Steps for Establishing and Maintaining Your FOOLS Chapter Web Site

Step 2 – Hosting Company

In Step two of this series you'll be guided through the process of selecting and setting up your hosting company for your new FOOLS chapter web site. By definition, a hosting company is a company that sells space on their server to store your web site for the public to view.

1. Establish a budget.

Before you begin your search for a hosting company you need to establish a budget. You'll want to consider what you want your site to do when you develop your budget; for example, e-commerce (online sales), a forum or other programs that may require some server technologies. This will also help you narrow down the prospective companies from which to choose. I will be covering specifics about server technologies in the coming articles.

2. Choose a separate hosting company.

I highly recommend that you DO NOT use the same company that you purchased your domain name from. I am a firm believer that putting your eggs in one basket can be a real headache if things go south. For example, say the hosting company suddenly goes under and turns off their servers. Not only have you just lost your web site, but now you cannot change any the domain name servers to point to your new hosting servers. This can leave you out of commission for an undetermined amount of time and the loss of your domain name.

During your research for hosting companies, some key items you want to make sure are included in your hosting plan are:

A. Storage space of at least 50 GB. To give you an idea of the relevance of this, FOOLS International uses close to 150 GB of disk space out of our allotted 250 GB.

B. Bandwidth, or what some call monthly traffic. Think of bandwidth like a fire hose -- the smaller the bandwidth, or traffic, the fewer the number of people who will be able to use your site. If you're not careful when choosing your plan, your site can go down because of bandwidth restrictions. This may also be an additional charge per KB of data transferred over your allotted amount and can add up very quickly. If you plan on doing any kind of online sales, you may want to find out if the company offers any packages that will fit your needs. Again, in a later article I will cover the specifics about e-commerce.

Most of the companies will have some type of Google, Yahoo or MSN add vouchers to entice you to purchase their package. This feature can be very easily turned off and or removed from your package if you so choose to.

3. Email.

Email accounts are one of the most overlooked areas of your hosting package. It is highly recommended that you use an email account associated with your new domain name. This is for several important reasons.

A. First, it separates your personal email address from your FOOLS chapter email, allowing you to keep business away from pleasure.

B. Second, you are most likely going to post the email addresses for the principal officers on your web site for all to see, including SPAM bots!!! So what is a SPAM bot? This a computer program that runs 24/7/365 looking at millions of web pages to gather email addresses and use them to solicit all kinds of products and scams. Do you really want that to come to your personal email account?

C. Third, if you change principal officers, notifying each member of your chapter and FOOLS International that a new personal email is being used can be a real pain. If you stick with a generic email for each principal officer -- for example, President@yoursite.com -- you really can't go wrong. Make sure you will also have enough email accounts to cover the principal officers and at least 10 to 20 other accounts you may use for other members or programs that you will install to your web server. It's always better to have extras that are not used than to purchase more at a later time and break your budget.

4. Technical Support.

Next you want to find out what kind of technical support the company offers. Is it email only, phone or web based? The type of support they offer can be a help or a hindrance in your time of need. So make sure they offer at least two to three options and it is available 24/7.

5. File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

One of the last items you should make sure is included with any package is the use of FTP, file transfer protocol. FTP will allow you to use third-party software such as Dream Weaver or Microsoft Front page. I would highly discourage the use of any program that the hosting company offers as the only way to design your site. They tend to limit you in so many ways that your site design will likely not come out the way that you want. Also, FTP access will allow you to access or manage certain things that you would not otherwise have without FTP.

6. Purchase Set-Up.

Once you have chosen a package that will fit your budget, you will be taken through the purchase set-up process. During this process, you may or may not be given the choice to pick your own user name and/or password. Do not use the same ones you have for the domain name account. If, by chance, someone gets either set of information they can very easily take your site hostage, causing you a lot of trouble. Whatever options you are given in your password/user name, make sure you add this information to your newly-created spreadsheet for your web site.

In the next part of this series I am going to cover how to get your domain to point or talk to your newly-acquired web server.