Web Hosting 101
Web Hosting 101
Web Hosting 101
Here are some notes to help you understand some of the terms involved with web hosting and web sites in general.
Domain Names and Registration
Not all web sites are for business purposes but we can start off using the analogy of a web site as a shop, or shopfront, to explain some of the terms and concepts involved. The first item on our list is the domain name. If the web site is your shop, then the domain name is like the sign above your door. In fact it goes beyond that, because your domain name provides a unique identification of your web site on the internet. So it's like your sign and full address combined. Like a trademark, it costs money to set up a domain name. This is called registering the domain name. Then you have your "identity" on the internet.
A domain name's registration must be renewed, typically yearly or every two years. The company that does this is called a registrar and is said to "manage" the domain name. The yearly cost to have a domain name registered is usually of the order of a few pounds.
Hosting Services
Web space is like the actual "space" that you rent for your shop in the shopping centre. In hosting terms it equates to the physical disk space that is allocated for storing your web site's files. There is a monthly or yearly charge for this. Shops in a real shopping centre can be charged thousands of pounds per month for a decent space in the shopping centre but you can get basic web space for around 50 per year, or even less sometimes.
Your web site is stored on a web server, which is a server computer that is connected to the internet and configured for delivering output for the web.
DNS
A domain name is associated with a web site using the Domain Name System (DNS). The entry for this in Wikipedia says this:-
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The Domain Name System (DNS) is a distributed hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participants. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide. An often-used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the "phone book" for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses.
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To the uninitiated that might seem obscure and technical, to say the least! The essential thing to appreciate is that every device connected to the internet has a unique, special number called an IP address. "IP" stands for Internet Protocol. Just as your house number and postcode identify the location of your home, an IP address locates your web site, or at least the server (or cluster of servers) where your web site can be found. However, humans prefer words to numbers, and the Domain Name System is the system that turns a domain name into an IP address.
If you enter the address "http://173.194.36.104/" into the address field on your web browser, you will find it returns the Google main page. You get the same result if you enter "http://www.google.co.uk". This is because the DNS translates the name "google.co.uk" into the number "173.194.36.104".
Additional Features
There are additional features, of varying importance, that you can have added to your web site. The most obvious will be one or more email addresses. Behind an email address is an email account which includes a mail box, which is some storage on a mail server. There are a number of different types of email account; a popular type is a "POP mail box". ("POP" stands for "Post Office Protocol".)
We all know what an email address looks like. The crucial thing is that it includes your domain name, so that if your domain name is veryfinefencing.co.uk, then your email address will be of the form, "sales@veryfinefencing.co.uk". It is common practice in business to use the full stop to separate first name and last name.
When the web was in its infancy and web sites were appearing in the mid-1990s, web sites were very commonly made up of static (that is, unchanging) web pages. You can think of such a web site as being a bit like a brochure. The web site would not be updated very often and it was not a straightforward process to do. A feature that is more and more commonly being made use of nowadays, to bring your web site to life or give it added functionality, is a database. Combined with technologies that enable web sites to be built with the ability to interact with the user, web sites that are supported by a database can provide a much richer and dynamic user experience, such as ecommerce, forums, blogs and video.
Website Development
This is the designing and writing of the contents of your website - designing the shop floor and installing the cash registers, to push our metaphor or analogy to its limit. Web site development has come a long way in the last 10 years, and the expertise required to build and publish and maintain a web site has been reduced by the advent of power tools and online services that empower all but the most timid user to do it themselves. For example, with the appropriate hosting package and using a free content publishing platform such as WordPress, a non-technical person can have a basic blogging web site configured and deployed online, ready to start filling it with content, in a matter of minutes.
Internet Experts - Who needs 'em?!
So, if it's so easy to publish and maintain a web site, what's the need for a professional web site designer? In fact, there is still a place for designers and developers and other internet experts. Why is this? As technologies have advanced, web sites have become able to do more compex things, and so have our expectations of what web sites should do for us. There always seems to be something ahead of the curve and outside of the "easy to do" box that is required, and with that comes a need for the various types of expert. Indeed, new types of experts become invented and needed as we progress.
For example, the term "Search Engine Optimisation" (SEO) - the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in the search engines - is becoming a common term in the mainstream culture. People now talk about internet marketing and "driving traffic" to web sites, and there are experts who make a living from it. Webmasters started optimizing web sites for search engines in the mid-1990s: They would submit their web site address to the search engine directories and place "key words" relevant to the web site content in specially allocated parts of the web pages. These days the requirements and techniques involved have evolved to the point now where SEO is like a "black art" - and experts can command several hundred pounds per month optimising a web site to achieve high rankings with the search engines.
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