A hosting account gives you facilities and resources needed to have a website on the Internet. This can be created through your internet service provider, or through another company. Face 2 Interface is a hosting provider, for example.
How Do I Get Hosting Set Up?
By comparing features and prices, and planning a little in advance on what your needs are you can find a hosting provider to meet those needs at a competitive price. Word of mouth, e.g. asking other people you know who have websites how reliable their hosting provider is may be a big help.
I Have Hosting, Now What?
The company that you use as your hosting provider will give you an id and password, as well as a certain amount of space on their server. From there you’ll have to hire a professional or learn on your own. Web development is a technical skill involving lots of knowledge and work. SIMPL is designed to take much of that effort out of website development by doing many of the technicalities behind the scenes for you.
For more information, please drop us a line.
For a Technical Look at Hosting, Start Here
If you connect a couple of computers together at home, or at work, then share printers and even disk drives – you’ve got a little network set up.
Now connect millions of computers around the world together and you’ve got the Internet.
To make that connection you use an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who gives you the ability to connect to the web, email, and use other parts of the internet as well. Although dial-up access is still the most commonly used method worldwide, broadband (high speed) is becoming very common now. Broadband is usually cable or DSL.
These ISP’s not only give their customers a way to connect their home computers to the internet, they also allow websites on their computers which are called servers. By creating a website and putting it on a server connected to the rest of the net, anyone in the world who is also connected to the net can see your site.
Two additional things need to happen to get yourself a website.
First, you need to buy a domain name.
If you’re on a Windows computer try this :
Go to Start > Run > command and type in
ping www.face2interface.com
You should see something like this :
Pinging www.face2interface.com [216.157.5.252] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.157.5.252: bytes=32 time=226ms TTL=236
etc…
Here’s What Happened
You see how there’s that long number in brackets right after ‘www.face2interface.com’? That’s called the IP Address and it’s the way computers on the internet really communicate. The domain name is designed to make life easy for people because www.face2interface.com is easier to remember than 216.157.5.252. But strictly speaking, the domain name isn’t necessary.
Practically speaking, a domain is vital. Choosing a domain which :
represents what your website is about
is easy for a person to remember
are the keys to choosing your domain name wisely.
Second, you’ll need to establish hosting for your website.
After selecting your domain name and buying it from an approved domain registrar for a period of one or more years, you’ll then need to establish a hosting account. This can be done with Face 2 Interface, with your ISP, or with any of the many other hosting providers.
Before making this choice, it is wise to decide what sort of features you will want on your website. If you choose to do your own website we hope you will consider our web authoring product SIMPL. In that case the decision is easy because SIMPL comes with our basic hosting plan.