Hosting

When it comes to hosting, there are several things required: a domain and a database / hosting.

On the issue of hosting, I sent the student council an email alongside with an attachment that addressed the problem at hand, by including: the problem itself, potential solutions, and the costs to those solutions.

General Costs for Hosting and Database

General Costs to Purchase Domain

Overall Overview

Overall, there isn't that much of a difference between A2Hosting and GoDaddy. They both offer a similar package at similar prices. However, in the short term, GoDaddy can be cheaper as they allow users to pay 5 HKD to rent domain name if they purchase a GoDaddy product. On the other hand, A2Hosting generally has lower prices. As the council is uncertain of the website's success, it would be best to purchase GoDaddy in the short run and if everything works well, we can consider switching to a cheaper alternative.

Email to the student council

After sending the email to the student council, they invited me to join in on one of their meetings to further discuss about it. In the end, the committee gave me a budget of 500 HKD to set up everything for 6 months.

I decided to stick with GoDaddy and later found out that there were promo-codes online that could reduce the price. All there was to do was to input the codes before confirming a purchase and the reduction would be directly applied to the final cost.

Once I purchased the website, I had to figure out how to upload my offline files to the server so that anybody can access them. By messing around with the user interface, I found cPanel, which effectively is a CMS for users to control their website without programming.

How cPanel looks like

To input personal files to the server, all you have to do is go into a File Manager, find the upload button and drag and drop all the necessary files.

File Manager

Online mySQL Database

On the other hand, for the mySQL databases, I had to export the existing one (from WAMP) and import then use that file to import the tables from the offline one to the online one.

Once that's done, there's an issue where the nothing would connect to the database. This is because the password of the online database (unlike the offline one) cannot be blank and will hence be different to the offline one. To solve that all that's necessary is a slight modification in the file "connect.php" (change the password).