Domain Names and Web Hosting

In order for Web Surfers everywhere to view your web pages they need to be placed on a computer that allows public access to the sites stored on it via the HTTP protocol. This means putting them on a web server - a computer that has additional software that allows it to serve web pages.

Allowance of this public traffic means the computer becomes more vulnerable to a myriad of security threats. For this reason I don't recommend that you expose any of your home computers in such a manner by attempting to host your own web sites. Web hosting is very inexpensive and unless you want the experience of setting up, maintaining and the monitoring of security on your own server I'd suggest that you leave that to the experts.

So you are ready to publish your new web site to the web? Here is what you need to do:

1. CHOOSE A DOMAIN NAME: Many of the companies (registrars) that sell domain names allow you to search to see if the one you want is available. They will also often show you numerous variations on the name including suffixes that you may not have considered such as .net, .org, .mobi (one of the latest ones indicating the site is specific for mobile devices). Companies selling domain names with suffixes such as .com must be approved by ICANN - the overseeing body of the domain name system. All .ca names are controlled by CIRA - The Canadian Internet Registration Authority and all companies selling .ca names must be approved by them.
   
   
2. PURCHASE THE DOMAIN NAME: Once you have selected the name it is usually a simple manner of placing it into a shopping cart and proceeding to purchase it directly from your selected registrars web site. Along the way though you will need to provide some information and select some additional options:
   
   
   1. You as the purchaser of the domain name must supply your contact information. You will also need to supply the name and contact information of the person who will be the administrative contact for the domain. The person who is the administrative contact will be the one who has ultimate control of the domain name. They will receive the renewal notices from the registrar and can control the future of that domain name. I strongly recommend that the owner of the site, or the owner of the company for who the site has been created be the Administrative contact. I've seen bad things happen when Admin contact ends up being a disgruntled employee, gets fired, dies, or just can't be reached. Even if you are the admin contact for your client, should your relationship sour, this can be a problem. Who ever really owns the site should be the admin contact.
      
      
   2. You will be provided with options when registering. Chances are you will be offered web hosting, maybe just email hosting, or just parking the domain. Parking is when you buy the domain name but you don't tell the registrar where your site will live. In which case visiting your domain name on the web will take you to an advertising page on the registrars site. I'll explain the 'where the site will live' shortly. One thing I would recommend is that you make use of the registrars domains by proxy service. According to users agreements for registering a domain name you must provide your full contact information. Someone performing a WHOIS search on your domain will be able to see that information and acquire your contact information - likely to send you SPAM in regard to moving from your current registrar to another more extremely expensive one. Today, most registrars allow you to pay for a domain proxy service, usually a few extra dollars. You still maintain full control of your domain name, but the contact information available via WHOIS will be that of the proxy and not your own. I do recommend that you do this.
      
      
   3. The other essential piece of information the registrar will require either now or when you are ready to make your site live to the world is the addresses of your name servers. What this does is tell the world wide domain name server system what server your site lives on. By default the name servers for the registrar will be used. That works fine if you are in fact hosting the site with them or just parking your domain at the moment. If you have hosting elsewhere and know the name servers you could enter them now. Otherwise, once you setup your hosting and receive the name server addresses from the hosting company, you would return the domain name registrars web site, login to the area where you manage your domain names and enter the name server information at that time. If you were ever to move your site to a different hosting company, then you would get the name server address for the new host and enter that into the correct area on the registrars site. Note that changing of name server information can take 24 to n72 hours for your site to change from one server to the other.
      
      
3. ACQUIRE WEB HOSTING: Now you need to find web hosting. Many companies that provide Domain Names also provide web hosting as they really go together. But this does not mean you need to do that. Shop around for prices, reliability scores, length of time in operation, location (offices and data center), and features. For features consider the amount of storage space available and at what cost, how much bandwidth are you allowed per month, how many email accounts can you setup, is it a Windows or Linux server? How will you manage the hosting for your site (protect directories, provide usage statistics) etc. You should be able to find hosting in the range of $5 to $10 (USD) per month quite easily. This would be shared hosting where many sites live on a single server. Normally this is fine, but if you want to better ensure no downtime you may want to look at dedicated server hosting for just your site. For dedicated hosting expect to pay $100 a month with prices going up from there
   
   Once you find a web hosting company you are comfortable with you should find on their site a shopping cart system from which you will order a hosting plan. Most will have various plans and these will accommodate different data storage capacities, bandwidth and features. For simple sites you won't need much storage space or bandwidth. If the site you are acquiring the hosting for is complete, check the properties of the folder that contains all of the sites files. That will show you the amount of space you will require. And unless your site contains a mountain of images or video, even the most basic of hosting plans will provide more than enough space. Likely bandwidth too - but if your site is successful and has an audience in the tens of thousands you won't have too much to worry about.
   
   Static sites that won't ever require writing application code for sending form mail messages or connecting to back-end databases means that your site can live on any server. If you know you want to develop code using Microsoft .net technology then you need to find a host that provides MS Windows Server hosting. If on the other hand you plan on developing with PHP and MySQL a host that provides that is what you'll need, and that would typically mean a Linux Operating System.
   
   Also check to see if the host will allow multiple domains (web sites) on a single account - this can save you money later on. Also see how many email accounts they allow you to setup per domain and whether you have access to any statistical reporting to show how users are using your site and where they are coming from. Good hosting companies will provide a control panel area from which to manage your site. Companies providing PHP hosting on the Linux Operating System often use cPanel which is a very good back end site management tool. If you are not specifically looking for a windows host then i'd recommend you seek out a Linux host and one that provides cPanel access to your sites features.

TIPS:

When I started out I'd shop around for the registrar with the lowest priced domain names. Over time I ended up having domain names spread out over a handful of companies and this made management of the domains more difficult. For this reason I'd encourage you to pick one registrar and stick with them. This will save you from some of the hassle that I have experienced. You can always move from one registrar to another but that too is extra work and cost potentially that you can avoid if you plan effectively now.

.ca OR .com? If your site is Canadian and you feel that you want to make that more apparent to visitors then certainly register the name as a .ca. If you don't want it to be obvious then register a .com. And note that you can register both domains and have them point to the exact same web site if you want.

Can I recommend a registrar? Sure. For the past few years I have been using GoDaddy exclusively. In the process of registering they will try and sell you many add-ons, such as web hosting. I'm sure their web hosting is fine but have no experience with them on that regard. I would recommend you purchase their Domain by Proxy option as outlined earlier on this page. This will hide your personal information in the WHOIS data for your domain names.

Can I recommend a web host? Sure. For a very long time I have been using 100 Megs Web Hosting. In about 6 or 7 years I've only had two issues. Once they had a switch/router fail and it took them several days to get the problem solved. More recently the main hard drive for a server failed and it took 12 hours to restore it and bring it back online. That calculates to about 99.8% uptime over my experience with them. Granted the several day stretch was quite an ordeal but also very out of the ordinary. Note that in a low-cost shared web hosting scenario these are the types of situations you may encounter. And even with higher cost dedicated hosting you can have issues.