webhosting

This is my site about, you guessed it, web hosting. Apparently, some people have the notion that creating and maintaining a good web site is a difficult task. This notion could not be more untrue. Some people associate servers and networks with the profession but that is only the technical side of it. It is quite normal for someone to have a web site without having an idea what a DNS (domain name server) is. What I will be doing is to give you a rundown of what it takes to successfully get a web site up and running.

(Publishing Web Sites for Dummies)

1. Have a clear idea of what you want to present in your web site. Some people view at as a novelty but I prefer to view web sites as a tool for communicating ideas to the public. So before you start designing your web site, you need to know what information you would like your web site to contain. Some people start with their hobbies, talking about basketball for example or knitting. The possibilities are endless.

2. Design your web site. There are many tools available for doing this. For beginners, I would suggest using Microsoft FrontPage. This is a part of the Microsoft Office package that is installed in many computers. The advantage of using Microsoft FrontPage is that it assists you in creating complicated "Internet stuff" like DHTML (dynamic HTML), CSS (cascading style sheets), all of which are designed to improve your web site. If you are an advanced Internet programmer, which you are probably not because you're reading my web site about web hosting primer, you can use more advanced tools such as Macromedia DreamWeaver or ColdFusion or if you are a little bit more hardcore, you can actually code HTML using nothing less than Notepad or Emacs if you're running in GNU/Linux.

3. Select a good web host. A web host is the computer (read: server) that is virtually permanently connected to the Internet and which contains the Internet documents (HTML) that you want the general public to read. If you have a computer and a permanent Internet connection (such as cable or DSL), you can actually set up your computer to become your own Internet server. Microsoft offers IIS (Internet Information Services) to Windows users as server software or you can use Apache which is an open-source server solution. This is the difficult part of web hosting so we will skip this part and move on to the easy part. A lot of Internet services offer web hosting and some are even free. Some of the best web hosts I have encountered are Geocities and Angelfire. Instructions on how to upload your pages to these web hosts are provided in their own pages.

4. After uploading your site, you need to let people know that your web site is published. Some people spread it by word of mouth and some people submit their links to other sites. For example, if you have a web site about basketball, you can contact the webmaster of a local and established basketball fan page to include you in their related links, that way, people visiting the more famous site will see your link and may be interested to visit. As long as you provide good content, people will start flocking to your web site and you might even earn money with it.

That concludes my introductory discussion on Internet publishing. If you have more questions, feel free to e-mail me at popisunga [at] gmail [dot] com