A2 Hosting
This screencast walks you through the process of setting up an account with A2 Hosting and getting it published.
Transcript:
Hi, this is Dan from Karelia, and today I'm going to walk you through getting a domain name and an account through A2 Hosting, one of our partners. You might come to a link from Sandvox itself. Let's click on setup host. Choose edit. We're going to be choosing remote host, but lets go ahead and click on our link to A2 Hosting here...or you might come across an email message from us with a link to A2 Hosting.
So, we'll go ahead and click on that link now...
All right, here we are at A2 Hosting's page. They have a number of different plans and I'm not going to go through all the differences here. But let's go ahead and set up an order. So, we'll click on order now or order here, it doesn't matter.
... In this case we want to register a new domain name, but if you already have a domain name that's fine you can do that. We're going to come up with the domain of urban-ranch-supplies.com. Click next.
We don't want any of the other variations on that. We'll click continue.
... This is where we get to choose some of the different options. I'm just going to order a single month at this point, although you might want to order a number of months in advance for better savings. Are there any add-ons? You can get a dedicated IP address and SSL certificates which you would only need under special circumstances.
...And now for the coupon, we're going to enter our Sandvox coupon.
Then click calculate totals. All right, here is the summary of what we're going to be paying: $12.95 for the annual domain name registration, then $9.95 for the single month's hosting. We'll be billed some more later on.
There's a subtotal and our discount reflected, with the total that's going to be due. Then we choose I am a new customer and click continue.
... Now we're ready to fill in the information, which I'm not going to be showing you right here. The name server information, let's leave that alone. This is just the information that tells the domain name registrar where the hosting is taking place and, of course, it's the same company, so we'll leave these alone. The domain name information, we'll fill that in with the contact information.
...Then finally, we'll enter the account information. I'm going to type in a user name. This is a private user name; only you are going to see this. Referred by... we'll say other because that came from Sandvox. Then we'll enter our credit card information here. Go ahead and say yes we've read the terms and click verify my order.
...Here's the verification of what I entered. I'm going to go ahead and press process my order.... OK. Here's the summary. Now we're waiting for our order confirmation in email.
...Very quickly, I got several emails from A2 Hosting. Let's take a look at the one that has all of our account information that we're going to care about. So, if you look in the account details, there's our domain of urban-ranch-supplies.com. That's the site URL and that's two different ways to access the website: one is when the domain is actually up and running, and it does take sometimes a couple of days for a new domain to actually become available over the Internet. The other is the particular server that we can actually access it from now. Even if the domain name is not actually available, we can still access it with this other URL.
So, the important thing is the FTP information. Notice the FTP urban-ranch-supplies.com or the alternate host there... our user name and password... As I scroll down here I see that we actually do have SSH and SCP and SFTP support. So, we'll be able to use the more secure SFTP for transferring our information. Let's go back over to Sandvox and set this up. I'll choose setup host, setup a new configuration on a remote host via SFTP, then continue. All right, so the URL format is just the main URL for our website.
The host name we can copy from that email. It's what they call the FTP address. We're going to change this to SFTP and from the email I want to point out they gave a special port number for connecting through SFTP and so on. I'll enter the user name and the password that they provided. You'll want to go into their control panel and set the password to your own special value.
Now the document route they don't specify, but it's just the common public underscore html that a lot of web hosts use. We'll leave the subfolder blank. Press continue.
... And it passes the test. Now, the next thing we're going to do is a publish... and if your domain name is actually up and running and available then you will be able to see your result immediately. So we'll choose publish.
...Now let's see if we can take a look at the website. There we go. It's already there.