Q: I have registered a domain name. What next?
Q: What is virtual/shared hosting?
Q: What is a dedicated server?
Q: Should I use a website design wizard?
Q: How do I know how much disk space I need for my website?
Q: How do I know how much traffic my website will get in
a month?
Q: What is bandwidth?
Q: What can free software offered by website hosting companies
do for me?
Q: What is FTP
Q: I have registered a domain name. What next?
A: Next, you'll want to get a website designed and then publish that
website to the Internet by copying it to a website hosting server.
Q: What is virtual/shared hosting?
A: When you have virtual/shared hosting, several accounts are
stored on one website server. They share the available resources, but
they're kept completely separate. This type of account is appropriate
for most individual and small business websites.
Q: What is a dedicated server?
A: With a dedicated server, you use the entire server (as opposed
to the situation with virtual/shared hosting). Dedicated servers are
often more appropriate when you have a larger website that may generate
a considerable amount of traffic. With this type of server, there is
often less support from the hosting company, and you need to know a
lot more to keep it going.
Q: Should I use a website design wizard?
A: We recommend that you have your website designed by a professional
website designer, rather than using a proprietary website design wizard
that your website hosting company might provide to you. Website design
wizards may seem like a good thing, and sometimes they are--they make
it easy for people with little or no experience to design a website.
However, if you should ever choose to make changes to your website,
or move your website to another hosting company, it may not be as easy
to do as it was to use the wizard to create the site.
Q: How do I know how much disk space I need for my website?
A: When looking at the website files themselves (not the log
files or email files or other behind-the-scenes files), most individual
and small business websites made up of 5 or 10 pages often use less
than 1 MB of storage space. You can see how much space is used by your
website by checking the properties of the folder that contains all of
your website files.
Q: How do I know how much traffic my website will get in a month?
A: In general, most small or medium websites use approximately
1 to 5 GB of data transfer a month.
Q: What is bandwidth?
A: "Bandwidth" and "data transfer" refer to how much information
can be transferred to and from the visitors to your website in a certain
time frame (usually one month) before you incur an additional fee and/or
have to upgrade your account to the next level of service. This includes
the information transferred by page views on your website, by visitors
uploading and downloading information to your website, and information
transferred to and from your domain by email.
Q: What can free software offered by website hosting companies do
for me?
A: Some free software will allow you to set up and maintain an
online journal (often called a Web log or a blog). Or give you a way
to set up an online photo gallery, software to allow you to offer a
chat room on your website. Or provide your website visitors with an
online guestbook to sign when they visit your website. Or set up online
surveys to poll your website visitors. Or allow you to set up online
message forums where you and site visitors can post and read messages.
Q: What is FTP?
A: FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and it is the language
used to transfer files from computer to computer across the Internet.
When you transfer files from your computer to your website hosting provider's
computer (the Web server), and when you transfer files from the Web
server to your computer, you may use a program that uses FTP to transfer
the files.