Earlier in this series we covered what a webpage is, and how to put
that webpage into a webserver so that it can be viewed. Now we move on
to the question of connecting a webserver to the billions of people
with internet access.
As we've seen, webservers take many shapes. In fact, you can quite
easily install a webserver on your own personal computer, and you can
build a full-scale website inside it. But for anyone else to see the
website, you need to connect it to the Internet. In Vanuatu, such an
option is very expensive. In fact, in most countries a normal internet
connection will make it technically difficult or outright forbidden to
publish a website – if you want to do that, you need another (more
expensive) contract and different services.
Fundamentally, there are two choices – operate the webserver yourself,
or get someone else to do it for you. For the first choice, you buy a
server, install all the software, and give the machine to an ISP
(Internet Services Provider) to house for you. You pay the ISP for a
fast internet connection to your server and to keep electricity and
similar services going. But the server itself is your responsibility.
You keep it up-to-date, you look after security, you make sure you have
enough storage space and computing power to keep up with demand. This
option is known as co-locating.
The second option is far more popular, and this is the webhosting
industry. Here, you pay a fee for someone else to host your website.
The webhoster looks after storage capacity, Internet connections,
backups, server security, everything required behind the scenes to
enable you to build and publish a website. Nearly always you have a
choice of the basic system that runs the webserver software, in terms
of Linux (typically the common Apache webserver) or Microsoft (and
their Internet Information Server IIS). Microsoft webservers may be
preferred by people using Microsoft website-development software, or
who need to integrate their website with their Microsoft-based office
systems. Linux webservers are cheaper and give a much wider range of
options.
Finding a webhoster can be difficult. There are thousands of them
worldwide, with multitudes of pricing plans. In Vanuatu, only TVL
provide webhosting, and they only offer Microsoft webservers. This
simplicity is expensive. Currently the “budget” webhosting package is advertised by TVL
at Vt4,500 per month for 12 Mb of disk space and up to 95 Mb of data
transfer to/from your website. Compare this to Vt1,700 per month for
500 Mb of disk space and up to 30,000 Mb of data transfer (see webhosting.com, cheapest Windows plan). There are even cheaper webhosters.
So, to make your website available you need to consider not only the
process of creating the webpages and how to get them into a webserver,
you also need to consider where the webserver will 'live', how much
control over you want, and what you are willing to pay. Note that a
Vanuatu website does not need to be hosted in Vanuatu, it can be
anywhere in the world. This is the Information Economy! More next week
on webhosting 'extras'.
