Looking back, its hard to believe that I only started hosting the site 2 days ago and have most of the basic features up and running. So its official, http://www.dave-bytes.com is finally off the ground. Now the hard work starts in pulling all the material together for it.
Okay, so where did it all start. Well, I've always been into computers and networks and in all honesty, more of the network than the computer side. I just love the way that networks use some amazingly resilient protocols that just work. Unfortunately, these protocols have been around for decades and security wasn't designed in from the outset because they weren't designed for hostile environments like the internet, but secure offices and military installations. Some time ago, I realised that there is some fairly basic stuff that we have to do to keep ourselves safe online, unfortunately, although a lot of these things are just common sense, they arn't common practice. I saw the need for a site that just focuses on individual internet security and so starts my mission to educate the masses........
I've blogged enough already about the site content, so now I wanted to cover the process I went through to get the site off the ground. For most of us techies, web hosting is pretty much meat and gravy kind of stuff. We've had web servers running at home for years, but this time, I wanted a hosted solution. So the first job was selecting someone to register the domain with. Well, there are a lot of big names out there, but all I wanted was a cheap one. So I went with GoDaddy as they are a big company, fairly cheap, have data centres all over the world and most importantly also offered a cost effective mail solution. As a quick aside, I intend to configure my own mail server at home as a long term mail solution, but wanted to put the framework in place with a host (ie, domain name and mx forwarding) but that's a story for another day.
So, was it hard? Well, no, it was painless. The domain registration was quick and easy. Selecting a hosting package was also easy. Linking the domain name to the hosting package was a few easy and obvious clicks in the configuration webpage, and it was even obvious how to upload files using the web browser ftp software. The website ftp programme was very limited not allowing me to upload directories and only transfer files from within a folder so if you are thinking of running your own site where you write the actual web pages yourself and then upload them, I would highly recommend the opensource FileZilla ftp programme. It's just so simple and works. I included a forum as part of the site which has many hundreds of files of and folders and so an automatic solution was essential. The other thing that is a god send was the mysql databases that are included as part of the package. For the uninitiated, if your website has the ability to store user information like comments or blogs then it needs to have a database somewhere to store this information and that is what mysql does. Its amazing how many different databases you actually need for a website...one for the forum....one for the blog ...... one for comments and that's just for starters.
So, what went wrong. Well, nothing major really. The main lesson I learnt was that domain registration includes the address of the holder and contact information like a phone number and email address and this is available to everyone on the internet. I knew this was going to happen but just not where the information was going to come from and was hoping I could change it to something other than my home address. I couldn't. So, I've had to employ a third party to act as an intermediary to remove this info. It's all done and I'm nicely safe again, but it was an extra step I'd preferred to not have had to take.
If you get a chance, please check out my website, and I'd love to hear your views on it.
Happy Computing!
No comments:
Post a Comment