2.2. Deciphering Your Hosting-Plan Options Spend any time researching web hosts, and your head begins to spin with tech-sounding buzzwords like bandwidth and MIME types. Here is a quick tour through the most important options for your Dreamweaver site-to-be: Hosting space -
This affects the total weight of your site, or the raw amount of disk space that your site can occupy. Refer to Table 2-1 for rough guidelines on how much web site you can expect to publish depending on the amount of space that your web host provides. In general, more is better, but make sure you're not getting too much, or you could be throwing money away. You don't need 10 GB of hosting space unless you're in a band with a full back catalog of original MP3s to share. | TIP | Some web hosts advertise that they are Dreamweaver-compatible. As it happens, all web hosts are Dreamweaver-compatible, so you don't have to choose a host based on whether this statement appears in the ad copy. By contrast, Microsoft FrontPage (a code editor similar to Dreamweaver) does require that the web host install special "FrontPage extensions" to enable certain visual effects. If you were working in FrontPage instead of Dreamweaver, you'd want to find a host that specifically mentions FrontPage compatibility. |
| TECHTALK | Weight is the amount of disk space that a computer file requires. For example, a graphic file of 30 KB is lighter than a digital photo of 300 KB, which is lighter than an entire web site with a combined weight of 3 MB. |
Bandwidth -
Your web host measures the amount of activity on your site not in terms of "hits" but as data transfer of bandwidth, i.e., the amount of information that it pushes to your visitors over a given length of time, typically one month. You get a certain amount of bandwidth for free. If you exceed this limit, you have to pay extra. When you're first starting out, guessing at how much bandwidth you need is tricky business, because you don't know how much traffic your site is going to generate on average. One gigabyte of data transfer per month is a good place to start. That's roughly the equivalent of 20,000 page views, or a total of 20,000 pages served. This isn't the same as 20,000 "hits"; 20,000 page views is one person visiting 20,000 pages of your site or five people visiting 4,000 pages of your site or 20,000 people visiting one page of your site over the course of the month. This should be sufficient for most small businesses and more than enough for personal projects. Hopefully, your web host offers multiple service plans, so you can upgrade to more bandwidth (or downgrade to less) as your needs require. | TECHTALK | Bandwidth or data transfer is the amount of information that your web host pushes to your visitors over a given length of time, typically one month. A page view is one person viewing one page of your site one time. |
| BEHIND THE SCENES | When it comes to measuring your site's traffic, the page view is a much more useful statistic than the hit. A hit is nothing more than a request to the web server. If you have a web page that contains five images and a Flash movie, then viewing this one page creates seven separate hits or requests: one for the HTML file, five for the images, and one for the movie. By contrast, viewing that one page one time equals one page view, no matter how many requests go off to the server. Marketing departments like to brag about "a million hits." You can have a million hits, too, if you really want them. Simply create a web page, add 999,999 image files, and view it once. View it twice, and that's two million hits. Web designers prefer page views, because they're more authentic and harder to fake. To get a million page views, you'd have to visit your web page a million timesa small matter of, oh, about two years, assuming you work 24 hours a day! |
POP3 email accounts -
You probably already have an email account, and you're likely to have several. Some web hosts offer additional email accounts to go with your web site and domain name, letting you be bob@mysite.com in addition to your usual bob@yahoo.com. For a personal home page, this is a luxury that you probably don't need. But for business or organizational purposes, you're likely to want those branded email accounts to reinforce a consistent image and keep your professional and personal lives separate. If additional emails are for you, make sure your host gives you POP3 email accounts in addition to or instead of web-based email. POP3 email accounts work with client software such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, which means that you can jump online, download your email, and read and answer it offline at your leisure. With web-based email, the mail lives on the host's server and you browse your mail on their server just as you would a web page in your web browser, so you have to be online to read and respond. | TECHTALK | POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) is a standard for Internet email delivery that allows users to download their email to their personal computers through client software like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. |
Media types -
If you plan on posting multimedia files such as Flash movies, Shockwave movies, Adobe Acrobat documents, MP3s, streaming audio, or streaming video, you need a web host that supports these media types. Somewhere on your web host's site, you should find a list of supported file types or MIME types. Check the list for the types of multimedia files that you want to post, and if you don't see your particular multimedia type on the list, it's time to make one of those service calls to a live human being and get a definite yes or no. If your web host doesn't support the MIME type that you want to use, then your visitors won't be able to view or listen to those files. Not to worry, thoughmost hosts are set up for the full battery of the most popular MIME types on the Web, including Flash, Shockwave, Acrobat, RealMedia, and QuickTime. But if you tend to like obscure multimedia formats, make sure to check with your web host before you start posting. | TECHTALK | A MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) type gives the format for a particular computer file. Some common MIME types are text/plain, audio/mp3, and video/quicktime. |
| TIP | If you're building a dynamic site, your web host needs to support your application server and database server of choice. ASP.NET sites connected to Oracle databases won't work if your web host supports PHP and MySQL only. |
By contrast, because you're building your site in Dreamweaver, you don't need any of the following options, which, if you add them, can drive up your monthly cost: Dreamweaver provides all of the above, including dozens of professionally designed pages. |