- Buy your own second-level domain name, e.g. yoursite.com, without anything in front of and behind it (www. doesn’t count). Once registered, the domain name becomes your property as long as you pay the annual fee to the registrar. This is your permanent address: if you don’t like how your pages are hosted, you can move them to another hosting company at any time and all page addresses (URLs) remain the same. Nothing changes for your site visitors. If you don’t like how your registrar maintains your domain name for you - take it to another registrar, it won’t break anything either.
If you don’t own one, you are fully dependent on the company that gives you the address (e.g. yoursubdomain.hostcompany.com or hostcompany.com/yourdir/). Should something go wrong or you are no longer affiliated with the company (either will happen, sooner or later) - and you lose all your visitors and popularity because your pages no longer have URLs they used to be at; your work is wasted; your readers cannot find the pages they want.
- Host your site with a commercial hosting company (with your own domain, you won’t find free hosting anyway). Since you pay, they are eager to keep it up 24x7 and maintain the server in order. If you are not satisfied, there are scores of other hosting companies to choose from; a move is easy.
No, there is no way around it. The most common pitfall is domain redirection schemes: you host your site wherever you can (usually for free), register your own domain name and pay a small fee to a company that makes your site appear to have your domain name. Unfortunately, no redirection technology works exactly the way a normal hosting does. At best, it will lead to unpleasant surprises and technical problems to some of your visitors and your site will never be indexed correctly by the Internet search engines (that alone is enough to not use redirection).
No, there is no free lunch. These services intrinsically cost money. There is a company that offers second-level domain names for free, supported with massive advertising, but make no mistake - they own it, not you, and it’s indeed they who dictate the rules. Why waste time. Pay a moderate amount and get the real thing. It’s more than affordable today (domain name and decent hosting costs $100-150/year; if you get into temporary financial straits later in your life, you can always switch to free hosting with redirection while keeping your domain name, $15-25/year). Have respect for your readers and for yourself. Enough said.
Redirecting from Old URLs
Sadly, by the time one realizes all this, usually he or she already has pages published on URLs that somebody else controls. To handle it with the least loss, you need to replace every HTML page at your old URL with a custom redirection page pointing at exactly the same page on your new permanent site (not just to the site main page). Make sure these redirection pages at the old location live as long as possible (one year at the very least, several years better).Feel free to take my example of redirection page as a template. Note that you need to edit URL in three places in the page source to replace each of your pages. It didn’t take me long to replace a hundred pages on my site by hand; if you know Perl, you can write a script and publish it here. I also replaced every image file on my old site with a small image-notice (JPEG or GIF) in case somebody linked to images directly or used them on their pages. Still, you’re creating small inconveniences to a lot of people (including yourself) and you’d better set your site up the right way as soon as possible.
By now I’ve dealt with six hosts (four of them commercial) and four registrars, so it’s time to sum up this little experience.
Where To Look for Them
Every top-level domain (TLD) authority has a list of accredited registrars, i.e. companies that can register and maintain domain name for you. The authority for .com, .org and .net TLD is ICANN, but InterNIC site provides a better organized list of registrars. For other TLDs, such as two-letter country code ones, look for the corresponding local authority. For instance, for .no - Norway - it is NORID with its own list of registrars for .no domain and registration rules, which are rather restrictive comparing to "anyone can" policy for .com, .org and .net.Looking for a good domain name may take time. Most common words and short domain names have already been taken.
Web site hosting is a different service. Firms offering it are in abundance (just look around) and it is very competitive, because it takes little effort to move your site elsewhere in the world. Look for "own domain name" option in the hosting plans. Let me name one directory where you can search through many providers and plans: HostSearch. Or, if you prefer a listing less obscured by business front-ends and greed for customers, here is a list of some of the world’s largest physical hosting providers from Netcraft.
Almost always, you can register a domain name when you sign up for a hosting plan. Even if the hosting company is not a registrar, they will handle it for you through another firm that is a registrar. Some companies offer hosting and are registrars at the same time, but that’s not necessarily an advantage.
Lessons Learned
Major- Everybody screams about 24x7 uptime. Only few have it.
- I haven’t found an ideal hosting company. There always was something wrong.
- Custom configuration is something a hosting company won’t do (not for small and mid-sized accounts, at least). Ask as many questions as you can up front. If it isn’t going to work exactly the way you need, look for another company. Don’t sign up for a plan with non-refundable setup fee: free trial is really necessary. Stick to ones using mainstream software (e.g. UNIX/Apache and not Microsoft something): it has less chance to cause problems.
A company that doesn’t have extensive technical information about user accounts on its site (and I do mean extensive, i.e. hundreds of pages), usually sucks in other ways, too. - You get what you pay for, or less than that (but never more). Note that the cheapest hosting plans have to make up money one way or another. Sometimes it can be found in fine print, sometimes you will discover it after you sign up. It’s more expensive to be stingy. Providers that skimp on their connectivity and computer resources are the worst ones.
One way to save is to provide name-based hosting (many sites on a single IP address): your site won’t work with older HTTP 1.0 clients.
- Never pay attention to that special expiring in two days. There are so many other firms around that chances are, you will find a better offer the next day. Just do your work at the pace you are comfortable with.
- If you want to please users who have high-speed connection (> 1Mbps), host in the same geographical area or at least in the same part of the world where they reside. Throughput for Web and FTP traffic is ultimately limited by the physical distance to the host. A very large available bandwidth alone does not guarantee the fastest download speed (at least not with the present TCP implementations).
Most people are using slower connections, so this is actually not very important. Still, local hosting improves response times and consistency: there are fewer clogged networks to go through.
- It may be easier to register under .com/.org/.net TLD than under a national domain, because there is stronger competition among registrars for the former ones and no bureaucratic restrictions apply.
- My domain name - vad1.com - actually turned out to be a bad choice, for two reasons:
- The numeral 1 and letter l look similar in some fonts and can be confused when somebody tries to type my domain name.
- When I have to spell my domain name over phone (vee-ei-dee-one-dot-com), it’s confusing what one means: vadone.com, or what?
No comments:
Post a Comment