Web publishing beyond Goshen College

There are many free ways to get your content onto the web...

But for about $50/yr you can get your own website (typically php-enabled) at an address (domain) that you chose. About ~ $100/yr will get you a database-enabled site that lets you run your own installation of, say, blog software Wordpress. The steps involved include:

Your own Domain name

One of the less expensive status symbols of the early 21st century is your own domain name. A domain name is that shortest possible part of the address for your website such as "goshen.edu", "mcdonalds.com", "habitat.org", "sprint.net", "paulreimer.com".

Many new top-level domains (TLDs) ".biz", ".info", ".name", ".us", ".ws", ".tv" and others have been approved.

Registering most Domain Names costs around $10-15/yr when purchased for several years at a time. TV and MOBI are exceptions ($15 for .mobi and $30 for .tv)

Nowadays, domain name registrars such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions will sell you just a domain name or sell you a package of the domain name bundled with web hosting.

If you're a non-profit organization, you might be able to get a local ISP to host your site for you, and so you might buy just a domain name.

For other kinds of sites you might want to start by looking at web-hosting packages, as many of them will throw in the cost of registering your domain name as part of the hosting, and administration will be a bit simpler.

Web page hosting services

You *could* set up a computer yourself to be a webserver, as long as the computer will always be on, and has an always-on connection to the rest of the Internet, but for most small organizations it's preferable to buy a web hosting package from a company that takes care of the maintenance/backup and such of your website.

A web hosting service does not need one computer per website, but can run many many websites as "virtual servers" all on the same physical computer. GC is hosting globeradio.org, goleafs.net, eeai.org, gcmusiccenter.org and some others on the same computer as www.goshen.edu.



There are thousands of web hosting services. Some possible starting points:

Web hosts will compete on:

Nowadays web hosting services will often include domain name registration in the cost of their hosting packages.

Non-profits should approach their local ISPs and ask them if they'd be willing to host a site for free.

Domain Name Service (DNS)

DNS is like the "phonebook" of the Internet, allowing one computer to figure out how to communicate with another one.

There is no one central repository of computers on the Internet, but rather a distributed system. If someone's computer wants to communicate with "gconline.goshen.edu", a request might typically flow through the top level ".edu" registry, which sends the request on to a dns server at Goshen College, which tells the computer that "gconline.goshen.edu" has the IP number 199.8.232.7.

If you buy a domain name separately from web hosting you'll need to inform your domain name registrar of the IP addresses of one or more DNS servers that your web hosting service will make available.

If you don't have the DNS addresses when you buy the domain name, you will "park" your domain until you have web hosting squared away.

Publishing to your own site

Let's say you've signed on with a webpage hosting service. They will provide you with a username and password to access your folder on their servers. This (together with the URL of your site) is generally all the information you need to connect to a web-hosting service, and publish your content.

Almost all web-hosting services allow you to use the "ftp" protocol to publish content to your site. You can use an ftp program, such as WS-FTP-LE (available at GC) to move your files into place. Most modern HTML editors also have some publishing capabilities built in (which almost always use ftp, behind the scenes).



You can set up a site in DreamWeaver, and the first two screens might look like...