When Host Your Own Website

Introduction

Web sites have proliferated greatly over the years to become a part of everyday life for many people. People use them to create Web logs of their daily lives, provide family members with a place to store their memories or to tell people of their experiences in getting things to work. The following is a typical Web site address:

www.ittables.com

Businesses originally used them primarily as a marketing tool, but later expanded them to become an important part of their operations. Many companies rely almost exclusively on their Web sites to sell their products and provide both customer and supplier support services.

The decision as to whether or not to host your own Web site can be difficult. You have to consider factors of cost and convenience as well as service and support. This chapter briefly addresses the most common issues and outlines the simple network architecture for use in a small office or home.

Not all homes require a Web site, but the process of establishing one touches many aspects of not only Linux, but information technology as well. This is about to setting up Linux servers to do the things that most businesses and homes need. It's about getting the job done. 

Our Network

The above diagram consist of a system which contains your website “web server”

Router this can wireless or wired as per your need. An active internet connected from ISP speed depends on your requirement. Rest our clients who will be accessing your website from our entire world using internet.

Alternatives To In-House Web Hosting

There are two broad categories of hosting options for small Web sites. There are companies that host multiple Web sites on the same server, and are called virtual hosting providers. There are also those that allow you to use servers completely dedicated to your site, these are called dedicated hosting providers. Dedicated providers might provide you with only a network connection for a server you purchase ands install in their data center, or they might offer a menu of services from monitoring to backups from which to choose.

Virtual Hosting

It is easy to find virtual hosting companies on the Web that offer to host a simple Web site for about $10 per month.

The steps are fairly straightforward:

1. Sign up for the virtual hosting service. They will provide you with a login name and password, the IP address of your site, and the name of a private directory on a shared Web server in which you'll place your Web pages.
2. Register your domain name, such as www.ittables.com, with companies like Register.com, godaddy or indialinks. You must make sure your new domain name's DNS records point to the DNS server of the virtual hosting company.
3. Upload your Web pages to your private virtual hosting directory.
4. Start testing your site using your IP address in your Web browser. It takes about 3-4 days for DNS to propagate across the Web, so you'll probably have to wait at least that long before you'll be able to view your site using your domain, www.ittables.com.

The virtual hosting provider will also offer free backups of your site, technical support, a number of e-mail addresses and an easy-to-use Web based GUI to manage your settings. For an additional charge, many will also provide an e-commerce feature which allows you to have a shopping cart and customer loyalty programs.

The disadvantage of virtual hosting is that, though it is cheap, you often have no control over the operation of the server and have to rely on the staff and operational procedures of the hosting company to get your changes implemented. These may not necessarily be to your liking.

Dedicated Hosting

In this scenario, you typically have to make contact with a live sales representative who represents an Internet data center. At a minimum, you have to pay for the amount of space your server occupies in the data center, the amount of power it consumes and the amount of Internet bandwidth you expect to use. Additional services such as backups, monitoring, on call engineering time, firewall management and bandwidth graphing information often can be purchased as extra line items on your bill.
As you can imagine, these services can be fairly expensive. A 3 cm slot in a computer rack for a Web server can easily cost $200 per month for 1 Mbps of bandwidth. The advantage over virtual hosting is that you can customize the server to your needs.
Despite the relative merits of external hosting, you may also want to consider doing it yourself.

Note: - Hosting your Web site externally, especially virtual hosting, is the ideal solution for many small Web sites.