How to be present on the Internet?

May 11, 2008

There are people who want to start creating their own website. Being able to create a web design and then having CSS code done based on the template it is not a simple job, but that’s not all. You need to know how to “put” your site on the Internet. This article contains main knowledges about hosting, domain registration and necessary utilities.

If we want to be present on the Internet, or simple having a web site you need:

domain name ( the name you are accessed on the Internet - for example mydomain.com)
web hosting on a server which can be free or payable(free servers always offer poor services, a business always need to pay for a server)
the files which compose the website
site monitoring (optional)

Having a website on the Internet can be done in two ways: free or paid

free - you can obtain a domain, host on the server and maybe an e-mail address. In this way you can publish your site, but with the limits imposed by the server administrator.
paid - you can registered the wanted domain (if available) and benefit web hosting with more advantages than the earlier alternative.

Domain names

This means your website has an unique name for accessing on the Internet. The domain can have extensions: .com, .info, .biz, .net etc. Before you register a name we have to verify for its availability. There are plenty services on the Internet where we can find out if the domain we want is available or not. Here is an example in this case.

Web Hosting

As I said the hosting can be: free on a server who has these services or on your own computer configure to act like a server and pay hosting.

The web hosting offer is varied and has these characteristics:

host technology: Unix, Linux, Windows
server location
domain size (from 5 Mb to unlimited)
month traffic
numbers of sub domains
numbers of email addresses
access type (ftp or http)
files type accepted on the server
the maxim size of accepted files
auxiliary services

Free Hosting

In this case your domain is actually a subdomain of the server, for example (name.server.com). The package is low and the administrator will recover the expenses by adding advertising banners on the hosted pages.

Host on own server

Your own computer being connected to the Internet 24 hours per day, having a static IP address can be configured as a web server by installing the Apache Server which is also free. Also, you can install a programming language which run on the server, for example PHP, and a database administration server like MySQL. This solution involves a server that works 24 hours/day, maintenance services and back-up.

Paid Hosting

Site administration

After registration you will get an username and a password necessary to log in your administration panel. Here you can almost configure anything based your domain: adding and configuration for e-mail addresses, FTP counts, upload files, online statistics, add subdomains.

File transferring on the host server

This transfer can be done using specialized FTP programs : CuteFTP, SmartFTP, FileZilla, CoreFTP.

Traffic

Monthly traffic has the formula:

(no visits/day)*(no pages/visit)*(page size)*30days

Example: 250 visits/day, 5 pages visited and 40kB page size will give us the next month traffic: 250*5*40kB*30=1500000kB=1500MB=1,5GB

Changing Host Server

This situation appears when you are not anymore content with the offered services. Practical, this means changing the old DNSs with these corresponding the new server and moving the files on the new server. DNS (Domain Name Server) is a service that transform the domain name in an IP address. The domain name can be easily remembered than a numeric value.

The Website

As I said, the site itself is composed by files. The pages we see are hosted on the server. This files are made using “technologies” like HTML, PHP and may contains: text, images, sounds.

For a webpage creation you need HTML knowledge, but it is not all. You probably don’t want static pages, so adding JavaScript, Flash will make your page dynamic. For all this you need specialized editors like: Macromedia Dreamweaver, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Microsoft FrontPage and programs for image editing.

If you want to add some “action” on your pages include scripts like: JavaScript (on the client side) or PHP Scripts (on the server side).

Site Monitoring

The monitoring services brings usefully information about the visitors: number of visitors, data and others. This information bring us a real help, because this way we can see the site evolution. Site monitoring can be made thorough:

free or paid services of specialized companies
services offered the host server
specialized scripts

For a full web-design/web-developing solution you may visit http://www.tractsolutions.com