Joe Innes

The first step in becoming a webmaster is choosing a domain name. Some domains are easier to register than others. .com TLDs are the easiest. My own TLD (.es) is supposed to be used for Spanish websites, and so I chose a Spanish company to buy the domain from. Now, I have to do all of my domain management in Spanish, which is great for my language skills, but not ideal if you struggle with other languages. If you want...

I’ve found a gap in the market. This is going to earn me billions. I’ve already chosen my Ferrari. All I have to do now is actually make the damn thing. What is it? It’s an employee training tracker. Yes, we can use Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, and pen and paper, but it doesn’t do all the fun stuff I want it to do. What fun stuff? Glad you asked. It’ll list trainings, summaries, time taken, prerequisites, whether they’re part...

I use VPS Dime, and have been very please with the price and performance, but you could just as easily use AWS, Digital Ocean, or any other VPS provider. The instructions provided here are for VPS Dime’s cheapest VPS, but once the server spins up, it makes no difference who the provider is. AWS is fairly complex and designed for enterprise clients, so the user interface is not as nice, but they do have a free tier which is more...

You don’t want to have users typing in your IP address to access your server, you want them to be able to access your server via the name you paid for. The exact steps to follow will depend on your registrar. First though, a little background. When you register your domain, you only have the name reserved. When someone tries to access your website, they will still need to be told where to find it. That’s where a name server...

So now you have a server in the cloud. Nice! But at the moment, it’s not doing anything. It’s connected to the internet, sure, but it’s not actually ready for you to do anything with yet. In order to do that, you’re going to need to get used to the command line. If you’re on a Mac or Linux, SSH is built into your system, but if you’re on Windows, you’ll need to download an SSH client. I recommend PuTTY,...