1.5. Choosing a hosting, purchasing a domain name. Transferring a site to a hosting.

17/04/2025, by Ivan

You’ve already built your site and are ready to publish it online. To do that, you’ll need two things: a domain and hosting. When purchasing a domain and hosting, read the pricing plans carefully and ensure they support Drupal 8.

Purchasing a Domain Name

First, decide which domain zone to buy. Popular choices include:

.ru for Russia
.ua for Ukraine
.by for Belarus
.com for international/English-speaking audiences

Be cautious: domains often have a different price for the first year and a higher renewal price. Also, domain quality is not dependent on price – all registrars sell the same domain rights.

Reference links on Wikipedia:

For affordability and simplicity, you can use 2domains.ru to purchase a domain.

Register an account, verify your email, and then log in. Choose a domain name, check its availability, and complete the purchase. Real personal information is required for legal ownership of the domain.

Registering for Hosting

Drupal 8 can run on most modern hosting providers. For this guide, we use jino.ru and choose "Flexible Virtual Hosting". Create an account and fill out your profile.

Once signed up, go to hosting activation and select PHP version 7.2 or newer. Then, add your domain to the hosting account. You will be given a path like /domains/example.ru to upload your site files.

Uploading Site Files and Database

Use an FTP client like FileZilla or WinSCP to upload your Drupal files to the server.

To export your local database, use Adminer (a lightweight alternative to phpMyAdmin). Place adminer.php in your site’s root directory and open it via http://yoursite.com/adminer.php.

Log in using the credentials found in /sites/default/settings.php, export the database (preferably in gzip format), and upload it to your host using Adminer or phpMyAdmin.

Linking Domain to Hosting (DNS)

To connect your domain to your hosting, update DNS servers at your domain registrar (2domains.ru in this case) to Jino’s:

ns1.jino.ru
ns2.jino.ru

This change may take 2–6 hours to propagate, sometimes up to 24 hours.

Restoring the Database

Upload the database dump using Adminer. After import, update /sites/default/settings.php with your hosting’s database credentials:

<?php
$databases['default']['default'] = array (
  'database' => 'db_name',
  'username' => 'db_user',
  'password' => 'db_password',
  'prefix' => '',
  'host' => 'localhost',
  'port' => '3306',
  'namespace' => 'Drupal\\Core\\Database\\Driver\\mysql',
  'driver' => 'mysql',
);
?>

If you see errors, try clearing the cache using:

http://yoursite.com/core/rebuild.php

Once done, your site should be live and functional on its new domain and hosting.

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