Hosting and Domains:

You got a website (or are designing one) and you want to know how to get it on the web. Well, this is a great article to help you get started and also some hosting companies that I found to be reliable and easy to use.

When you have a site ready to go "live" you need to get two things; a domain name and hosting company. Most companies can provide both for you. Network Solutions is a great source to get both but not necessarily the best for your money.

A domain name is the Web site address for a particular site, such as www.google.com or www.microsoft.com. Each site has to have its own unique name. Just like you have your own home address with a number and street, well the internet is the same large community with its own addresses. My Domain address is www.modeltemplate.com.

Domain names are a very interesting component to the internet. Remember the days in the early internet era where everyone was buying popular domain names for investment uses. Imagine owning the domain Coke or Dell then having the actual company come to you to purchase the domain. Some people made good money doing this back in the day. Now with certain laws and domains already being used, creative naming when it comes to your new domain name is essential. Lets face it, if your starting your own Real Estate company joeblowrealestate.com is not so catchy as moving.com or something to that effect. A domain name also plays a role in web surfers looking for you via search engines.

Ok, so an address is one thing but now you need a place to store your site on the web. Many savvy web designers host their own site, but many others don't have the experience or equipment to do that and with competitive prices its sometimes more expensive to host your own site than have someone else to host it for you (unless you lease out your server to others that want hosting, but your not starting your own hosting company are you?).

Many have hear the term FTP or File Transfer Protocol (see the Model Template article FTP 101). Oh, you haven't, well FTP is the method in which you upload your site to the hosting company. Many don't know that they use FTP to upload their site, some are just using an application like Transmit, CuteFTP, or just use their Frontpage or Dreamweaver to do it for them.

Many times a hosting company will walk you through the process of getting a domain name and then server space to store or "host" your site. Yahoo and Network Solutions does a great job of walking through this process. With more and more people using PHP and other scripting technologies, many of these hosting companies come with support and compatibility by default.

Most if not all hosting companies not only provide you with the domain name and storage for your website, but they also provide you with email addresses and most of the time an online interface to your email (almost like an online Outlook Express). Your email address will be whatever you setup for names plus the domain name you chose (yourname@yourdomain.com).

These hosting companies usually cost around $10.00 to $20.00 per month for beginner and basic hosting. Even with these packages you can still create and implement website like this one and still use some dynamic programming like PHP and CGI scripts for your forms, etc.

There you have it, your introduction to hosting and domains. If there are any other questions on this topic that wasn't answered or you still may be confused, please feel free to email me your questions or comments.