Many of you (and understandably in my view) have asked if your portfolios are stuck being accessed at via the rather hideous hostnames that I have set up for you automatically (something like http://abxx123.wordpress.city-1.vsccreative.com). You’ll be pleased to hear that the answer is no.

The good news is that you can register any domain name that isn’t already registered and point it at your portfolio site. The bad news is that you will need to pay for this.

You don’t have to pay us in the online journalism module, or indeed anyone at City. You will need to pay a registrar. There are hundreds of registrars out there, and they range hugely in price, reliability and flexibility. The only one I’m happy to recommend is Gandi.net. They are affordable, reliable, and flexible (and no they didn’t pay to be mentioned here).

How does it work

When you purchase a domain name, you are officially claiming it and thereby ensuring that no other person or organisation in the world can use it for their site.

As we’ve been learning, (and apologies to those of you that already know about this) most websites are kept in a single folder on a specially designed kind of remote computer called a server. The unique identity of a server, known as its IP address, is four digits that range from 0-255, separated by dots. For example, the Cutlines server has an IP address of 195.42.142.12.

When you register a domain name, you have to tell the entire world that when they go to that name, they should be directed to a particular server, referred to by its IP address. This is done by asking the registrar to make something called an A record. For example when we registered cutlines.org, we created an A record that pointed all requests for cutlines.org to 195.42.142.12.

If you’d like to know more, the system within which this takes place is a worldwide network called the Domain Name System or DNS.

Anyway, suffice it to say that Gandi, as well as any of the good other domain name registrars, will make it easy for you to do this, if you give it a try. For your portfolio sites, the IP address is 92.243.19.103.

But once your readers have been referred to that server, there is still one last step that needs to be taken.

As you can imagine, it’s possible to point an infinite number of different domain names at a single server.

As I mentioned above, the files that make up your site are all in some folder on the server. How does the server know which domain name, when requested, maps onto which folder?

The answer, in short, depends. It depends mostly on which software your server is using. Student portfolios are using one called Apache, which according to this Netcraft survey, is still the most popular one, with a 50.34% market share. I use this for all servers that I manage, because it has proven itself to be the most reliable, hence its success.

In Apache, something called a VirtualHost needs to be created. This is essentially a file that contains a simple mapping between your domain name and the folder where your site is stored, and all Apache web servers use VirtualHosts. We just create one of these, restart the server, and now the server will know that your domain name points at your site. If you register a domain name, let me know and I will set up a VirtualHost for you.