June 26, 2004

One of the coolest trend these days, aside from blogging, is owning your own “.com” domain name. From news to entertainment to personal pages, the World Wide Web is littered with millions of webpages of the people, by the people, for the people.

This article is an attempt to explain everything that a person or small and medium sized-business (SMB) owner might want to know about hosting their own website. There are fundamentally five steps to develop and host your own website. Let’s take it step by step:

1. Design your website first

This is usually considered a good start. Until and unless you know how much space your website is taking or what tools are required for it to function effectively (for instance, does it require SQL databases or perhaps Real Audio Servers and so forth), you won’t be able to plan effectively for your hosting. Websites made in Macromedia Flash require a different type of web hosts, than those designed with Notepad. However, do remember that many host providers also provide free tools and web templates that help you in designing your site step by step. So if your needs aren’t that high (not exceeding 10 pages and 300 images), then you can take the easy way out and go directly to next step which is as follows.

2. Bandwidth and space

What will it take in terms of web hosting to accommodate the web design in Step 1, is your next question? Here you will have to estimate the host disk space and monthly traffic requirements. In this step you will also have to answer the question how will you create the webpages and more importantly, how will you keep updating your website, because rarely does the web audience revisit stale pages, thus you’ll have to plan for your future as well.

Host providers charge by the amount of storage (5MB is the usual space cited in Pakistan, whilst it varies from 50 MB+ internationally) and bandwidth you’ll be using (normally given in MB per month such as 5000 MB+ internationally, whilst most ISPs give an unlimited bandwidth in Pakistan). Most people get confused by the bandwidth allocation issue, let me explain it briefly before I proceed. Say you have 10MB worth of data on your website. Someone who visits your website will consume 10 MB entirely from the 5GB that has been allocated to you. If a hundred users a month visit your website and they all completely visit your website, that’s 100x10= 1GB worth of data that is being used per month. That means your provider will only let 500 people visit your website. After that, until the end of the month, the website will display “Not found” message. You will then have to pay for more bandwidth, if you wish to accommodate more than 500 users a month.

Prices for services also vary with types of hosting servers you choose, such as Windows server or Apache on Linux.

A rule of thumb that I can suggest is that a new business or person start off with the cheapest package and then gradually add on to it as the website generates more and more traffic. Please note that this rule does not apply to established businesses with known names.

Also, be sure to answer questions In each of the categories below:

Domain: How many sub-domains would you need (if any). Sub-domains mean a separate part of your website providing something beyond your main content for instance, or are separate sub-domains which provide different services on Yahoo!’s website.

Email services: How many email accounts you need? Will you need other services such as “Auto Responders,” “Catch All” (meaning any email sent to your website, even if you don’t have that email listed, will be delivered to your mailbox), Aliases, Mail Forwarding, or webmail.

Website management services: Would you require FTP tools, Frontpage Extensions (especially important if you develop your website in Microsoft Frontpage and use it’s many features), statistics and even how many levels of statistics you require. Most users are happy with traffics, yet many businesses need additional information like dropped shopping carts, patterns in behaviour, regression analysis, and so forth.

Development and database: Do you need SQL or MYSQL, Access or Oracle, CGI, Perl, PHP, or “.Net” tools? Or do you require encryption to make your site safe.

Free software and scripts: If you don’t want to pay to have your website developed, than many websites can offer free of charge tools and templates which will have your website up in minutes. Many providers also offer online forums, website counters, email lists, server side scripts, and so forth.

Back-up services: This is perhaps the most important of all. Does your provider have data redundancy and backup? What type of technical support will you require? When you call in for technical support, it can be a frustrating experience to be stuck talking with a nontechnical “customer service” representative when you really need to talk to a systems administrator who can resolve your issues. This point cannot be stressed enough. Will you be running applications that the web host cannot handle? What level of security would you be needing? Only after you have answers to you all the questions can you proceed to the third step.

3. Domain name hosting

Now that you’re all ready with your needs analysis, let’s just quickly discuss why you should you pay for a fully registered domain name, if subdomain names are provided for free by free host providers.

The reason is that unless you are building a personal or hobbyist website you’ll want your own fully registered domain name because one or more of the following reasons may be true:

— You want make your presence felt on the web.

— You’re required to go with a fee-based host provider because the free host providers cannot meet your website needs and fee based hosting services require fully registered domain names.

— You want people to be able to easily remember your internet address is harder to remember than .

— Search engine rankings are an important means of attracting traffic to your website and search engines don’t rank subdomain named web sites reliably.

— If it’s a business site, it needs to both target international users and as a marketing tool.

4. Domain name

The first thing you should do is to find a domain name service host provider (You can check for the availability of the domain name you like from . By this you will find out if you can have or if someone else already has registered it and now owns it. In which case you’ll have to go for a different name).

The most known provider on the web is InterNic for all domains (.com .net .org .biz .info .person). However, they are also the most expensive on the web charging close to $35 per year. A less cheaper Domain Name sellers is CyberSync which charge $15 a year. For a Pakistani domain (.pk in the end), you will have to contact an ISP. Charges are close to Rs2000 a year and you will have to register with PkNic .

However, a better option, in my opinion, is to just go for a website hosting provider that also provides a “Domain Names Services.” This is better and cheaper too, otherwise there is a small hassle of transferring domains. What this means is that for instance if you buy a domain from CyberSync, they will assign two IP Addresses to you, which are called “Name server” addresses. If you have a different server on which you’re hosting your website, than you will have to enter the IP addresses assigned to you by your website provider with the domain provider (in this case CyberSync).

Before we come to the hosting part, let’s just go through the types of hosting that you will find on the net.

Shared hosting: Sometimes called virtual hosting and the most popular, this means you are sharing a single server with a number of other clients of that company. Your host will manages the server almost completely, although you maintain your site and your account. These hosting providers can afford to charge you little because many clients are paying for use of the server. Remember other people than you are using the resources of that server, which means heavy traffic to one of the other sites on the server can really hammer your site’s performance. Also, you typically cannot install special software programs on these types of machines because the host needs to keep a stable environment for all of the clients using the server.

Collocated hosting: This means you purchase a server from a hardware vendor and you supply this server to the host (in this case an ISP). The host then plugs your server into its network and its redundant power systems. The host is responsible for making sure its network is available, and you are responsible for all support and maintenance of your server.

Unmanaged dedicated hosting: This is similar to collocation, except that you lease a server from a host and do not actually own it yourself. Limited support ( typically web-based only) is included, but the level of support varies widely from host to host. This type of server can be had for about $99 per month. This service is typically good for gaming servers, but not for serious businesses that need responsive, expert-level service.

Managed dedicated hosting: Ranging from anywhere between $300 a month, it means leasing an entire server from a host and having that company provide a robust level of support and maintenance on the server that is backed by quality guarantees. This maintenance typically includes such services as uptime monitoring, hardware warranties and security patch updates.

Companies proliferate on the net that provide these services from Yahoo! (starting from $8 a month) to GeoCities, HostAcres, FortuneCity, and so on and so forth. Each offers different services and rates, so be sure to search the net for a provider that meets your needs.

The best service that I found on the net was . Charging only $23.40 a year (almost $2 a month) with 50MB space, they had everything that a starter business or person could look for and with a $12.00 registration for the domain, the total cost of the website for a year was less than Rs2000 per year and they have an excellent technical support centre, as well. Pakistani ISPs on the other hand, charge anywhere between Rs3000- Rs8000 a year for 5MB hosting.

Here’s one way to check the quality of your web host:

— http://www.findmyhost.com/

— http://www.xde.net/tools/benchmarkhttp.jsp

In most cases you can get yourself registered with a credit card on the web and Voila! Your website information will be sent to you.

5. Uploading and launch

Depending on the type of web host you’ve chosen, you can now upload your files via an FTP software like CuteFTP (the information is provided by your website host) or use web-based uploading like one that Yahoo! provides. Do remember to name the main file index.html. The server will automatically read this file and display this on your web browser.

Congratulations! You have just attained the status of being cool now. Now you can register with search engines and other websites, and let all your other friends know that they can now see your 300 pictures at and mail you at DECoolCat@imacoolcat.com and that if they’re nice to you, you’ll give them email accounts ending with imacoolcat.com too. Wish you all the best.

The writer is a young scholar of IBA, Karachi, and contributes articles regularly to Sci-tech World

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