|
To set up a home page for your business or organization you will need to have a number of things. Here is a short list: |
||||||||||
|
A server To obtain a domain name you must have a computer on the Internet where that domain will exist. If you want a small and simple site you can rent space from an ISP who offers a virtual server. You rent a certain amount of memory on their server that will give you space for your web site. They will set up their computer as the location for your domain name. The cost of this rental varies with the ISP and two other factors. 1) The amount of space you need. In most cases this is not that critical because unless you have a large catalog of materials or you are doing something that is graphically extensive the amount of storage space needed is usually small. When people have to download your site over a modem less is better. The larger the site the more time loading it into a browser will require. The current Computer Farm web site takes up a total of 228,000 bytes on the server. Most virtual servers have 5,000,000 bytes or more of storage included in the base price. 2) The second charge is for the amount of traffic that comes to your site. This is a very small charge and in most cases enough bandwidth is included with your monthly rental that it will cover your usage. Of more concern is that when your site is busy, that people get good fast access to your pages. top of page Virtual Servers are used by businesses who want to have web sites without the expenses of setting up the physical site themselves. When you rent server space from an ISP for a virtual server they can handle the technical processes involved in getting your site on the Internet. Access speed is determined by the server that you use. When you are working with an ISP part of their responsibility is to provide enough bandwidth on the Internet to be certain you site works well. The effective performance that a company will get from a virtual server with a good ISP saves thousands of dollars in setup and hundreds in monthly maintenance. Unless you have a very high traffic site this option has tremendous cost advantages. It is a cost effective way to setup your first web site. Today there are a number of services that make it easy to establish a store on the Internet with this type of virtual server. top of page If a company needs more power they can elect to have their own server. The server is a computer and it can be any of several types of computer. The most common thing for a company to do is to get a PC and set it up as a server. The PC can be anything from an older 486 unit up to $30,000 or more multiprocessor unit depending on the power and features that are needed. It could also be one of the Unix machines that are the standards for high performance. The performance of the server is also affected by the network it is connected to. Some ISPs offer a colocation setup for their customers. Colocation means the server is physically at the ISP's POP in an area where you can come and work on it when you need to but which is fully secured and is physically connected through an ethernet link to the ISP's system. The advantage of this is the speed of the connection. A basic connection would be a shared 10baseT connector. The main advantage of this is that the server is totally committed to the operations of your company and people will always get high performance. This is valuable if you are doing something that requires fairly high server performance. The cost for this service is similar to having a slower dedicated line to your office. These options are for high speed performance. Most businesses that are not going to have more than 20 or 30 people at a time on their web site never have to go beyond the virtual server. The virtual server can be remotely programmed and configured and email and e-catalog purchases can be operated from it without any physical connection. top of page If you want a business page of your own with your company's name you will need to obtain a domain name. This service is usually provided without charge by the organization setting up your web site. Domain names are registered with an organization called the Internic. The Internic is a nonprofit American organization that keeps records of all domains registered in the USA and collects a fee to cover the expenses of managing the process. The initial cost is $70.00 for a 2 year registration and then $35/year from then on. Domains are assigned on a first come first serve basis and the Internic doesn't act to determine whether or not companies or organizations have the legal right to use specific names. They only demand that names be unique. The domain name becomes your URL (Uniform Resort Locator) which is passed to all the DNS (Domain Name Servers) on the Internet. Your URL is translated into an IP address by the DNS which client computers can use to contact your server. Computers do not speak English. An IP address is a number containing 4 sets of 1 to 3 digits separated by periods. The IP address for www.thecomputerfarm.com is 192.41.37.234. You could type that number into the browser's URL locator and it would find the same site as http://www.thecomputerfarm.com . top of page What we refer to as a web site is a set of documents that are similar to any document produced by a word processor or a desk top publishing program. It is written in ASCII text (American Society for Computer Information Interchange) format so it can be read and written back and forth though almost every type of computer system without special requirements or software. The document itself is written in a specific format that is called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Special formatting characters are used to communicate with a program called a browser so the dynamic formatting of the pages will contain graphics, colors, varieties of type styles and sizes as well as Hyperlink. EXAMPLE: This paragraph in ASCII This is a paragraph designed to link to my home page. In a browser clicking the mouse while the pointer was over the words "home page" would cause the browser to lookup and locate the site http://www.thecomputerfarm.com and send a request to the server at that location to send the default page. The browser then loads and displays the document it receives from the server. This is the basic operation of the world wide web browser and HTML. The page can contain animated graphics, backgrounds and text. It is also possible to create forms using HTML. That is people will be able to enter information into the computer and the HTML can send that information to the server. On the WWW when you are asked to leave your name and email address in a guest book you are usually filling out an HTML form. That is where the simplicity ends. HTML was not designed to be able to interact with the person viewing the page beyond that point. When people interact with a web page additional systems of programming are required. This has been fairly complicated in earlier systems because a layer was necessary between the HTML and the program that would receive and act on the information the person using the web page entered. There are a number of alternative systems available to do the interactive part of web page operations. The costs and features also vary. Part of setting up a page is selecting the proper tools for the needed operations. top of page Access to those web pages If you want to access the Internet you need a connection. The organizations that provide connections are called ISPs (Internet Service Providers). They generally keep lots of phone lines which can be used to access their computers which are linked to the Internet. The ISP usually provides access to 6 Internet Services. These services are:
Access to the Internet from an office can be handled by a number of optional methods. The basic dialup allows a connection through a standard phone line and a modem. The fastest available modem is nominally 56K. The actual speed of these units is a maximum of 28.8 upload and 40K download of actual throughput. A serious step is to use a special router that will permit use of several lines at the same time. I have seen units available that will handle up to 4 phone lines simultaneously and give performance of 4 times the speeds above. Phone line costs in Connecticut are low so this option could make sense for some people. top of page The next step up is ISDN. An ISDN line is an actual 64K and can come in as 2 b lines giving 128K through a single connection. The cost of ISDN service is higher than regular phone service and the cost for connection to an ISP will also be higher because they must have an ISDN phone number available for you to access. The performance of the ISDN is substantially better than standard phone service because of the additional speed. Also because there are two b lines you can interactively swap them You could have one for a fax machine and if you were on the Internet using both lines and a fax came in the fax line would unhook from the Internet and get the fax while leaving the Internet line connected and running at half speed. When the fax call was completed the other b line would automatically reconnect to the Internet and return the connection to full speed. ISDN can download with an effective throughput of close to a megabyte a minute. ISDN can be configured as a dedicated line or it can be used and a dialup system. The dedicated line is able to operate as a full Internet Connection and would allow you to host your own server. This would be an option for a small company that was not having a great deal of Internet activity on their site. The cost for a dedicated connection could run about $600 a month. With it you can host your email and perform your own operations. Doing this does invoke other types of expenses because your network becomes visible to the Internet and so a firewall is probably a good idea. Firewalls range in cost from $350 up to several thousand depending on product you use. Also routers for ISDN are more expensive than modems. The support needed to maintain an ISDN setup is also an additional expense for a business. From this configuration the next step is frame relay and T1 with speeds to 1.5 mbs (megabits per second). Frame relay and T1 would require a more sophisticated router. Frame relay is a shared T1 with variable speeds from 56K up to full T1 speed. With a dedicated line it would be a useful setup to operate voice phone lines, access the Internet and host a web server from a company's own location. There are independent phone companies who support these multiple options very competitively. We would be happy to give you more information for your specific projects or estimates of actual costs. Contact info@thecomputerfarm.com for additional information. |
|||||||||||
