Hosting

A major part of having a web presence is of course putting your stuff on the web. This means putting it on a computer which is accessible to others over the internet using the HTTP protocol (if you've ever wondered what that 'http://' stands for in the web addresses, it stands from this protocol, which is short for HyperText Transfer Protocol).

One way to do it is make your own computer into a web server. I'm not going to go into this, and it's usually not the best option anyway, since few people have the bandwidth at home to provide web pages at any reasonable speed.

This leaves you with the option to put your data on some other person's web server. This is typically referred to as hosting, especially in the context of having your own domain name.

It's not necessary, however, to have your own domain to have web presence. Lots of people have pages on the web and don't have a domain. All you need to do is find a place willing to keep your files for you. Luckily there are a lot of places which will do this for free. Others charge money, and provide more features for it. I'll get into this later. For now let's assume that you're just starting and want a small and simple web presence, like my own site.

There are quite a few ways to get free hosting for simple websites. Here are a few:
I'll provide a little more comprehensive list of hosts (including free hosts) later on.

For now I'd like to go into the other part of hosting, which is tying your web space to your domain. By this I mean that, having bought a domain name, you naturally want people who type that name (like www.eyalteler.com) to see your pages.

Domain hosting is the most natural way to go about it. It can also be the easiest, if you buy both the domain and the hosting from the same place. I got some space for free at Netfirms when I bought the domain name from them. But note that if you just have some free hosting at Geocities or whatever, you can't just have a domain pointed there -- the host must give you the ability to set this up.

If you don't find a free place to get domain hosting, or you want more than you can get for free, then you have to pay for it. Prices for hosting vary widely, depending on the level of service, the amount of web space, the bandwidth allocated to the site, which server side languages are supported (if any), the number of mailboxes, subdomains, ftp connections, and other factor.

You can go here for a fuller explanation of the above terms. The short of it is that prices can range from $1 a month for a site that's hosted in India and has bad technical support to hundreds of dollars per months for a site that's guaranteed to be available virtually 24 hours a day, 365.25 days a year, is backed up daily and allows millions of simultaneous users. (I may be exaggerating a bit or getting the price wrong, as I've never dealt with that kind of high end site, and I don't suppose that's what you're looking for anyway.)

Another way to get your domain name associated with your site is forwarding. This means that when the browser goes to the site, it gets the response "I'm really at that other address" and goes there instead. The benefit of this is that you don't have to work hard to link the domain with the site. If you already have a site somewhere, and just want to be able to tell people more easily than "it's at barak dash online dot net slash eyal teler", then forwarding is a good way for that.

This does lack a certain professionality, since people will look at the browser and see the actual address, not the domain name. It's possible to hide this -- it's called "stealth forwarding" or "masking" at variour places. It works by putting a container (a frame in HTML, which is the language most pages are written with -- if you use "view source" in the browser you'll see it) which loads your forwarded site within it. This has some limitations. For example, not all forwarding services will pass the path (such as /more/info/bla.html) correctly, and it will likely not show on the browser. You might have to do extra work to navigate outside the site without the other site retaining your domain in the browser, and so on. In short, if you're looking for that professional look, it's better to get real domain hosting, and not just to forward.

[To be continued]