6. Hosting and Posting
Now your ready to put your site online. But how and where? You could do it yourself, but this is very expensive. You would need a permanent large connection to the internet and a server with the appropriate back up facilities. The next step down from this is to have somebody maintain or host this dedicated server for you, still very expensive, but at least you don't have to look after it anymore. The third and most common option is to share a hosted server with a number of other websites.
Under this shared arrangement you will be limited to the space you have on the server, and how much traffic your site generates and the amount of data you transfer. But you will usually receive a number of email accounts and statistics about your site for free. Plus you can run a number of CGI and Java scripts. You will have to pay extra for secure server pages (for e-commerce).
To actually get the pages from your computer to the hosted server you use one of the standard features of the Internet, File Transfer Protocol (FTP). There are a number of software programs which make FTP easy, we use WS-FTP. But another popular one is Cute FTP.
You may be able to use the same ISP you are using to access the internet, or you may choose to use an independent ISP or Virtual Host who can guarantee a more reliable service. We currently use and recommend Cyber Host, who will provide 25Mb for $275 per annum.
