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Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: March 4th, 2025
  • javiwhite@feddit.uktoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Is there any fundamental difference between an instance and a formal website ?English
    3·
    2 days ago

    I’ve read through your comments on this thread, and it sounds as though you need a better understanding of the fundamentals of website hosting, so I’ll try my best to give you some research topics to start from .

    I’ll make a few assumptions about your use case:

    • you want to setup a website as a project to learn more networking skills
    • you want to spend as little money as possible on this project.

    1 - DNS (Domain Name Servers):
    The core of how we access websites is something known as DNS; DNS is essentially a giant phonebook of all different public IPs, and the domain names associated to them. All website names, are really just human friendly aliases, for the IP address they’re assigned too. It is technically possible to host your own public DNS servers, but 99% of the internet will not trust your DNS servers, and as such it’s usually best to sign up to an established DNS provider.

    If you look to purchase just the domain name, you will have access to the DNS records. Alternatively, there are free DNS providing tools such as DuckDns which will give you a free subdomain, if you’re really strapped for cash but domain registration is really cheap, so worth considering imo.

    2 - VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting:
    Okay, so you’ve got curious-mind.org all purchased and now you need somewhere to point it! You could point it towards a self hosted server at home, but you should really consider spinning up a free VPS with a cloud provider. A free tier vps will be tiny (something like 1 core, 20gb space and 2gig ram if you’re lucky) but the knowledge you will gain from working remotely with a server, rather than locally; will help you progress a lot faster… You will force yourself to learn ssh, and how to master bash functions for admin work.

    AlaVPS have a permanent free tier VPS that could get you started. AWS also offer 12 months free on their micro EC2 instances. Once you have a VPS purchased; you can then go to your DNS provider, and update the DNS record for your website to point to the VPS IP address.

    3 - CMS (Content Management System):
    What is with tech and 3 letter acronyms eh?

    The next piece of the self hosted puzzle, and the part you’re referring too when you talk about a proper website is likely the CMS. CMS’ are modern tools that allow websites to build a theme, and then dynamically apply it to content. This allows for blogs, webpages etc… to be written in plain text, and have all the sites formatting applied rather than you having to apply it manually to each html document.

    Wordpress is the most used in the personal sector, and it’s very popular in the business sector too, though personally I’ve seen a real surge in Drupal usage over the last decade or so. Find the CMS that works for you, some are drag and drop; others are more code oriented.

    The above should hopefully serve as a good starting point for if you’re looking to not do this the easy way. (The easier method is to just pay a DNS provider to host a wordpress instance for you; but where’s the fun in that?) Make sure you read up on each of the acronyms; maybe in watch a Tutorial on each to get a basic understanding of what they are, and why you’re looking to use them. Good luck 👍