Web hosting basics (for novices)

So, you have decided to publish your own web site. Now, how do you go about doing it? We’ll discuss hosting your own site step by step.

I. Define the scope of your hosting needs

First, you have to be very well aware of all the hosting functionalities that you might need. Sample cases:

1. Publishing some web pages or photos with descriptive content (Static Pages)
2. Reserving a domain name based on your name or family name (Personal websites) and running the site.
3. Interacting with your visitors (Guest Book, Online shopping Portal, Customer feedback and etc)
4. Running news sites that handle high user traffic (like cnbc.com, ibnlive.com and etc)
   

II. Choose the hosting provider

1. If your requirement is similar to case I.1, then you may choose free hosting services like geocities.com or pages.google.com. These sites provide static hosting services for free of cost. Yet, they provide tools to build, edit your web pages.
2. If your requirement is similar to case I.b, then you have to register a domain name first. Refer to the post (http://web-admins.blogspot.com/2008/08/domain-names-at-cheap-price-10.html), that lists a review of companies that provide domain name registration service for cheap price. Once, you have registered a domain name, you have to map it to a server (location of a directory where in your entire html files are stored). This space is called as web space or storage space. You may either buy the space from service providers or you may redirect all the requests to this registered domain to some other web sites.
3. If your requirement is similar to case 1.c, where in you need to interact with your web site visitors, then you have to buy a hosting service that offers server side scripting (Php, Perl, Jsp, Python and etc) facility. You have to check with the service providers for the quota limits like web space quota, database quota.
4. For case 1.d, you may have to go for dedicated servers that offer a hassle free service.
   

III. Building your web pages

Your web site content and appearance is what attracts your visitors. So, you need to pay more attention while designing your web pages and writing the web page contents. There are plenty of web designing tools available online. We’ll be discussing this section in detail.

Mind your Bandwidth

While hosting your web site, you need to optimize the data transfer, since bandwidth is very costlier to buy.

How bandwidth is calculated?

Bandwidth indicates the data transfer. Just in case if your site serves a single web page of size 100KB, and 15 users visit the site every single day, then the bandwidth is: 100KB * 15 = 1500KB per day.

Bandwidth Optimization tips:

1. Keep the web pages as simple as possible. Do not put big image files on the web site.
2. If you are very sure that the web site content is not going to change for certain period of time, then you can set the cache-expiry header in every web page. So, that the users will fetch the web pages from their local cache and hence the data transfer will be less.
3. Suppose, if you need to display some images or documents from other sites, do not copy them in to your site. Instead have reference links to other sites,so that the partial traffic will be routed to other sites.If your site allows downloading, then zip the files and then transfer the zipped content. It may help to reduce the data transfer.
   

Domain names at Cheap Price ( < $10).

Following is the list of few companies that offer domain name registration service at cheap price (less than $10 per annum). Note that this is the price only for domain name registration. Hosting and other services will be charged separately.

As on Jul 2008:

Company	Price
NetFirms	$4.95
Yahoo	$4.98
EV1Servers	$5.99
Hostway	$6.95
Stargate	$6.95
Interland	$7.95
Web.com	$7.95
AIT Domains	$7.99
Go Daddy	$8.95
RegisterFly	$9.99

Welcome from your host.

This blog will primarily focus on Web Hosting, Web site Administration and related tips & tricks. Also, the blog will have reviews on various hosting service provider. Readers are welcome to share their comments !