Hostng - Web Hosting For All

Choosing a Host and Domain Name
Practically every Web hosting provider offers all sorts of extended services inaddition to plain Web space. These often include some form of e-commercehosting, ranging from simply supplying the software to setting up a completeturnkey solution for you.

Choosing a Host

Virtual servers
Dedicated servers


Virtual servers
Virtual servers are nothing more than directories on a hard drive. If that harddrive is on an existing Web server that supports virtual server capabilities,however, the Webmaster can make each one of those directories seem asthough it were a fully functional Web server.
Other than being a really clever example of how you can use computer tech-nology, does this have a practical application for you. It depends on yourbudget and your site?s traffic expectations. It's certainly one of the cheapestways to get your site up and running. You could pay for a couple of months?worth of a typical virtual server by skipping one good dinner at a decentrestaurant. Some virtual servers are so cheap that you could pay for themjust by skipping dessert.
On the other hand, you're sharing one physical server with lots of other vir-tual servers. Any physical server's performance degrades as it gets busier,with more and more people connecting to it and placing demands on it. But if you?re on a virtual server, that scenario has a slightly different meaning.People visiting a Web site on one of the other virtual servers that's hosted onthe same physical server as yours are putting a drain on your resources, too,because those resources are shared. Basically, if someone else's site gets toobusy, yours can look like a turtle in molasses. And vice versa.

Dedicated servers
Nearly every company that handles virtual servers also leases dedicated ones. A dedicated server is a step up from a virtual server: Although it costs a bit more, it’s your very own physical computer holding your Web site, with nobody else on it.
Both virtual and dedicated servers offer more than just Web hosting. For example, they also handle e-mail. The focus here is only on the Web hosting aspect because this book is about Web sites.
Dedicated servers used to cost a small fortune, but a combination of generally lower computer prices and competitive pressures has dropped the expense of leasing one. At a bottom price of around $50 per month, dedicated servers are still a bit pricey for a private individual, but for any serious commercial operation, they’re a great bargain. After all, that’s only $3,600 a year, although hiring a single network administrator to work at your company can easily set you back 20 times that or even more.
Why compare those two costs? Aren’t they apples and oranges? No, not at all. When you lease a dedicated server, the people you’re leasing it from take care of keeping it up and running, which is what a network administrator does. Dedicated servers, like virtual servers, are located at the facility of a Web space provider, such as Verio, and you don’t have to worry about regularly backing up your data, restoring after a crash, upgrading things like Linux kernels, or any of the million things that keep technical staffs hopping.


Getting Your Own Domain Name Domain names, like dummies.com, are the addresses of sites on the World Wide Web. Picking and registering your own domain name are two of the most critical phases in your site planning, and I show you how to do both in this section. When you tell your Web browser to go to www.dummies.com, it’s Chapter 15: Letting the World In: Choosing a Hostng and Domain Name 243 obvious where you’re going to end up — at the For Dummies Web site. Your computer doesn’t know that, though. It can’t actually go to a named site; instead, it asks a Domain Name Server (DNS) to translate that name into a more computer-friendly set of numbers known as an IP address. It’s like getting into a cab and telling the driver to go to the Acme Building. He asks you where it is, and you tell him it’s at 1123 Main Street.
Domain extensions — the final letters at the end of an Internet address — are known as the top-level domain, or TLD. They’re called “top level” because you read Internet addresses from right to left, and the part after the last dot is the highest step in a hierarchy that eventually leads down from the Internet as a whole, step by dotted step, to the particular computer you’re going to. Here are the four main domain extensions you’ll probably deal with:
. .com: Commercial operations
. .edu: Educational institutions
. .net: Internet service providers (ISPs)
. .org: Nonprofit organizations

The funny thing about all these TLDs is that there’s no requirement in many cases for people to use any of them in the manner in which they were intended. Plenty of nonprofit organizations have .com addresses, and quite a few .nets have nothing at all to do with ISPs. Go figure. Some of the new TLDs, like .museum, have stringent requirements; if you’re not a museum, you can’t get a .museum address.

Picking a name
In the early days, it was easy to create a domain name because there weren’t many of them in use yet. Today, though, if you want to pick a three- or fourletter abbreviation or a single word for your domain name, you’re very likely to be out of luck. Everything short is already taken. The solution? Forget the acronyms and short names. Use phrases instead. The basic idea is to go for anything long enough that it’s unlikely to have been used yet, but short enough to remember.
To find out whether a name is available, you use a WhoIs utility. One of the most familiar ones on the Web is the Network Solutions page at www. networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois. You might also try the nice set of tools at www.whois.net (see Figure 15-3) or use a stand-alone tool like WhoIs ULTRA, which you can get your hands on at www.analogx. com/contents/download/network/whois.htm.
Take your time and poke around the AnalogX site. You can get some other wonderful utilities there, too.
What do you do if you’ve come up with a great domain name, but it’s already taken, and you’ve just gotta have it? Well, it depends. If you’re a company that already has a trademark, the domain name may well already “belong” to you as a matter of course, even if you haven’t registered it yet. Well, at any rate, it probably can’t legally be used by anyone else. If you’ve been doing business as, say, Joe’s Acme Fabuloso Garbanzo Beans and Unicyle Maintenance Company, and that name’s your registered trademark, anyone running a site named www.JoesAcmeFabulosoGarbanzoBeansAndUnicycleMaintenanceCompany. com is probably easy game for your lawyers.