Use open source to build your own top-class online presence for nothing, part one

David M Williams
Sunday, 11 November 2007 15:20

Business IT - Open Source

Now, once you’ve decided to purchase a domain, the process is relatively swift, if a little painful. Choose to buy the domain and you’ll be walked through a process which asks you the essentials – namely, your payment details – as well as try to eke a bit more cash out of you.

The registrar will ask if you want web hosting, mail hosting, a parked domain, a personal consultant to speak with you about your needs, if you want a reseller account and many more. Skip through all these; you don’t need to buy any of these features. (Of course, you can if you want to and you understand what is being offered and what the fees are, but for the purpose of this article we’re going to do it all without any more costs.)

At the end of it all, you’ll have a domain name or names, with a registry key for each. It’s vitally important you keep this registry key safe. You’ll need it whenever you want to update any of the details for your domain – and we will do so soon.

Web hosting
Before you can put anything online, you have to find a server willing to host your site. There’s a few options here; one is any free web hosting your ISP offers you as part of your regular service fee. Seeing as you’re paying for it, why not use it? The problem is you won’t really get to take full advantage of your new domain name without paying an additional fee to your ISP.

For instance, my own blog is at www.alivad.com. It’s not that interesting, so don’t feel any need to rush there, but if you do you’ll see that because I have redirected the address www.alivad.com to my ISP web space, the address bar immediately changes to show the ISP-specific underlying address. Any internal links just keep using the ISP address convention. I used my ISP provided space here because it has generous storage and bandwidth allowances and was simple to set up.

Now, this works fine in the sense that my chosen domain name gets people to my blog. However, it’s not good in terms of people bookmarking or linking to pages within my site. Any copy-and-paste of the address bar will reference the ISP space, not my domain name. And if I ever change ISP all those links will break.

Another option is the web icon of the late ‘90’s, Geocities, long since Yahoo! GeoCities. Here, people flocked to claim a stake in cyberspace, building their own web site and joining in a community with similar interests.

However, Geocities suffers from the same problem – without paying an additional fee to them you also can’t take full advantage of your own domain name. Also, GeoCities makes its money from advertising. You can’t begrudge them that: without the ads they wouldn’t give you a free web site. The problem is you really don’t want someone else’s advertising on your site; happily, even though we’re being dead cheap in this article, we can find someone to meet our needs.