setting up your own web presence
- November 30th, 2007
- Posted in Amusing . Europe . Web
- By Jason Zerbe
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There are many different ways to go about creating your own website or network of sites. Here are a few of the options I have gone through.
- For those of you who want the most control, you can run your own web server/email server from home. I recommend an “always on” connection such as Cable or DSL. The important part for this option is that you have enough upload bandwidth to serve your content to multiple users. This works just fine for a small site, but if you are expecting lots of visitors, have your website hosted by a hosting company. I’ve done this before and had good success with Debian Linux. For more instructions on setting up a variety of software on top of Debian –> check out the ISPConfig set-up tutorial for Debian 4.0 (Etch). The full ISPConfig setup takes about 1-2GB of hard drive space and at least 50-100 MB of RAM so don’t do the full set-up if you don’t need ISPConfig.
- The next best option is free hosting. Yes, there are such things, but many of these “freehosts” require you to display their ads. Most free hosting plans give you: 1-10GB per month of bandwidth, 100-500MB of space with a file size limit (so you can’t stash all your copy-infringing mp3′s on their server and link them to your MySpace account), PHP scripting enabled with sendmail turned off, and 1-5 MySQL databases. A conclusive list of free hosting providers can be found at free-webhosts.com.
- You then get into shared hosting. It’s called such because the hosting provider rents out space on the server and hosts many different accounts on a single server. Consequently you are restricted on how much control you have over the server and how much processing and memory you receive. Shared accounts can cost $3-20 a month, depending on what is all included. Shared hosting accounts include: email hosting (10-100 email accounts), web hosting (10-100GB of space with full PHP and sometimes Perl installations), and database hosting (10-20 mysql databases).
- A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. I managed to get my VPS for $10/month at cheapvps.net, but most VPS plans run from $30-70/month. You can also find cheap unmanaged VPS deals at vpslink.com.
- If you truly need all the power and a whole lot of bandwidth you can pay out $30-200/month for a dedicated server. Serverpronto.com has some of the lowest priced deals that I have found on entry level and medium range dedicated servers.
Now that you have your hosting set-up, it’s time to create and put up your content. For starters I suggest having a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS markup. What I have done with most of my sites is find a good XHTML/CSS template and add my content in on top of the tweaked template. If you are also looking into having a “dynamic site” I suggest reading up and having a running knowledge of PHP, MySQL or PostgreSQL, and Javascript. I also suggest using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for web development such as ActiveState Komodo, if you are going to be creating web content on a regular basis. It has saved me from quite a few scripting errors before I experience them server-side.
To get your content up on your host, you can use a web-based file manager that most hosts provide, or an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client. An FTP Client I suggest for Windows is FTPSurfer by WisperTech. If you are using Linux, Unix, or OSX here are a few suggestions I found.
After you got most of that down, then there is the issue of financing all of this, I’ll be getting into that with some information on advertising in an upcoming post.
Some questions I received about this post from my buddy Devin:
D: “I was wondering how you managed your VPS?”
JZ: The hosting provider I get my VPS through provides a pre-installed control panel, that I can manage my entire VPS through, but for tweaks and such I have to SSH into my VPS and do some command-line junk. If I wanted to add in another application that did not come pre-installed, for instance a counter strike or team speak server.
D: “With Vista on my first partition, is it safe to install the grub boot loader? Debian tutorial says that we need a static IP address. What do I do if my IP address is given via DHCP?”
JZ: As long as you don’t overwrite your Vista partition, everything should be just fine. I definitely suggest backing up your data to some removable media first though. The only problem might occur when you want to remove the Linux partition holding the Grub boot loader, then you have to overwrite the MBR (master boot record) with your Windows install disk, so Windows will boot in first again.
I haven’t done a partition on my Vista machine before, but you might not even have to use the Grub. I was poking around my Vista release the other day and I found something about multi-boot from Vista.
Well you don’t have to have a static IP address, but it makes it easier when you need to find/access your machine directly by IP address. It is required in a server setup, so you don’t have to constantly update your DNS records pointing to the server. It’s not that hard to find out the variables for doing your network setup, just do an “ifconfig” command in Debian or an “ipconfig” command in Windows. Which should give you your subnet/netmask, and gateway address.