October/November 2003

Volume 44, Number 2

Web hosting demystified

by Guy Ball, Senior STC Member

Many of us first search for product or service information on the Web. These days, Web sites are important tools to help communicate to the widest possible audience. If not posted out there, even the best product or service can get overlooked. In technical-communicator terms, this could mean online samples of our work, businesses that we are starting or helping, or organizations where we volunteer.

But if you've never set up a Web site, you probably could use some help getting started. This article is designed to assist with a couple of the early steps in the creation of a site. (I'm not going to teach you how to create the HTML pages. There are plenty of books and tutorials to do that.) I'm going to show you how to choose and obtain your domain name and then where to host your site.

I've been creating Web sites for about eight years now. I am the first to admit that I'm a graphically impaired writer. My sites won't compete design-wise with those from my more visually creative brethren. However, I've been able to leverage my strength as an information engineer/designer (a.k.a. technical writer) to create Web sites that have strong content and, as a result, are widely respected. And you, my fellow professional, can do the same—or better.

Choosing a domain name

Your first step is choosing the domain name—that's the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address people will type in their browser to go to your site. The name you choose needs a bit of thought, and you may not get the first name that strikes your fancy—a lot of other people have done this before you. The best way to handle this is to find a domain name registry site and, using the name search tool, start entering names that seem to be good ideas. My personal favorite registry is www.directnic.com. I previously used one of the bigger companies that charged me $35 a year with a two-year minimum contract. But Directnic is fully accredited and charges only $15 a year with no minimum contract. While there are a couple of companies that claim to be even cheaper, Directnic also gives you a few other benefits for no extra charge—and that keeps me a loyal customer. More on those benefits in a minute.

Now, about choosing a name. What's the site for? Personal use? Then an obvious choice might be JohnDoe.com or JohnDoeDesigner.com. Business? If you have a company name, you'll probably want to start with that. If the name is too long, you may consider a shorter version or even initials. A unique catch phrase is a good idea, but try not to get too cute. Think of how people might remember the site by name. For a new site for the Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society, I chose www.SantaAnaHistory.com. Using the full organization name as our domain might have had people forgetting words or misspelling the URL. Also, I'm not a fan of initials—sahps.com—so that didn't work for me either. www.SantaAnaHistory.com is much more memorable and was available. (Side note: Although we promote the site by capitalizing certain letters, the URL is not case sensitive.)

Com, .net, or .org

You may ask in the example above, why do I use ".com" when the society is an organization? You might remember when commercial Web sites tended to be .com, organizations were .org, and networks were .net. In reality, you can pick and choose whatever domain extension you want (except for .gov and .edu). I usually pick .com because that's what most people think of in a URL.

However, I also buy the .net and .org versions of the name, just to protect it from people trying to capitalize on my creative domain names. (I now pick up the new .us and .info extensions too, for the same reason.) Since the price is only $15 a year per name and extension, it ends up being a cheap price to protect your domain name.

URL Redirection

One nice benefit with Directnic is that it allows you to forward Web visitors who type in one URL that you've bought to another (they call it URL redirection). For instance, those who click www.SantaAnaHistory.org will go to the actual site at www.SantaAnaHistory.com. While we promote the .com address, should someone type in the wrong extension, he or she still ends up at the right place.

Now, URL redirection works even better if you have already set up a Web site at your "home" Internet service provider (ISP); for example, www.aol.com/users/mommas-boy1234 with AOL being your ISP. The URL doesn't exactly scream "professional" on your business card, does it? However, if you now buy the domain name www.SuperProTechWriter.com, your Directnic account can be set to forward the visitor who types in this URL to your existing site. Using an additional Directnic feature called frames, your pages will all show www.SuperProTechWriter.com in the browser window and your visitors won't have a clue that they're on your home ISP site.

More on the side

Another benefit of the Directnic account is that you get a few e-mail addresses to use such as myname@superprotechwriter.com. E-mail to this address is forwarded to your personal e-mail address (such as mommas-boy1234@aol.com) at no extra charge. However, your reply to that original e-mail would be through your regular e-mail account. So if you have a dorky e-mail name, correspondents would know it. For an extra fee, Directnic also offers POP3 e-mail accounts where you can receive and send e-mail using your domain name.

Of course, there may be other domain registration companies that do all this. I get no financial gain from my recommendation of Directnic. If you prefer, you can search around to find other companies. But I'm obviously happy with Directnic and its services. To activate the features I've mentioned, you do have to click a couple of buttons in the right places, but contact me if you can't figure out the online directions and you need some help.

Hosting your site

The next step in setting up your Web site is determining where to host it. If you already have a personal site on your home ISP, then you may not want to move it, which will save you a bit of money. Have Directnic set your domain name for URL forwarding to this site and you'll be fine.

If you're doing this for an organization or business—or you need more space than your home ISP allows—you will want to pay for a hosting service. The service gives you a certain amount of space for a set fee. Right now, I'm the volunteer webmaster for a few sites, two of them for nonprofit organizations. Both of these groups have small budgets to host the sites. When we first started, we were paying $25 a month. I soon found less expensive hosting services for what we needed (including www.omnis.com for $7 a month and www.fatcow.com for $99 a year). Both services have FrontPage extensions in case you use Microsoft FrontPage for HTML creation. While the $25 a month hosting service had 24-hour customer support, I've always been able to get through to the less expensive companies or use their effective e-mail support. Both Omnis and FatCow offer plenty of space (50 MB) to feature our files, and they handle all the traffic we get.

Well, I hope that takes a bit of the mystery out of setting up your domain and hosting your Web site. Let me know if you still have any questions on site setup (not on HTML, please).

Guy Ball is a technical writer with Unisys Corporation and lives in Tustin, CA. He's currently working on his fourth book, Images of America: Santa Ana, to be published by Arcadia Publishing in Spring 2004. Guy recently received the President's Outstanding Achievement Award from the Conference of California Historical Societies for developing and maintaining their www.CaliforniaHistorian.com Web site. You can contact him at guyball@pacbell.net.