Headspace Design

12 things you need to know before commissioning a website - part 2: Hosting, Domain and Bandwidth

Posted On October 16th, 2007 Author Kyle Racki  Filed Under Business   2

This is part two of a six-part series. It is meant to give someone relatively new (or simply overwhelmed) to the web the information they need to commission a website for their company. It is broken up into 12 bite sized pieces:

  1. Know your audience
  2. Content
  3. Content Management Systems
  4. Hosting and Domain
  5. Bandwidth
  6. Web standards
  7. Search Engine Optimization
  8. Browser Testing
  9. Accessibility
  10. Design/Usability
  11. Open Source or Proprietary?
  12. Flash or HTML?

The previous post covered topics 1-3. This post will discuss points 4-5.

Hosting, domain and bandwidth. These 3 words scare almost anyone new to the web. And yet they shouldn’t, because they’re actually quite simple. Let me break it down:

A generous host

Everything has to live somewhere. You probably live in a house. Your computer lives in your office. And even computer files need to live somewhere. Your word documents need to live on your computer. But where does your website, which is essentially a bunch of computer files, live?

Well, if you want people other than yourself to be able to see your website, you need to buy hosting. When you buy hosting, you are essentially renting a cozy little home for your website to live in. Your website lives on a special computer with a lot of other websites. This computer, or server is open 24 hours a day, which is why everyone around the world can view your site at any given time. You might say that your host is the neighborhood, and the actual directory your site sits in is it’s home, but that’s getting a bit too specific.

The type of hosting you buy is important because it can limit what you do on your website. For example, if you carry critical data on your site (like credit card numbers) you’ll need what’s called a dedicated server - in other words, a special computer that only your website lives on, and no one else’s. Some houses that you buy may be cheap, but they are small and boxy, whereas other homes are a little more money but have a pool in the backyard. The same idea goes with hosting providers.

Hosts are very important, so if you don’t know what you’re doing - then hold off on buying a hosting plan until your in touch with your web designer/agency. They will be able to help you find a host that gives you what you need.

Master of your domain

A domain is not the same as a hosting account. If we were to use the home analogy, when people want to visit your website, how do they get there? They need an address. When they type this address into their browser window, they browser locates the place on the server that your site lives in.

www.headspacedesign.ca is my domain, and I need the domain and a hosting account to keep this site alive and kicking. You have to be careful when you buy a domain. They’re relatively cheap, but remember; most of the good ones are gone, so you’ll need to get a little creative. What you don’t want is an overly long domain name, or one that is hard to remember. Dot coms are popular choices, but since most are already owned, try a dot ca if you live in Canada, or a number of other options are available. I use internic.ca for domain purchasing, since they offer dot ca’s among others, but you can use whatever domain provider you like.

Bandwidth - Nothing to do with your waist-size

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred between your website and your audience. Don’t let that phrase frighten you. It’s a pretty straightforward concept. Let’s use our house analogy; Your website is a proud homeowner, and he likes to have people visit him to show off his digs. But how many people can he have at one time? And how much tea can he realistically offer all of those visitors. The doors and rooms are only so big, and there’s only so much tea in the cupboard.

This is similar to bandwidth. When you buy a hosting account, your provider will generally give you as much bandwidth as most websites need. However if you’re a large company and you expect an enormous amount of people to be visiting your site, or if you want to put a lot of big files on your site, like video and audio clips, you will probably need to buy more bandwidth.

Can you imaging if a million visitors were on your personal computer at the same time? It would get really sloooowwww wouldn’t it? Every time a user visits your website, they are accessing that special computer that your site lives on, the server. So it has to have a lot of power to have that many people accessing it at one time.

Think of it like the difference between a garden hose and a fire hose. A garden hose can’t have gallons of water flowing through it at any given time, because the width of the hose is only so wide. However a fire hose is very great in width, therefore it can have a lot of water flow through it.

Summary

So remember, the host is the computer, or server that your site lives on. The domain is the address to this server (www.something.com) and bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred between your site and your users. If you’re commissioning a website through a professional designer/developer, they should be able to help you with all of this. But it’s useful to at least understand the terms and why they’re important.

Another term you’ll want to get to know really well is web standards. This is extremely important because not every freelancer or agency knows about it. This subject will be discussed in the next part of the series. As usual, all comments are appreciated.