So last week, I talked about the 5 Second Rule that helped me overcome my procrastination. I ended up buying my own domain name and website and then I finally created and published my first ever video on my new blog. Check it out here if you haven’t watched the video yet.
When I went to visit my sisters for a meeting to talk about My English Matters, I showed them my video and the blog post and the question they asked me was: How do you create a website? How much does it cost?
So I thought that this would be a good topic to teach as it relates to online business and marketing. This was also something I had to figure out for myself through lots of reading online. I remember getting confused with certain terms such as domain name and website hosting, so I hope that this post will try to make everything as simple as possible for you.
When you have an online business, the most obvious thing you’ll need is a website. You can start off with a free website through wordpress.com, but if you’re ready to look more professional online, you’ll need your own .com.
Creating your own website is easy and can take less than 5 minutes. First, you’ll need to figure out what your domain name will be. This could be your name or the name of your online business. For example, my domain name is amnahshurfa.com which is also my own name (so creative, right?). Thanks Mama and Papa for giving me such a unique name that no one has bought the domain name yet. 
To look for available domain names, you can visit Instant Domain Search. Just type in the preferred name you’d like for your website to see if it’s available. If it is, then that’s great! If it isn’t, then you’ll have to think up other names. Try to keep your domain name simple and not too complicated to spell. When we started My English Matters last year, we actually wanted English Matters, but the domain name, englishmatters.com, was already taken. So we added “My” at the front and, as they say, the rest is history.
After you’ve figured out what your domain name will be, you don’t need to buy it yet. A lot of web hosting services will usually give you your domain name for free as part of their package. Please make sure to check whether the web hosting plans give you a free domain name or not.
“Wait, what the heck is web hosting?” I hear you say. Web hosting is the service that enables your website to be viewed on the Internet.
Still confused? To put it in simple terms, imagine an office space. An office space would have an address where people would be able to find it. The office space itself is located in a building that provides services such as WiFi, electricity and running water.
So the website host is kind of like that building to the office space. It provides services such as technology, storage space and allows the website to be viewed on the Internet. Whereas the domain name is kind of like the address of the office space. It’s where people can find you online.
Hope that makes sense.
Now you can start looking for web hosting services online. There are a lot out there, but popular ones would be BlueHost, Hostgater, Siteground. They all have different plans and are relatively affordable. You can choose a monthly plan (where you pay them monthly) or an annual plan (you pay once for the whole year and it’s usually cheaper).
I have chosen Siteground for my own website because I found that their plans were slightly cheaper when I was looking for a host for My English Matters. Choose the plan that is best for you money-wise and take note of other things that you’ll need for your website. If you’re starting out, you can purchase the plan that doesn’t require a lot of storage space (it’s the cheapest plan and you can always update later if you need more storage space).
I chose the Startup plan from Siteground. The domain name was given free and they also provide email for you so you can have a dedicated email address (example is info@myenglishmatters.com). This makes your online business look more professional than a personal email like yourname@gmail.com.
Once you choose your website host, make the purchase! You’ll need a credit card or debit card for this. It would usually cost around RM300 to RM400 for one year, but do bear in mind that the price may increase for the following year because most website hosts provide discount packages only for the first year. This is to attract new buyers.
After you’ve made the purchase, your website host will guide you in choosing the domain name and creating content for your new website. This is where wordpress.org comes in. WordPress.org is a website platform. It’s a platform that you use to write your blog posts and publish any content. Most website hosting services such as BlueHost and Siteground will guide you through installing WordPress.org so that you can immediately start creating your content.
So there you have it. I seriously think creating a website would take less time than actually writing a whole blog post about it. But I do hope this post has been helpful for you. I’ll be posting a video on this topic soon for those too lazy to read so watch this space!
Update 24 September! Here’s the video for you! It’s a quick one.
Do you have any questions? What would you like me to teach next week? Hit me up in the comments below! I’d love to hear from you!