Planning: Web Hosting FAQ

We have assembled a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) with the appropriate answers. We trust that this will help you in your quest to become web smart.

» What is Web Hosting?
» What are the advantages of having a web host?
» What should I consider when choosing a package?
» Can I add disk space or email accounts to my package without changing packages?
» How much does it cost to register a domain name?
» Do I need to pick my domain name when I sign up for Web Hosting?
» What if I want to change my domain name after I sign up?
» Which name and top level domain should I choose?
» How do I move my existing web site to a new Web Host?
» How do I move my domain name to a new Web Host? Is it a registrar transfer?
» Do Web Hosts support ASP, scripting and databases?
» What happens when I upgrade — do I have to pay the setup fee again?
» Can I publish web pages with FrontPage 2002®?

What is Web Hosting?
Let's begin with a couple of definitions that will help you understand what we are saying:

  • Web Site: A web site is a location on the Internet where a group of files and programs have been collected and stored on a computer. These files are viewed by a special program called a web browser.
  • Web Server: A web server is a computer system on which the files that comprise a web site have been placed. This, in itself, does not make it a web server, just a file server or networked file storage. In order for this computer to accurately be called a web server it must be capable of serving the files when they are called for by a browser. This is achieved by running a web server daemon on the computer. The most commonly used web server daemon program is called Apache.
  • Web Host: A web host is simply another way of referring to a web server.

Web Hosting generally refers to the service that a company provides by having a number of web servers with any number of web sites running. These web sites will belong to their clients. This is called Web Hosting. In addition to simply providing the equipment and connection to the Internet to their clients, a web hosting company will normally also provide support, backup, email and other technical services to their clients. They do not normally provide support or technical services to the public, or the customers of their clients.

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What are the advantages of having a web host?
By using a web host, or web hosting company, you avoid having to invest in the the infrastructure needed to build a web site, you avoid having to learn how to support the infrastructure and you avoid all of the technical headaches associated with keeping the servers running reliably. You can, therefore, concentrate on delivering your value proposition to your customers which will be far more profitable for your business.

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What should I consider when choosing a package?

  • How big do you think your web site is going to be ? You can figure this out a couple of ways, the easiest is to actually develop your web site on you workstation and then simply use the 'properties' option on the main folder. The other is to estimate about 14K per page and about 5K for each jpeg graphics file. Unless you are a large corporation, you are extremely unlikely to have a web site that needs more than 10MB of disk storage space.
  • How many hits do you think your web site is going to get each day or month ? This is important because it impacts the amount of bandwidth you need. A reasonable size web site with moderate business graphics and a moderate hit count is probably not going to use more than 1GB per month, possibly 2GB per month.
  • How many pop3 email accounts can you reasonably expect to use ? This is one of the easiest to estimate. You need one for info@, sales@, support@, webmaster@ and a separate one for each of your employees and yourself. You can probably get away with fewer real email addresses if you alias the email addresses I've listed to a real person. For example, you'd create a real email address for Jane Doe (jdoe@mycompany.com) and alias sales@mycompany.com so that all email addressed to sales@ goes directly to jdoe@.
  • How important is your web site to your overall business strategy ? The more important your web site is to your business the more critical it is that the hosting company will provide backup service, 24 hour, 7 days a week support.

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Can I add additional disk space or email accounts to my current web hosting package without having to change packages?
Yes. All hosting companies provide for the dynamic addition and deletion of email addresses and most of them provide for dynamically incrementing disk space and bandwidth.

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How much does it cost to register a domain name?
This depends on which company you use to do the registration and what the top level domain is. Country based top level domains normally cost a bit more than the generic .com, net and .org domains which can be registered for as little as $9.95 per year with some registrars.

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Do I need to pick my domain name when I sign up for Web Hosting?
Yes. Your domain name becomes your web address. That is to say that the domain part, mydomain.com, is absolutely necessary before you can create a web site as www.mydomain.com.

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What if I want to change my domain name after I sign up ?
This is also quite possible and reasonably easy to do. If you are really considering doing this you should consider keeping the old domain for a while so that both domain names point to the same web site. This is important because any search engine links you may have established, or swapped links with other web sites will become 'broken' if you don't and the hard work you will have done creating search engine relevancy will be lost.

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Which name and top level domain should I choose ?
It is best to pick something that is most widely used. At present the most widely used top level domains are .com and .de. If you aren't operating in Germany, .de does not make a lot of sense. Apart from that, simply because of the history of the Internet, .com, .net and .org are the most widely used when a person is looking for a web site. This raises problems because they also have the most already existing domain names so if the name you want to register is fairly common (something smith.com), you're likely to find it already registered. At this point you have to decide whether smith.biz or johnsmith.com is going to be better — of course, johnsmith.com may already be registered, as might smith.biz.

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How do I move my existing web site from one web hosting service to another ?
There are a couple of steps you need to take. First, setup an account at your new hosting service with your domain name and then copy all of your web files, probably with FTP, to the new host. Test the site if you can using the IP address they provide you (sometimes they don't used IP aliasing for virtual web sites so it won't work). Once you have all of the files transferred you will have to go to the company thatis managing your DNS service and have them point to your new web host. In many cases this services is provided by the web hosting service themselves so it will be done automatically for you as soon as you have established the new account at the new hosting service.

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How do I move my domain name to a new web hosting service ?
If you already have a domain name with another registrar, you can easily transfer it to and DNS service you like. Companies like DNSExit (http://www.dnsexit.com/) provide free DNS services so transferring it there, or another company that provides free DNS services is a reasonable option.

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You do not have to change registrars just to move your domain to a new hosting service.

Do web hosting services support ASP, scripting, and databases?
This depends entirely on the web hosting provider. Many of them have both Unix and Windows hosting options. ASP requires a Windows host while MySQL and PostgreSQL (SQL databases) require Unix or Linux hosting. There are so many options you really need to review each hosting package carefully to determine what you need. Linux hosting packages tend to be cheaper than Windows hosting packages and many of them provide Frontpage extensions, just like Windows hosts.

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What happens when I upgrade -- do I have to pay the setup fee again?
Most hosting companies do not charge setup fees when upgrading. In fact, many hosting companies have done away with setup fees entirely.

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Can I publish web pages with FrontPage?
As mentioned above, almost all packages these days include FrontPage compatibility, including compatibility with front page extensions on Unix and Linux platforms.

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