How To Get Your Website On The Internet Using A Plone Hosting Service

Using a hosting service is probably the fastest way to get your website out onto the public Internet. You basically pay a small monthly fee to a company that maintains the server hardware, updates the operating system, performs backups, and fixes any problems. You only have to worry about designing and building your website.

Running a Plone website requires a hosting service that supports Python and Zope, the building blocks of Plone. One such service is WebFaction.  Click here to see their hosting packages - Shared package 3 is suitable for most website needs.

I have found WebFaction to be an extremely powerful and easy-to-use service, and this very website is running on a shared package 3. With that particular package you can have up to ten domain names pointing to it, which gives you the versatility of having more than one website.

In this lesson we are going to assume that you have signed up with a hosting service, in this example, WebFaction. Other services existing and would have equivalent, although slightly different control panels and procedures.

To see the type of information required for signing up with a service like WebFaction, click here.

After signing up, you will have a unique login or userid and password to the WebFaction system.  For the rest of the steps in this example, we assume you have the following:

• Login Userid:      myuserid
• Password:          mypassword

To begin, in the upper right hand corner of the WebFaction site is the lLogin or Customer Login hyper-link. Click it, and enter in the userid and password into the fields, as shown below.