How to Create Your Own Social Media Website
By: Aryan Gandhi
Tags: Social Media, Marketing, Startup, Life, Business

How to Create Your Own Social Media Website

For $0 and 2 hours

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

I still remember my first C in high school. It was junior year and I was at a wedding in New York when I got the notification on my phone. It was the notification that you look at, put your phone back in your pocket, wipe your eyes and check again. Is this for real? The notification said that I had finished with a C in my object-oriented programming class.

Thank goodness for that because I immediately began to work as hard and smart as I could to prove the teacher who gave me the C wrong. One of the things that I wanted to accomplish was creating a Social Media Website which has now become a reality for me.

Here is how you can do the same:

The first thing I did was look for free hosting. I found the best site to do this is InfinityFree.

Webpage you should be seeing

I have no affiliation with Infinity Free whatsoever, if you find another free web hosting platform then use them, but this was the one I found and worked amazing.

Once you have chosen which registrar you want to go with, hit the client area button and sign up for a free account.

This is what you should see once logged in

Next, hit the create account button and this will take you to an area where you enter the domain name that you want. Keep in mind, they will add .epizy.com to any domain name you choose. If I choose the domain name Graycat, for example, then my actual domain name would be Graycat.epizy.com for the website. To remove this you need to pay money, but it will work for our purposes.

Next, you enter the additional information, which is a password, and then you have finished and got your domain name. Your website will not show anything right now, which leads us straight into developing the social website.

To do this, go to https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org/ which has the free open source network we will be using.

Download the basic version

Once downloaded, upload it onto the hosting platform we are using, InfinityFree. Go back to the InfinityFree client area and login if you have not already. Once in, hit the blue manage button next to your domain, and you should see a menu like this pop up:

Menu

Click the File Manager button and click the htdocs folder. There will be two files in there, delete those two so there is nothing in your htdocs folder. Once this is complete, unzip the file and click the upload icon in the bottom left and hit the upload folder. The ossn should pop up, but if it does not, go into your downloads and click on the zipped ossn file, and then click on the folder ossn and it should begin uploading. The upload process will probably take 5–10 minutes, so if you are this far, take a break because you earned it.

Congrats on starting your journey to your own social media website!

The next step is to go to the general menu and click on your domain name in the domain names box.

I would click on mywebsitetutorialforyou.epizy.com

This should open up a page that has multiple blue boxes and to which you continue on and then read the terms they have given. Once done, you click continue again and you will be shown a screen where you need to enter your database name, password, and other fields.

Pay attention to this part very carefully, I have a youtube video that shows this more in-depth if needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkbiNNCGUuY&feature=youtu.be

Go to your control panel:

Green button

Click on the MySQL Databases button:

In the New Database box type in ossn and hit create database. Once you go down, you will see your Database name, hostname, and user name under current databases. Copy and paste all of the info into the respective boxes, and you use the password under account details.

The last thing that you need to do is go to your file manager and go to your htdocs folder. Once there, right-click and create a new folder, and name it ossn_data. Then, go to the directory listing box and add ossn_data/ after whatever is in the box. Then continue and you will be shown an area where you create your administrator account. This is all up to you, so fill it all out and then move on. Your open source social network should now be complete. If you go to your website name and click on the folder, your website should now come up.

This is what my website currently looks like:

Obviously, the website we set up today is far from complete. There are a lot of customizations and other things that need to be done, but this is for other articles. If you need more help you can check out the youtube channel, but I will have more articles coming in the future showing how to edit and make the website much more like your own.

I will also write a couple of articles on how to monetize your site and make money from it once you start getting people on your site. Stay tuned, and congratulations on your social media website.

I recently started the publication Never Fear, which I put this story in. The goal is for all writers to help each other, and every day I will post a story of the day from one of you guys to help it gain more traction. I wanted more people to learn about this publication, as it is to show people different stories and interests from around the world. The Google Forms link to become a writer is here: