Getting Started with Hosting

Introduction

Hosting is a pretty general term that is often used to refer to a number of services related to hosting, in addition to the hosting itself.

Specifically, when someone hosts for you, they are providing you a hardware, software, or service that you and/or others can access over the internet. It could be a website, and most often is, but can also refer to email, files, databases, software, or connectivity, among other things.

As it pertains to this page, Hosting is the service that Computerisms or other companies such as GoDaddy or Canadian Web Hosting provides, and is related to your domain name and the related services linked by it.

Domain Name

Before any hosting can take place, you must first own a domain name. Own is a strong word, since really you can only buy one year at a time, so maybe rent might be a better word for it. Regardless, it needs to be registered in your name, and it is required to have a findable place on the internet, much like your house must have an address in order to be findable in your town.

Domain names are parsed from right to left. Every thing to the right of the right-most dot, at least in most cases, is consider the Top Level Domain, or TLD. Everything between the rightmost dot in the domain name and dot to the left of that is considered the 2nd level domain, and this generally the namespace that identifies you most specifically. In our case, computerisms is the 2nd level domain, and .ca is our TLD.

The most common TLD is .com, which is run by the organization called ICANN, but another very common TLD is .ca, which is run by the organization CIRA. Many other countries and organizations also have TLDs, such as .org, .tv, .pro, .info, .br, and so on. These organizations keep track of all 2nd level domains in their respective TLD, so for example, once I have registered computerisms with CIRA, computerisms.ca is now taken, and nobody else can take computerisms.ca unless I let it expire. However, someone could go buy computerisms.com if I haven't bought it yet.

For a full list of all the TLDs that are available, consult This Page

In order to prevent others from occupying your 2nd level domain namespace, some people think it is a good idea to buy up the 2nd level domain in as many TLDs as is reasonable, so they might buy domain.com, domain.ca, domain.org, and domain.net. Overall, this is not terribly expensive in the big scope of things, and it can prevent problems in the future; for example a company who bought a 2nd level domain in the .ca TLD later found out that someone else had bought the same 2nd level domain in the .com TLD to host a porn site, so some of their clients ended up at the porn site instead of the company web site because they went to the .com version of the 2nd level domain. But it is by no means necessary for you to do this in order for your website and related services to work.

If you want see if your chosen 2nd level domain and TLD combination is available, you can use a site like This One.

When people are talking about domain names, they typically combine the 2nd level domain and the TLD, and refer to that as their "domain name". So computerisms.ca and computerisms.com would both be considered as 2 separate domain names in conversation.

Once you have chosen your domain name and made sure nobody else has taken it already, then you need a registrar to get your domain name(s) registered for you. A registrar is basically any organization that is authorized to sell domain names, so companies like Computerisms can do this for you, but there are a virtual plethora of registrars available online where you can register it as well.

Each TLD has its own rules, but generally you can own any domain name for up to 10 years, and they are sold by the year, so if you are sure you will still be using the domain name in 5 years, you can buy all 5 of those years in one block.

Building a Website

Websites are built by Web Designers; they are basically the artists who listen to what you say, and turn it into what you want to see.

In a lot of cases, a company that offers hosting also builds the sites, but the two things are not necessarily related. Many people, for example, can build a website, but know nothing of how to setup a web server so that people can find it on the internet. Computerisms is an example of a company that provides the hosting, but does not provide the artistic services of building sites.

There are two basic kinds of websites; static HTML, and CMS.

Static HTML sites are the old-school way of doing things. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was pretty much the only way to build a site, and it involves writing the whole site in code. There are some advantages to this still. For example, it is generally much harder to hack a site that is built in static HTML. Unfortunately, it is also far more time consuming, and updating a site written in HTML is much harder, which usually translates to much more expensive, as well. However, if you are just wanting a single page "business card" site that is not likely to change much over time, this can be a quick and inexpensive way to get something online.

CMS, or Content Management Systems, are the modern way of building web sites, and they should be used for all but the most basic of websites. Common software that are used to build a CMS site include Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and MediaWiki, though that list is far from exhaustive. It should be noted that sites using this kind of software require consistent software updates in order to minimize the risk of the site being hacked, so they really shouldn't be treated as "fire and forget"; someone should be actively maintaining these kinds of site on a regular schedule. These software make it much easier to build features into a site, such as photo galleries, contact forms, and E-Commerce. They also make it much easier to maintain a consistent layout and colour scheme through every page, and most importantly to update content on the site. In most cases, someone who wants a website will get the Web Designer to build the site in a CMS, and then they can handle content and software updates themselves, thereby saving a lot of money.

Getting a web site built is usually the most expensive component in the whole hosting package. it can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on factors such as what features the site has and how much content is being presented, and this should be discussed with the Web Designer.

The Actual Hosting

Once you have a domain name, and a web site to present to the public, you need a way for people on the Internet to be able to find and see your site. This is where the hosting provider comes in.

The hosting provider is going to setup his servers so that services can work with your domain name. In most situations, this is going to consist of 3 parts.

The first part is DNS, and the hosting provider is going to set that up so that your domain name can be matched to specific servers on the internet that are going to provide services based on your domain name. In addition to your main domain, this can also be used to create sub-domains for various other services. For example,

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