how do you set up a website?

[Gaston]

were do you find a server to put your website on? i have the html files now i need to find a place to put them. are there any free places?

 

[Andy1845c]

Google web hosting services. There are millions out there, some free, most not. I pay like 5 bucks a month with Holhost.com. Suites me and my business just fine.

 

[Gaston]

thanks, i think i can live with 5 bucks a month.

 

[Styx]

or do it from home thats what I do
local server running Debian (well changing to Fedora this week, debian has issues or I have issues with it) with Apache

 

[3v0]

I have been using apache for a number of years.
What issues do you have ?

 

[Gaston]

3v0, is your avatar a drawing of that computer guy from the early '70s i saw on tv last night? and do you need a static ip to run a server from home. and how do you get your ip on the dns servers?

 

[justDIY]

running from home is nice, but having dedicated hosting is real nice. especially if you have a lot of rich content or visitors.

also check with your ISP, many of them don't allow self-hosting, and will ****-can you if they catch you doing it.

my latest purchase of web hosting netted me 5gb of storage, 300gb transfer, two dedicated static IPs, custom DNS control and ability to host unlimited domains. After discounts, I think it cost me about $10/mo.

 

[3v0]

Thread about the avatar. Lets not go there again.

You can either run a DNS server at home or use a service.

There is a place called DollarDNS.net that lets you run a DNS server on there machines for $12 a year. This looks good compared to others that charge per domain name such as ZoneEdit.com.

If you do not have a static IP both of the above have tools for dealing with dynamic IP addresses.

I am using ZoneEdit and looking at switching to DollarDNS. IIRC both have multiple sites so that if one goes down you still have a working nameserver.

In short it goes like this.

• Create site pages
• Load site pages to web server/host
• Buy Domain Name from name registar
• Setup names of DNS servers with name registarSetup
• Site info on DNS Server
• Wait about a day

Hope I got that right, it is late. Someone is sure to correct me if I did not.

Do check with you ISP about hosting. The more reasonable ones do not give a rip as long as you have low traffic sites.

 

[Hero999]

What did you create the html files in?

I would strongly recommend you avoid MS Front Page or MS Word as the pages they create only display well on Internet Explorer; Firefox and Opera users might not be able to read your website properly.

 

[Andy1845c]

Notepad - - - The only way to go for HTML

 

[Gaston]

i bought the html files. i have never programed in html. let me run this by you to see if i have it correct. the dns server takes a url like (www.yahoo.com) and has a listing of the ip address and converts it into the ip and directs you to it. is that correct?

 

[3v0]

That is the basic idea. Think of the Domain Name Server as a telephone book. Instead of name -> phoneNumber it does URL->IP.

Its a bit more complicated then that. There are many many DNS's out there. Your DNS indirectly shares your info with all the DNS server in the world.

Good DNS have fancy features like using an alternate IP if the primary one is down.

 

[Sceadwian]

3V0 URLS are a completly seperate subject, they allow a much higher degree of abstraction from even a domain name. yahoo.com is not a URL, it's a domain name. https://www.yahoo.com/index.html is a URL. The domain name www.yahoo.com would be broken down into several states. Your computer would contact your ISP's DNS server and ask for yahoo.com's DNS entry and then redirect the query to yahoo's DNS servers for the www part, unless it's a specifically setup alias for the domain name (A great deal of web sites set up aliases for www. to redirect to the root DNS server for that domain. Which is how dynamic DNS sites work. They have highly dynamic DNS servers which are updarted literally every few minutes. The entire process starts with a NAME.EXT all other steps are up to how the domain owner decided to configure it. URLS actually include protocol and various other structure which is software dependant.

 

[3v0]

OK. What you said.

I was attempting to get the idea across without causing the OP to get a headache.

 

[Sceadwian]

He'll have an even bigger headache later if he thinks a URL has anything but a distant relationship to a domain name. If they looked up Domain Name or URL in Wikipedia, the question wouldn't even have been asked. It's a bit more complicated covers things, but the closer Domain Name-IP link is very important, as URLS are highly application specific. It's like saying chocolate and a cacao bean are the same thing. Chocolate is a much more refined form of the cacao bean. The difference seems trivial, but if you pop a cacao bean in your mouth and expect to taste chocolate you're in for one hell of a surprise.

 

[3v0]

Correct Uncle

 

[HiTech]

also check with your ISP, many of them don't allow self-hosting, and will ****-can you if they catch you doing it.

It's doubtful that you'll get ****-canned, however what they fear is people running a business via a server through them... losing some revenue income for whatever reason, and blaming it on the ISP provider. If there's an outage, a person may try to sue for potential lost income for the duration of the outage. That's why they disapprove of using their alloted webspace granted to a subscriber other than for personal use. Besides, anyone who is going to rely on income based websites should have more than one backup servers located in different geographical regions.
I personally know an individual that is undergoing multiple law suits by companies who lost revenue when hurricane Katrina wiped out his servers. They were nothing more than some PCs in a bedroom in his home, that floated away. He saved money then but may be paying out alot more very soon. He's currently trying to impoverish himself so there's nothing to give any value to his estate or personal worth, other than his clothes. He's being a deceptive scumbag. But life will catch up with him somehow, someway, someday.

 

[justDIY]

I personally know an individual that is undergoing multiple law suits by companies who lost revenue when hurricane Katrina wiped out his servers. They were nothing more than some PCs in a bedroom in his home, that floated away. He saved money then but may be paying out alot more very soon. He's currently trying to impoverish himself so there's nothing to give any value to his estate or personal worth, other than his clothes. He's being a deceptive scumbag. But life will catch up with him somehow, someway, someday.

Most of the shady operations like that around here pay a small fee to incorporate as an LLC (limited liability corporation). If something bad happens, the corporation just goes bankrupt and the stakeholders are left with very little responsibility. There's a few holes in the llc armor, for instance I don't think it protects the stakeholders from bodily injury type liability - so if you make a product and it permanently disables someone, you're screwed.

 

[Imnewtothis]

BRAVENET.COM free and easy to use. There is a small monthly fee for a domain though... hope this helps.

William

 

[Nicksan]

Sign up with a company to host it (or do it yourself if you have the now-how), create the site, upload it to their server.

This last week I got my site up and running using network solutions.

They have simple tools to create a quick website using templates, but they are kinda bland and all look similar, or you can upload your files you create with whatever program, frontpage, Nvu or whatever other way you create your pages.