Today I’m going to show you how to register your domain and setup a hosting account with BlueHost. We’re going to start this process by coming over to this link under Lesson 1 Resources for Bluehost. Click on that link and you are taken to the new Bluehost home page.
First Choose a Domain Name
They currently have a deal for $4.95 a month now which we’re going to take advantage of. We’re going to hit Get Started Now and search for a new domain. Now, if you don’t already have a domain name figured out, go back and take a look at that article, Selecting a Business Domain Name. Once you get the domain name that makes sense to you you’ll come back to this.
Register the Domain Name
The domain name I’m going to register today is going to be byobbootcamp.com. Then we just fill out this whole form. I’ll add my name, address, phone and email. Rick Anderson and 935 Daley Street Edmonds 98020, phone number is 2068015209 and my email address is rick@byobwebsite.com.
You have a choice of number of months to purchase, so 12 months at $6.95 a month, 24 months or 36 months and I’m going to buy the 36 months package.
Deactivate the Sitelock Domain Security and deactivate Who is Privacy. Actually at this point I’m going to deactivate the Site Backup Pro as well. Then I’m going to click on More payment options because I want to pay with PayPal. I’ll select PayPal. Then confirm that I’ve read the terms of service.
Upgrade Services Available
Click next and this is going to take me to my PayPal account, it cost me $178.20. Agree and pay. Once you’ve done that it takes you to these upgrades that you may wish to purchase. Migration Services is if you’ve got your website some place else they’ll charge you $100 to move it. If you want a 45-minute call with one of their experts, which I warn you is a bit of a sales pitch, then you could click that.
You can also add other domain names but we won’t do that. I’m not going to add Site Backup Pro, Dedicated IP Address or PositiveSSL Certificate. We’re not going to do Search Engine Jumpstart or SEO linking or the Website Builder.
In fact, we’re not going to do any of those upgrades so we’re just going to hit complete and it says, “Congratulations”, “welcome to bluehost”, “Your purchase was sent a confirmation email”.
Setup Password
I need to set up a secure password so we’ll go back up here and create our own password. This should be a strong password which includes letters, numbers and special characters. And then we’ll create. I think a strong password is very important for many reasons the least of which is that it will help prevent your site from getting hacked.
Login to Site
The site we’re going to log in to is byobbootcamp. Log in and here we are at the very beginning or the very first page you see the first time you sign up.
Again there are a bunch of these services that they’re going to offer to you but we’re going to skip all of that. Most of this is really about selling you more products and services that you might get some benefit from but we’re not going to do any of those. This is probably the last time you’ll see this screen though.
Let’s look at this main overview menu up here. You’ve got Home, Hosting Domains, Addons and Account. If we click on Home, again they’re going to offer to do this for you or to hire somebody to help and that kind of thing. I’m going to close that welcome message and not show it anymore.
Now we’ll go to my email. And here’s an email from BlueHost, “Welcome to Bluehost”. I’ll click on that and there’s my username, byobboot. That’s pretty funny, I like that. There’s FTP information, there’s the name server, there’s the email server and so on.