How Does This Stuff Work, Anyhow

I’d like to dispel some of the mystique behind web technology. The good news is that almost anyone can make sense of web technology, quickly and without burning out any brain cells. There are only 4 major parts to it.

1. The domain name - Your domain name is the dot-com that identifies your website. In order to get a domain name, you need to register it with a registrar. For new domains, this is a simple process with a small annual fee.
2. The web host - You also need to obtain hosting services. Your hosting provider provides a web server with space on it to put your website software and data. They also provide a name server, which is what lets users access your website by using your domain name. And a database, in which your web software (if you use web software) will store your website’s data. Finally, your hosting service will handle e-mail for your domain and provide you e-mail in-boxes.
3. HTML data - Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other web browsers expect HTML. HTML combines text, graphics, and formatting. It allows you to make some text italic or bold, display images, or create floated sidebar boxes that text flows around. You can store the HTML in files directly on the web server, or you can use…
4. Blogs, Forums, and Content Management Systems (CMS’s) - These are all forms of web application software. They make it easier to manage the content on your site and to collaborate with other websites. You can also have custom web app software written for you, but that’s only worth it in very specific cases.

For my sites, I use DreamHost, which provides both domain-name registration and hosting services. I use WordPress blog software or Drupal CMS software, both of which run on DreamHost. I talk about all these later in this chapter.

15 Qualities to Look For in a Web Host... And How to Hedge Your Bet

Picking the wrong web host can be a pain. If something goes wrong, your site could go down. People who come to visit your site won’t see anything. If they’re lucky, they’ll see an error. And if you’re buying advertising, people who click on your ad won’t see your web page, but you’ll still pay for those ad clicks.

And if your site gets linked to by slashdot, a news site, or some other popular site, you could find your website flooded with visitors. And if your host doesn’t know how to deal with large spikes of traffic, you could find your account suddenly frozen or canceled. Surprise!

Fortunately, web hosting is a commodity. Where they differ is primarily in terms of customer support and style. In any case, you can hedge your bets so that if you don’t get satisfaction, you can switch to an alternative web host with a minimum of down-time.

The first thing you can do is to sign up for Hyperspin’s free website monitoring service. Their computers will do a quick check on your website every hour, and they’ll email you whenever it goes down. You’ll want to set up a GMail account to receive these emails, because if your hosting provider has gone down, you won’t be getting email through them.

The second thing you need to do is to make sure you have a backup of all the files on your website. And if you use a web application with a database, keep a regular backup of the database. If you have a falling out with your hosting provider, or if disaster strikes, you won’t be in a panic that you’ll lose your data, because you will have a copy of all of it. And you’ll be able to setup an alternative site quickly on a different host, because you can simply restore from those files and backed up data.

Thirdly, keep an eye on what resources you use. The big 3 resources you need to look out for are bandwidth (the amount of data your site sends over the Internet), CPU, and disk space. Some hosting providers advertise “unlimited” bandwidth, but there’s no such thing as unlimited. The only question is when someone puts one of your blog posts on Digg, and your site suddenly gets tens of thousands of visitors in a short amount of time, and it starts overloading your web host… How will your hosting provider respond? If you’re keeping an eye on what resources you use, and if you know what your hosting provider’s policies are, you’re much less likely to be surprised.

So switching hosts can be a pain, but it need not cause a crisis. You’ll still want to avoid that pain. To that end, here are 15 things to take into consideration when choosing a web host:

1. Do they run their own infrastructure? Or do they resell hosting from someone else? If you work with someone who resells hosting, find out who their supplier is. The people who actually run the computers, they’re the ones who ultimately control whether your website is available or whether it’s down.
2. Where are they physically located? And is there a real, live, English-speaking technician on-call 24/7? Or are you going to be dealing with a call center in some other country?
3. Is there a phone number you can call when things go wrong? If not, does that make you uncomfortable? A phone number does not mean they’ll actually respond to problems when the occur. Rather, it’s more a question of style. Does their style match your own?
4. Do they have an automated control panel, like cPanel? They should.
5. Can you run the web app software you want on their server? If you’re just going to serve simple HTML files, this is not an issue. But if you want to use a blog or CMS, you’ll want to make sure the hosting plan you choose actually supports this software. Not all hosting providers support all software, especially on the less expensive plans. On the other hand, some do.
6. Do they have a one-click install for the software you want to use? Just because they don’t have a one-click install doesn’t mean you can’t use your chosen software. But if they do have a one-click install, it can make setting up your website much easier.
7. What happens if your site accidentally uses too many resources? Will they cancel your account? Will they charge you for bandwidth overages? Will they work with you when their computer gets overloaded?
8. Can you easily measure the bandwidth you’ve used, the disk space you’ve used, and the CPU your sites use? If not, it will be harder to monitor these resources.
9. Can you use multiple domain names and sub-domains from a single hosting account? If so, how many? This is a very important feature, because it allows you to inexpensively set up promotional mini-sites, with no additional hosting charges. All you need is the domain names for your mini-sites. I talk more about mini-sites later in this chapter.
10. Can you set up multiple databases? Let’s say you want to put up two different sites, each with its own blog, for example. Both blogs can use the same database, but it’s easier to manage these if each blog can use its own database.
11. What is their tech-support policy? Do they publish the status of their computers and network? It’s much easier to trust a hosting provider the more information they provide about what’s happening, even when things go wrong— Especially when things go wrong.
12. How thorough is their documentation? Do they have any online documentation to describe how to use the features they provide?
13. Do they support any other specific features, such as embedded audio and video, that you want to use?
14. Do they have a money-back guarantee? They should have at least a 30-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.
15. Do they offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA), with an uptime guarantee… and teeth? Most SLA’s merely say you get credit for any time your site is down, but you won’t get anything for any business you lose while your site is down. On second thought, forget the SLA. Instead ask whether they have multiple, distributed, redundant servers… And expect to pay for a feature like this.

The Inefficiency Most Web Designers Build Into Their Process

There’s an inefficiency built into the way most web designers put together websites. Have you ever asked yourself:

• Why does a 5-page website cost more than a 3-page website? In fact, it shouldn’t matter whether your site has 3 pages, 10 pages, or 100 pages. It should cost the same regardless, because it costs about the same amount to store 3 pages worth of text as to store 100 pages.
• Why does it have to be so inconvenient to modify or change content on the site? You shouldn’t need to wait for a webmaster to manually add or change content on your site, because a website runs on a computer. You should be able to have your computer just publish new content automatically and see it immediately appear on your website.
• Why are Web 2.0 marketing techniques out of reach of the small business? Web 2.0 is a whole other opportunity, of course, which I’ll get into when I talk about web traffic. But you don’t need to be Google to do Web 2.0, because the technology behind it is fairly simple.

The reason we face these problems is just part of how most web designers build websites. They do it inefficiently. Here’s how it usually works. The webmaster starts with a blank HTML document, called a template. The template looks like just any page from your site, except it has no content. You probably send the webmaster an email telling him what content to put on the page. He manually copies and pastes your text and graphics into the template and saves it as an HTML file on his computer. Then he uploads this file to the web server. He has to repeat this manual process for every single page on your website.

But it gets worse. On your website, you’ll need menus your visitors will use to navigate around the site. And you’ll need links from some pages on the site to other pages. The webmaster has to set up all these links manually. Now, if he plans it well, it won’t be that bad at first. Because he’ll set up all the links on the template. Then when he pastes in your content, all the links come along for the ride.

But what happens when you find out you need to add another page to the website? Or you need to rearrange the links? Or you need to make some other change? And if you’re doing things right, you will need to change things on your website. Because you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t with your customers, and you’ll want to tweak your website to work better. How will your webmaster handle that? The only way he can handle that is to edit every single page, manually. If your site has only a few pages, it might not be so bad. But with a website of any size, it’s a gargantuan task.

And that’s why a 10-page site costs so much more than 3-page site, and a 100-page site is right out.

So what’s the answer? How do we deal with this complexity? And how do we make it possible for a layman to add content, without dealing with the innards of HTML? Both questions have the same answer: We let the computer do it for us.

But isn’t that expensive? No! It’s inexpensive enough that websites like Blogger and Squidoo can provide features like this to their users for free… And make a profit, just using on-site advertising. Build a Professional Website with Homestead. Try for free! And companies like Homestead use similar technology to enable you to put together your own professional-looking small website, without any expensive up-front charges. Any of these technologies work to make maintaining a website easy and inexpensive.

Traditional web designers don’t use these technologies, however, because in their mind, web design is about look and feel. But it’s not just about look and feel, because it runs on a computer. It’s about technology, too. And with web application software, we can use this technology. And a small business owner needs to use the technology available to him, because he needs to get the most bang for his website buck.

Now, some may say it’s about performance. They may say that using a web app is slow, and that raw HTML is fast. And that may be true… for a 100-page dynamic site with Web 2.0 features… as if you could ever provide such a site using raw HTML. For 5 pages of text, it’s not going to matter one way or the other. In fact, for a site like this, the web app software will optimize everything so that it’s practically the same as using raw HTML.

Sometimes the best option may still be to use raw, manually maintained HTML. The only reason to do so is that there are fewer things to go wrong. If you really only need a 5-page mini-site, manual HTML may actually be easier to maintain. But what I mean by “mini-site” is not what most web designers mean. And I’ll talk about that next.

3 Ways to Manage Your Website Content

There are 3 common kinds of systems website owners use to manage the content on their sites. Some are more powerful and more flexible, but also require more effort to setup and maintain. Which system is right for you depends on what kind of web site you need.

1. Manually upload HTML files. This is the simplest, and the most limited way to manage your website content.
2. Use blog software. This lets you publish large amounts of up-to-date content, and it provides some powerful ways to organize your content and market your website to users.
3. Use a content-management system. With a CMS, your website can blow you away. Add in some custom programming, and you can do almost anything you can imagine.

There is a disadvantage to all this power, however. It’s like the difference between riding a bicycle, driving a car, and flying an airplane. A plane will get you a lot farther, a lot faster, but there’s a lot more that can go wrong. If you want cheap and reliable, and if a bike will get you where you want to go, then that’s the way to go. There’s also some overlap between the three. If I needed to get from New York to Tampa Bay, I could fly or I could drive. Flying will get me there much faster, but it’ll be more expensive, and you’ll have to deal with the TSA to boot. Which means of transportation you choose depends on the particular trip you want to take.

It’s the same way with these three ways of managing your web content. Each level overlaps into the others:

• Some businesses have extensive on-line article archives, which they publish using hand-coded HTML. Usually, you’d use a CMS to manage a collection of documents this large.
• I’ve even seen people provide Web 2.0 features like RSS feeds using hand-coded RSS! I’m just glad I don’t have to do that.
• And some users use their blog software as a CMS. They install plug-ins up the wazoo, even tweak the software with custom programming.
• Still others install a CMS just to put up a simple, 5-page website. They could have used manual HTML. But they chose the automated software, because they want the flexibility to rearrange it, extend it, or change the look and feel of it easily.

So there are no hard and fast rules. You have to use your own judgement to determine where you want to go and how fast you want to get there.