Hey There Admin

So you picked a domain name and you claimed that domain by signing up at Reclaim Hosting. This means you have some shared hosting on a server that points to a specific address. You are an administrator now! Well, in a way…. You don’t have your own server or even dedicated hosting but those are all technicalities. You still have a lot more than most people who work on the web.

This post could become very long if we tackled the “ownership” piece of DoOO in-depth. I don’t want to spend too much time on it but I do want to begin thinking about some questions. What does it mean to own something and why would you want to? Isn’t it easier to let someone else do the owning and let them provide a service? Why are you going through all of this and not just signing up for some service or another?

Think about property. If you live in a dorm room a lot of the maintenance aspects are taken care of for you. You never need to worry about paying for repairs but you also don’t have the freedom to remodel – heck you often can’t even have a pet or certain appliances. The grounds around campus are beautifully manicured but what if you wanted to plant your own garden? With ownership comes flexibility but also responsibility.

Right now what you have is basically a empty plot of land. It has an address – your domain name – but there is nothing on that land yet. Your “domain” is not just the name but also the shared hosting space.

You will control the shared hosting space through cPanel which you can access by logging in at Reclaimhosting.com.

From this point you will go through a process of “trying things on”. As you build on your plot of land. One thing you can do is install WordPress (linked help document currently points to UMW’s site while we build our own help document) but you can also just host HTML pages. Taylor Jadin has created a great tutorial on how to host some very basic HTML on your site. If you have already installed WordPress or have anything else on your root domain you will want to create a subdomain to complete this project.

Next week we will go through this project in our Tech Bar meeting but if you want to get started early you can.

We have been having some great conversations around the ironing board table at the TechBar as consultants have been claiming domains and spinning up sites. Did you learn something cool this week about domains or WordPress, create a great video, or any other cool digital project? Put it on your domain and let us all know about it and maybe we will feature it here on knight.domains.

All images CC0 Pixabay