 Hello there, so there's never been a better time to start your own personal website or websites and I think that although it's a great stride to make there are a lot of decisions that people often get confused by One of them is choosing how to host their website not just what with what host but how to host their website There are four main alternatives I want to talk about in this video and explain sort of the pros and cons and my perspective on them because I get a lot of questions about them one is traditional hosting that is Rinting some server space and uploading your website there and hosting it from there Second is using one of the many free hosts out there nowadays GitHub pages having a separate tumblr blog that serves as your domain name or Having some other kind of free host out there third is self hosting much loved by independent people there are some complications to it but it's always an interesting option and My personal favorite having a virtual private server Which I know a lot of people actually don't know about but they're very common nowadays And I will go ahead and say that that is my recommended choice, but there are pros and cons to all four of them So I want to talk about them give my perspective I'm gonna run through all four of the options and then we'll take it from there So I hope you learned something and I hope this makes it easier to make your decision when starting your website Now the first option as I said is what I'm calling traditional hosting now What I mean by this is when you usually go to some kind of domain host and you say you pay some amount of money to Basically rent server space for you to upload files and have your your website there now This of course is opposed to the other original alternative was you know just to host your own website But of course there are downsides to that. We'll talk about that when we talk about self-hosting But traditional hosting usually is relatively cheap You have to you'll pay more than you pay for your domain name usually But it's relatively cheap and you can just put files on some kind of web server So one example of it here is nearly free speech net This is a nice site. It's actually a pay-as-you-go Kind of host where you pay determine, you know depending on however much bandwidth you use But typically when you have a traditional host, you'll pay some amount which is usually around three dollars a month I think that's about a normal amount and you can upload files to a particular directory on a server and That will broadcast your website now to be clear This when you're putting your files on the server. This is actually a server used by many different people You don't have root access to this server You can't make changes to that and when I talk about VPS as I'll talk about why this is probably a sort of a bad thing But the benefits of it is that you don't actually have to worry about setting up a server You don't have to install Apache or figure out how that works or something like that So I'll go ahead. I'll say this again later in the video But if you just want to have one website and do whatever you want on it Having a traditional host is probably a good option But if you want to have more than one website, I'm gonna recommend you to use a VPS when I talk about VPS as I'll talk about that Now the second option out there which might be more appealing because it is free is To host on some kind of free provider now. This is a more general recommendation There's not like one place you can go to but I'll put it this way I have two tabs pulled up here get lab and get hub both of these sites Allow you to have what are called either get lab pages or get hub pages where you can using get upload your own website as a repository and Host it for people to see now, of course, you don't get a domain name with this But you can usually set up a domain name so it looks to this website So if your domain is my domain calm That will not just redirect to the URL of your get lab pages Blog or website generally it'll also of course totally alias it so it'll just still appear as my blog or whatever Now this is nice, of course because it's free you can I pulled up get lab and get hub here But this could apply for a blog spot Account or just blog spots still exist. I actually don't know but theoretically if it did exist It could apply to blog spot or it could apply to say a tumbler or any kind of place where you can usually have your own Account and a blog you could just use that as your website and all of those sites will usually provide a way for you to Link a domain name with it So if someone goes to that domain name they will be viewing your tumbler blog or whatever it is But they won't know that they'll just see it as whatever website now the downside of this Well the upside of course is well you get it for free you can do whatever you want Well, actually know the downside is you can do whatever you want and that is because often These kind of sites will be very constrained in what kind of user interface you can have or how the website is actually generated So on get lab and get hub for example I'm pretty sure you can have any kind of static html or you can use Hugo or Jekyll to generate a site But outside of that, there's not really that much you can do you can't really have if you need server side scripts for something You can't really do that if you need some extra software. You can't really install that. They're very limited I would recommend I would recommend get hub or get lab or one of the even you know tumbler Whatever if you have some kind of blog that already exists you can link that to a domain name Now of course this isn't really a fully customizable website But if you're just making a personal page, and that's all you need this might just be all you need So it's definitely worthwhile contemplating so option number three is Self-hosting and a lot of people get really excited when they hear about self-hosting because they like the idea of Having your own website that you manage yourself with a physical device Often with an old computer or one of these a raspberry pi now the good news is you don't need You know 30,000 cores to run a website. You don't actually need that much space But what you do need to worry about in self-hosting is stuff like bandwidth, which can honestly be a big problem or How much power consumption you have now? I will say the reason I do not recommend self-hosting especially if you're watching this video and you're looking for directions on What to do, you know how to start a first your first website? I don't recommend using self-hosting just because there are a whole bunch of complications that come into it If you want your site to be to get a good bit of traffic It's not necessarily an option to have it at your physical house or something like that now if you have access to You know someplace with which has really good internet You have lots of you know good machinery that can keep cool and not actually use that much power or better You don't have to pay for all the energy it consumes You could think about self-hosting Somewhere there, but hosting a site on your own house You should really only do that if I mean if you're a novice if you're doing it out of mere academic interest You just want to do it to just to do it and not necessarily because you want to have a website that gets a good amount of traffic Because if you want I mean when you you have to think about it like when people are accessing your website They're accessing your computer that you have on your home internet or something like that and that can Depending on how much traffic you get that can affect your home internet and it also might potentially make your website extremely sluggish So that is a big consideration depending on how much traffic you're going to get now There are examples of some people who self-host websites There is this one a couple of you guys probably know of this already. It's pickfire.tk. It's an interesting site You might want it might want to check it out. It's actually a website hosted entirely free Down from the domain name to everything else But I believe this is run on a raspberry pi as well and the thing about the site is it's cool It's nice. It's nice to have a site like this Which is again self-hosted from the bottom up But it will you know occasionally go off or when you people are seeing this video when I'm putting it out If there are thousands or hundreds of people seeing this site, it'll probably be really sluggish or not pop up So that is one concern if you want any reasonable amount of traffic, especially in acute periods of time Self-hosting is not necessarily what you want to do Now self-hosting of course does when I talk about VPS is self-hosting has a lot of the advantages of having a VPS because Really you can manage a server you have root access you can do pretty much anything you want But a VPS is probably a better choice generally So what is a VPS number four the last type of hosting and the one that I recommend and I use myself A VPS is a virtual private server It's sort of like hosting and that you're buying service buying a service from some kind of provider, but instead of Purchasing renting a portion of their hard drive you get an entire virtual server That you have root access to you can install whatever you want. You can do whatever you want You can configure whatever websites you want now I've left out some of the downsides of hosting on a traditional hosting service for this so I can explain to you Why VPS is are so nice now again? Self-hosting will have many of these benefits But I think having a VPS is a little better because you don't have to worry about bandwidth or anything like that Now here is my VPS host again. I give no particular endorsement to namecheap It just happens to be what I use now the downside to VPS is the price I pay 14 88 14 88 might sound a little scary to some of you guys But it isn't really that bad because Even though I'm paying nearly 15 dollars a month for a VPS There are a lot of costs that I'm saving now in comparison to a Physical server at your house that you're hosting of course. I'm not paying for power I don't have to worry about the bandwidth because this bandwidth is plenty For my multiple websites a terabyte of bandwidth a month And it also has an ssd and all that kind of stuff, but the real benefits of Having a VPS are pretty simple to explain Now let me put it this way. I have I have a personal website lukesmith.xyz. I have another website called larbs.xyz I have another website not related.xyz In fact, I have a bunch of different websites and all of them are hosted on the same VPS So this $15 is actually going to all those different websites Now compare that with having traditional hosting the problem with traditional hosting Is that they will often nickel and dime you for either having different domains or even subdomains So if I go to my website, so this is lukesmith.xyz on a lot of Typical hosts they will charge you extra for having a subdomain if you want blog.lukesmith.xyz Or if you just want another domain name or something like that Now if you have a VPS or a self-host or if you self-host But if you have a VPS you can get as many websites as you want All you have to do is configure it in the server, which isn't a very difficult process You can have as many websites as many subdomains as many anything that you want Additionally, you have root access to that server That means you can install whatever software you want If you want to have an IRC server, you can have that you want to have a Chan style image board. You can have that you want to have a PHP board. I once had a MyBB PHP board on a form a web form on my website. That's easy to do. You can just install that on a VPS You can't install that on traditional hosting or if you can you'll have to install Often obsolete software that they make available to you through their graphical interface that isn't very flexible And it's not it's it's only really just a big pain So if you're the kind of person who just wants one website and one website only Hosting might be okay traditional hosting might be okay But you really want a VPS if you're going to have any if you want to have multiple subdomains or domain names Or stuff like this because frankly traditional hosts since they have to configure this kind of stuff for you They will charge you out the wazoo just to have this kind of stuff and it's sort of a pain Now the other thing that's also super important nowadays Is s ssl or https. You'll see that all of my websites here. They all have https So if you are doing any kind of sensitive transactions on your website, you 1000% need https If you have just normal websites like me, you'll probably want them You'll you'll be higher in search results If you have https and it's just nice to have that extra layer of security But in order to get https or ssl you have to get a certificate which expires after a certain period But luckily nowadays there's this nice thing called certbot esf.org certbot is this nice little thing put out by the electronic frontier foundation that can get you Free ssl certificates. You don't have to pay for anything and it will actually auto renew them Now I mention this because I get all the https for all my websites with certbot And I can only use certbot because I have An actual vps If I had traditional hosting what often happens is if you want https You'll have to pay you'll have to buy a certificate either through your host or a third party That's sometimes cheaper, but then they'll charge you an installation fee And then you have to renew them after every couple of months and it's just a huge pain having to do something like that So ironically enough, um, even though again This may sound like a whole lot more money paying nearly $15 a month to host all these websites But I get all the websites. Um, I don't have to pay for https when nowadays I mean, I mean this might change mind you what I'm saying about https But right now at the beginning of 2019 Pretty much all hosts that have traditional hosting They will charge extra for you know having https and setting that up because they have to do a lot of the configuration But if you have your own vps, you can just do you don't have to worry about it You can just ignore most of what i'm saying because once you run certbot and you set it to auto renew You don't have to worry about it. It's just not something you have to think about And so that that's one of the reasons that while I actually used to use traditional hosting This is one of the reasons I actually actually switched to a vps because I realized that I would be paying Way more if I had traditional hosting and I had to maintain all these certificates and You know check and see if they were expiring. That's a big pain It's nice just having it done automatically on a server that I can control and install software on So that that is why I recommend vps is um now mine here again 1488 Um that is actually I I don't want to say it's expensive, but it's it's probably normal You can actually find sites that offer Vpses of about the same bandwidth for a good bit less I'll put some of those in the video description. Some of you guys actually recommended some of them, but just check those out All right, so there you have it again my recommendation for most people is probably to get a virtual private server But if you just really want one website and one website only and you're not too worried about configuring things Or having your own server where you can install your own stuff It might be better to get a free host or one of those cheap traditional hosting plans I'd only recommend self hosting for people who really know what they're doing Who know about their bandwidth limitations and know that they can deal with them And other stuff like that So I I recommend vps is not just for the reasons I gave that is you can have multiple domains very easily You don't have to worry about the bandwidth. You can easily set up HTTPS Not just for that, but as a general principle Having your own server to be able to maintain is very nice And a vps sort of has all the benefits of having your own A physical server in your house and that you can use that you can use the software however you want But you don't have to worry about the constraints of the internet at your home or other mechanical constraints It really Makes dealing with the website you only have to deal with the website portion You don't have to deal with the details and although you are paying money Although you have to pay a little bit more money than you would for a traditional host You actually avoid a lot of the physical difficulties of having a physical server But again, there is none of these four options are bad. That is my personal recommendation But depending on your use case or your specific needs or your constraints or your personal knowledge You might You know any one of these four could be a possible option But I will say in my In my exposure in the in the kind of people who ask me questions, especially you guys who Follow the channel Most of you guys are probably going to be best using vps's they allow you to be most Flexible without having to deal with any of that kind of overhead or frustration So anyway, I'll be doing more videos on setting up your own website Including managing an Apache web server managing a vps How to actually install sites multiple sites doing cert bot and https all these kind of things probably relatively soon So I hope you learned something from this video and I will see you guys next time