Alternatives to In-House Web Hosting
There are two broad categories of hosting options for small Web sites. There are companies that host multiple Web sites on the same server and are called virtual hosting providers. There are also those that allow you to use servers completely dedicated to your site, these are called dedicated hosting providers. Dedicated providers might provide you with only a network connection for a server you purchase and install in their data center, or they might offer a menu of services, from monitoring to backups, from which to choose.
Virtual Hosting
It is easy to find virtual hosting companies on the Web that offer to host a simple Web site for about $10 per month.
The steps are fairly straightforward:
1. | Sign up for the virtual hosting service. They will provide you with a user account, the IP address of your site, and the name of a private directory on a shared Web server in which you'll place your Web pages.
| 2. | Register your domain name, such as my-web-site.org, with companies like Register.com, Verisign, or RegisterFree.com. You must make sure your new domain name's DNS records point to the DNS server of the virtual hosting company.
| 3. | Upload your Web pages to your private virtual hosting directory.
| 4. | Start testing your site using your IP address in your Web browser. It takes about 3-4 days for DNS to propagate across the Web, so you'll probably have to wait at least that long before you'll be able to view your site using your sub-domain, www.my-web-site.org.
|
The virtual hosting provider will also offer free backups of your site, technical support, a number of e-mail addresses and an easy-to-use Web-based GUI to manage your settings. For an additional charge, many will also provide an e-commerce feature, which allows you to have a shopping cart and customer loyalty programs.
The disadvantage of virtual hosting is that, though it is cheap, you often have no control over the operation of the server and have to rely on the staff and operational procedures of the hosting company to get your changes implemented. These may not necessarily be to your liking.
Dedicated Hosting
In this scenario, you typically have to make contact with a live sales representative who represents an Internet data center. At a minimum, you have to pay for the amount of space your server occupies in the data center, the amount of power it consumes, and the amount of Internet bandwidth you expect to use. Additional services such as backups, monitoring, on-call engineering time, firewall management, and bandwidth graphing information often can be purchased as extra line items on your bill.
As you can imagine, these services can be fairly expensive. A 1 ½-inch slot in a computer cabinet for a Web server can easily cost $200 per month for 1Mbps of bandwidth. The advantage over virtual hosting is that you can customize the server to your needs.
Despite the relative merits of external hosting, you may also want to consider doing it yourself.
|
