Hosting your website on a server

In this article, I'll walk you through one way that you can take your webpage and host it on your own server.

Why would you want that? And what's a "server" anyway?

When you visit websites on the internet, they are each hosted by a "server". A server is a computer located somewhere in the world that's connected to the internet, and that computer's job is to "serve" webpages to internet users that want to view them.

When you create webpages here on Khan Academy, it's the Khan Academy servers that are in charge of serving your webpages. That's nice of us, since you can share your webpages with friends for free, but there are some disadvantages: 1) your webpages have a bunch of Khan Academy user interface surrounding them, 2) your webpage has "khanacademy.org" in the URL, and 3) you can only create single webpages, not multi-file websites.

All of that is great when your goal is learning, but not ideal if your goal is to create a professional looking website, like a portfolio, resume, or shop.

When you develop webpages on your own computer, then you can create multi-file websites that aren't surrounded by Khan Academy UI - but the URL of your site looks like "http://localhost" or "file://...".

If you try sharing a URL like that with a friend and they try loading it on their computer, they'll be sad because they won't be able to see your website! Those URLs are "local" URLs, only viewable on your own computer.

So now you need a server to "host" your webpages, and that's where you have a lot of options. Many companies are "hosts" or "hosting providers", and they make money by letting people host your webpage files on their servers.

You might also want your own domain name - like "khanacademy.org" or "yourownname.com". You can buy those from a "domain name registrar", pay a small amount each year to keep them around, and then point that domain to your server. You can also learn more about domains, from the inventor of the internet himself!

You can search the internet for "hosting providers" and "domain name registrars" if you want to check out all the companies offering those services and see what their pricing is like.

Since this is Khan Academy, where we like to enable you to learn skills for free, I'm going to show you an option for hosting your website for free on a place called Github.