Bought a domain... now what?

Alright, here's my question of the week (or month?). What happens when I buy a domain at, say, http://www.active-domain.com/. How do I build the site after I buy the domain? Is it like Webs or Weebly which has a little editor and stuff?

uhh well. First after you buy a domain, you need to buy web hosting.
I have used all of these that I am listing for you. (I do not own these, or own any part of these websites, I am not advertising for them, just giving you examples of good hosts, FOR CHEAP!!)

http://www.hostmonster.com/
http://www.justhost.com/
http://www.supergreenhosting.com

Basically for about $5 a month, you can get everything. If you pay more, you are getting way way way ripped off. On one of my websites hosted with super green, I have 490 user emails hosted, and about 18 Gigs of Data. Don't ever remember having an outage.

Thanks ErrorMagnet. But, can't I host them on my own "computer"? Like a server?

Hi linux731

There is still allot I need to learn myself before I can advise on setting up servers and personal web-spaces.

I have just recently gone down this road though. First thing you would need is to find out if your ISP is blocking the port you need to link your Domain Name, this port is usually port 80. Next would be to decide if you want a static or dynamic IP address. Static IP is an address that never changes. Dynamic IP will change every-time a connection is made. Web servers with dynamic addresses can be made, however the router would need to be able to make the necessary changes to the IP address that the Domain Name is linked to every-time the IP changes. It would be easiest to contact your ISP and make sure you have a static IP and a router that will support a static IP.

Once you know you have an IP that you can link the Domain Name to, the next step would be to setup your server and forward port 80 from the router to the server machine.

Thanks. A static IP is the internal IP or external? I'm confused at that part.

Both!!

You can setup an Internal Static IP for your machine which by the way is needed when you forward a port to the server machine. You don't want the internal IP changing on your machine every-time you reboot. The External IP can be either one as well. Everytime you power up the router, there is a request for an External IP from your ISP. Everytime you power up your computer there is a request for an Internal IP from the router. The only way to keep these IP's from changing periodically is to assign them static IP's.

You control which machine has an internal static IP and what that IP will be. Your ISP controls who has a external static IP and what that IP will be.

Ahhh! I get it. Thanks. But my modem is always on, so unless I reboot it, it should stay the same IP (98.197.87.130)?

Actually most ISPs still drop your signal at some point and reestablish. I remember my old ISP it was about every 72 hours.

For a static IP they want you to pay for it plus if you are hosting pictures, large files, etc, the bandwidth tends to add up and they will want to charge you for that. Just the cost of the static IP address is often much higher than if you just buy space on a web host.

Yeah this whole domain idea is difficult to understand. I was just thinking of hosting a Flight Simulator server, and a website for the "Virtual airline". Do these hosts that Errormagnet said host my kind of program? (Games)

Well you could host a game without a domain name, they simply need to know 98.197.87.130 (that is a perfectly valid address, it does not need to be words).

BTW, I looked and it seems those #s have not changed since your first post a week ago so with your cable connection it does not appear it is reset very often.