Hosting a Website 101

Are you ready to get it on?

Hosting a website on the internet, that is?

(*ahem*)...

Okay I know... Cheap trick... Guilty as charged... ... heh heh...

Nevertheless, I'm assuming you're here because you've decided you want to 'go live' with a full-blown website. Right?

Well congratulations and welcome to the world of online publishing! Now you will not only be surfing the scene but you will also be making the scene as well.

Alright then so let's say that you already know how to make a web page, you have an idea what your website is going to be about and you have, in fact, hammered out a few pages of content (text and graphics).

Now you want to get from:

A) Some web pages you have whipped up and stored on your computer's hard drive that you've only showed to your mom/brother/sister/best friend/dog/nobody...

TO

B) Building a full blown website and have it hosted on the internet for everybody and their monkey's uncle to see (and send you emails about).

And you're wondering:

How do I do this?

...and of course...

How much is it going to cost?

And the answers are 'EASY' and 'NOT MUCH'.

Sound good by you?

Alrighty then... But first of all, let's get you organized into a 'website frame of mind' by starting with...

Your Home Page

Your website begins with your "home page". Just to clarify, the phrase "home page" can refer to several things in internet parlance. It can refer to the page that your web browser defaults to when you first start it up or it can colloquially refer to a personal or hobby page on the internet.

But for our purposes here, "home page" will refer to the starting page or the entry page to your website. The file name of this page on your website is typically called index.htm or index.html.

Now you may have noticed throughout your travels on the internet that many URLs don't actually have a file name at the end to indicate exactly which web page is being requested. To explain, let's say for example the URL to your website is:

http://www.your_domain_name.com/

Since there is no file name tacked on to the end of the URL, when you put this into the address bar of your web browser and hit Go, your browser is actually requesting the root directory of files that exists at this URL. Web hosts usually have their servers configured to search for and open the index.htm or the index.html file when any directory is requested by a web browser. Although this helps to abbreviate some URLs by dropping the file name, its real purpose is to prevent visitors from getting a directory list of files (á la Windows Explorer) when using a URL that requests a directory instead of a specific file.

Hence, the starting or entry page to your website, a.k.a. home page, should always be named index.htm or index.html and it should always be kept in the root directory that your web host has created for your HTML files (most web hosts' technical support should be able to tell you what this directory is and how to access it).


Now before you go live (and I know you're just itchin' to get on with this whole 'what is web hosting' thing), I strongly recommend that you start by building your website offline...

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