Low Cost Hosting Functions

If you’re wanting to add capacity to your site or make your site more professional looking, you can do so for a very low cost. For just $5 to $10 per month many more capabilities can be added to your site. Additionally, you’ll have none of the problems stated in earlier chapters to deal with. The elimination of the banner ads alone will be worth the small monthly cost. Here is a sampling of typical functionality that can be obtained for just a few dollars per month:

• 500MB of Disk Space
• 10GB / month Data Transfer
• Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions
• PHP Scripting
• Full CGI Bin Directory (Perl)
• MySQL Database Support
• Web Mail & POP3 email accounts
• Domain Name Pointers
• SSL Services
• Unlimited FTP Uploads
• Support for multiple file types (MPG,AVI,etc.)

Domains

Most Web hosting for small websites companies allow customers to use the hosting companies domain name along with some type of identifier (like “company.com” or “www.company.com/yourcompany”), and though there are good uses for this like using specific tools and secure connections provided by the hosting company, there is really no reason not to have your own domain name.

If you don’t yet have a domain name, you can secure one right now. You may find that your first choice of names is already taken by someone else. If this happens, try another name that would identify your site. Remember that most people are comfortable using “.com” domain names and though dashes (“-”) are allowed in domain names, you want to be able to easily tell someone your domain and have them remember it easily. If you register “our-shop.com” there is a very good chance that your customers would skip the dash and come to “OurShop.com” instead. The best domain names are short, descriptive such as your company name or product, and easily memorized.

Second Level Domain Names

Second Level Domains, such as yourcompany.cnet.com, are called subdomains. To get them, you have to contact your web host’s administrator and have them add the subdomain name you want to their DNS table, and then point it to the IP address of the machine which will handle calls to that subdomain. Most Web Hosting providers do all of this dirty work for you. Search in your provider’s admin web pages for details on how to do this.

Email

Low-Cost providers always include a number of mailbox addresses and other associated mail facilities. Mailbox address give you valid emails that you can use to send and receive mail. Connectivity with the mailboxes usually can be achieved by accessing a web-based interface available at the hosting provider or by a web-based facility at your hosting provider. Additional functions such as email-forwarding and screening are usually also offered.

Web-based email

Most providers provide a browser-based interface to your mail accounts. This allows you to access your mailbox from any browser that is connected to the internet.

POP E-mail

Do you have an e-mail account through your ISP, work, or school? If so, it is likely that you already have a POP e-mail account. When you sign up for hosting services you will usually be given the option of setting up one or more POP accounts for use in association with your domain name. POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) e-mail accounts are specific aliases for your domain name that hold mail on your host’s web server. You will then have the ability to login to the server using a username and password specific to that POP mailbox and retrieve your mail securely from anywhere in the world. For example you might setup larry@somedomain.com with the username Larry and password bluelightning. If this was done, all e-mail sent to john@yourdomain.com would sit in a secure area on the web server until someone logged in with the correct username and password, using a mail program such as Netscape Messenger or Microsoft Outlook, and downloaded the mail. POP accounts for every department and your employees don’t have to worry about checking for mail in several different mailboxes.

E-mail Forwarding

The most basic service, included with virtually all hosting accounts, is known as default e-mail forwarding. This allows you to specify an existing e-mail address where all messages sent to your domain name will be deposited if you do not specify otherwise. This can be very useful if you wish to place several different e-mail aliases (such as sales@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com, ane_doe@yourdomain.com, etc.) throughout your web site, but you still want the mail from all of these different addresses to end up in the same mailbox. This service can be set up to forward to any active e-mail account, whether it be a POP account setup with your Internet service provider, a free account such as you@hotmail or you@yahoo.com, or even a POP account setup with your hosting provider. The advantage here is that you can receive e-mail from many different aliases associated with your domain name in one central mailbox, without having to login to a separate e-mail account with a different username/password combination each time.

Server Side Includes (SSI)

Server side includes (SSI)s are special tokens inserted into an HTML page that allow the pages to perform dynamic operations without the need for CGI functions. As the page is sent from the HTTP server to the requesting client, the page is scanned by the server for these special tokens. When a token is found the server interprets the data in the token and performs an action based on the token data. Using SSI, many of the common functions needing for basic dynamic content can be performed. A typical SSI token embedded within HTML would be something like:

When the visitor’s browser loads this page it will automatically execute the referenced CGI program and insert the programs output in place of the comment tag.
Examples of common SSI functions are:

• Echo tag provides for inserting the data of certain variables into an HTML page.
• Include tag provides for inserting the contents of a file into the HTML page at the location of the include token.
• Fsize tag provides for inserting the size of a given file into the HTML page at the location of the fsize token.
• Flastmod tag provides for inserting the last modification date of a given file into the HTML page at the location of the flastmod token.
• Exec tag provides for executing an external executable.
• Config tag provides for setting certain HTML output options.
• Odbc tag provides for querying and updating ODBC databases.
• Email tag provides for sending an email whenever an HTML page is accessed or an HTML form is submitted.

An SSI+ document must have a file extension of ‘.SHT’ or ‘.SHTM’. For the sake of efficiency the HTTP server will only scan those documents with the aforementioned extensions for SSI+ tokens.

Web hosting for small sites can be found for a little or no money if you’re willing to put up with a few nuisances such as banner ads and severe space limitations. If your goal is simply to provide a small-scale site to disseminate information or to publish personal articles that you want to share, then you may be able to get by with using one of the Free Web Hosting providers. If you know a few tricks you may even be able to put together a fully functional but small-scale E-Commerce site, but this is not recommended. For only a few dollars a month you can get so much more, without the annoying banner ads and the tricks the hosting providers play on the free site owners.

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