Web Design Fall 2008
Hosting
Website Hosting Website hosting is an essential part of creating a website. Common website hosting companies such as Godaddy.com offer hard drive space on a computer, setup as a website server. So the real questions here are which hosting company to use and how many of their services to purchase. Hard Drive Space The amount of space that your site will require is directly related to how many images and pages your site has. Very small sites tend to be under 5-10 Megabytes. Where as huge extensive websites can be as large as 500 MB. When deciding on how much space to purchase for your website hosting keep in mind that unless you plan to expand your site infinitely you can probably use any hosting plan that has over 10 MB. Data Transfer Limit Many Hosting companies have a limit on how much data they will transfer over the internet for you in a months time. This option is usually bundled together with a particular hard-drive space and the pair are generally matched correctly. To determine exactly how much data you will need transferred you can judge how many visitors you might have to your website every month and multiply by the number of MB your site is. This number would assume that every person that visits your site will view every single page and every picture. This is unlikely but it will prepare you for one month where you have more hits on your website than you expected. FTP accounts Most website hosting companies will have a control panel that allows you to edit the server setting for your website. This includes creating FTP or User accounts. Once you have purchased a hosting plan you will need to create a FTP account for yourself so that you can post your website onto the internet. See you hosting company's FAQ to determine the process for creating and using an FTP account. The all important DOMAIN Before you can purchase a hosting plan you will need to get a Domain name such as domain.com. The domain name that you choose for your website will be what all visitors associate your site with. It is important to get a good domain that will help your visitors find you easily. Avoid really lengthy domain names as they take too long to type in and are harder to remember. The following website is for a hosting company called network solutions use this site to pick a domain name. (note: I wouldn't use this website as a hosting provider. Only to check the availability of the domain names you want. ) http://networksolutions.com If you want to have a very high profile domain name such as love.com or something along those lines you are most likely going to have to purchase the domain from the person that already has it. Visit your hosting companies website, they will usually have a service that takes care of this for you. Depending on the domain you want it could cost you up to $2000 or as little as $100 E-mail Accounts Once you have a domain name your hosting company will allow you to have e-mail accounts associated with that domain. This could be any e-mail address you want such as your_name@love.com. See your hosting companies support or FAQ area to establish how to setup an e-mail account and how to check the e-mail account. You can also usually setup forwarding e-mail accounts so if you had your_name@gmail.com you could set up a mail forwarder that would push all e-mails sent to your_name@love.com to your_name@gmail.com. How Much Should it Cost A basic hosting package shouldn't cost more than about $20 / month depending on the amount of hosting you purchase. Godaddy.com's basic package only runs $5 / month and has almost everything you could want or need. |