Renting bandwidth and space with the help of a company, in order to be able to show your web site on the net.
You can choose from free and paid web hosting. The free web hosting is maintained with banners, while with the paid web hosting you have absolute control over the contents of you site.
Virtual hosting
Popular with the name shared hosting, the virtual hosting have to satisfy most everybody.
With simple words, this type of hosting means that on the server where your site is, there are other sites too.
Because of the incomes and the actions being done from nowadays sites, this is a very often choice, instead of the dedicated server.
Domain name
Together with the top-level domain the domain name makes sites differ from each other.
How to register a domain name?
First step: Ensure that the desired domain is free. This could be done with the help of so called WHOIS lookup - such type of site is Lunarpages.com.
Second step: Visit Lunarpages.com to register and buy a domain name.
My host offers unlimited bandwidth/space/transfer
As previously explained, a web hosting could not provide 'infinite' diskspace or bandwidth. Such hosting always have contract, where there is control of the quantity of - bandwidth, being transfered in a defined time; use of central processing unit, and so on.
What is space and data transfer/bandwidth?
Diskspace is the limitation of the size of your site. Every one of the elements on your website - letters, numbers and so on, have to be saved somewhere on the server of the web hosting. One letter is one byte, and a megabyte is approximately a million bytes. Ordinarily pages written in HTML (hyper-text markup language) are small, but the scripts, images, and other data need huge amount of space.
Data transfer, this is the limit of quantity of data, which is allowed to be sent from your site for a month. Here is the place of gigabyte - billion of bytes; because this is the unit of data transfer. If your go after this limit, your site might be shut down from the hosting for the rest of the month, or at the end you will have to pay for the additional gigabytes.
Flash on website
Flash consider the client not you. It is the personal computer of the user. There is no connection between flash and hosting. If there is the neccessary plugin installed on the PC, the site will be available on their computer.
How to find the hits on my website?
Definitions(Termins):
* Hits - the amount of elements (page, images, and so on) on the site.
* Impressions - How many times is a page opened (this action is called pageview). Sometimes impressions may be used instead of hits.
* Uniques - the amount of visitors of the site.
For instance, if I visit you site, look at three pages, 1st of which has 1 image, the 2nd - three, and the 3rd one - seven images; than this will change your stats as follows - one unique, three pageviews, and 14 hits.
You can track your website either server-side or remotely. Using server-side, the information about the visitor is created by log files, whis is considered to be more precise than the remote tracking. This requests some javascript, which is used to follow the user's data.
Usually this is offered by hostings, but if it is not, there are companies which can remotely track the visitors of your website.
PHP, ASP, Perl, and etc.
Here are the programming languages with their acronyms -
PHP - PHP: Hypertext preprocessor
ASP - Active Server Pages
Every different programming language has its own advantages and disadvantages. The best way to choose a programming language is to make a survey or a research and find out which is best fullfiling your needs.
MySQL, MS SQL?
MySQL and MS SQL are systems for database. According to what the web hosting offers, you chose what database to use to organize the data on the site.
Should the domain be changed, if the hosting is changed?
This is not neccesary. Yuo just have to prove that the domain is registered on your name, and you just have to modify your the namservers (the place from where you manage the domain names) to those of the new web hosting.
Will there be advertising, banner ads and popups on my site?
No, because you pay your space and it is only yours, which means that you and only you have the right to put things on your site.
Domain parking
This allows you to purchase a domain and after that make a 'future' page on this domain. Thi is not neccesary, of the domain is not domain parking, it just will unreachable by anyone.
How to pay for web hosting?
This depends from the web hosting you have chosen. In most web hosting, it available to pay with credit cards, checks, PayPal and others.
PayPal
This allows sending money only by email address.
Every user signs up in PayPal and after that enters the information of the banking and the credit card. Once you have registered, only with email you can send money to anybody.
eBay owns PayPal.
Subdomains
This is something like an expansion of the domain. For instance, your website is www.hello.com, and therefore hi.hello.com will be a subdomain.
Ordinarily subdomains are considered to be different sites from the main one.
How I upload my site online
There are many ways in which you can upload your site, but the most commonly used is File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
When you have created web hosting account, you are given an account for File Transfer Protocol. You can log in your account with software such as CuteFTP and WS_FTP and etc. And after that this program is used like a normal program, but the difference is that with it you can put files on your hosting only by dragging and dropping. Then the files instantly become online.
Other way is using Security Shell (SSH) or just transfering file through your browser.
Uptime
This is the whole amount of time of the site being online during a month.
The best up time is 100%, but because of the breakage of things, most web hostings provide 99.9% guarantees. This means, that if your site had been unreachable for more than 43 minutes in one month, you will be recompensed, according to the terms of use of the service.
UNIX and Windows hosting
Windows hosting is more apropriate for back up of products of Microsoft such as (ASP) Active Server Pages, MS Access, and others; moreover if you are feeling better with IIS and can not understand UNIX, again beter choose Windows hosting.
But remember:
Firstly, the use of Windows operating systems, does not mean neccesarily the use of Windows hosting. They absolutely differ from each other, which means that using Windows operating systems do not prevent your server to be UNIX.
Finally, Linux is more often seen with web hosting because of its better steadiness, and of course because they are free. This means that UNIX hosting is cheaper than Windows. And moreover, beacause it is not paid does not mean that not obedient, Linux is a first class product too.
I have a fast internet connection (DSL/cable) - can I just host my own site?
This could work, but it is not suggested.
Firstly, almost all Internet Service Providers do not allow you to use your internet connection for web hosting, doing it when it is forbidden will only end up you account.
Secondly, think of the dissadvantages and problems such as: securing the system, very well in order to nobody could hack it, keeping your computer on twenty four hous a day, seven days a week, etc;
Thirdly, the good web hostings have good performance - huge amount of RAM, excellent performance of the hard disks. What's more, they have more than one internet connection, which speed is far higher thn the one which neighbourhood DSL and cable services offer.
FInnaly, the back up. If there is a problem, you are the person who have to amend it - which will be sometimes impossible.
Dedicated Internet Protocol
If you would like to offer unidentified File Transfer Protocol or even a website using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a dedicated Internet Protocol facilitate this.
Why not to choose the chepaest hosting?
A web hosting should have a good income to continue working. Some do not undertand the market the way it is, and that is why their price is very cheap.
Bandwidth
Lessen the quantity of bandwidth - yes it is possible in most of the case.
First of all, the graphics on the website should be perfected. Most of the GIFs look well with less colors, many JPEGs look as good with higher compression. NetMechanic offers a program which is optimizing images online.
Then look at the HTML on the site. Ensure that you exploit relatinal paths, in order to the images not being downloaded many times. Get id of extra space, and when you make links to other pages, exploit realtional path, but not absolute links.
Check if your web hosting has mod_gzip. This program will conserve you much bandwidth.
Finally, if you follow the above steps, then your users will be more satsfied with oyur site because it will load faster, after the modification.
