I'm going to tell you what happened when I bought my website, but before I do, for those that don't know, it may help if you know what analogies certain terms fit.
There are three things you need for a website, a Domain, the virtual Website itself and your Website address.
The Domain is computer hard drive space you buy in a computer centre, the Virtual website is what you create on the hard drive and the Web address is what you tell everyone so others know where your website is located.
So think of the Domain as a piece of land you build your house on, the virtual Website is the house you build on the land and your web address is your postal address where the postman delivers your mail.
So it was suggested that a good place to buy my first domain was D9 hosting. I proceeded to buy my domain and called it robertjshaw.com. During the process of registering, I was interrupted at a critical moment, when I had returned to the computer the process had timed out. I went through the process again and registered the website but due to the critical timing of the previous purchase, there was a problem. Apparently the near completion had set the DNS settings (DNS or Domain Name System is a system that points a domain name to physical IP address (where the postman delivers your letter). For example, when a user types in www.example.com in their browser and hits enter, the DNS servers resolve it to the IP address where the website is hosted.) for the first Domain purchase.
On the second attempt I gave the web address the same name but it couldn't talk to anyone because the first website was holding onto DNS settings. My mail requests were effectively being sent to a non existent houseand I was getting the message : robertjshaw.com’s server IP address could not be found. After a while I explained the situation to a Techie at D9 and he very efficiently sorted the problem by applying the DNS settings to the correct website installation.
The next stage in the process was to start building my house now that the land was all secure. I decided to use a program called WordPress to build my house. During the installation you are asked whether you would like Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http://) or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https://). That s makes a huge difference in that it secures your website so that Google doesn't give a visitor a ton of warnings about how the website they are visiting is unsecure.
Anyway, I must have misclicked during the WordPress installation and ended up with a http version. After a lot of work loading various things to make the website more interesting I noticed that when I looked at the website it was giving me an unsecure notice. This meant talking to D9 again, after a bit of chat, they told me what I had done and what the solution would be. It meant I had to start again and I had to re install WordPress and use the https:// so the site was secure.
So the moral of the story is don't get distracted when your about to pay for something on the internet and pay attention and check all the boxes for what they do when you are installing software!
