March 18th, 2010
There are so many options available for you to get your website online that many people dont know where to start. I will run through a few (non-exhaustive) options for you, from limited and free to powerful (and expensive).
You can run a website from your home PC via your home internet connection. I wouldn’t do it though but it can be done and in the early years of the internet, many sites were run in exactly this way via dial up modems. I am not going to detail how as it is now so cheap and easy to organise proper web hosting that it makes no sense, for anyone.
Before you begin, you need to have your Domain Name registered and ready to use.
When you have your Domain Name ready to go, you should have a bit of a think about how you intend to use your web site. Do you imagine the web site scaling to handle very high numbers of users? Do you have a preferred platform (Windows or Linux are the two big options) or preferred programming language and database system that you want to use? Basically Linux hosting will always be cheaper than Windows but cannot be used for Dot.NET applications or SQL Server databases. It can be used for PHP programming and MySQL databases though which are very widely used online. Windows can also support PHP and MySQL but in my experience, shared hosting of PHP and MySQL on Windows hosts seems slower than on Linux, possibly due to licencing costs meaning more sites are hosted on each Windows server.
To begin with, you can host your website with pretty much anyone you like. Make sure they have an online reputation (www.hostsearch.com is a good place to start) and can support what you need (if you want to use a free Web Content Management System like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki etc, it must support PHP and MySQL). This site costs around $6AUD/m to host on Linux servers with unlimited space and bandwidth (I havent fully explored the concept of ‘unlimited’ though) but I would probably be asked to leave or have my site restricted in some way if it became so popular that it affected the performance of the other sites hosted on the same server. Some hosts are ‘free’ but make their money with ads etc, others are quite expensive and offer Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) regarding server up time. I have found Australian hosting to be considerably more expensive than hosting offshore and the performance impact of being located in the US vs Australia is negligible. Once you have signed up, delegate your domain name to them (or point it to them if you host it elsewhere), upload your website to them and it will just go live on the internet.
If you have some specific hosting needs, the next step up is a dedicated hosted server, probably a Virtual Server in a data centre. A Virtual server is completely self contained but many of them share the same physical server (as average utilisation is always a small fraction of peak performance, this is a much better use of a physical server). You can treat this like your own server, you will be given full access to it as if it was your own (but if you stuff it up, you have to fix it too). A dedicated server can usually handle a larger volume of traffic and users than a shared server as well.
A dedicated physical server is your next step up, you can lease one from a hosting company or install your own into a data centre. The prices start to rise with this option with data centre space being expensive and increasingly scarce (In Melbourne anyway).
Above this is the redundant server farm with load balancing. The sky is the limit once you get here in terms of how much you could potentially spend. Google has spent billions of dollars on their infrastructure but any level of load balancing and fault tolerance does not come cheap. This level of hosting is out of my league and more often than not would just be overkill for most business web sites.
Regardless of who you host with, make sure you keep regular back ups of your website. If your hosting company goes under, you may need to get up and running with another host on very short notice and may not get a chance to pull down a copy of your website before it gets turned off.
December 2nd, 2009
Linux as an operating system is moving out of the server and IT geek arena into more mainstream user friendly graphical desktop versions. Ubuntu is one such Linux distribution that is more user focussed and comes ready to go with most office, internet, email and entertainment needs covered with pre-installed free software . Linux operating systems are free to use for either personal or commercial use and with only minimal training, most business PC users would be able to make the change without too many challenges. Ubuntu has a “release” every 6 months, usually in April and October of each year. Hardware support is generally good and with a little perseverance and web searching, a user can usually find that they can do anything on Linux that they could do on Windows. The real power of Linux though is not in its graphical environment but its underlying service power and ability to be controlled via a command line terminal session.
Usually though, MS Windows is supplied with most name brand PC’s so unless you have a compelling reason to buy white box generic PC’s with no software or you have a fundamental aversion to Microsoft, Windows will remain the operating system of choice for most small to medium enterprises.
Other commonly used Linux desktop releases include (but are certainly not limited to):
These are all based on one of the three distributions below:
If you want to give Linux a go, the best options are Ubuntu (Debian based), Fedora (Red Hat based) or OpenSuse (Slackware based). My personal preference is Ubuntu. These all come as easy to install and easy to use distributions packed with useful software. Once you get used to an underlying distribution, it is easier to stick with it, they each do some things differently. Most Linux installations are available as a “Live CD”which allows you to boot from a CD to try out Linux on your hardware without having to install it or you can dual boot with Windows if you have some unallocated space on your hard drive (you can make some with various boot CD disk partition tools if you dont have any).
September 10th, 2009
No user can be without VLC, the Video Lan Client, an open source free media player (yes, completely free).
Unlike pretty much any other media player, VLC can play almost any audio or video format (yes even Real, Quicktime and Flash FLV) straight away including DVD’s without requiring third party or commercial codec’s (to read various non-standard compression formats). Its interface is not quite as slick as the latest Windows Media Player, PowerDVD, Plex or iTunes but it is not trying to be, it just works. It will happily play direct from disc or file as well as digital streaming media (including DVB-T television). It can play VOB files (from ripped DVD’s), as well as the newer high definition formats such as M2TS and MKV files.
A useful side effect of installing VLC is the installation of an MPEG2 codec which will then allow Windows Media Player to play DVD’s.
Unfortunately the version for the iPad (still free) is not as stable as the version for normal PC’s. I have found that it crashes (locks up) quite regularly (every 6-8 minutes), far to often to be a useful media player when offline. Development for the iPad may not continue due to the iTunes store licencing requirements conflicting with the Open source GNU licence VLC is developed under.
It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux from http://www.videolan.org/
June 18th, 2009
Microsoft, the company everyone loves to hate.
Microsoft Windows is the operating system that most users are familiar with when the term “computer” is mentioned. It has been around for many years in one way or another and is supplied pre-installed on most large vendors PC’s (for small orders anyway, large corporates can buy with no operating system but consumers will have to buy generic PC’s to avoid Windows). Microsoft Windows is pretty much the only choice for serious gamers (some big games have been released for Mac and Linux but only a handful) but for business users it is another story with both Mac and Linux being capable of handling most business computing needs.
Microsoft Windows has copped a fair bit of flack over perceptions of stability and security (hacking, viruses etc) but this is to be expected with its complete domination of the world PC market and the sheer volume of people using Windows. Ultimately, the end user is probably just as responsible for this as the software itself. Safe Computing practices (most of which are common sense) will do far more to keep your system safe.
You will probably know Microsoft Windows well but don’t let this make you think that you have to use as much Microsoft software as possible. There are plenty of alternatives. Dont get me wrong though, Microsoft has a lot of good products and has the market share for a reason, but you will pay for the privilege of using it.
Microsoft Windows does, however, require regular maintenance to keep it operating well. All computer systems do, but especially Windows. Lack of proper and regular maintenance will cause you problems. Regular cleaning of the Windows Registry and deframentation are critical to keeping Windows happy.
So why would you choose Microsoft Windows over the alternatives?
- Compatibility with existing systems, clients and customers. As most businesses run Windows, you will probably have fewer issues working with them and sharing documents. This would not be an issue if Microsoft used open standard file formats though, which they don’t…
- Support for Windows operating systems and Microsoft software in general is relatively easy to find (but not actually from Microsoft by the way. Their support is good but will cost you $400 per issue to get resolved unless it is proven to be an issue with the software rather than the configuration)
- The range of software written for the Windows platform dwarfs any other platform (this will be less of an advantage as applications move to online browser based applications).
- Pick your hardware. Unlike Mac, Windows runs on a wide range of hardware (but not nearly as wide as Linux) so you can customise your hardware specifications easily if needed.
- Windows Servers are easy to manage and maintain and have some very nice server software available, eg Exchange Server, Sharepoint, SQL Server, some free, some cheap, some hideously expensive.
