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WEB HOSTINGOne of the easiest ways to offer information on the Internet is to host a Web Site. Pick agood host, create and upload our pages submit our site to search engines.INTRODUCTION:The main advantage of a web site is to share our ideas and views with theworld. To create a web pages is very easy. However, to provide access to everyone. Weneed to host it on a server that is available to everyone. There are hundreds of hosts both paid and free that provide you with space on their servers to serve our pages. Differenthosts have different services, technologies, requirements etc. Now we look at what weneed to consider when choosing a host. After that we discuss few hosts and features.SELECTING OUR HOST:-The life of a site depends on its quality. One of the factors that affects thequality of the site is the host. When choosing a host, we need to consider the following.COST:-If a personal web site is all we are looking for, cost will definitely be afactor we need to consider first. If we are looking for a service based site or if we expectmore than ten thousands hits a day, you may want to consider a paid server. Since freeservers would be highly trafficked merely because of the volume of sites they host.Otherwise, a free service provider is an ideal choice for all sites.SPEED:-Speed is very important in ensuring stickiness our site. Remember thatthere are hundreds of sites on every topic, if a visitor has a bad experience with our site,he may never came back. Checkup on the kind of speeds available with a server bychecking out other sites on the same server.The web server should have adequate memory and disk space and should be implemented on a high_speed computer. Most web servers run on WindowsNT or

Unix computers. Most WindowsNT systems use pentium processors. Although some runon DEC Alpha processors.If our web site requires additional services such as fill in forms, orderforms databases wewill need to look more closely at the type of server and it’s capabilities.An Important factor affecting the speed is the physical location of the server if we play to build a local site say, about restaurants in our city or in India, We should choose a server in India, otherwise servers in US or Japan are good choices.FREE SPACE:-We must consider the amount of free space available on the server before choosing one. Most personal sites will fit under 5MB. Again if we want to host amultimedia intensive site, we will need much more space. Sites depending on the type of traffic. A minimum of 15MB is recommended for discussion based sites. Some sites also provide additional space in standard lots for a small fee.SERVER PLATFORM:-The operating system running on the server is very important whenconsidering the web server. It indicates the reliability of the server. It determines thetechnologies available to us. The security features and also kind of support we expect.Before we decide on this. We will first need to consider our requirements.A static site with HTML pages and images will run well on any server. Itshardware requirements are negligible and every server will serve these. Advanceddevelopment however, will require additional resources. Our development environment,too, may determine the platform we choose, we may be using Microsoft Front page, for example in this case to be able to use front page server extensions, we will have to opt for WindowsNTVery often, the server platform will not be a choice. If will be predetermined bythe kind of site you plan to host, the software we use and the scripts we implement.TECHNOLOGIES SUPPORTED:-This is another consideration that is nor really a choice. We would beusing web development software and scripts that we are most comfortable with. The

server should support all resources we use for you to be able to implement our site withthe least hassles.Server_side scripting has its own fickleness. An ASP site by default willrun on WindowsNT. If we are using script other than Vbscript or Javascript for our ASP pages.If our site involves databases, the database the connector (the driver used to connect thedatabase to the front end) will also affect the server configuration. Currently mostdatabases have better connectors for Windows platform. The connectors for databasesmay also depend on the frontend. For example, in general Oracle may have stableconnectors FW both windows, as well as Linux. However, the connector for PHP would be different from the connector for zone.SMTP service is another important issue. Many providers do not allowyou to send e-mail from their servers. This means that you cannot send newsletters,updates, etc. to our visitors. It also means that tell a friend or e-greetings are out.Receiving e-mail is also important as sending. If we want to receive e-mail at the samedomain where our site is hosted. Many sites don’t offer e-mail to all, while some providelimited number of e-mail accounts.BANNERS:-The number, size kind and loading speed of banners should also beconsidered when hosting a free web site. Most free sites require you to put up one of their banners on every page and our site. Others require us to pop up a window with their information from our pages. Some even offer completely advertisement free services.Don’t even touch the services that popup windows. This is highly irritatingfor visitors. They do keep our site free of ugly space hogging advertisements, but are stillnot worthit. Take a close look at the ones that require one banner either on home page or every page. Visit a few sites on the server to determine the loading speed of the banner.This is important because the banner may actually be served by a highly trafficked webadvertising agency like double clock or rights serve. This greatly slows down loading of the web page and makes visitors restless.The size and placements of the banner is normally standard and not anissue anymore. However, given a choice, the color and appearance of the banner does become important. We wouldn’t really like to have a right yellow and green banner on awhite page.EDITING TOOLS:-