WordPress Officers Directory

Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 5:19 am

Web Hosting 101

Here are some notes to help you understand some terms related to web hosting and websites in general.

Domain Names and Registration

Not all web sites for commercial purposes, but we can start using the analogy of a website as a store or window, to explain some of the terms and concepts involved. The first item on our list is the domain name. If your website is your shop, the domain name is as the sign above his door. In fact, beyond that, because your domain name provides a unique identification of your website on the Internet. So is like your sign and the full address combination. As a brand, it costs money to create a domain name. This is called the domain name registration. Then you have your "identity" on the Internet.

Registering a domain name should be renewed, usually every year or every two years. The company that does this is called a registrar and is said to "manage" the domain name. The annual cost to have a registered domain name is usually the order of a few pounds.

Hosting Services

Web space is like the actual "space" that the rent of his shop in the mall. In terms of accommodation equivalent to the physical disk space is allocated for storage of files on your website. There is a monthly or annual fee for this. Shops in a real mall can be charged thousands of pounds per month for a decent space shopping center, but you can get basic web space around £ 50 a year, or sometimes even less.

Your website is stored on a server website, which is a server computer connected to the Internet and configured to deliver output to the web.

DNS

A domain name is associated with a website using the domain name system (DNS). The entry on Wikipedia says the following: -

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The Domain Name System (DNS) is a distributed hierarchical name for equipment, services, or any other resource connected to the Internet or private network. Various information associated with domain names assigned to each of the participants. The most important thing is that translates domain names meaningful to humans in the numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices around the world. An analogy often used to explain the domain name system is that it serves as a "phone book" of the Internet by translating human-Friendly computer host names into IP addresses.

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For the uninitiated can seem obscure and technical, to say the least! What is essential to appreciate is that each device connected to the Internet has a unique number called an IP address special. "IP" refers to Internet Protocol. Just as your house number and zip code to identify the location of your home, one finds the IP address of your website, or at least on the server (or cluster of servers) on your website can be found. However, humans prefer words to numbers, and the domain name system is the system that converts a domain name to an IP address.

If you enter the address " http://173.194.36.104/ "In the address field of your browser, you will find that it returns the home page of Google. You get the same result if you enter" http://www.google.co.uk ". This is because the DNS translates the name" google.co.uk "number" 173.194.36.104 ".

Additional Features

There are additional features of varying importance, which can be added to your website. The most obvious will be one or more email addresses mail. Behind an email address is a mail account that includes a mailbox, which is something a server storage e-mail. There are a number of different types of email account, a popular type is "POP mail box." ("POP" stands for "Post Office Protocol ").

We all know what an e-mail looks like. The crucial thing is that it includes your domain name, so if your name veryfinefencing.co.uk domain is, 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 the name.

When the web was in its infancy and websites were appearing in the 1990's, web sites were most commonly by static (ie unchanging) web pages. You can think of a website as a bit like a brochure. The website is not updated very often and was not a simple process to do. One feature that is increasingly common use was made of today, to bring your website to life or give you more functionality, is a database. In combination with the technologies that enable websites to be built with the ability to interact with the user, web sites that are supported by a database can provide a user experience much richer and more dynamic, such as electronic commerce, forums, blogs and video.

Web Site Development

This is the design and drafting of the contents of your website - design plant and the installation of cash registers, to push the metaphor or analogy to its limit. Web site development has come a long way in recent 10 years, and experience necessary to create and publish and maintain a website has been reduced by the advent of power tools and online services that allow all but most users shy to do it themselves. For example, each package of accommodation and the use of a content publishing platform for free, as WordPress, a person without technical knowledge can have a basic web site blogs to configure and deploy online, ready to begin filling content in minutes.

Internet Expert - Who needs' em?

Therefore, if it is so easy to publish and maintain a website, what is the need for a professional web site designer? In fact, there is still a place for designers and developers and other experts on the Internet. Why is this? As technologies have advanced, web sites have become able to do more things Compex, and so have our expectations what websites should do for us. It seems that there is always ahead of the curve and outside the "easy to do" box that is required, and with that comes the need of different types of expertise. In fact, new types of experts were invented and where necessary to progress.

For example, the term "optimization Search engine "(SEO) - the process of improving the visibility of a website or a website in search engines - is becoming a term common in the dominant culture. Now people talk about internet marketing and "direct traffic" to the web sites, and there are experts who make their living it. Webmasters began optimizing websites for search engines in the 1990s: You could submit your website to directories engine search and place "keywords" relevant to the content of the website especially assigned parts of web pages. These days the requirements and technical that have evolved to the point that SEO is like a "black art" - and experts can require several hundred pounds per month for a website optimization to achieve a high ranking in search engines.

About the Author

James Collett runs JSC Solutions Ltd (http://www.jscsolutions.co.uk), a small privately owned IT company based in Surrey, UK. The company was established in 2003 with the goal of offering small busineses a no-nonsense and "jargon-lite" approach to meeting their IT needs. Behind this was the belief that there are lots of people who use IT but don't want to get bogged down in technical stuff that is quite frankly irrelevant to their business.

Our core service offering is the provision of flexible web hosting and internet solutions to small and growing businesses, charitable and educational organisations, as well as providing email and domain registration services and advice to private individuals.

We also offer networking solutions and computer installations for the office and home, and undertake bespoke software development projects.

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