Young Writers Society

Introducing web hosting by the Young Writers Society! Pro-account holders and others who have donated to YWS can now host their website on YWS' server farm for free. Those who have donated at least $49 receive permanent hosting, and those who have donated less than that receive a month of hosting for each $3 donation. Thus, if you sign up for a pro-account, you will receive a free hosting account as well.

To get started, click on "Hosting by YWS" in the footer area of the site, or click here.


Details
This is a very basic hosting account. You can only host one website, and you only have one MySQL database. Storage space and bandwidth usage is not metered, but if your website starts to use more than 1GB of space, you will probably get a notification from me.

That's more than enough though to host a Wordpress blog or a phpBB forum. All sites also come with SSL support.


How to get started
If you are eligible, go to the Hosting by YWS page and fill out the form at the bottom. Once you've submitted a domain name and password information, your hosting account will be created within 5 minutes. SSL support, though, may take up to 24 hours.

After you've submitted a domain name, update your domain's DNS records at your registrar to point to the correct IP address as given under "About your web hosting account" on the Hosting by YWS page.

If you do not yet have a domain address, I recommend Google Domains for purchasing one. Namecheap and Hover are also good.


Adding files
On the Hosting by YWS page, you'll see the SFTP and MySQL details. Use these to upload files and to create a database.


If you run into any problems..
If you run into any issues, just contact me. I can help you with pretty much anything, including walking you through updating your domain's DNS records and setting up a website.


Further questions
I imagine there will be a lot of questions, so please ask away.

This is great! I have no specific need for a website at the moment, but might do one day and it's useful to know there's some provision here for me to do so.

Although, my full name .co.uk and .com are both taken. Which isn't super unusual. But what's really strange is the owner of the .com domain has put a price of $5,000 dollars on it.

Are there restrictions for what the purpose of the site can be? Like I'm sure nothing illegal or malicious and stuff. But I'm considering using this for an art commissions website. Would that be alright? Or are you only interested in hosting blogs, forums, etc.?

@fortis ->> An art commissions website sounds absolutely fine. There are some restrictions, but they're no different than what you'd run into on most hosting providers.