Web Hosting – the Good, the Bad and the Lack of Unicorns

• A Domain Name- your domain name is a unique address very much like your house address. There can be only one and thank God or otherwise mail delivery people would have a tough time knowing where to drop your letters and packages! You will need to register your domain name with a registrar. I highly recommend GoDaddy or if this is your first site and new domain then this process and cost is included with my shared hosting packages and it is the registrar I use. This registration is necessary so that when a person types http://www.insertCo0lDomainNameHere.com  the web knows where to find the server where the site lives. Which brings us to…

• Web Hosting- your web site is a set of documents,  pictures (jpg’s, gif’s, bmp’s, png’s) and maybe some video or animation. These files are stored on a server which is just a computer, not unlike your own, that is customized to serve web pages, email ,etc. I hear the next question already; “Why can’t I just use my computer then?” The short answer is you could! However, in order to do that you need to install the right server software, pay for a new ISP account that allows your computer to act as a web server and open Port 80. This is expensive and really not necessary, not to mention you’ve just opened your personal computer to the public. It’s a jungle out there. Now for the third part…

• A Web Site – The pages that govern your web site can be written in a variety of languages. Some of them are HTML, PHP and ASP. Then there are additional languages used to control the layout or provide additional features that may not exist in the other languages. Two of those are CSS and Javascript. Also, you may want audio, video or animation of some sort so we might need Flash, QuickTime or AJAX which is not a language actually. AJAX is referring to a framework that features are built around and is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. All of this is stored on the hard drive of the server provided by the hosting company you choose which brings us to the reason I felt compelled to write this today.