Website Introduction 1

Websites

You need five things to create a succesful website...

1. A domain name
2. A server
3. An internet connection
4. A webmaster
5. Visitors

Domain Names

These can cost just a few pounds, hundreds of pounds, and occasionaly millions. Each domain name can only be purchased once, and some types are cheaper than others. In the UK, business sites should have .co.uk as their suffix and these cost nominet members (like us) five pounds each excluding VAT. A domain name by itself is no good at all. You have to 'store' domain names somewhere (on a server) and then you need to tell the rest of the world where the server is.

Servers

Web servers are a special type of computer that can cost anything from several hundred pounds to ten thousand pounds or more. Most websites though are fairly basic and have just a few visitors - so a single server for every website would be very expensive. Virtual servers though enable hundreds or thousands of websites to share a single server - one server is shared by many people to reduce the cost.

Servers need good software to be reliable so our servers use Debian Linux - considered by many to be one of the most stable and secure platforms around. Linux servers are very different from home computers - they are always on, always connected to the internet and often run for hundreds of days without crashing or rebooting. This is because updates, patches and applications can be installed without restarting the server.