 All right, so we've learned what WordPress is. We've learned things, how to choose them, what to be aware of, plugins, same thing. We've learned what Gutenberg is gonna be as it comes out, contact form, SEO, what everything we need to have a successful site. Now, what do you do with it? How do people view it? How do people go to it? Well, that's where hosting comes into play. You could have your own local host, there's a lot that goes into that. But before that, you have to think, domain name registrations, domain names. What's the name of your website? This is your digital presence, how you're uniquely identified. Think dreamhost.com or costco.com, any major site. It's very simple, straight to the point, it's what the business is, the name. And that's very important, because it acts as your digital phone number. You could have an IP address to, or like for example, what's your website? Oh, 192.5.163.2, okay. Or peddlingpusher.com or peddlingpeddles.com, right? It's a lot easier to remember, it's a lot more to the point, it's very generic and easy to remember. You own that name. Now, typically it's in your increments, but you always can renew it, obviously. So that's, you have to take that step, you have to have an idea on what you're doing with your domain name and how people are gonna view your site. Now, what's involved on the hosting side? Now that we have our site, we have our name, where are we going with that? If you were to try to do this locally, well you need to set up a web server, that's Apache, if you're looking at a more technical side, Apache. And then there's Nginx. Apache is the most popular one out there right now. Then you need a PHP interpreter. How does Apache read your site files? You need MySQL, that's where all WordPress data is stored. PHP MyAdmin, it's a tool that you would use to manipulate the database. FTP, how do you get your files onto the web server? FTP, file transfer protocol. Security, that's a huge thing in today's day and age. You have to worry about security, it's super important. You don't wanna have to worry about all of that. That's where a major web host would come in handy. They do all of that and more already. They worry about performance, security, stability, technical support, what happens when your site goes down? It will eventually at some point have an issue. Hopefully it doesn't, there's a good chance that even if it's a minor issue, like I can't upload an image. Well, is it a server issue or is it a plugin issue? A web host, a good web host will be able to point you in that direction. How do you move forward with the issue that you're having? Simply put, a web host rents you resources, tied to the server to store and serve your content to your customers, visitors, viewers, et cetera. Website management using a host. Now every good web host is going to have some kind of a control panel so you can easily manipulate their services to modify your site settings. So here's an example, and it zoomed in a lot for some reason, of the Dreamhost control panel. Here you'd be able to manipulate all of your domain settings. You can manage your hosting settings, your registration, your domain name, your secure SSL certificate. With Dreamhost you get a free Let's Encrypt certificate which if you care about SEO, which is how visitors get to your site, you want a Let's Encrypt certificate. All major search engines now will downgrade you, especially Google, downgrades your SEO based on if your site is secure or not. Now, also other major web hosts will have this. One click install. To install WordPress, it's as simple as going here, go to the blue W, choose your domain name, create the database, done. WordPress is installed. You get an email, you connect, you're building your site. Now, how do you get your site live? Now that you have all of these tools laid out, I like to use a duplicator plugin when I don't have direct access to the files. A duplicator plugin, it's a way to manipulate the site files in the database from between domain names, servers, different environments. So it's effectively a tool that you use to move your site. So you have your site built on your local environment for server press. Well, how do you get it live? How do other viewers get it, see it? Now we covered how to install a plugin real quick already. So you just go to the plugins page, search duplicator, install, and then you see that option pop up in the lower left, create a package. If I'm moving too fast, please let me know. It runs a quick scan to make sure everything's looking good and that there's no issues. Then you click build. Then all you do is installer archive. You download those two files. You FTP them to the server, which I personally like to use FileZella, it's a great program. Once you have the files, you just put in your host name, which is your domain name, your user, your password, which you would get from your host. Connect, and then you would just drag the files and drop them. I apologize, I stepped out of order a little bit. So how easy is it to get a site online? Well, you have your domain name, you add it to the panel. Okay, so with www and your URL or not, that's something you wanna decide. With WordPress, it's best to choose one or the other. You don't wanna try to make it work with both for multiple reasons. One, WordPress doesn't play very nicely with both due to the way the URLs are encoded. You can start having redirect errors. I personally don't like www. And even if you do choose www, you can still just give the root URL like stanton.xyz. WordPress could be set to use www.stanton.xyz and you could still give out just the root domain and it should still redirect. Preference, really, in my opinion, it's preference. Yeah, it used to be required to tell the browser, you're searching the World Wide Web, but that's not a thing anymore. When you choose a user, create a new user as ideal, then click fully host. Now, with a web host, they do everything for you already. All the aforementioned tools and backups, all the aforementioned tools and applications are already available. Backups, now, you shouldn't ever rely on your host to solely do the backups unless it's strictly stated in the contract. If it's not strictly stated in the contract in terms of service, well, more than likely any good host is taking backups, you don't want all your eggs in one basket. You should always take your own backups, which we covered a good backup plugin earlier, Updraft Plus. High up time, they want your site up. If your site's not up, you're not happy. Then you're coming, you're asking technical support, well, why is my site not up? You're generating support, which generates cost. Doesn't make sense. So they want your site up. Simplified through a control panel. You're not having to configure Apache. You're not having to install anything. Just all there, done, ready to go. Technical support, we covered that. All you should have to do is maintain the WordPress installation itself. Design, backup, troubleshoot, various issues. So I fully hosted the domain. Then you install WordPress really quick. You would just choose that. And then it would be done. Just like that. Okay, so you can usually use like the most popular web host. Some of the bigger web hosts use a thing called C-Panel, proprietary software. They can, you can usually manipulate your site files in through that, through like a browser-based application. Dreamhost offers that as well, but it doesn't have the SFTP protocol, which is port 22, which is the secure file transfer protocol. You want your files transmitted securely. You don't want it plain text. So you could use the browser-based, there is browser-based options. In my opinion, the best way forward is to use a application such as FileZilla and make sure it's SFTP. So now, I, oh. They will be. Correct. So I do apologize that I stepped out of line there. Out of order. So there's two ways to go about it. One, which is install WordPress. You have a fresh site. You don't have any content yet. You just need to get online. You need to get building and you don't wanna do it on a local environment for whatever reason. There's numerous reasons why you may not want to. And there's numerous reasons why you do want to. So you would install WordPress. You'd be off and running. On this domain, I actually didn't install WordPress because the duplicator plugin, if you're not using the premium version, doesn't want WordPress there already. So on the left side, you have the local site. That's your computer. That's where your physical computer and all the files in it. And then the right side is the remote side. That's the web server. That's what you just connected to and where you're gonna upload the files. So the domain name I'm working with actually is the wc.stanton.xyz. And as you see down here, there's no files. There's a quick start, but really, there's no actual files. And we put that quick start just to make sure that they don't see a blank index. So it's almost here. And as soon as you put any files there, it overrides that. So we have our two files. We'll fold here. So we have the archive. You just simple click and drag. And then you'll have that second file, which is the installer.php. Another just simple drag. And this process will work with any host. It's very simple. So then we just wait for that download bar down here to complete, which it did complete. Come here, put in the domain name slash installer.php. Now it brings you to a few steps. First, make sure that the archive is present, that other file it needed. Make sure that all the permissions and extensions that goes with WordPress are available and ready to go. Options, if you're changing the domain name, you might need this. Well, that's set somewhere else. Sorry. So then you just accept the terms. It's gonna go through, it's gonna unpack, and it's gonna get you to the point where it's gonna ask for your database information, which is where most of your customizations for WordPress is stored. And then in the dream host panel, it's actually really easy to find. It's right there under advanced, MySQL databases. And you'd be able to get your host name, your database name, your user, and then click the user to get the password. I started all right here for ease. I know very original database name user and password. Well, that's not good. Now it wants to know the URL you want set and the path on the server that the files will exist under. Typically the default settings are best unless you're changing the domain name for some reason, or you're nesting it under a subdirectory. Let's say you already have WordPress installed at wc.stanzen.xyz, but you're adding a secondary site. You'd put it like wc.stanzen.xyz slash secondary site. Obviously you would use a different name, just an example. And then you give it that title, which is up here, what's up at the top. It will carry over the data you had from the previous example or from the previous install. Click next, and then you're, that's it, you're done. So if we go to wc.stanzen.xyz, again, here we see that WordPress install. Now I didn't customize it and go through all most of the steps, but as you can see here, the WCLA.dev environment matches. It's very simple to get your site up and running. The hardest part is the design part. Once you have that, it's all downhill. And I think, hmm, do we have any questions? Could I clarify something? Updraft plus, if your host does any special caching, they may need to add a rule, but if you're using a basic hosting plan, typically it won't conflict at all, if that makes sense.