Having some contents to share online where available online services are not reliable or could not support, requires a website of your own. This tutorial will show you the simplest steps to make that possible in just a minute or two.

Step 1: Set up an online storage for your website. An online storage allows your contents to be accessible worldwide through the internet. It in fact looks like a logical drive or folder on your local computer, except that it resides on a remote server with internet connection, supporting HTTP protocol – a nice and popular internet protocol for content showing up, and may have some access restrictions due to security requirement. If the contents are static then you do not need any additional services for your contents to be generated. Otherwise, some programming language engines, depending on the server scripts of the contents, need to be installed on the server. With that being said, preparation an online storage for dynamic contents, therefore, may be more complicated than that of static ones. If you are new to website then please try with static contents first before going further with dynamic ones. There are three options for setting up an online storage; (1) set up the storage as a folder on a dedicated server (real server), (2) set up a virtual private server (VPS) and make a folder on the server as online storage, (3) share a folder with other users using a physical server through a web hosting service. Of the three, the last option does not require any skills on computer system management. However, it may pose some burdensome in case you want to customize the online storage yourself. Once you have got the online storage set up, just copy your contents there using a desktop application, such as windows explorer, SSH client, Puty, or a web control panel.

Step 2: Test your website. The contents shared through a HTTP protocol (web service protocol) can be accessible using web browser, providing the URL (universal resource locator) of the content. An URL has the following format:

http:///storage-folder/[content-name]

where IP is the internet protocol address of the server; content-name is the name of the content to be shown. If the content name is not provided, the server, in general, will show the content of the index.html file. For example, this website is hosted on a server of which the IP address is “192.3.90.24”. You can try browsing the server content by using the URL: "http://192.3.90.24/index.html". The browser just display a simple NGINX page that I made, not the main page of this blog. This is because my blog is located in a sub folder on the server, which needs to be kept in secret. :)

Step 3: Choose a name for your website. A website name, or website Domain Name, is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control on the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System (DNS). Any name registered in the DNS is a domain name (Wiki). The only reason that we need a domain name is because it is too hard to remember an IP address. For example, I am using "blog.tinyray.com" instead of "192.3.90.24" to indicate the online storage of my blog. Absolutely easier it is to remember "blog.tinyray.com" than "192.3.90.24". You need to decide what domain name you want for your website. Obviously, this depends on what the site is about, whether it is a personal site, business site, a blog, etc… and, most importantly, the domain name should be available for you to register. Once you have got the domain name for your own, go to GoDaddy, or any other domain name registrar, to register the domain name. You need to pay around $10 per year for a domain name. However, using a promo code, you may only pay $0.5 for the first year per domain name. Having done with domain registration, you now can use the domain name control panel of your domain registrar to define the mapping between your domain name and your server IP address. Waiting up to 24 hours to have your mapping updated worldwide is good for you to go browsing your website using your own domain name.