode server.

Similarly, for some users we suggest using SSH protocol to copy the files. But, for this, SSH service should be running on the Linode server. Also, Linode firewall should allow connections from your IP address.

4. Check website online

Ok. Now the files are uploaded to the Linode server. Here, our Support Engineers modify the permissions and ownership of the files so that it is accessible via internet.

Additionally, we take special care to give proper permissions to configuration files. For example, setting write permissions on such critical files can cause attacker to tamper with the site configuration.

Then, we test the site preview using the link http://serverIP and fix errors if any.

When things are working fine, we edit DNS records of the domain and point it to the correct IP address.

There you go, your website is online!

[Need help to make website online? Our Linode Experts can help you.]

Conclusion

It’s pretty easy to setup website in your Linode server. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers help customer to make their website online.