Web hosting basics (for novices)

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

I. Define the scope of your hosting needs

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

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

II. Choose the hosting provider

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

III. Building your web pages

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