How to Upload your Website to the Internet (2026)

Hey, I'm Dan and in this tutorial, I'll show you exactly how to upload your website to the internet. I'll walk you through every single step so that you feel confident your site goes live without any issues and I'll show you how to easily make changes to your site after you first launch. Whether you've coded your website yourself or built it with the help of AI, by the end of this video, your website will be live at a real domain name that anyone anywhere can visit. The first thing we need to figure out is where your website is going to live. Right now, your website lives on your computer. You probably have a folder of HTML files and maybe some CSS and JavaScript and when you open those in your browser, it works exactly the way you want it to. But currently, your website files only allow you to view them on your local computer. For anyone else to visit the site, we need to move those files onto a web host, a company that runs servers 24/7 so that anyone else on the internet can then visit your site. There are some free hosting options out there. GitHub Pages and Netlify will both host a website for free and they do work, but they come with a few downsides. On GitHub Pages, any free plan will make your website code public for anyone to read and on either platform, setting up a custom domain can involve a few extra manual steps and it can take more time to go live. These options are better for really basic sites and using a different host will give your website room to grow later if you'd like. So today, I'm going to show you how to use Hostinger for hosting. It's one of the most affordable options and it has everything that you actually need. It includes a free domain name for your first year and your site will be live at that domain in just a few minutes with no headaches. To get the best deal on your hosting, make sure to sign up using our exclusive partner link in the description down below. That will get you an extra 10% off any Hostinger plan. Once you click that link, you'll join me here on this page. Go ahead and click start now to see all the available plans. For most people uploading a website, the premium plan has everything you need. You can host up to three websites, you get 20 GB of storage and most importantly, it includes a free domain for the first year. You can always upgrade later if you need to. So go ahead and click choose plan under premium. On the next page, you'll be asked to pick how long you want your hosting plan for. The default is 48 months, which is your chance to lock in the best rate for the longest period of time. But if you want to get started today at a more affordable price, you can shorten this period down to 12 months and that still includes a free domain for 1 year with the order. You'll notice that if you clicked our partner link, the MM10 coupon is already applied and you can see that here in the order summary. Once you've got your plan and period selected, down here, you can click continue. You'll be taken to the registration page to create your Hostinger account. Go ahead and enter your email and a password and when you're ready, click register. Next, enter your billing address and then click continue. Then, enter your payment information and when you're ready, click submit payment. In a few seconds, you'll be brought to the Hostinger dashboard. If you're brought to an onboarding sequence, the fastest way to get to the dashboard is to come up top and click on the Hostinger logo. I'll walk you through all of the next steps so don't worry about leaving this screen. Click leave. Now that you're on the Hostinger dashboard, you'll be prompted to claim your free domain. If you see it in your list of to-dos, you can click that here or you can get back to this area anytime by going to domains on the left and you'll see that claim domain button here as well. Next, type in the domain name that you want. For my sample site, I'll use Northwind Studio HQ and then pick an extension in the drop-down. If you can find one that's available, I still like choosing .com. To see if it's available, click check availability. And assuming that it is, go ahead and click claim domain. You'll get a reminder to verify your email address that you used to sign up with Hostinger and you have a week or two to do that. If you haven't already done that, take a moment to do it now so that you don't forget. Then, click continue. If you're shown an offer, scroll down and click skip for now. After that, you'll land back in the domain overview. Now that your hosting and domain are sorted, let's get your website files ready to upload. If you already have a folder of HTML files on your computer, you're all set and you can skip to the next section. If you don't have a website yet, the fastest way to make one today is just to describe what you want to an AI like Claude. You can show it screenshots of sites that you like, you can tell it to build a simplified version and in a couple of minutes, you'll have an HTML file that you can open within your browser. Once you have your files, you can go back and forth with the AI to change colors, swap out sections and add your own text if you need to until it looks exactly the way that you want it to. Once you're happy with how your site looks, the last thing to do is zip your files. On Mac OS, select all your files that you've downloaded, right click and choose compress. Or on Windows, right click, select send to and then compressed zipped folder. That will give you a single zip file containing your whole website, which is what we'll upload to Hostinger in the next step. Now that you've prepared your website files, let's upload them to Hostinger. From this domain overview page, go to websites in the left-hand sidebar, then click all websites. Here, you should see a setup button next to premium. You'll now need to answer a few of those onboarding questions that we skipped earlier, but some of them are still skippable in the flow. When asked if you want to create a website or migrate a website, click bring your website to Hostinger, then click next. And here, choose upload backup files because HTML and CSS is exactly what we want. Then click next. On this page, choose the domain that we just got and click next and you'll see Hostinger preparing server space. Just sit tight for a few minutes while this gets prepared. Here, we'll need to upload the zipped website files that we prepared earlier. Click upload, then select your zip and open. If you intend to have a database file and you're missing it, make sure to include it. If not, click next. Hostinger will provide a migration summary and when you're ready, click submit request. Once the migration is complete, click continue to dashboard. And just like that, your site is live. To check it out, open up a new tab and type in the domain name or click this link here to open it in a new tab automatically. You'll also notice that your site is automatically loading with HTTPS, which means Hostinger has already set up an SSL certificate for you in the background. That's something that you sometimes have to do manually on other hosts, but here it just works out of the box. Make sure your website is working as you intended. And if it is, congrats. You're now live. But it's important I show you briefly how to do this from the HPanel for when you want to make changes or in case you want to start completely from scratch. If you were doing this again, you would log in and you would land on the Hostinger homepage. From there, click websites. You'll see the domain that you want to update and you can click dashboard here. That brings you back to the screen we were just at. From here, go to files on the left and click file manager. To reach the files of this specific site, click here. And your files will open here in a new tab. From within the file manager, you can see your 20 gigs and you want to open public_html to see your files. This is the folder where your website files need to live in order for them to show up at your domain. If we wanted to replace them, I'll select all the files by holding down shift and clicking and then I'll click delete and confirm. And now we can upload the zip file again. Choose upload and then file. Select your zip and then open it. Once it uploads, right click and choose extract. For the folder name, just give it a single period so that we don't create a subfolder. Then extract again. You can then select the zip and choose any other files you might want to delete and remove those. And now I'm left with just the HTML, the JavaScript and CSS file that I would expect. To view the site, open a new tab, enter the domain name and search. And now you're right back online. To return to the Hostinger dashboard, simply close these tabs. If you've only been following along so far and you haven't started the process yet, don't forget to use the link in the description to get an extra 10% off any Hostinger plan if you haven't already. And if this video helped you get your site online and you want to watch more tutorials like this one, go ahead and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.