4.1 Hosting & Custom Domains

Welcome to the final chapter of this website building course. You’ve come a long way from not knowing how to build a single web page to now knowing how to build a full blown website in no time.

We’ve built a fully functioning website with all the content we wanted in there. 

But, we’re not done yet. Infact, if we wanted to share our website with someone, the link would take them to this page. Well, the website is fine, but you can't really share it. For that, you need your website to be on a custom domain.

Let’s look back at one of the episodes from earlier where we talked about hosting a domain.

We spoke about how you need to rent a space on the web, just like you would rent a space for a store in a mall. Now here’s the good news. Because you’ve built your website on Webflow, you don’t really need to worry about renting out a new space because they already have their own server - that's essentially like they own their own mall.

Now here’s the good news. Because you’ve built your website on Webflow, you don’t really need to worry about renting out a new space because they already have their own server. So they are happy to store websites that have been built with their tool, on their own server at a monthly cost.

But if you do want to find another space on the web, you can always download the entire website that you just built and upload it onto your server. Now, that’s a rather complex process and kinda unnecessary if you are building a website on Webflow. We highly recommend using the Webflow hosting services so it makes your job easier.

Now, how do you obtain these hosting services? You need to first go to the dashboard here, and click on these three dots on the website that you want to host.

Click on settings and then go onto the hosting tab on the top, over here. This will show you the different plans you can choose from. Once you pick a plan, click on “Add a CMS”, and just pay as you wish and you're ready to go. And at $16 a month billed annually, we're going to be able to virtually host our website.

The next thing you want to have is your own web address, or what we call a domain. In our case, we want the domain lancifyabroad.com But where do we find this address, and how can we own it?

Well, we need to actually buy this domain. You can do this with a website like GoDaddy.com. Once you're on this page, you can type in the domain that you wish to buy, and see if it’s available. In this case, it says unavailable because we bought it when planning this course, but otherwise the process is simple. You just add to cart like you were shopping at any e-commerce store and go ahead and complete your purchase.

Now that we’ve gone ahead and purchased the domain, the only thing left is to connect our website to the domain. So let’s go back to the hosting page. All you have to do is go back to your website project, and click on the top right here where it says  “Publish”. Click here where it says “custom domains”, and just add our new domain.

Finally, click on “Publish to selected domains” and there you go! You’re done. Let’s have a look at our website.

Just type in your custom web address on your browser and there you have it! You now have a fully functioning site on the web that has its own address. And that's how you get your custom hosting and web domain going.

 Now, we’re almost at the end of this series on building a highly converting website, but we have two episodes to go before we say our goodbyes so let’s get into that.