Website Development & Design
Getting a Domain Name
It is important that the very name that you use to advertise your product is your domain name, because it's the first thing that people will try in their search. It is the easiest thing for them to remember and will be more likely to be tried out than some obscure domain name. If your name is also your URL, they'll automatically know where to go. For example, when people think of A2Barcan, they don't have to wonder what web address to type into their search engine (a2barcan.com).
Local Hosting VS External Hosting
| Local Hosting | External Hosting |
|---|---|
| There are no external fees for hosting or managing the environment. | Cloud hosting comes with a monthly bill. |
| Allows you or your company to decide everything and have complete control. | If something unforeseen happens, you have relay on the hosting company to fix the problem. |
| Often have greater performance than external hosted websites. | Latency can sometimes be a factor in externally hosted websites. |
| All of the supporting power, cooling and space costs are covered by you or your company. | All costs are rolled into a single monthly charge, which is normally cheeper. |
| All of the hardware, software, and maintenance costs are yours. | Have the ability to rapidly scale up and down as needed. |
| It needs to be monitored and managed 24x7 by your organization. | Web hosting company provide maintenance of the server |
Types of External Hosting: which one is right for you?
Shared Web Hosting
The costs of running the server are shared between all of the users and so it is often the cheapest way of having your website hosted.
However, all of the sites being hosted on the server have to share the same resources like RAM, CPU time, and bandwidth. Therefore, if another site on the server has a lot of traffic then your site might experience poor performance.
You might also have to accept advertising on your site. This sometimes happens with low cost web hosting as the company balance the lower charges with the advertising revenue.
As well as this, you may not be allowed to install specific modules or scripts that you want and they may only allow you to use their services.
Virtual Web Hosting
This kind of sharing of a single physical server to host many web sites means that everyone shares the cost of it, so prices are kept low.
Every 'virtual server' is given an amount of hard disk space so it overcomes many of the issues of using the standard shared hosting service.
Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated servers are often used by companies who have a lot of website traffic because they want to be sure that their website's performance is not affected. As well as this, paying for a dedicated server means that you get fast and good quality support.
But it is the most expensive option as the costs of renting the server cannot be shared with other users.
Domain Name
In this context it means the address where Internet users can access your website.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
The unique web address for every webpage on the internet. For example 'a2barcan.com' is the URL for the home page of this website.
Search Engine
A software program/website that searches a database and collects and presents information that contains or is related to specified terms. The most known is Google but there are others like Duckduckgo or Qwant
Local Hosting
Hosting a website on your PC or your company's servers. Also known as Internal hosting.
External Hosting
Where you pay a web hosting company to host your website on one of their servers. Also known as Cloud hosting.