I’ve been stymied in my webcrafting lately. As I discussed in my last post, I registered my domain by upgrading a WordPress.com blog, which I found out means I don’t have FTP access to my domain. That meant I couldn’t in good faith, say I’d completed Challenge 6, since I WordPress had taken care of all that for me. After completing a challenge a day for almost a week, being stuck was frustrating. Learning about web publishing and HTML had been exciting, but I didn’t want to gamble this tidy and understandable blog on my sustained interest in building and maintaining my own website. I talked about this problem with my web-savvy friends, my disinterested friends and various houseplants, and eventually came up with this list of demands:
- I wanted to keep veronicabeaty.com as a blog, looking and acting as it always has
- I wanted hosting I have FTP access to, so that there’s a piece of the web I where I can publish html and css files and whatnot
- I wanted that sandbox of my very own webpage to connect to veronicabeaty.com
- I wanted to keep paying what I’m already paying and no more, i.e. not pay for hosting
At first these seemed like an irreconcilable collections of desires, but after many sleepless nights and fruitless Google searches, I came up with a solution.
- Free Hosting from 000webhost.com
I read about 000webhost in the HTML.net tutorials. i did a bit of research and heard nothing but good things, at least from people whose needs were as minimal as mine. Registering for a free account was quick and easy.
- Creating a subdomain on my domain mapped to WordPress.com and pointing it to my new 000webhost site
Following the directions on the “Map a Subdomain” topic in WordPress Support, I added a CNAME record and an A name record for the subdomain “DIY” to my WordPress domain’s DNS records. This created the subdomain diy.veronicabeaty.com and pointed it to my 000webhost site.
If you’ll allow me to (over)extend the metaphor from my last blog post, setting up a subdomain is like putting the hut I am building by myself in the backyard of the apartment WordPress furnishes for me. I chose the subdomain “DIY” because it’s the DIY ethos that drives me to learn new skills and to try and make my own website.
- Parking my new subdomain on 000webhost
I couldn’t tell if I also needed to change things through 000webhost. The closest thing I could find was the directions for parking a domain. I have attempted to park diy.veronicabeaty.com on vbeaty.hostei.com, the free domain from 000webhost.
I’m not sure if this step is necessary. I also don’t think I can complete it correctly, since, as shown in the image, 000webhost says parking will only work if I update the nameservers for the domain. I think i would do that by adding more custom records, in this case NS (nameserver) records, to my WordPress list of custom DNS records. That custom DNS records page won’t accept NS records, however, so we shall see if this fix is stable.
As of right now, diy.veronicabeaty.com takes you to a piece of internet that is very empty, but all my own.
Veronica Beaty 
Good. Sort of.
If my experience is accurate, Two things happen from your diy.veronicabeaty.com link.
1) The blog link takes me to a blog page, but it is a 404 error page. That page is generated from WordPress to say more than a typical html error page. The whole link is:
http://veronicabeaty.com/2013/09/13/challenge-5-5-6-my-subdomain-and-hosting/diy.veronicabeaty.com
That happened, I think, because you created the link as diy.veronicabeaty.com (without the http:// ahead of it).
2) What you want the link to do is go to: http://diy.veronicabeaty.com. Unfortunately that page doesn’t exist, either. I got an almost blank page saing “Index of /” which is generated, I think, by the web server because it wants to list the actual file names of the “root” directory of the site. When a site doesn’t have an index.html page, the server is generally set to show an actual index of the files in the folder specified.
You need to quickly create at least a small file named “index.html” to replace that empty index list. It doesn’t need to be too fancy, of course. Once you create it, run your FTP program to link to http://diy.veronicabeaty.com and transfer a copy to it. Then fix the link in your blog post to say “http://diy.veronicabeaty.com” and I think you’ll be where you want to be for the moment.
[There is no need to approve/post this comment. Just use it to your benefit and then charge ahead. Keep up the process.]
–Algot