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Setting up a Domain
When beginning a website there are several things that should be taken into consideration: Getting a domain name and finding a hosting service. By purchasing a domain you essentially tell the organization you’ve bought it from that anytime your domain is entered into a browser, the browser should be routed to a subdirectory under the physical server. You can even set up sub-domain forwarding, that directs each sub-domain to a completely different server, or change servers in a matter of minutes.
Therefore, the first step in setting up a web site is buying the domain name and there are many such providers of such at various costs and services. Here, we’ll look at the process of purchasing a domain name from www.domaindirect.com. First, enter the domain name in the search field. If the domain name isn’t yet assigned, a screen showing your name and its availability appears. Click on the name you requested bring up a screen in which you choose a level of service.
Choose “Domain Parking” to simply reserve the name without using it, or “Personal Identity Account” to purchase a full-service account. Service varies from level to level because of differences in web site hosting, additional email accounts, and online HTML editors for beginners, but regardless of which level you choose, make sure it includes a sufficient quantity of both sub-domain and email address forward to satisfy your web plans.
Another available feature for domain forwarding is URL hiding, or “URLKeeper.” Enabling URL hiding effectively obscures the site’s physical URL from visitors, instead substituting your virtual URL alias. For example, even though www.cs.niu.edu/~mcintire is the physical URL for the virtual address www.pennymcintire.com, if URL hiding were enabled, only www.pennymcintire.com will ever show in a visitor’s browser address line regardless of which page in the site a visitor opens.
Although URL hiding can make your site appear more professional, there are several potential “gotchas”. First, any external pages (that is, pages belonging to another site) opened from within your own site will appear to be from your URL unless you remember to include “target=_top” to turn off URLKeeper for those links. Additionally, any bookmarks a visitor saves for your site will refer back to your home page, not to the lower-level pages the visitor actually bookmarked. There are a few other problems associated with URLKeeper as well, such as some security issues and incompatibility with some web hosting sites; read the documentation of your domain name provider as well as your web hosting provider to see if any of these issues affect your site.
As mentioned earlier, you might want to set up forwarding for email accounts as well. In this way, you can route emails to the appropriate person in the organization, whether by name, like penny@pennymcintire.com, or by function, like info@pennymcintire.com. Setting up forwarding email accounts to go along with your domain name works similarly to domain forwarding, using alias’ in place of “real”, physical email addresses.
You might want to consider purchasing similar names or frequent misspellings to your chosen domain to help out users with bad spelling or bad memory. For instance, www.randmcnally.com also owns the misspelled version, www.randmcnalley.com, which routes to the site just as if it were spelled properly.
All the discussion so far has been on purchasing a domain name that isn’t currently owned by anyone. But what if you discover that the domain name you want is already spoken for? In many cases the domain purchasing company includes expiration date and contact information for reserved domain names as well.
If your intended domain name is already owned by another organization, you don’t necessarily have to abandon that URL. Instead, contact the owner of the domain name and offer to buy it. Of course, if a website is already active under that name, it’s probably not for sale at all, or if it is, you’d probably have to pay an exorbitant price for it.
On the other hand, perhaps the owners have abandoned the site or have changed their minds about building a site. You could also wait for the domain name to expire rather than contact the owners to see if they want to sell it. Although it’s still a seller’s market, an unused domain name is often cheaper than one that’s in active use.
Choosing a Web Hosting Provider
Unlike large organizations who often host their site on their company server, individuals often use a web hosting provider. Free web site hosting with email and internet service is available, even from some big portals like www.yahoo.com or www.geocities.com. For larger web sites, though, free services probably won’t be sufficient. In such cases, you’ll need to go shopping for a web hosting provider. Many domain name providers can also supply web hosting, or you can search for providers on a search engine. The most important considerations when choosing a web host are:
- cost
- capacity
- speed
- average downtime
- technical support
- FTP access
- option for personal web editing
- server-side technologies
- ASP
- JSP
- ColdFusion
- available visitor statistics.
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April 1, 2008 6:11 PM