NetBloke.com - Putting it on the Internet - Part Five
Publication Date: 25/07/2001
ISSN 1445-1360
Publication Date: 25/07/2001
ISSN 1445-1360
G'day!
This week I am polishing off my Building a Web site series by telling you some of your options for hosting your Web site. It is fairly critical that you work this step out otherwise no one will ever see your Web site!
I have some other suggestions for Web site related issues such as an issue covering bloggs or online diaries. I will make an attempt at covering these sometime soon.
Some bloke named Gary Lenarz asked me this week if Australia didn't have credit reports how on earth did banks check our credit. Well for those of you interested, banks still can find out through checking with employers and credit card companies, however there is no central repository for such information (that I am aware of). Personally I found the process for obtaining loans and credit back in Australia a lot less intrusive than here in the states. It is just another thing I will have to get use to!
Next week I am going to give all you Aussie and International blokes and sheilas a tip or two on American theme parks. You see I learnt a thing or two this past weekend on my trip up to Ohio's King's Island. It was a real eye opener.
That is about it for now so until next week seeya later!
Nathan Allan
When it comes to Web site Hosting you get what you pay for. Free services can be good for a personal site, but do not risk a business site with them.
Then when it comes to paid hosting services, the more you pay normally means an increased level of service and the more guaranteed uptime you will get.
Therefore in my opinion I believe you are better to pay for your hosting service if you want good service.
A domain name is the basically the address of a Web site. It takes the form of:
www.sitename.com
Where www can be interchanged with other words but is normally kept as www (for World Wide Web).
The sitename can be anything that is available. In my case it is NetBloke.
The .com is for a commercial site. There are also the following common alternatives.
This week I am going to cover a few options for the hosting of your Web site.
Your ISP
It may be the case that the company you use for your Internet access may have as part of their package some Web server space for you. Normally it will not be a lot of space but it would work well for a personal Web site.
You should contact your ISP's helpdesk and ask them if they offer this service.
Who I use?
After a lot of research and analysis I decided to go with a middle of the range Web hosting company. It is not free but it also does not cost me an arm and a leg every month!
The company is called Hostmatters. I get a good deal with subdomains, email accounts and bandwidth allowance. They also have a great Control Panel interface so I can look after most of the technical side of my Web site myself.
Finally, I believe their Customer Service has been brilliant! They have a great ticketing system that tracks your requests and even have ICQ so you can sometimes get an instant response!
See their site at:
http://www.hostmatters.com/
How do you find an appropriate host?
The best way to answer this is to tell you from my own experience.
I basically surfed the net, compared plans, and looked at what other people had to say on various forums.
The forums I found most useful were the SitePoint Forums:
http://www.sitepointforums.com
This week Dan asked me:
"What do you use for dynamic content management and what features were important in choosing a content management system?"
Next week I will have my answer for him along with any other recommendations I receive from my readers. So send in your solutions now.
Answer
Last week I asked you the following question:
"So who do you use to host your Web site and why?"
Chris Baker from Melbourne, Australia said:
" For my hosting I use http://www.brinkster.com/. It provides a free General membership hosting service for IIS, .NET and ASP developers providing 30mb of (ad free) space with an Access database backend. This is a great starting point if you want to use more than just html on the WebServer and want to capture and re-display information. However it is a bit slow and does not allow access to all ASP options and third party objects. But for just $12.99US per month the premium Membership offers much more, with 60mb, FTP, own domain name and 25 pop3 email accounts and use of 25+ third party ASP components (you just have to work out how to use them)."
David Parry uses the following:
" www.crosswinds.net started using them cos they offered unlimited free space with no pop-ups, unfortunately they now are using pop-ups BUT the unlimited free space still goes, did have one minor hick-up when they deleted my whole site cos I didn't have permission to host MP3's (even though this was given many months previous) but started again and not had any problems since... I hosted 3 sites at the time, one I've given up but about to start at least another 2 and have one main lead in page and all the rest in directories all split up, 3 of the 4 are for bands, so contain lots of MP3's & other media... so the unlimited space is great for that, but I've rambled on for WAY to long so gonna stop now..."
Meadows V whose site is Special Ops Force at http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/soforce/index.htm said:
"I use Angelfire because they are fast, friendly, always there and reliable.
Reliability is very important to me because I am constantly uploading. It is so frustrating to be working at a fast pace and then all of a sudden your whole train of thought is disrupted when you can't upload your work.
I had years of hair pulling with Xoom and nbci and then a short while ago I started moving everything (25 megs so far and more to come) over to Angelfire and I couldn't be happier."
If you have a question of your own, contact me.
The Janitor and Email
An unemployed man goes to apply for a job with Microsoft as a janitor.
The manager there arranges for him to take an aptitude test (Section: floors, sweeping, and cleaning). After the test, the manager says, "You will be employed at minimum wage, $5.15 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and tell you where to report for work on your first day."
Taken aback, the man protests that he has neither a computer nor an e-mail address. To this the MS manager replies, "Well, then, that means that you virtually don't exist and can therefore hardly expect to be employed."
Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having only $10 in his wallet, he decides to buy a 25-pound flat of tomatoes at the supermarket. Within less than two hours, he sells all the tomatoes individually at 100 percent profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 before going to sleep that night.
And thus it dawns on him that he could quite easily make a living selling tomatoes. Getting up early every day and going to bed late, he multiplies his profits quickly. After a short time he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again so that he can buy a pickup truck to support his expanding business. By the end of the second year, he is the owner of a fleet of pickup trucks and manages a staff of 100 formerly unemployed people, all selling tomatoes.
Planning for the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. At the end of the telephone conversation, the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically.
When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned, "What, you don't have e-mail? How on earth have you managed to amass such wealth without the Internet, e-mail, and e-commerce? Just imagine where you would be now, if you had been connected to the Internet from the very start!"
After a moment of thought, the tomato millionaire replied, "Why, of course! I would be a floor cleaner at Microsoft!"
Moral of this story:
