Tutorial Web Hosting for Dummies Complete Part 1 Getting Started with Web Hosting
Getting Started with Web Hosting
In this part . . .
✓ Understand what web hosting is and what its different facilities and functions do.
✓ Learn how to choose between hosts. Understand what your host does and does not provide.
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding what web hosting is
▶ Mastering the language
▶ Simplifying the different concepts and technologies
Web hosting is a massive industry. With hundreds of millions of websites currently online, people all over the planet are finding them-
selves diving into a strange new world of technology that they’ve never explored before. It can be confusing and intimidating at first, and many people never quite grasp what hosting is all about, what it does for them, or how it affects them.
In this chapter, I explain the whole system of web hosting, paralleling every aspect of it with things that you already know and understand in the real world.
I start by getting some confusing terminology out of the way.
Many different terms can be used to describe web hosting, such as the following:
✓
Web hosting
✓ Website hosting
✓ Self hosting
✓ Blog hosting
✓ Hosted website or blog
The different names can be confusing at first. However, with the exception of “hosted website,” they all mean that you have complete control of how your website is made available to the world.
In the case of a hosted website or blog, the hosting and all its related functions are done by another company. All you get is the facility to build your site, without any access to the powerful tools behind the scenes. This has its advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is that you don’t have to worry about any of the background functions behind your site; you just get to do all the fun stuff.
The disadvantage to a hosted website is that you are restricted in what you can do by the host in a multitude of ways.
If you start out with a hosted site, it’s most likely that after a year or so you will find that the limits and restrictions imposed by your host make it too difficult for your site to expand the way you want it to. This is the time to move to self hosting.
In this part . . .
✓ Understand what web hosting is and what its different facilities and functions do.
✓ Learn how to choose between hosts. Understand what your host does and does not provide.
✓ Read the fine-print to understand what your hosting contract really says.
Chapter 1 Explaining Web Hosting in Real-World Terms
Chapter 1 Explaining Web Hosting in Real-World Terms
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding what web hosting is
▶ Mastering the language
▶ Simplifying the different concepts and technologies
Web hosting is a massive industry. With hundreds of millions of websites currently online, people all over the planet are finding them-
selves diving into a strange new world of technology that they’ve never explored before. It can be confusing and intimidating at first, and many people never quite grasp what hosting is all about, what it does for them, or how it affects them.
In this chapter, I explain the whole system of web hosting, paralleling every aspect of it with things that you already know and understand in the real world.
I start by getting some confusing terminology out of the way.
Many different terms can be used to describe web hosting, such as the following:
✓
Web hosting ✓ Website hosting
✓ Self hosting
✓ Blog hosting
✓ Hosted website or blog
The different names can be confusing at first. However, with the exception of “hosted website,” they all mean that you have complete control of how your website is made available to the world.
In the case of a hosted website or blog, the hosting and all its related functions are done by another company. All you get is the facility to build your site, without any access to the powerful tools behind the scenes. This has its advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is that you don’t have to worry about any of the background functions behind your site; you just get to do all the fun stuff.
The disadvantage to a hosted website is that you are restricted in what you can do by the host in a multitude of ways.
If you start out with a hosted site, it’s most likely that after a year or so you will find that the limits and restrictions imposed by your host make it too difficult for your site to expand the way you want it to. This is the time to move to self hosting.
Conceptualizing Web Hosting
For any website to be available for viewing on the World Wide Web, it has to be on a computer that is connected to the Internet. The computer your site is on is known as its host.
The host can be any computer at all, anywhere in the world. Your computer at home can host your website, if you want. You could also use a computer in your office, in a warehouse, or even in a shed. All you need for the host are
✓
Power
✓ An Internet connection
✓ A dedicated IP address
Each computer or device that connects to the Internet has an IP address. This address is unique and allows other computers on the Internet to find you. It’s just as unique as the street address of your house. Most homes and even some businesses have a dynamically allocated IP address, which means that their Internet Service Provider (ISP) allocates the person or business an IP address each time a connection is made to the Internet. The IP address could be different for every connection.
For a site to be readily found online, it needs to always have the same IP address, which is called a dedicated IP address.
Think of it as a party. The person whose house the party is at is called the host. In the same way, the computer that your website resides on is the website host. That host has an address, which is how you can find the party. Likewise, your web host has an address, which is how the Internet finds your site.
The IP in the term IP address stands for Internet Protocol. The current version is Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), which has numeric addresses in the format xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. There are approximately 4.29 billion possible combinations — and thus, 4.29 billion possible addresses. The problem with that, though, is that each device requires its own address. There are so many devices connected to the Internet that we’re just about to run out of addresses. The solution is to move to IPv6, which has billions of times more addresses and is starting to be phased in now.
You could get your own dedicated IP address at home and host your site on your own computer, but what happens when the power goes out, your Internet connection goes down, or you need to reboot your computer? All of a sudden your website wouldn’t be available for anyone to see, which would be bad.
Imagine each website you visit is in a house. Wouldn’t it be annoying if you couldn’t get to Google.com because the house it is in has a power outage? Or what if you couldn’t open Amazon.com because it was on a computer in someone else’s house and the phone lines went down?
The Internet would be terrible if that were the case. Sites would be up and down like yo-yos, and you would never be able to rely on a site to be up when you wanted to visit it.
The solution to this problem is web servers, which, as the name suggests, are dedicated machines that exist solely to serve websites to whomever wants to see them.
Servers are located in buildings called data centers, which are built specifically for housing web servers. Data centers have all manner of backup systems and generators to ensure everything keeps running smoothly. They have Internet connections coming in from multiple different companies so if one or more go down, there are always others to take the load. They have a whole host of other safety features — all with the aim of making your site available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Each server can host multiple websites, depending on the size of the sites. This is called shared hosting. Some servers, however, are dedicated just to one site or to a small number of sites belonging to one person or organization. These are called dedicated servers.
That’s all that web hosting is. It’s simply having space online to house your website and serve it to any visitors who come looking.
Now that you know what hosting is, I’m going to explain in simple terms what some of its main functions are and how they relate to your website.
For any website to be available for viewing on the World Wide Web, it has to be on a computer that is connected to the Internet. The computer your site is on is known as its host.
The host can be any computer at all, anywhere in the world. Your computer at home can host your website, if you want. You could also use a computer in your office, in a warehouse, or even in a shed. All you need for the host are
✓
Power ✓ An Internet connection
✓ A dedicated IP address
Each computer or device that connects to the Internet has an IP address. This address is unique and allows other computers on the Internet to find you. It’s just as unique as the street address of your house. Most homes and even some businesses have a dynamically allocated IP address, which means that their Internet Service Provider (ISP) allocates the person or business an IP address each time a connection is made to the Internet. The IP address could be different for every connection.
For a site to be readily found online, it needs to always have the same IP address, which is called a dedicated IP address.
Think of it as a party. The person whose house the party is at is called the host. In the same way, the computer that your website resides on is the website host. That host has an address, which is how you can find the party. Likewise, your web host has an address, which is how the Internet finds your site.
The IP in the term IP address stands for Internet Protocol. The current version is Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), which has numeric addresses in the format xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. There are approximately 4.29 billion possible combinations — and thus, 4.29 billion possible addresses. The problem with that, though, is that each device requires its own address. There are so many devices connected to the Internet that we’re just about to run out of addresses. The solution is to move to IPv6, which has billions of times more addresses and is starting to be phased in now. You could get your own dedicated IP address at home and host your site on your own computer, but what happens when the power goes out, your Internet connection goes down, or you need to reboot your computer? All of a sudden your website wouldn’t be available for anyone to see, which would be bad.
Imagine each website you visit is in a house. Wouldn’t it be annoying if you couldn’t get to Google.com because the house it is in has a power outage? Or what if you couldn’t open Amazon.com because it was on a computer in someone else’s house and the phone lines went down?
The Internet would be terrible if that were the case. Sites would be up and down like yo-yos, and you would never be able to rely on a site to be up when you wanted to visit it.
The solution to this problem is web servers, which, as the name suggests, are dedicated machines that exist solely to serve websites to whomever wants to see them.
Servers are located in buildings called data centers, which are built specifically for housing web servers. Data centers have all manner of backup systems and generators to ensure everything keeps running smoothly. They have Internet connections coming in from multiple different companies so if one or more go down, there are always others to take the load. They have a whole host of other safety features — all with the aim of making your site available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Each server can host multiple websites, depending on the size of the sites. This is called shared hosting. Some servers, however, are dedicated just to one site or to a small number of sites belonging to one person or organization. These are called dedicated servers.
That’s all that web hosting is. It’s simply having space online to house your website and serve it to any visitors who come looking.
Now that you know what hosting is, I’m going to explain in simple terms what some of its main functions are and how they relate to your website.
Thinking about Your Site as a Store
To help you understand the different functions involved, I break hosting down for you with an analogy that you can easily understand. This will help you quickly and easily see which functions do what and when you will need them.
Even if you don’t intend to use your website or blog to sell things, think of your site as a store and your visitors as customers to that store. The analogy works just as well whether you are selling something or not.
A blog is just a website designed to be easily updated with new posts. In this book, I mostly use the term website to mean blogs.
Imagine you are opening a new store. To open your store, you need
✓ A name
✓ A location
✓ Staff
✓ Products to sell
If any one of those essential items is missing, your store can’t open, so you have to, at the very minimum, have all those things in place.
The same is true of a website. To start a website, you need the following:
✓
A name (the domain name)
✓ A location (a web server)
✓ Staff (someone to maintain and update your site — probably you)
✓ Products (something on the site for visitors to read/see/buy)
Without those four basic elements, you cannot get your website up and running.
In your hypothetical store, you might also want the following items:
✓
Security
✓ Advertising
✓ Decor
✓ An office
✓ Keys to get in
✓ Insurance
✓ An easy way to get new stock
These things are also available for your website. Security and advertising are self-explanatory, but the other items in a brick-and-mortar store translate to the following things on your website:
✓
Decor = the design of your site
✓ An office = your hosting control panel
✓ Keys to get in = your username and password
✓ Insurance = a good backup system
✓ A way to get stock = FTP
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Most people don’t realize that the http at the beginning of a web address stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. The difference between the two is that when you specify http, the computer knows that you want to open the file and display whatever is inside it. When you use FTP, the computer knows you want to transfer the whole file to another location rather than displaying it.
To help you understand the different functions involved, I break hosting down for you with an analogy that you can easily understand. This will help you quickly and easily see which functions do what and when you will need them.
Even if you don’t intend to use your website or blog to sell things, think of your site as a store and your visitors as customers to that store. The analogy works just as well whether you are selling something or not.
A blog is just a website designed to be easily updated with new posts. In this book, I mostly use the term website to mean blogs. Imagine you are opening a new store. To open your store, you need
✓ A name
✓ A location
✓ Staff
✓ Products to sell
If any one of those essential items is missing, your store can’t open, so you have to, at the very minimum, have all those things in place.
The same is true of a website. To start a website, you need the following:
✓
A name (the domain name) ✓ A location (a web server)
✓ Staff (someone to maintain and update your site — probably you)
✓ Products (something on the site for visitors to read/see/buy)
Without those four basic elements, you cannot get your website up and running.
In your hypothetical store, you might also want the following items:
✓
Security ✓ Advertising
✓ Decor
✓ An office
✓ Keys to get in
✓ Insurance
✓ An easy way to get new stock
These things are also available for your website. Security and advertising are self-explanatory, but the other items in a brick-and-mortar store translate to the following things on your website:
✓
Decor = the design of your site ✓ An office = your hosting control panel
✓ Keys to get in = your username and password
✓ Insurance = a good backup system
✓ A way to get stock = FTP
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Most people don’t realize that the http at the beginning of a web address stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. The difference between the two is that when you specify http, the computer knows that you want to open the file and display whatever is inside it. When you use FTP, the computer knows you want to transfer the whole file to another location rather than displaying it.
Giving your store a name
When you open a store in the real world, the name is not the first thing you need. It helps to have the name first, but it isn’t essential. In the hosting world, though, the site name, known as the domain name, is the first thing you need to decide on.
You can’t buy hosting and start designing your site until you have decided on a name and have purchased the domain name. See Chapter 2 for an explanation of how to pick a name.
When you open a store in the real world, the name is not the first thing you need. It helps to have the name first, but it isn’t essential. In the hosting world, though, the site name, known as the domain name, is the first thing you need to decide on.
You can’t buy hosting and start designing your site until you have decided on a name and have purchased the domain name. See Chapter 2 for an explanation of how to pick a name.
Finding the right location (and landlord)
As I explain earlier in this section, you should picture your website as a store regardless of whether you’re actually selling anything.
Remember that in this analogy, your hosting is like a building that your store is in, and your website is the decor, products, and everything else that goes inside the store.
When you first open a store, you need to find a building you can lease in a good location at the right price.
You may want it in the local shopping mall, but that has its drawbacks because then you’re restricted by the mall’s opening hours and by its rules and regulations about what you can and can’t do.
Alternatively, you may want to lease some property of your own or get some space in a strip mall. With the strip mall, you have more freedom but are still somewhat restricted; if you lease a piece of land, you’re free to do whatever you like on it (providing the city council allows you).
Finding somewhere to host your website is the same. You can go for a hosted website as described earlier in the chapter, but a hosted site is like being in a mall. The plethora of restrictions might outweigh the benefits.
You can locate your site in the web-hosting equivalent of a strip mall — a shared server. There, you’re fairly free to do what you want, but you’re sharing the space with possibly hundreds of other sites, and some things you do might affect them (and vice versa).
The final option is to lease your own server. Like leasing your own plot of land, nobody can tell you what you can and can’t do on your own server.
Don’t try to go too big too fast; your web hosting can grow with your website. Unless you know you will be getting thousands of visitors from the get-go, you don’t need top-of-the-line hosting right from the start.
With a physical store, not only do you have to find the right location, but (unless you buy the land yourself) you need to make sure you have a landlord you can work with.
Your landlord leases you the building and is responsible for the physical building. It’s his responsibility to make sure the walls are sound and the roof doesn’t collapse, but beyond that, everything is up to you. If one of your racks or product display stands breaks, it isn’t your landlord’s responsibility. It’s yours.
The same is true of your hosting. The web hosting company you buy hosting from is renting you space on a computer connected to the Internet. It’s the web host’s responsibility to make sure the computer keeps working and the Internet connection stays live, but beyond that, it’s all up to you.
Most store owners only contact their landlords to pay the rent or to tell them when there is a problem with the building. Likewise, website owners only need to contact the web hosting company to pay the hosting charge or to report that the server seems not to be working correctly.
Ask around online to find out how good your chosen web host is as a landlord — in other words, how good the host’s service, response time, and communication are.
As I explain earlier in this section, you should picture your website as a store regardless of whether you’re actually selling anything.
Remember that in this analogy, your hosting is like a building that your store is in, and your website is the decor, products, and everything else that goes inside the store.
When you first open a store, you need to find a building you can lease in a good location at the right price.
You may want it in the local shopping mall, but that has its drawbacks because then you’re restricted by the mall’s opening hours and by its rules and regulations about what you can and can’t do.
Alternatively, you may want to lease some property of your own or get some space in a strip mall. With the strip mall, you have more freedom but are still somewhat restricted; if you lease a piece of land, you’re free to do whatever you like on it (providing the city council allows you).
Finding somewhere to host your website is the same. You can go for a hosted website as described earlier in the chapter, but a hosted site is like being in a mall. The plethora of restrictions might outweigh the benefits.
You can locate your site in the web-hosting equivalent of a strip mall — a shared server. There, you’re fairly free to do what you want, but you’re sharing the space with possibly hundreds of other sites, and some things you do might affect them (and vice versa).
The final option is to lease your own server. Like leasing your own plot of land, nobody can tell you what you can and can’t do on your own server.
Don’t try to go too big too fast; your web hosting can grow with your website. Unless you know you will be getting thousands of visitors from the get-go, you don’t need top-of-the-line hosting right from the start. With a physical store, not only do you have to find the right location, but (unless you buy the land yourself) you need to make sure you have a landlord you can work with.
Your landlord leases you the building and is responsible for the physical building. It’s his responsibility to make sure the walls are sound and the roof doesn’t collapse, but beyond that, everything is up to you. If one of your racks or product display stands breaks, it isn’t your landlord’s responsibility. It’s yours.
The same is true of your hosting. The web hosting company you buy hosting from is renting you space on a computer connected to the Internet. It’s the web host’s responsibility to make sure the computer keeps working and the Internet connection stays live, but beyond that, it’s all up to you.
Most store owners only contact their landlords to pay the rent or to tell them when there is a problem with the building. Likewise, website owners only need to contact the web hosting company to pay the hosting charge or to report that the server seems not to be working correctly.
Ask around online to find out how good your chosen web host is as a landlord — in other words, how good the host’s service, response time, and communication are.
Hiring the right staff
Before paying for hosting, think about who is going to keep the website updated. If you were opening a business, you’d have to think about what staff you are going to have in the store, whether you’ll sell enough to pay them, and whether you’ll ever get any sleep with all the work you’ll have to do.
Keeping a website updated is very similar. Whether you’re creating a site for your community group, a blog, or even an online store, who is going to keep it updated? It always sounds easy, but the challenge of writing every day or remembering to update the website with new events or even adding and deleting products can soon drive even the most patient person to insanity.
Before paying for hosting, think about who is going to keep the website updated. If you were opening a business, you’d have to think about what staff you are going to have in the store, whether you’ll sell enough to pay them, and whether you’ll ever get any sleep with all the work you’ll have to do.
Keeping a website updated is very similar. Whether you’re creating a site for your community group, a blog, or even an online store, who is going to keep it updated? It always sounds easy, but the challenge of writing every day or remembering to update the website with new events or even adding and deleting products can soon drive even the most patient person to insanity.
Stocking the shelves
It is not enough to open a store and stock the shelves once then never restock them. The stock on the shelves needs to be replenished regularly or people will have nothing to come back to buy.
Likewise, unless the content on your website changes regularly, there is nothing new for people to come back to your site for. Not all websites need to be updated daily, but regular new information gives your visitors a reason for continuing to return on a regular basis.
Your hosting plan and your website are not the same thing. Your hosting plan is the facility that gives you a location in which to house your website. The website itself is comprised of the files, databases, and pages that create something viewable to Internet users.
If you picture a store, you generally think of a building with products inside. What you’re seeing, though, is two separate parts: a building and the decor/ products. If you take the decorations, racks, products, and everything else out — and even take the sign off the front — the building is still there.
Hosting is the building. It’s empty; it simply provides space for you to work in. Your website is everything that’s inside the building. Delete your website and the computer it was hosted on still exists (and you’ll still be charged for your hosting plan whether you’re using it or not).
Every store needs an office. Somewhere where you can sit and relax without being in front of customers. Somewhere you can do all the background administration the store needs. For the hosting plan, that’s called the control panel or the dashboard.
Your control panel is where you administer the hosting, set up passwords and e-mail accounts, and do all the back-end stuff that is related to the hosting but not specifically the site. With most hosting companies, you can run multiple sites under one control panel, like having a central office doing the administration for a chain of stores.
You need a lock and keys to keep your office safe, and that’s your control panel’s username and password that your host will have provided for you when you registered for hosting.
Stores need a way to get stock in and out, so where possible they have a loading bay. The loading bay is typically at the back so the customers don’t see the deliveries being made and can’t interfere with them.
FTP provides a loading bay for your website. Any time you need to update the site in any way, FTP is the tool you need to do that. It’s like a delivery driver. You tell it which files you want delivered and where you want them delivered and the FTP does the rest.
Finally comes the part everyone hates — insurance. Nobody likes making insurance payments until something goes wrong, and then they’re really glad to have insurance and wish they had paid a little more to get even better coverage.
Website owners face the same problem. Nobody wants to pay for daily backups — or even weekly or monthly ones — and many people choose not to, but then their website goes down and they really regret not having paid for the backup service.
Just as I would suggest that any company get insurance, I absolutely recommend that website owners get a good backup system.
It is not enough to open a store and stock the shelves once then never restock them. The stock on the shelves needs to be replenished regularly or people will have nothing to come back to buy.
Likewise, unless the content on your website changes regularly, there is nothing new for people to come back to your site for. Not all websites need to be updated daily, but regular new information gives your visitors a reason for continuing to return on a regular basis.
Your hosting plan and your website are not the same thing. Your hosting plan is the facility that gives you a location in which to house your website. The website itself is comprised of the files, databases, and pages that create something viewable to Internet users. If you picture a store, you generally think of a building with products inside. What you’re seeing, though, is two separate parts: a building and the decor/ products. If you take the decorations, racks, products, and everything else out — and even take the sign off the front — the building is still there.
Hosting is the building. It’s empty; it simply provides space for you to work in. Your website is everything that’s inside the building. Delete your website and the computer it was hosted on still exists (and you’ll still be charged for your hosting plan whether you’re using it or not).
Every store needs an office. Somewhere where you can sit and relax without being in front of customers. Somewhere you can do all the background administration the store needs. For the hosting plan, that’s called the control panel or the dashboard.
Your control panel is where you administer the hosting, set up passwords and e-mail accounts, and do all the back-end stuff that is related to the hosting but not specifically the site. With most hosting companies, you can run multiple sites under one control panel, like having a central office doing the administration for a chain of stores.
You need a lock and keys to keep your office safe, and that’s your control panel’s username and password that your host will have provided for you when you registered for hosting.
Stores need a way to get stock in and out, so where possible they have a loading bay. The loading bay is typically at the back so the customers don’t see the deliveries being made and can’t interfere with them.
FTP provides a loading bay for your website. Any time you need to update the site in any way, FTP is the tool you need to do that. It’s like a delivery driver. You tell it which files you want delivered and where you want them delivered and the FTP does the rest.
Finally comes the part everyone hates — insurance. Nobody likes making insurance payments until something goes wrong, and then they’re really glad to have insurance and wish they had paid a little more to get even better coverage.
Website owners face the same problem. Nobody wants to pay for daily backups — or even weekly or monthly ones — and many people choose not to, but then their website goes down and they really regret not having paid for the backup service.
Just as I would suggest that any company get insurance, I absolutely recommend that website owners get a good backup system.
Avoiding Misconceptions and Missteps
Building websites and purchasing web hosting are things that are still new concepts to most people. Knowing who does what and who is responsible for what does not come naturally.
A few things trip up many people . The next sections describe these things so you don’t fall into the same mistakes.
Building websites and purchasing web hosting are things that are still new concepts to most people. Knowing who does what and who is responsible for what does not come naturally.
A few things trip up many people . The next sections describe these things so you don’t fall into the same mistakes.
Know what to expect from hosting support
Your web host will offer support in some manner. Some hosts offer phone support or an online chat option, whereas others might only offer support through an e-mail or ticket system. Either way, there are limits to what your host can do for you.
As I mention in the section “Finding the right location (and landlord),” your host’s responsibility is to provide you with a computer connected to the Internet to host your website on.
Generally, the hosting support desk will work with you to ascertain whether the problem is with your site or the hosting plan. If it turns out to be your site that is causing the problem, most hosts will tell you to find someone to help you fix it, or they may offer to help fix it for an extra charge.
It would be unreasonable to assume that your host would be an expert in whatever language or script your site is hosted with and would have staff available to fix every problem you come across with the site you are creating.
Make sure that you identify in advance other ways to troubleshoot problems that arise with your site for those situations where your host cannot help. Knowing where to turn in an emergency can be a great comfort in itself.
Your web host will offer support in some manner. Some hosts offer phone support or an online chat option, whereas others might only offer support through an e-mail or ticket system. Either way, there are limits to what your host can do for you.
As I mention in the section “Finding the right location (and landlord),” your host’s responsibility is to provide you with a computer connected to the Internet to host your website on.
Generally, the hosting support desk will work with you to ascertain whether the problem is with your site or the hosting plan. If it turns out to be your site that is causing the problem, most hosts will tell you to find someone to help you fix it, or they may offer to help fix it for an extra charge.
It would be unreasonable to assume that your host would be an expert in whatever language or script your site is hosted with and would have staff available to fix every problem you come across with the site you are creating.
Make sure that you identify in advance other ways to troubleshoot problems that arise with your site for those situations where your host cannot help. Knowing where to turn in an emergency can be a great comfort in itself.
Recognize that you’re the owner and you’re the responsible party
Whenever anything goes wrong at home, I always look for someone else to blame. My poor kids get the blame for everything!
The same is true online. Whenever something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. I never do anything wrong — at least, not that I’ll admit.
The problem with that attitude, though, is that it gets me nowhere when something goes wrong with my website.
What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that a website is the owner’s responsibility. You put a lot of time, work, effort, creativity, and money into creating the site, and, ultimately, if the worst happens and you lose it all then you’re the only one who can re-create it. Re-creating it will take a long time.
You must take responsibility for your site and ensure that you have a good, recent backup of it at all times.
In case the server blows up or your host goes bankrupt or some teenager with nothing better to do on a Friday night hacks in and deletes everything you need, you must be sure you have a recovery plan.
Shouting at your host might feel good, and if the problem is the host’s fault, suing the company might be successful, but neither of those actions will get your site back.
A website requires simply too much of your valuable time and talent for you to not do everything you can to ensure that you can recover it when disaster strikes.
Whenever anything goes wrong at home, I always look for someone else to blame. My poor kids get the blame for everything!
The same is true online. Whenever something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. I never do anything wrong — at least, not that I’ll admit.
The problem with that attitude, though, is that it gets me nowhere when something goes wrong with my website.
What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that a website is the owner’s responsibility. You put a lot of time, work, effort, creativity, and money into creating the site, and, ultimately, if the worst happens and you lose it all then you’re the only one who can re-create it. Re-creating it will take a long time.
You must take responsibility for your site and ensure that you have a good, recent backup of it at all times.
In case the server blows up or your host goes bankrupt or some teenager with nothing better to do on a Friday night hacks in and deletes everything you need, you must be sure you have a recovery plan.
Shouting at your host might feel good, and if the problem is the host’s fault, suing the company might be successful, but neither of those actions will get your site back.
A website requires simply too much of your valuable time and talent for you to not do everything you can to ensure that you can recover it when disaster strikes.
Don’t fall foul of your host’s terms and conditions
Did you read the seemingly endless pages of your host’s terms and conditions when you signed up?
I didn’t think so — I never do either.
Web hosting terms and conditions make for interesting reading, though. You’d be amazed at what they say.
Every host’s terms and conditions are slightly different, but here’s the general gist of them:
“We’ve listed a thousand things that we could class as being unacceptable, and if we find you doing any one of them we will most likely suspend your account immediately and possibly even delete it without any notice.”
Yes, seriously, your host is like a landlord, but there aren’t many laws covering what it can and can’t do. This means the host can, if it wants, change the locks right now and never give you access to your stuff again — for pretty much any reason.
Now, most hosts won’t do that, but they generally give themselves the option should they need to.
Things that will normally get you in trouble with your host are pornography, illegal content, and phishing sites (where you mimic a bank or other website to try to steal people’s login details).
If your site does get suspended, contact your host immediately. You’ll probably have to do a little convincing that your site got hacked or you genuinely didn’t realize that what you were doing was wrong, but most often your host will at least let you collect your files before deleting the account.
Don’t delay in contacting your host, though, because delays can be seen as proof that you knew you were in the wrong and you’re not going to fight to get your stuff back.
Did you read the seemingly endless pages of your host’s terms and conditions when you signed up?
I didn’t think so — I never do either.
Web hosting terms and conditions make for interesting reading, though. You’d be amazed at what they say.
Every host’s terms and conditions are slightly different, but here’s the general gist of them:
“We’ve listed a thousand things that we could class as being unacceptable, and if we find you doing any one of them we will most likely suspend your account immediately and possibly even delete it without any notice.”
Yes, seriously, your host is like a landlord, but there aren’t many laws covering what it can and can’t do. This means the host can, if it wants, change the locks right now and never give you access to your stuff again — for pretty much any reason.
Now, most hosts won’t do that, but they generally give themselves the option should they need to.
Things that will normally get you in trouble with your host are pornography, illegal content, and phishing sites (where you mimic a bank or other website to try to steal people’s login details).
If your site does get suspended, contact your host immediately. You’ll probably have to do a little convincing that your site got hacked or you genuinely didn’t realize that what you were doing was wrong, but most often your host will at least let you collect your files before deleting the account.
Don’t delay in contacting your host, though, because delays can be seen as proof that you knew you were in the wrong and you’re not going to fight to get your stuff back.
Don’t fool yourself: Unlimited is NOT unlimited
Many hosts offer “unlimited” plans that seem almost too good to be true. You get an unlimited amount of web space and an unlimited amount of bandwidth to use every month.
You know what they say, though: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.
Web hosts work on an “average use” system. They know that for every site that has 10,000 visitors a month, there are 100 sites that have only 1 or 2 visitors. Because of this, the hosting companies play the odds. They know that while one site on the server may be using more than its fair share of space and bandwidth and is unprofitable to have as a client, there are dozens or even hundreds that have paid for hosting and are using very little or even none at all.
There are limits to that, though, and although some hosts do offer genuinely unlimited plans, most have a little clause in their terms and conditions that puts in limits. Look for something like, “Any website found to be using excessive amounts of server resources will be suspended immediately.”
There’s more to hosting than just space and bandwidth. The site is on a server, which is just a big computer. When people visit your site, the server has to do some thinking to deliver the web pages the visitors want to view. That takes processing time and memory space.
So what your unlimited plan gives you is unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth allowance, but a limited amount of processor time and memory use.
That’s like saying you can have an unlimited number of cars and an unlimited number of parking spaces, but only a few gallons of gas between them. Most websites will never use enough server resources for the limits to become a problem, but if your site is successful, you may find your host telling you that you need to “upgrade” your unlimited plan!
Chapter 2 Evaluating Web Hosting Technologies
In This Chapter
▶ Mastering the language
▶ Comparing what’s on offer
▶ Choosing a host
You have a website and you need to find somewhere to host it. Sounds easy, right?
Then you start looking at web hosts and even though they try to make it as simple as possible, there are a dizzying array of options and different technologies.
In this chapter, you learn what all of the different options are and the advantages of each.
Understanding the Terms
Terms and names for the different aspects of web hosting and site building are thrown around freely by people in the industry. To newcomers, though, it’s all jargon that can make you feel like you’re on the outside of a club that’s hard to join.
In this section, I explain some of the most important terms so you can see the difference between them and start talking like a web hosting master.
Domain names
A domain name is the name you type into your browser to view a particular website. For example, the website for the For Dummies books is found at dummies.com. That’s its domain name. The domain name is also called the website address or web address.
Domain names are becoming a normal part of everyday life; you see them on commercials, posters, and flyers everywhere. Your domain name is important because it’s what people have to remember and type in accurately to get to your website. The domain name differs, however, from the site name. Let me explain.
Let’s say you own a store called Patti Percival’s Cupcakes and you want to start a website.
When people visit your site, you want them to associate the site with your store, so you prominently display your store name and logo on the site. That’s your brand identity.
When you’re buying the domain name for the site, though, you want to choose a name that is as short as possible and has as little chance for spelling errors as you can manage.
In the case of the store used in the example, PattiPercivalsCupcakes. com is a fairly long name for people to type, and some people might have trouble remembering if it’s Patti (with an i) or Patty (with a y). You might want to try a shorter domain name like PPCupcakes.com or even Cupcakes.com (if they’re available).
All web hosts have a domain name-checking tool on their websites. You can check the availability of a name by going to your host’s website and entering the name into the checker. On many sites, the checker even suggests alternatives if the name is not available.
Your website will still be called Patti Percival’s Cupcakes, but its address will be PPCupcakes.com.
In Chapter 9, I explain how you can buy more than one domain name and have them all point at the same site. This means you could buy both PattiPercivalsCupcakes.com and PPCupcakes.com and have them both go to the Patti Percival’s Cupcakes website. Sweet!
When many people say a website address, they preface it with www., the period inclusive. That is legitimate, and with most sites it gets you to where you want to go, but the www. is not necessary and is not part of the domain name. It’s actually a subdomain (see Chapter 9 for more information on subdomains).
Hosting accounts
Hosting accounts (also called hosting plans) are very different from domain names. Your hosting account gives you space online to house your website. It’s like leasing a building.
If you lease a building to use for your business, that building becomes your business address. You can move your business to another building, taking your name with you at any time. You aren’t stuck in one building forever just because that’s where you started.
You purchase a hosting account from a web host or hosting provider and, although it is often purchased in conjunction with a domain name, it is independent of the name. See Chapter 1for an in-depth look at the concepts behind web hosting.
The term hosting plan actually defines the specifications of your hosting account. The two terms, account and plan, are sometimes used interchangeably to mean the facilities and allowances you get with your account from your web host.
The difference between a hosting account and a domain name is an important distinction to note. When it comes time to renew your name registration and hosting account, you must make sure you renew both. Just because you renew your hosting plan doesn’t automatically mean you renew your name registration. In real-world terms, it’s like saying that renewing your business license doesn’t mean you have paid your rent.
Web scripts or platforms
There is often a lot of confusion between hosting accounts and platforms. A platform, or web script, is the software you install in your hosting account to build your website.
The platform is a group of files and maybe a database or two that work to give you a basic framework with which to design your site. The platform (the files and databases) can be moved from one hosting account to another and, like the domain name, is not tied to one particular web host.
When you talk about your site, you can say, “My domain name is xxxxx, it’s built using yyyyy (the platform), and is hosted by zzzzz (the hosting company).”
For example, my site is peterpollock.com (xxxxx), it’s built using WordPress (yyyyy), and it is hosted by my company, Day3 (zzzzz).
The three are completely separate and I can change any one of them at any time, but they come together to make my website viewable online for anyone who wants to see it.
Choosing between Servers
Linux hosting, Windows hosting, UNIX, cloud hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), dedicated servers — the list of choices for your hosting is huge. So how do you choose which is best for you?
Start by defining your needs.
The most important consideration is what platform or program you are going to use to build your site. Some platforms and certain web technologies only work on certain types of hosting, so you need to know what you are going to use before you can pick a hosting plan. Are you planning on using a platform like WordPress or Joomla, or are you going to code the site yourself? If you are coding it yourself, which language will you use to write it? Knowing the answers to these questions gives you the starting point for choosing which server is best for your needs.
Any server needs an operating system and some web server software to be able to deliver websites to the Internet. The most commonly used are Windows/IIS and Linus/Apache.
Using Windows as a server
Windows servers are most commonly used by businesses that design their own sites and use Microsoft technology to build them with.
Windows servers run the Windows operating system (usually a version of Windows Server) and run Internet Information Services (IIS) to serve up web pages. The Windows server/IIS combination is great if you want to create a database for your website using Microsoft Access or if you want to use the ASP.Net framework. They are also capable of running PHP-based sites, but it is not their forte.
In my experience, Windows servers are fairly reliable and do the job well, but in general I would only recommend that you use Windows if you know you have a specific need for it. Most web technologies run better on UNIX and Linux.
Looking at the different flavors of UNIX and Linux
UNIX is an operating system originally developed by AT&T in the 1970s. Its purpose was to run the servers at large corporations and universities.
The way UNIX was licensed, the purchasers received a full copy of the source code (the code that makes up the operating system) so they could alter any and all parts of it to make it work on their particular computer hardware.
This resulted in different flavors or types of UNIX becoming available. Each flavor has its own strengths and is designed to work well on certain hardware. Today’s UNIX flavors include
✓ AIX
✓ BSD
✓ SCO Unixware
✓ Solaris
Due to the cost of UNIX, in 1983 the GNU Project was started with the aim of providing a free UNIX-like operating system. This eventually spawned the Linux operating system, which is similar to UNIX but is freely available.
Like UNIX, Linux is being developed in a plethora of flavors (or distributions), the most popular of which are
✓ CentOS
✓ Debian
✓ Fedora
✓ FreeBSD
✓ OpenSUSE
✓ Red Hat
✓ Ubuntu
UNIX and Linux are robust, making them especially popular among web hosts. Linux is free, which keeps the host’s costs to a minimum, so it is obviously the most popular.
Different hosts have their own preferences of which Linux flavor to use, depending on the particular hardware they have and their experience with each version.
The most popular flavor seems to be CentOS, which is built entirely on the Red Hat version of Linux, but to most website owners it doesn’t seem to make too much difference which one is used.
Web hosting in the cloud
Cloud computing is all the rage these days and the hosting industry is no exception. The basic idea of cloud computing is that you join multiple computers together to provide faster, more reliable performance.
In terms of web hosting, that translates to meaning that websites get delivered faster and don’t suffer from slowdowns. When one website receives a lot of traffic, the load is spread equally among multiple servers in the cloud.
Imagine it as a grocery store where, if the lines at the checkouts get long, shelf-stackers and other staff from around the store are summoned to temporarily open additional checkouts until the rush is over.
Cloud hosting has a couple of small drawbacks, but they affect only the most security-conscious users. Some users may be concerned about data security due to multiple websites floating around in the same cloud, and the potential exists for a hacker to break an entire cloud rather than one server, but for the majority of website owners, the advantages of the cloud far outweigh the drawbacks.
Virtual Private Servers
A VPS is the next step up from a standard shared server. With a shared server, all of the sites share all of the resources of the server, and if one site hogs the resources, all the other sites suffer. With a VPS, the server is divided into equal sections, and each site (or set of sites) is placed within its own section. These sections are called virtual private hosts because they act independently of each other and are like a set of mini web servers that all share the same hardware.
A VPS can be a good idea if your site has a fair amount of traffic because it guarantees a certain level of processor time and memory availability to you.
Dedicated Servers
A dedicated server is exactly what it says . . . a server dedicated to you. It is a physical server in a data center which is yours and yours alone. No one else shares it or even has access to it. This is the most expensive hosting option, but it is also the most powerful and gives you the most control over the environment in which your site is hosted.
All Hosts Are Not Equal
It’s impossible to tell exactly how many web hosting companies there are in the world, but the number ranks in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.
Choosing among them can be tricky because they all make bold claims about their speed, reliability, and service. It sometimes can be nearly impossible to distinguish among them.
In this section, I explain a few things to look out for that might make the decision a little easier.
In the end, though, the best way to pick is by asking people you know which hosts they have used and which they would recommend. You can’t believe everything you read online; personal recommendations trump just about every other way to select a web host company.
As reliable as Old Faithful
Most hosts claim to have a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. That means that the server your site is on will be up and running and delivering pages to the web 99.9 percent of the time.
Let’s break that down for a moment. There are 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year. That’s a total of 8,760 hours in a year.
If your web host claims the server will be up 99.9 percent of the time, that means it will be up for around 8,7511⁄2 hours every year, leaving a full eight and a half hours of downtime.
A server reboot takes maybe 20 minutes on a shared server. If the hosts are monitoring the servers, they should spot when those servers go down and be able to reboot them within 30 minutes.
So at 99.9 percent uptime, the server could go down once a month and be fixed by a simple reboot, which still leaves more than four hours of downtime for some other event. If the server you were on went down every month, even for just half an hour, you might think it was unreliable, but your host could still claim a 99.9 percent uptime.
The 99.9 percent uptime therefore doesn’t really mean anything. Generally speaking, servers are reliable things, so comparing uptime claims is a waste of time.
It’s simple. Servers are reliable. Occasionally, they hiccup and need a little work done on them. They might be down for a few hours at that time and, if it’s serious, the downtime might extend to half a day or more. In general, however, whichever host you go with, the servers are made of the same parts, run the same software, and are as reliable as Old Faithful.
Expensive doesn’t mean better
Prices vary wildly from host to host. Some offer hosting from as low as $30 per year whereas others charge in excess of $100 per year for essentially the same service.
Just because you go with a big company that charges more, that doesn’t necessarily mean the service will be better. In fact, I have often found that smaller web hosts offer the best service. The big ones can become cumbersome and impersonal.
Don’t be fooled by grand claims and ultra-professional presentation. Just like cheap can sometimes mean cheap and nasty, expensive can be an overpriced rip-off.
If a company is charging more than others you’ve seen, be careful to check what it is offering that is truly different and worth the extra money — and don’t forget to ask your friends about their experiences.
Location, location, location
The Internet is a truly global market. In theory, you can tell where a company is based by its website address. Most countries have their own country codes; for instance, google.co.uk has the country code .uk at the end of its address so you can guess it’s in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, google.com.au has .au at the end of it, so you know it’s in Australia.
The code gives away a little about the company’s location, but it isn’t foolproof. Any website with any address can be located on a server anywhere in the world. So just because a website has a German web address, that doesn’t actually mean the site is on a server in Germany.
Although data travels around the Internet at incredible speeds, you can expect a definite time delay when talking to a server that is geographically a long way from you.
Ideally you should locate your site on a server that is in the same country as your target audience simply for the benefit to your visitors in speed of access.
Then, of course, there is location within the same country. If most of your website visitors are going to be from the East Coast of the U.S., what would be the point of having your server housed 3,000 miles away on the West Coast?
Check with the web host you are thinking of using to find out where its servers are located, just to make sure they’re not hidden away in Outer Mongolia or somewhere on the other side of the world.
Back that thing up
One major difference between web hosts is the backup options. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a good, recent backup of your site. Check with your host what its options are.
Some hosts automatically back up every site they host every night. This is good.
Some hosts do not back up the websites they host at all. This is bad.
Some hosts will back up your sites for you for a small additional fee. As long as that fee doesn’t make your overall hosting cost too high, that can often be worth it.
If the server your site is on goes down and neither you nor your host has a backup of your site, then there is absolutely nothing that can be done to get your site back. Nothing at all.
Make sure your host is making regular backups of your site and then also regularly back it up yourself. See Chapter 4 to find out how to create your own backup.
Sometimes the hare beats the tortoise
We all know Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise. The two animals race and the hare takes off really fast, while the tortoise plods along. The hare uses too much energy too quickly, though, and decides to take a nap before he reaches the finish line. When he awakes, he finds that he slept too long and the slow-moving tortoise has passed him and won the race.
Sometimes the tortoise doesn’t win, though — like in web servers, for instance.
It is extremely rare in web hosting server technology that you’re able to sacrifice reliability for speed. In general terms, server reliability doesn’t change no matter how much you speed it up.
This means you should look for a host that claims to have or is proven to have faster servers. Factors to look for are as follows:
✓ Does the host limit how many sites are put on one server?
✓ What specifications do the servers have? Faster processors and more RAM mean faster machines.
✓ Is the server’s uplink port 10Mbit, 100Mbit, or 1,000Mbit? The uplink port is the physical connection between the server and the Internet. The higher the number, the faster the connection.
✓ What operating system and server software does the server use? CentOS running Apache server is the most common combination, but the NGINX web server software is becoming more popular as a slightly faster alternative to Apache.
All these things make a difference, but when it comes down to it, don’t just take the hosting company’s word for how fast the servers are. Ask around because sometimes people’s actual experience can differ somewhat from what a company claims.
Not All Control Panels Are Created Equal
With hundreds of thousands of web hosts to choose from, the variety of hosting control panels is significant — and the difference between them in terms of ease of use is even more significant.
Web hosting software, and thus its associated control panels, comes in essentially two different flavors:
✓ Hosting software creators: These are independent companies that don’t provide hosting themselves. Instead, they put all their energy into creating a hosting system that is both powerful and easy to use. These are companies like cPanel and Parallels, which make the cPanel and Plesk hosting systems, respectively. Their systems can be licensed for use by any hosting company.
✓ Proprietary systems: These systems are developed in-house by the larger web hosts and are unique to that particular host.
Which system you use is totally based on your personal preference. Sometimes the difference between whether you feel a host is good or bad comes down to how easy it is for you to navigate around its control panel.
Control panel designs are changed frequently so what you see today might not be what you see in a couple of months.
The following sections cover some of the most popular control panels.
cPanel
cPanel is the most widely used hosting system and the most customizable.
The cPanel screen in Figure 2-1 is laid out in a series of sections, each containing related functions.
The cPanel control panel is highly customizable and comes with various preinstalled layout options. Many hosts even allow you to select which of the basic layouts you want to use. To change the format of the cPanel control panel, use the Change Style screen. (See Figure 2-2.)
Some hosts even completely redesign the control panel to integrate it with some of their other systems. The implementation by justhost.com is a great example of that. (See Figure 2-3.) Not only has justhost made the control panel blend in with the rest of the site, but it also has added sections to the control panel itself to provide a whole host of additional features and functions.
Plesk
Plesk, which is made by Parallels, is probably the biggest rival to cPanel, offering as much functionality with a very different layout. (See Figure 2-4.)
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar and web hosting provider. GoDaddy has created its own proprietary system to manage all aspects of having an account with it.
This system is quite different from cPanel and Plesk, but it tries to be intuitive and self-explanatory. (See Figure 2-5.)
DreamHost
DreamHost has created its own control panel, which is quite unlike anything else on the market.
From the front page, you can go directly to some of the most used functions through the Toolbox at the top left. (See Figure 2-6.) Everything else is easily accessible through a couple of clicks in the menu system.
1&1
1&1 has been in the online services business since 1988 and has a large presence in the U.K. and the U.S.
The control panel’s front page has developed over time to be simple, clean, and easy to use. (See Figure 2-7.)
Many hosts offer “unlimited” plans that seem almost too good to be true. You get an unlimited amount of web space and an unlimited amount of bandwidth to use every month.
You know what they say, though: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.
Web hosts work on an “average use” system. They know that for every site that has 10,000 visitors a month, there are 100 sites that have only 1 or 2 visitors. Because of this, the hosting companies play the odds. They know that while one site on the server may be using more than its fair share of space and bandwidth and is unprofitable to have as a client, there are dozens or even hundreds that have paid for hosting and are using very little or even none at all.
There are limits to that, though, and although some hosts do offer genuinely unlimited plans, most have a little clause in their terms and conditions that puts in limits. Look for something like, “Any website found to be using excessive amounts of server resources will be suspended immediately.”
There’s more to hosting than just space and bandwidth. The site is on a server, which is just a big computer. When people visit your site, the server has to do some thinking to deliver the web pages the visitors want to view. That takes processing time and memory space.
So what your unlimited plan gives you is unlimited storage space and unlimited bandwidth allowance, but a limited amount of processor time and memory use.
That’s like saying you can have an unlimited number of cars and an unlimited number of parking spaces, but only a few gallons of gas between them. Most websites will never use enough server resources for the limits to become a problem, but if your site is successful, you may find your host telling you that you need to “upgrade” your unlimited plan!
Chapter 2 Evaluating Web Hosting Technologies
In This Chapter
▶ Mastering the language
▶ Comparing what’s on offer
▶ Choosing a host
You have a website and you need to find somewhere to host it. Sounds easy, right?
Then you start looking at web hosts and even though they try to make it as simple as possible, there are a dizzying array of options and different technologies.
In this chapter, you learn what all of the different options are and the advantages of each.
Understanding the Terms
Terms and names for the different aspects of web hosting and site building are thrown around freely by people in the industry. To newcomers, though, it’s all jargon that can make you feel like you’re on the outside of a club that’s hard to join.
In this section, I explain some of the most important terms so you can see the difference between them and start talking like a web hosting master.
Domain names
A domain name is the name you type into your browser to view a particular website. For example, the website for the For Dummies books is found at dummies.com. That’s its domain name. The domain name is also called the website address or web address.
Domain names are becoming a normal part of everyday life; you see them on commercials, posters, and flyers everywhere. Your domain name is important because it’s what people have to remember and type in accurately to get to your website. The domain name differs, however, from the site name. Let me explain.
Let’s say you own a store called Patti Percival’s Cupcakes and you want to start a website.
When people visit your site, you want them to associate the site with your store, so you prominently display your store name and logo on the site. That’s your brand identity.
When you’re buying the domain name for the site, though, you want to choose a name that is as short as possible and has as little chance for spelling errors as you can manage.
In the case of the store used in the example, PattiPercivalsCupcakes. com is a fairly long name for people to type, and some people might have trouble remembering if it’s Patti (with an i) or Patty (with a y). You might want to try a shorter domain name like PPCupcakes.com or even Cupcakes.com (if they’re available).
All web hosts have a domain name-checking tool on their websites. You can check the availability of a name by going to your host’s website and entering the name into the checker. On many sites, the checker even suggests alternatives if the name is not available.
Your website will still be called Patti Percival’s Cupcakes, but its address will be PPCupcakes.com.
In Chapter 9, I explain how you can buy more than one domain name and have them all point at the same site. This means you could buy both PattiPercivalsCupcakes.com and PPCupcakes.com and have them both go to the Patti Percival’s Cupcakes website. Sweet!
When many people say a website address, they preface it with www., the period inclusive. That is legitimate, and with most sites it gets you to where you want to go, but the www. is not necessary and is not part of the domain name. It’s actually a subdomain (see Chapter 9 for more information on subdomains).
Hosting accounts
Hosting accounts (also called hosting plans) are very different from domain names. Your hosting account gives you space online to house your website. It’s like leasing a building.
If you lease a building to use for your business, that building becomes your business address. You can move your business to another building, taking your name with you at any time. You aren’t stuck in one building forever just because that’s where you started.
You purchase a hosting account from a web host or hosting provider and, although it is often purchased in conjunction with a domain name, it is independent of the name. See Chapter 1for an in-depth look at the concepts behind web hosting.
The term hosting plan actually defines the specifications of your hosting account. The two terms, account and plan, are sometimes used interchangeably to mean the facilities and allowances you get with your account from your web host.
The difference between a hosting account and a domain name is an important distinction to note. When it comes time to renew your name registration and hosting account, you must make sure you renew both. Just because you renew your hosting plan doesn’t automatically mean you renew your name registration. In real-world terms, it’s like saying that renewing your business license doesn’t mean you have paid your rent.
Web scripts or platforms
There is often a lot of confusion between hosting accounts and platforms. A platform, or web script, is the software you install in your hosting account to build your website.
The platform is a group of files and maybe a database or two that work to give you a basic framework with which to design your site. The platform (the files and databases) can be moved from one hosting account to another and, like the domain name, is not tied to one particular web host.
When you talk about your site, you can say, “My domain name is xxxxx, it’s built using yyyyy (the platform), and is hosted by zzzzz (the hosting company).”
For example, my site is peterpollock.com (xxxxx), it’s built using WordPress (yyyyy), and it is hosted by my company, Day3 (zzzzz).
The three are completely separate and I can change any one of them at any time, but they come together to make my website viewable online for anyone who wants to see it.
Choosing between Servers
Linux hosting, Windows hosting, UNIX, cloud hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), dedicated servers — the list of choices for your hosting is huge. So how do you choose which is best for you?
Start by defining your needs.
The most important consideration is what platform or program you are going to use to build your site. Some platforms and certain web technologies only work on certain types of hosting, so you need to know what you are going to use before you can pick a hosting plan. Are you planning on using a platform like WordPress or Joomla, or are you going to code the site yourself? If you are coding it yourself, which language will you use to write it? Knowing the answers to these questions gives you the starting point for choosing which server is best for your needs.
Any server needs an operating system and some web server software to be able to deliver websites to the Internet. The most commonly used are Windows/IIS and Linus/Apache.
Using Windows as a server
Windows servers are most commonly used by businesses that design their own sites and use Microsoft technology to build them with.
Windows servers run the Windows operating system (usually a version of Windows Server) and run Internet Information Services (IIS) to serve up web pages. The Windows server/IIS combination is great if you want to create a database for your website using Microsoft Access or if you want to use the ASP.Net framework. They are also capable of running PHP-based sites, but it is not their forte.
In my experience, Windows servers are fairly reliable and do the job well, but in general I would only recommend that you use Windows if you know you have a specific need for it. Most web technologies run better on UNIX and Linux.
Looking at the different flavors of UNIX and Linux
UNIX is an operating system originally developed by AT&T in the 1970s. Its purpose was to run the servers at large corporations and universities.
The way UNIX was licensed, the purchasers received a full copy of the source code (the code that makes up the operating system) so they could alter any and all parts of it to make it work on their particular computer hardware.
This resulted in different flavors or types of UNIX becoming available. Each flavor has its own strengths and is designed to work well on certain hardware. Today’s UNIX flavors include
✓ AIX
✓ BSD
✓ SCO Unixware
✓ Solaris
Due to the cost of UNIX, in 1983 the GNU Project was started with the aim of providing a free UNIX-like operating system. This eventually spawned the Linux operating system, which is similar to UNIX but is freely available.
Like UNIX, Linux is being developed in a plethora of flavors (or distributions), the most popular of which are
✓ CentOS
✓ Debian
✓ Fedora
✓ FreeBSD
✓ OpenSUSE
✓ Red Hat
✓ Ubuntu
UNIX and Linux are robust, making them especially popular among web hosts. Linux is free, which keeps the host’s costs to a minimum, so it is obviously the most popular.
Different hosts have their own preferences of which Linux flavor to use, depending on the particular hardware they have and their experience with each version.
The most popular flavor seems to be CentOS, which is built entirely on the Red Hat version of Linux, but to most website owners it doesn’t seem to make too much difference which one is used.
Web hosting in the cloud
Cloud computing is all the rage these days and the hosting industry is no exception. The basic idea of cloud computing is that you join multiple computers together to provide faster, more reliable performance.
In terms of web hosting, that translates to meaning that websites get delivered faster and don’t suffer from slowdowns. When one website receives a lot of traffic, the load is spread equally among multiple servers in the cloud.
Imagine it as a grocery store where, if the lines at the checkouts get long, shelf-stackers and other staff from around the store are summoned to temporarily open additional checkouts until the rush is over.
Cloud hosting has a couple of small drawbacks, but they affect only the most security-conscious users. Some users may be concerned about data security due to multiple websites floating around in the same cloud, and the potential exists for a hacker to break an entire cloud rather than one server, but for the majority of website owners, the advantages of the cloud far outweigh the drawbacks.
Virtual Private Servers
A VPS is the next step up from a standard shared server. With a shared server, all of the sites share all of the resources of the server, and if one site hogs the resources, all the other sites suffer. With a VPS, the server is divided into equal sections, and each site (or set of sites) is placed within its own section. These sections are called virtual private hosts because they act independently of each other and are like a set of mini web servers that all share the same hardware.
A VPS can be a good idea if your site has a fair amount of traffic because it guarantees a certain level of processor time and memory availability to you.
Dedicated Servers
A dedicated server is exactly what it says . . . a server dedicated to you. It is a physical server in a data center which is yours and yours alone. No one else shares it or even has access to it. This is the most expensive hosting option, but it is also the most powerful and gives you the most control over the environment in which your site is hosted.
All Hosts Are Not Equal
It’s impossible to tell exactly how many web hosting companies there are in the world, but the number ranks in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.
Choosing among them can be tricky because they all make bold claims about their speed, reliability, and service. It sometimes can be nearly impossible to distinguish among them.
In this section, I explain a few things to look out for that might make the decision a little easier.
In the end, though, the best way to pick is by asking people you know which hosts they have used and which they would recommend. You can’t believe everything you read online; personal recommendations trump just about every other way to select a web host company.
As reliable as Old Faithful
Most hosts claim to have a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. That means that the server your site is on will be up and running and delivering pages to the web 99.9 percent of the time.
Let’s break that down for a moment. There are 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year. That’s a total of 8,760 hours in a year.
If your web host claims the server will be up 99.9 percent of the time, that means it will be up for around 8,7511⁄2 hours every year, leaving a full eight and a half hours of downtime.
A server reboot takes maybe 20 minutes on a shared server. If the hosts are monitoring the servers, they should spot when those servers go down and be able to reboot them within 30 minutes.
So at 99.9 percent uptime, the server could go down once a month and be fixed by a simple reboot, which still leaves more than four hours of downtime for some other event. If the server you were on went down every month, even for just half an hour, you might think it was unreliable, but your host could still claim a 99.9 percent uptime.
The 99.9 percent uptime therefore doesn’t really mean anything. Generally speaking, servers are reliable things, so comparing uptime claims is a waste of time.
It’s simple. Servers are reliable. Occasionally, they hiccup and need a little work done on them. They might be down for a few hours at that time and, if it’s serious, the downtime might extend to half a day or more. In general, however, whichever host you go with, the servers are made of the same parts, run the same software, and are as reliable as Old Faithful.
Expensive doesn’t mean better
Prices vary wildly from host to host. Some offer hosting from as low as $30 per year whereas others charge in excess of $100 per year for essentially the same service.
Just because you go with a big company that charges more, that doesn’t necessarily mean the service will be better. In fact, I have often found that smaller web hosts offer the best service. The big ones can become cumbersome and impersonal.
Don’t be fooled by grand claims and ultra-professional presentation. Just like cheap can sometimes mean cheap and nasty, expensive can be an overpriced rip-off.
If a company is charging more than others you’ve seen, be careful to check what it is offering that is truly different and worth the extra money — and don’t forget to ask your friends about their experiences.
Location, location, location
The Internet is a truly global market. In theory, you can tell where a company is based by its website address. Most countries have their own country codes; for instance, google.co.uk has the country code .uk at the end of its address so you can guess it’s in the United Kingdom. On the other hand, google.com.au has .au at the end of it, so you know it’s in Australia.
The code gives away a little about the company’s location, but it isn’t foolproof. Any website with any address can be located on a server anywhere in the world. So just because a website has a German web address, that doesn’t actually mean the site is on a server in Germany.
Although data travels around the Internet at incredible speeds, you can expect a definite time delay when talking to a server that is geographically a long way from you.
Ideally you should locate your site on a server that is in the same country as your target audience simply for the benefit to your visitors in speed of access.
Then, of course, there is location within the same country. If most of your website visitors are going to be from the East Coast of the U.S., what would be the point of having your server housed 3,000 miles away on the West Coast?
Check with the web host you are thinking of using to find out where its servers are located, just to make sure they’re not hidden away in Outer Mongolia or somewhere on the other side of the world.
Back that thing up
One major difference between web hosts is the backup options. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a good, recent backup of your site. Check with your host what its options are.
Some hosts automatically back up every site they host every night. This is good.
Some hosts do not back up the websites they host at all. This is bad.
Some hosts will back up your sites for you for a small additional fee. As long as that fee doesn’t make your overall hosting cost too high, that can often be worth it.
If the server your site is on goes down and neither you nor your host has a backup of your site, then there is absolutely nothing that can be done to get your site back. Nothing at all.
Make sure your host is making regular backups of your site and then also regularly back it up yourself. See Chapter 4 to find out how to create your own backup.
Sometimes the hare beats the tortoise
We all know Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise. The two animals race and the hare takes off really fast, while the tortoise plods along. The hare uses too much energy too quickly, though, and decides to take a nap before he reaches the finish line. When he awakes, he finds that he slept too long and the slow-moving tortoise has passed him and won the race.
Sometimes the tortoise doesn’t win, though — like in web servers, for instance.
It is extremely rare in web hosting server technology that you’re able to sacrifice reliability for speed. In general terms, server reliability doesn’t change no matter how much you speed it up.
This means you should look for a host that claims to have or is proven to have faster servers. Factors to look for are as follows:
✓ Does the host limit how many sites are put on one server?
✓ What specifications do the servers have? Faster processors and more RAM mean faster machines.
✓ Is the server’s uplink port 10Mbit, 100Mbit, or 1,000Mbit? The uplink port is the physical connection between the server and the Internet. The higher the number, the faster the connection.
✓ What operating system and server software does the server use? CentOS running Apache server is the most common combination, but the NGINX web server software is becoming more popular as a slightly faster alternative to Apache.
All these things make a difference, but when it comes down to it, don’t just take the hosting company’s word for how fast the servers are. Ask around because sometimes people’s actual experience can differ somewhat from what a company claims.
Not All Control Panels Are Created Equal
With hundreds of thousands of web hosts to choose from, the variety of hosting control panels is significant — and the difference between them in terms of ease of use is even more significant.
Web hosting software, and thus its associated control panels, comes in essentially two different flavors:
✓ Hosting software creators: These are independent companies that don’t provide hosting themselves. Instead, they put all their energy into creating a hosting system that is both powerful and easy to use. These are companies like cPanel and Parallels, which make the cPanel and Plesk hosting systems, respectively. Their systems can be licensed for use by any hosting company.
✓ Proprietary systems: These systems are developed in-house by the larger web hosts and are unique to that particular host.
Which system you use is totally based on your personal preference. Sometimes the difference between whether you feel a host is good or bad comes down to how easy it is for you to navigate around its control panel.
Control panel designs are changed frequently so what you see today might not be what you see in a couple of months.
The following sections cover some of the most popular control panels.
 |
| cPanel screen |
cPanel is the most widely used hosting system and the most customizable.
The cPanel screen in Figure 2-1 is laid out in a series of sections, each containing related functions.
The cPanel control panel is highly customizable and comes with various preinstalled layout options. Many hosts even allow you to select which of the basic layouts you want to use. To change the format of the cPanel control panel, use the Change Style screen. (See Figure 2-2.)
Some hosts even completely redesign the control panel to integrate it with some of their other systems. The implementation by justhost.com is a great example of that. (See Figure 2-3.) Not only has justhost made the control panel blend in with the rest of the site, but it also has added sections to the control panel itself to provide a whole host of additional features and functions.
Plesk
Plesk, which is made by Parallels, is probably the biggest rival to cPanel, offering as much functionality with a very different layout. (See Figure 2-4.)
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar and web hosting provider. GoDaddy has created its own proprietary system to manage all aspects of having an account with it.
This system is quite different from cPanel and Plesk, but it tries to be intuitive and self-explanatory. (See Figure 2-5.)
DreamHost
DreamHost has created its own control panel, which is quite unlike anything else on the market.
From the front page, you can go directly to some of the most used functions through the Toolbox at the top left. (See Figure 2-6.) Everything else is easily accessible through a couple of clicks in the menu system.
1&1
1&1 has been in the online services business since 1988 and has a large presence in the U.K. and the U.S.
The control panel’s front page has developed over time to be simple, clean, and easy to use. (See Figure 2-7.)
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