If you’d like to design your own website and have complete control over your files, including using FTP, etc., you will want to use a standard Web Host. HostGator is an example of this type of service.

Although using an all inclusive service that will enable you to create your site online can be beneficial, they can sometimes be a bit limiting in regard to what you can do with your site and what you can upload to your server. However, they can also be very beneficial in getting your business up and running online, but will take a bit longer, as they will take you through a series of questions and information to assist you in building a successful online business. SiteBuildIt is an example of this type of service.

Another consideration is cost. Web Hosting services, such as HostGator will enable you to make small monthly payments for their shared hosting service as long as they host your website. However, a service, such as SiteBuildIt will require you to pay for their services on a yearly basis.

Selecting a Quality Web Host

When selecting a quality Web Host, your first consideration should be the company. Check out their background. Talk with some of their customers and ask them if they’ve been satisfied with their service.

In addition, you may want to find the answers to the following:

• Do they offer fast connections?
• Do they have a back-up system in place to protect your data in case there is a power outage?
• Do they require you to make payments in advance?
• Do they require a long-term contract?
• Do they charge set up fees?
• How is their customer support? Test them.
• Do they provide you with free access to a secure server for order processing?
• Do they offer shopping cart software to process your orders?
• Do they provide you with an online website manager?
• Do they provide you with an online support manual?

Here are some basic features you should look for when selecting a Web Host:

• 24/7 reliable tech support
• Your own domain name (www.yourname.com)
• At least 10GB of monthly transfer (traffic)
• Depending on the size of your site, a minimum of 50MB of server space with the option to upgrade later if needed
• Unlimited true POP email accounts – name@yourdomain.com
• Unlimited email aliases
• Email forwarding
• Unlimited autoresponders
• Your own unrestricted CGI-Bin
• Access to SSL Encryption for secure transactions
• Access to a shopping cart
• MySQL Database
• Perl
• PHP
• htaccess password protection
• Server Side Includes (SSI) support
• Design (and upload to) your site using HTML editing software
• Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions for those utilizing FrontPage
• Unlimited free access to your server via FTP/Telnet
• Easy access to your log files
• Statistics on visits to your site
• No hidden fees
• Referral program

If you’re just launching a regular website that has under 500 pages or so, a handful of graphics, a few simple scripts, such as a form processing script, etc., and a database, you most-likely won’t need more than 150GB of server space. This will also give you some growing room.

Hidden Fees

When you sign up with a Web Hosting Company, you will most likely pay a monthly fee for your account. However, what you may not realize is that many hosting companies have hidden fees that will end up costing you much more than you were prepared to pay.

Server Space and Bandwidth

Many times these web hosting companies will advertise a very low hosting rate, which lulls their potential customers in. However, what you may not realize is that you may be charged extra for specific features you will need, such as extra server space and bandwidth, which may end up costing you a lot of money.

Early Cancellation

In addition, you may be charged a fee if you decide to cancel your hosting account before a specified amount of time. For example, many hosting companies may charge you by the year. However, if you cancel your account before the year is up, they may charge you as much as $30.00.

Domain Name

Another hidden fee that you may not be aware of is your domain name. Many hosting companies will advertise that they will provide you with a ‘free’ domain name if you host your website with them. However, if you decide to leave their hosting company, you may have to pay a fee to take your domain with you, as the hosting company actually owns the domain. Even worse, some hosting companies may not even allow you to take your domain name with you.

For this reason, and the fact that you can probably get your domain name much cheaper on your own, it is highly recommended that you get your domain name on your own prior to getting a hosting account. You can register your domain name with NameCheap.com for a very reasonable price. You can then sign up with a web hosting company and then change your primary and secondary DNS to your Web Host.

Before you sign up with any Web Hosting Company, please ensure that you take some time to read the fine print to ensure there aren’t any hidden fees.

Conclusion

When selecting a Web Host, you must look at the entire picture prior to making your decision. You may find a host that charges $5.00 – $15.00 a month to host your site; however, their technical support may be poor, or your website may be slow or down a lot.

A lower monthly payment may look appealing, but how much is it actually going to cost you in lost sales? Most likely much more than the amount you’ll save.

If you’re just interested in launching a standard website that won’t use a lot of bandwidth (a lot of video, audio, scripts, etc.), a shared hosting plan will be your best option – this is what most people use.

There is only one host that we can recommend and it is HostGator. Their customer support is excellent, they have a 99% uptime rate, no hidden fees, and provide exactly what you’ll need for your websites.

I hope you now have a good understanding of what to look for in a Web Host. There are many companies to choose from with many different options. Take your time and select a company that will provide you with the service you desire.

If you are considering changing your domain name, use caution. This may make it difficult for others to find you. The ideal way to change a domain name is to keep the old domain name, and purchase the new one that you desire. Then, simply use forwarding features available through your Web Host to forward the old domain to the new one. This way, whenever someone types in your old domain name, they instantly arrive at the new domain.

When you change a domain name, changes must be made to thousands of DNS servers around the world. DNS stands for Domain Name System, and this is how domain names are mapped to IP addresses. When one computer communicates with another, they find the computer that they want to communicate with by the IP number associated with the domain name – not by the domain name alone. When your domain name changes, your IP address changes as well. Of course it is possible for one domain name to have multiple IP addresses, just as it is possible to have multiple domain names for one IP address.

Also note that an IP address does not stay the same for domain names that are sold to different people. For example, if you purchased the www.google.com domain, it would not have the same IP address that it does today, unless you purchased Google, the company. What this means is that when a domain name that has been used before becomes available again, the IP address that was associated with it is no longer associated with it. A new IP address is assigned.

You could opt to keep your current IP address, and change the domain name, but the result would be the same as if you purchased a new domain name, with a new IP address, in most cases. According to the DNS servers, the domain name and the IP address are no longer a matching pair. You see, when you purchase a previously used domain name, and the IP address changes for that domain name, the DNS servers around the world are not instantly updated with this new information.

Caching becomes a problem. Caching refers to a computer making a copy of a file for faster viewing the next time the file is requested. Just as webpages are cached on your computer for easier and faster load times, domain names paired with IP addresses are also cached on DNS servers, with the assumption that the matching pair won’t change very often, if at all. It typically takes anywhere from 24 hours to 48 hours for the caching to stop, and for the new pair to be recognized.

What this means to you is that if you are moving your website to a new domain name, it is best to keep the old domain  with the webpages intact for at least two or three days until the new domain name has had time to propagate. At that point, you could start advertising the new domain name, and even forward visitors from the old domain to the new domain name, with the confidence that your visitors will arrive where you expected them to.

Take your time and really think about the pros and cons before changing domain names. It’s always best to just keep your domain name to at least redirect your visitors to your new domain name.

The key to moving your website smoothly is proper planning. Start by writing or typing all of the files that are currently on your server. Hopefully, you’ve documented what has been done in the past, such as changes made to software and scripts that are needed to make your website operate properly. If not, make sure that you do this when you move over to a new server. This type of documentation will come in very handy.

Overall, write down how the files are organized. For example, write down the file folder or directory names, and then write down the file names that are in those directories.

Next, make sure that you do a thorough backup of all of the files on the server. This is vital, because things can be ‘lost’ during the move. Also, make sure that your backup files work! Too often people don’t actually test their backup, only to find that the files didn’t actually save. Don’t depend on anyone else, including your Web Host to do your backup for you. Do it yourself, just to be on the safe side, and save those files to a disk!

Many files that are needed to make certain elements of your site perform properly require the IP address of the site. If you are moving the site, the IP address will change. It is important to find all of the files that require this, and make those changes. Certain things that you need to check for this include databases, CGI scripts, and PHP Scripts.

Downtime may occur, and it is easier to take if you have prepared yourself and your visitors for this. In most cases, it takes time to move to a new server and bring everything back up again. There will most likely be minor problems that must be worked out before everything works.

When you move to a new server, you will need to change the name server at the company where you registered your domain. It can take up to 48 hours for the new name server to propagate. During this time, your website can be reached – at its new home – with the IP address, but not with the domain name. Remember, it can take up to 48 hours, but it may not take that long at all. There is no way to tell how long it will take until it’s done.

Take things as they come, and do one thing at a time. One of the biggest problems seems to be that several different things go wrong at once during a move, which causes one to become overwhelmed and frustrated. Again, take it a step at a time.

Use tools that you are comfortable with, such as your favorite FTP program, and make it a point to make the change when support staff will be on hand to help you with any problems. Note that the better Web Hosting companies offer 24 hour support. Let the new host know when you plan to make the move ahead of time, so that they can also be prepared for any problems.

First, really think about why you want to move. Is the Web Hosting Company’s equipment out of date? Is outdated equipment or software keeping your site from growing the way that you want it to? Before you make a move, contact your Web Hosting Company to see if any upgrades are planned. Explain to them what you need, and give them the opportunity to keep your business.

If the Web Hosting Company will not or cannot make the upgrades that you need, it is time to move. You may need a Web Host who can offer more up-to-date software, a faster CPU, more disk space, more bandwidth, etc. Of course, in most cases, you will need to pay more for these resources.

Are you unhappy with the level of support or service that your current Web Hosting service is providing? If this is the case, you probably need to move to a new company. First, think about how the support or service is hurting your website. You need to have a clear picture of this while shopping for a new Web Host, and ensure that you won’t go through the trouble of moving your site, only to find that the support or service offered by the new host is not an improvement.

While systems, software, and hardware are all very important to the health of your website, remember that there are actual human beings behind those systems and hardware keeping it all maintained and running smoothly. Unfortunately, sometimes those people simply are not competent, or don’t care enough to do the job right. If this is the case, the software and hardware eventually suffers, as does your site.

It may be a matter of talking to those who are higher up at your Web Hosting Company. They may not be aware that their customers are receiving less than desirable service. You may save yourself the hassle of finding and moving to a new host with a simple email to a supervisor at your hosting company. If that doesn’t do the trick, then you will definitely need to make a move.

Again, changing Web Hosts may not be about the hardware or software provided at all. It may have more to do with the people behind the hardware or software that prompt you to make a change. Just make sure that you are making a change for the right reasons.

It is the middle of the night, and your site has gone down. Soundly asleep in your bed, you are not aware of this – and neither is your Web Hosting Company. You are not earning money while you sleep – you are losing it! You’ve designed a website that was meant to be available to your customers twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year – and it’s not happening.

There are many things that can cause a server to go down; however problems are not limited to server outages. For example, the site could become slow, due to an overwhelming amount of traffic. There may be a software or hardware failure that is causing some problem on your site. No matter what has gone wrong, it is vital that you find out about it as quickly as possible, so that it can be taken care of. This is where a website monitoring service comes into play.

A website monitoring service will alert you if your site goes down – automatically. There are literally hundreds of website monitoring services to choose from, and they range in prices, from free to about $60 per month. Obviously, the paid services tend to offer more features and greater service than the free ones. Also, while a free service may just monitor one site, a paid service will usually monitor multiple sites.

The service does not monitor your site or sites all the time, however. It checks the site at specified intervals. Some services will check every three to five minutes, others will check every 15 to 30 minutes, and some will just check every hour. Usually, it is the paid services that monitor the site more frequently.

Here is how it works: The monitoring service uses automated software to send a request to the website it is monitoring. The website sends a response back to the monitoring service that essentially says ‘all is well.’ But it gets a little more complicated, as a good monitoring service will send requests to the website from various locations around the world to ensure that the site is available everywhere.

When the site responds to the monitoring services request, it is done so in code. If it sends back a code of 200, 301, 302, 401, or 403, it means that everything is okay. However, if no code comes back, or a code comes back that indicates that the site is not reachable, the monitoring service will send a request from another location, and then another. Most services will check three times before they ‘sound the alert.’

A monitoring service sends an alert to the designated person in numerous ways. An email may be sent, or an alert may be sent to a cell phone, pager, or PDA. Remember that the monitoring service is only designed to do that – monitor and alert. It does nothing beyond this. Once you’ve received the alert, it is up to you to get in touch with your Web Hosting Company to find out what is going on.

Many of the better monitoring services offer services that go beyond monitoring. For example, they may provide you with helpful statistics about your site. With this information, you can see just how often the site goes down, or how often other problems are experienced on your site.

After viewing website monitoring services reports, you may be satisfied with the Web Hosting service that you are using, or completely dissatisfied. If your site is down a large portion of the time – even just ten percent of the time – you most likely need a new hosting company.

This WS FTP Tutorial will assist you in learning how to use WS Ftp.

File Transfer Protocol, better known as FTP, is a procedure used to upload and download files to and from your web server.

In order to use FTP, you will need to download and install a software program on your computer. The most widely used FTP program is WS FTP.

When you first launch the FTP program, you will want to click on the ‘Connection Wizard’ button on the toolbar at the top. The following window will load and enable you to enter your website information, so that you can connect to your server.

Connection Wizard

Step One:

Enter your website name within the ‘Site Name’ section where indicated.

Step Two:

Enter your connection type. This is normally FTP.

Step Three:

Enter your server address.

Step Four:

Enter your user name and password. You should have received this information within your ‘Welcome’ message from your Web Host when you signed up. If you didn’t, contact your Web Host for assistance.

Step Five:

This is the confirmation screen. If everything is correct, click on ‘Finish’ and the software will connect to your web server.

As soon as the software receives a connection, the following screen will load:

Note: The next time you want to connect to your server, you can simply click on the ‘Connect’ button on the left side of the toolbar at the top.

The files on your computer are displayed within the left window and the files on your web server are displayed on the right.

To upload your files on a Host4Profit server, your first step will be to locate the files you would like to upload from your computer, which is within the left window. Your next step will be to click on the masteri5-www folder, within the right window, to place your files on your server.

However, the masteri5 text would actually be your username. It’s normally the first eight characters within your domain name. However, if there are other domains with a similar domain name, your username will most likely be the first seven characters of your domain name, followed by a number.

Note: If you’re using a different hosting company, this may be different.

Transferring Files

Prior to uploading your files to your server, you may want to set your transfer mode to auto. That way you won’t have to select ASCII OR Binary each time you upload a file.

To set this up, click on the ‘Transfer Mode’ button at the top of the server window on the right. Next, click on ‘Auto (Based on File Ext).’

Here’s what the button will look like:

To maneuver through your folders, simply double-click on them.

To transfer your files, click on the file once to highlight it and then click on the transfer files arrow button, which is in the center of the two windows.

Here’s what the button will look like:

The top button is the ‘download’ button, which will transfer files from your web server to your computer. The bottom button is the ‘upload’ button, which will transfer files from your computer to your web server.

To select more than one file at a time, click on each file you’d like to transfer while holding down the Ctrl key on your keyboard. Keep in mind, unless you are using the ‘Auto’ transfer mode, all of the files you select must be uploaded in the same mode. In other words, you could upload all of your HTML files at the same time, or all of your images.

If all of the files you’d like to upload are all together, you can click on the first file while holding down your Shift key and use the down arrow on your keyboard to highlight all of your files.

Transfer Modes

Files, such as text, HTML, and most scripts, should be uploaded to your server in ASCII mode. Any file that isn’t ASCII text, such as programs (EXE, ZIP), graphics, ebooks, sounds (WAV, MID) and movies should be uploaded to your server in Binary mode.

File Permissions

When using scripts on your web site, you will be required to set file permissions in order for your scripts to run properly on a Unix server. The most common setting for CGI/Perl scripts is 755. When working with scripts, you may receive an Internal Server Error when you try to run it. Many times, this error is caused by improperly set file permissions.

Permissions:

Read permissions are enabled with the number 4 or the letter r.

Write permissions are enabled with the number 2 or the letter w.

Execute permissions are enabled with the number 1 or the letter x.

No permissions are enabled with the number 0 or a dash (-).

Each of these permissions will be set for each of the following:

• Owner
• Group
• Other

To give you a better idea of how permissions are set, below is an example of a script that requires the permissions to be set to 755 — it breaks down like this:

7 – Represents the permissions for the Owner (you). The owner has been given Read, Write and Execute permissions. 4+2+1=7. This can also be written like this: rwx

5 – Represents the permissions for the Group (individuals with access to your server). The Group has been given Read and Execute permissions. 4+1=5. This can also be written like this: rx

5 – Represents the permissions for the Others (website visitors). The Others have been given Read and Execute permissions. 4+1=5. This can also be written like this: rx

755 is equal to rwxrxrx

Changing File Permissions

If you would like to set your file permissions through your FTP program, you can do so like this:

1. Log into your server and locate the directory that contains your file.
2. Click once on the file that you would like to change permissions – just to highlight.
3. Place your mouse pointer over the file and right click to launch a menu. Or, go to ‘File’ – ‘Properties’ on the main toolbar at the top of the software.

Click on ‘Properties’ to launch the ‘Properties’ window.

The ‘Properties’ window will look like this:

Set your permissions and click on OK. You can type in the numbers within the ‘Numeric Value’ section, or place the appropriate checks within the Owner, Group and World sections.

In addition to setting permissions within your FTP program, most web hosts will enable you to set permissions through your web page control panel.

If you’re managing your own web site, having a good FTP program is an absolute must. Not only will it provide you with some independence, but it will also enable you to have complete control over your files. This WS FTP Tutorial has shown you how easy using WS FTP really is.

Registering a Domain Name

If you want an online presence, you must have a domain name. A domain is a website address, such as www.yahoo.com or www.google.com. It is the address that visitors will use to get to your website. On the more technical side, a domain name points to a certain IP number, basically telling the browser which site, of the billions of sites on the Internet, to load.

IP Address

Every website has an IP address, which is a series of numbers. An example of an IP address may be 12.345.67.89. When you have a domain name, computers see it as a number, but to us humans, it looks like www.yourwebsite.com. A domain name must be registered through a domain registrar, such as Internic.

Internic is a subsidiary company of ICANN, which is the organization that certifies all domain registrars. When a domain name is ordered, it is put through the Domain Name Servers (DNS), which assign it an IP address. Most websites have both a primary and secondary name server, which point to the same website, making them more reliable.

Before you can register a domain name, you must first select one, and then make sure that it is available. The domain name that you select, so long as it is indeed available, is totally up to you. However, ideally, it will relate to the topic of your website and include your most relevant keywords. For example, a weight loss website might have a domain name such as www.weightloss.com, if that name was not taken.

Some characters are not allowed in the formation of a domain name. In fact, a domain name may only contain numbers, letters, hyphens, and underscores. However, it is always best to use text only and not numbers, hyphens or underscores. The length of a domain name is also limited to seventy characters. Shorter domain names are much better, as they are much easier to type, and to remember. It makes no difference whether or not you use upper or lower case letters for your domain name, as this is ignored by the DNS. Therefore, many people advertise their website in a way that distinguishes between the start of one word and the end of another, such as YourWebsite.com, which would also work as yourwebsite.com or YOURWEBSITE.COM – or even YoUrWeBsItE.CoM.

Dot com, or .com is not the only available extension. The extension is the end of the domain name. These days, there are a multitude of choices, with the most common being .com. Others include .net, .org, .gov, .biz, and .name. You can use what you want, but .gov is usually reserved for actual government websites. The extensions also designate certain things to visitors. For example, .org tells people that your site is an organizations website. Certain countries may also have special extensions. For example, .ca means that the site is a Canadian site.

Once you’ve selected a domain name, you can use one of the many available free online tools to check the availability of that name. Once you’ve found one that is available, it must be purchased through a certified domain registrar. There are numerous choices amongst registrars, and the prices do vary. You can visit Internic at http://www.internic.net/regist.html to see a list of certified registrars.

Selecting a Web Host

Once you have selected a domain name and registered it through a certified domain registrar, you will need a place to host it. For this, you need a Web Hosting account. This is where your webpages will reside, so that visitors may view them.

Once you’ve selected a Web Hosting Company, you must ‘direct’ or ‘point’ the domain name to the server. Your Web Hosting Company will provide you with a primary DNS and usually a secondary DNS. DNS is Domain Name Server. Your Web Hosting Company should also provide you with additional information, such as getting your account set up, uploading files, the various paths to your directories, and more. While all of this information is important, none of it matters until you have and use the DNS information.

A domain name is essentially numbers that are recognized by a computer – whether the actual IP number was typed in or the actual website address was typed in. While a website address may look like www.yourdomain.com, an IP number will look like 12.345.678.9. The DNS that is provided to you by your Web Hosting Company tells a computer where to find that IP number or website address.

Many Web Hosting accounts are on shared servers. Those accounts will all have the same IP number, and if there is not more designated, the computer trying to get to the IP number will instead be directed to an error page, or to a page that belongs to the hosting company. This is why DNS is so important. It further designates to browsers which directory to find a particular website address in.

The DNS is changed at the place where you purchased your domain name – not through the separate Web Hosting Company, in most cases. For instance, if you ordered your domain name through NameCheap.com, but have your hosting at Host Gator or Host4profit.com, you would go into your account control panel at NameCheap.com to change the primary and secondary DNS entries, which were provided to you by Host Gator or Host4profit.com.

After you’ve purchased a domain name, if you do not change the DNS, anyone who attempts to visit your website address will be directed to either an error page or some other page provided by the domain registrar. You can leave it like this for as long as you wish, and this is considered a ‘parked’ domain. While most people do purchase domains for the purpose of using them for a website, some do not. For example, someone may have found a domain name available that they feel could potentially be worth a great deal of money. They purchase the domain, and leave it parked, until such time that they wish to either use it or sell it.

A DNS entry looks like this:

Primary Name Server: NS1.YOURHOSTINGCOMPANY.COM (123.45.67.8)

Secondary Name Server: NS2.YOURHOSTINGCOMPANY.COM (123.54.67.8)

What the DNS entry looks like will vary from one hosting company to the next, but this is the general format. Again, this information comes from your hosting company, and is usually contained in the welcome email. If you are not able to locate it, contact the Web Hosting Company.

If you’ve purchased your domain name and your Web Hosting service through the same company, you usually will not need to change the DNS yourself. However, if you used separate companies, such as NameCheap.com for the domain name, and Host Gator or Host4profit.com for the Web Hosting, you will have to change it yourself. Don’t worry – it is very easy.

Once you’ve changed the DNS entry, you will usually have to wait 24 to 48 hours for the DNS to propagate. During this time, your site can be accessed with the IP number that the hosting company provided you with, but the rest of the Internet world will not be able to access your site without that IP number, and will have to wait.

If you have problems getting or changing your DNS entries, contact your domain registrar and/or Web Hosting Company, and they should be able to help you with this.

Uploading Your Website to Your Server

Now that you have a domain name, a Web Hosting account, and you have pointed the DNS to that account, you are ready to start uploading your webpages, graphics, and other files to your server. There are usually two ways to do this, with the most common being File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. Usually, special software, called FTP software or an FTP client, is required for this.

Another option, if your Web Hosting Company offers it, is to upload your files through a web interface. For example, you go into your control panel for your Web Hosting account, click a button that says ‘upload files’ and then select the files that you want to upload, and the directory you want them uploaded to – and then hit the ‘upload’ or ‘submit’ button. However, this method is usually slower than FTP.

File Transfer Protocol allows the transfer of files from one computer to another. In this case, you are transferring files from your computer to the computer that is your web server. The Web Hosting Company should give you the details that are needed to connect to the server using FTP, including your username, password, port information, and the FTP address. Other than this, however, they will not tell you how to use the software, since there are many FTP software titles available on the market.

In addition, your Web Host should tell you which directory in the account to upload files to. In most cases, this is the public html folder.

If you have a firewall, and most people do, you may have to lower the security setting on your firewall to allow the transfer of files with FTP. If this is the case, in most circumstances, the firewall box will pop up when you first attempt to transfer files.

When you are using FTP software, you will need to select whether the files that are being transferred are ASCII or binary. If you do not use the correct settings, the files can become corrupted during the transfer, and will not display properly on either end – whether they were uploaded to your server, or downloaded to your computer. Most of the newer FTP clients will automatically detect the correct setting for this, but some do not.

As a guide, remember that HTML documents and text documents, including those with the extensions of SHTML, DHTML, HTM, TXT, CGI, ASP, JS, and C, should be transferred in ASCII mode. Graphics, executable programs, and other types of media files, such as video, should be transferred in binary mode.

When you load the FTP client and connect to your server using the information that the Web Hosting Company gave you, you should see two ‘windows’ within the software. One will be displaying files on your computer, while the other will be displaying files on the server. Start by maneuvering to the file that you wish to upload, in the window that contains the files on your computer. Next, maneuver to the directory or folder that you want to upload the file to in the window that contains the files on the server.

All but one of your files can have any name that you want. Some examples may be order.html or order.htm, news.html, etc. The one that must be named a certain name is the very first page that you want your visitors to see when they arrive at your website. It must be named index.html, index.htm, index.shtml, or index with one of the other acceptable file extensions – but the word ‘index’ is essential. This is often referred to as your home page.

You must have an index page. Without it, visitors will be taken to a page that lists all of the files in your public html directory, and this does present security risks – it is also not a pretty sight.

Also note that many of the newer web authoring software titles now offer you the ability to upload your webpages directly from the software, to your web server. How this is done, and the availability of this feature, will vary from one program to another. FrontPage, offered by Microsoft, is one of these programs. However, if you use FrontPage to create your webpages, you will need to have FrontPage extensions installed on your Web Hosting account. Contact your Web Host support for further information on this.

Although there are many FTP programs you can use to assist you in getting your website online, WS_FTP Home by Ipswitch is one of the most popular. See the FTP tutorial for assistance in using this software to upload/download files to and from your web server.

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First, let’s take a look at what website administration actually is and is not. Website administration does not typically include designing and implementing a website. That falls under the category of web design. It often does not include maintaining a website or keeping content updated.

Website administration typically deals with the more technical side of operating a website. Database maintenance, site security, fixing bugs, doing backups, taking care of the email system, and allotting disk space all fall under website administration.

Of course paying for website administration can be costly, and it usually is not feasible for someone who is just starting out. There are budgeting issues to consider. If you hire an ‘as needed’ site administrator, you can expect to pay around $100 per hour. On the other hand, hiring someone to administer your website on a fulltime basis can cost more than hiring an as needed administrator.

Your Web Host may offer website administration services as part of your package, or for incredibly reduced rates. It is a good idea to check into this option before doing anything else. Unfortunately, you must remember that the hosting company will also be administering other clients websites as well, so your site won’t have their undivided attention.

If money is a real issue, you will need to learn how to administer the site yourself. Once you’ve learned how to do something, you won’t have to learn to do it again, and most of the tasks associated with website administration are done over and over again, with a few exceptions.

Before you start trying to administer your main website, however, you may want to set up a practice account. Before you try something on your main website, give it a try on the practice account to see how it goes – if it goes well, great. If it doesn’t go well, you can use free online information to find out what went wrong, and practice until you get it right.

Administering your own website does not typically require a great deal of time. Another benefit of administering the site yourself or learning to administer the site is that when you are in a position to hire others, you will be a better judge of how well – or how poorly – the job is being done.

One of the first things that those who manage multiple websites do is to get all of the websites on one server. This cuts down on the time that it takes to manage the sites overall. Instead of having to remember or record the locations of all of the control panels, the control panels for each website are all in one centralized location – one web server.

Many Web Hosting companies offer packages that will allow you to have unlimited domains on a server. In fact, they may even offer discounts for each additional domain name that you host with them. They want your business! You want their service because they have already proven to you – with your first domain name – that they are reliable. However, you may want to look at the other options that are available through other Web Hosts before you change your package.

While putting all of your websites on one server makes managing those sites much easier, it is not always the best option. What you must remember is that when all of the sites go on one server, they all have the same IP number. While you may not see this as a problem, if you plan to link the sites together, and use one site to advertise another and so on, it can be a problem when it comes to search engine optimization, as those links won’t matter to the search engines – because they are from the same IP address.

You can still opt to host all of your sites through the same hosting company, but on different servers. Each website would have its own account. You could also opt to open up a reseller account with your Web Hosting Company. When you become a reseller, you are given a certain amount of disk space and bandwidth. You can ‘resell’ that space and bandwidth to someone else, or use it as your own. Each website would have a different IP number, but you should be able to manage all of them from one control panel.

Another option is to upgrade to a dedicated server. This makes all of the resources on the server available to you, and you can host as many websites as you desire, providing that you don’t exceed the disk space and bandwidth available, on that server. Dedicated servers cost a great deal more than regular Web Hosting accounts, so be aware of this. Also note that you may be responsible for the maintenance of the server.

Overall, hosting all of your websites on one server is the easiest option for managing multiple websites. However, if that server goes down, for any reason, all of your websites go down with it. If the Web Hosting Company goes out of business overnight, all of your websites will also go. For this reason, you may want to consider managing multiple sites through three or four different Web Hosting companies. Although multiple domain Web Hosting may be convenient, hosting with different hosts is much safer!