Web Publishing

Web Publishing stands for uploading or ‘publishing’ your website on the internet so others can view it. There are many ways of publishing our websites; if we have our own internet presence (i-e a valid internet connection with a valid IP address) we can make our own computer an internet server. We’ll however need a very fast connection to serve so many users’ requests simultaneously. So we need an alternative!

Web Hosts

A Web host is a person or a company who has very fast internet connections and very reliable computers with multi-way backups to ensure robust service. It ‘Hosts’ our websites for us, so our users can connect to those servers and view them. Normally web hosts charge us a small fee(usually $3-10 a month).But some are free too!

Some Web hosting Terms

Some terms related to web-hosting are:

1. Web-Space (The space that the host is willing to allot us so we can put our documents and any files there)
2.  Bandwidth (The amount of data per month that can be downloaded from or uploaded to our website)
3. Server Technologies (Support for advanced technologies like Php, MySQL etc)

4. Ads (Advertisements) The web host usually puts advertisements on your website, so when the user clicks on them the web host gets paid, this accounts for the free hosting!

A website with Ads

Free Vs Paid Web Hosting

It is a logical question, if free web hosting is sufficient for our website, why paid hosting? The answer is, paid hosting provides corporate level reliability, more webspace, more bandwidth, no advertisements, and quick support from the admin team of the host.

Finding a good Free Host

Finding a good free host is easy, the most easy way is to ‘Google’ it! Open www.google.com and write “free web hosts” in the search box. You’ll get a list of web directories and web hosts, the web directories are actually like telephone directories, only they list free and paid web hosts!

Googling!

Some popular free webhosts

Some good free webhosts are:

www.byethost.com (5Gb Web space, 200GB bandwidth, Email features, Control panel, Php MySQL, No ads etc)

www.awardspace.com( 200mb web space, 5GB Bandwidth, Php Mysql, etc)

Sites.google.com (Google’s web page service offering step by step setup instructions)

Uploading a web-page

Lets say we have created a webpage and want to upload it to a free web host. First we usually need to register with the free web host The registration (or signup) link is always prominent on the front page of the webhost, for-example www.byethost.com

Byethost’s Signup link

Post-Signup

Once you click on the signup link, you’ll be given a form to fill which usually requires your email id. Once you submit that form, you’ll receive your account details as an email message. In those details are your FTP user name and password, also the host name for FTP access. You’ll be using FTP to upload your websites.

Byethost.com’s Signup mail

Using FTP Clients

An FTP client is software that allows us to upload or download data to FTP servers. There are freeware FTP clients available like filezilla. Filezilla is a very powerful, yet easy to use FTP client, you can get it from:

http://filezilla-project.org/download.php

Using FileZilla

We need to define an FTP host and assign a username/password to it first. We can do that in the quick-connect bar on the top. Upon clicking the “Quick Connect” button, we’ll be logged into the FTP server and we’ll be able to view the folders on the server, we must upload our site inside the ‘htdocs’ or ‘www’ folder.

Filezilla Environment

Accessing the website

We’re usually given a sub-domain with the free webhosting account, we’ll be using that subdomain to access our website. If we uploaded the webpage directly inside the htdocs folder we’ll access it directly using the subdomain. For example, If our page is named “index.html” and our subdomain is “qaiser.byethost15.com” we can access it by the address : http://qaiser.byethost15.com/index.html

Sub-Domain vs Top-level-Domain

l  A Top-Level-Domain (or TLD) is an english like representation of a webserver.

l  IPs are hard to remember so we use domain names.

l  Example: www.byethost.com is a TLD.

l  Subdomains are a small part of the TLD, like qaiser.byethost.com is a subdomain, part of the TLD byethost.com.

l  Unlike subdomains TLDs usually have a price, ranging from $8 to $20.

l   

Types of TLDs

A TLD maybe :

1. .com (company)
2. .net (network)
3. .org (organization)
4. .tv (Television/video)
5. .edu (Educational)
6. .gov( Government)

Etc

Acquiring a TLD

We can obtain our own Top level domain from domain registrars. Example of a popular domain registrar is www.godaddy.comWe must pay them via credit card and they’ll inturn register the domain for us.They will supply us with a control panel where we can link the domain name with our website/host. We link a TLD to our host by specifying nameservers(of the host) in the domain control panel(we obtain the nameservers with our free/paid hosting account automatically). Some registrars may provide TLD’s for free eg: .co.cc and .tk domains.