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TYS Support Center -
Basics about your website
This web hosting guide
provides everything necessary to make an informed decision about your
web hosting requirements. Here we will list the key components of a
website hosting package, and what they mean to you and your site.
Hard Disk Storage:
This is
the space you have to store your site. Every website is stored on a
web server which is the computer that broadcasts your site to your
visitors. Your hard disk storage is how much space you are allocated
on that computer's hard drive. Even most robust websites don't
require more than 5 megs of space, but having more is a nice luxury.
Monthly
Transfer (also called bandwidth):
This is
the total amount of data (including graphics and HTML web pages) which
can be uploaded and downloaded from your site each month. It is a
rough estimator of how many visitors your hosting plan can
accommodate. For example, on an average size website with a moderate
amount of graphics, it has been our experience that 750 megs of
transfer can accommodate well over 4,000 visitors per month. Some web
hosts claim to offer "unlimited bandwidth" which is generally
a bad thing. Not only are they likely to pack your site on
an overloaded server and connection (bandwidth costs us money), but if
you read the fine print there are always "excessive use penalties"
which are arbitrary and costly. In contrast, we monitor bandwidth and
insure your site is always fast and reliable with no hidden charges.
POP3 E-Mail Accounts:
These
are email accounts which can be used with your domain name. They
allow you to receive and read email via our easy web interface or with
a number of popular mail clients. This is incoming mail only, and
you should use the server of your dialup account for sending mail
(although it can still appear to come from your domain name). Please
visit our
support page
for more information on configuring your email.
Unlimited Updates via FTP:
We allow
you to update your site 24/7 using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
Client. This is a program which allows you to connect to our server
and upload your files. We recommend CuteFTP which is both powerful
and simple to use. It can be found at
www.cuteftp.com.
Microsoft
FrontPage Server Extensions:
Microsoft FrontPage is an extremely popular web development tool. You
can create your site and upload it to our servers using this extremely
powerful product. Our servers also support FrontPage "bots" which are
easy-to-add bells and whistles for your website like counters, order
forms, and more.
CGI script support and your own CGI-BIN
directory:
CGI
(common gateway interface) allows you to run scripts and programs on
our server to enhance your web pages. Most of these scripts are
written in a language called Perl, although C and C++ are also used
frequently. Unlike with HTML, CGI's are executed on the server. You
can use CGI to add advanced forms, shopping carts, counters, and many
other features to your website. The CGI-BIN is a special directory
which allows scripts and programs to be executed on the server.
Active Server Pages:
With
ASP, you can add interactive content to your Web pages or build entire
Web applications that use HTML pages as the interface to your
visitors. Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting
environment that you can use to create dynamic Web pages or build
powerful Web applications. ASP pages are files that contain HTML
tags, text, and script commands. ASP pages can call ActiveX
components to perform tasks, such as connecting to a database or
performing a business calculation.
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