When you sign up for a web hosting company to put your site on their server you are typically looking at a very low price (under $20 per month and sometimes under $5 per month) and in these cases the web hosting company is actually not using a dedicated server for your site.  If they were then they would be out of business very soon.  The fact is that in this situation you are signing up for shared hosting and that means that your website might me one of dozens or even hundreds of other web sites hosted on that same server.  The advantages of this of course is the price.  You could never get a dedicated server for the same price (they typically run over $100 per month for the bare bones package and can run into the thousands per month).  The disadvantages are more numerous.  On a Shared Hosting plan you cannot install any software that isn't already part of the package, you might be sharing the same IP address as many other sites and the server is distinguishing requests by address once they arrive at the server, and most importantly if someone on the same server as you compromises the server with their web application (in the case of dynamic code) then your site is going to be dragged down too.

This isn't an attempt to completely scare you off of Shared Hosting solutions, but be warned about the disadvantages before you jump at the price.  I use shared hosting of simple sites that I consider low security, for everything else I go Dedicated Server all the way.

When we talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) we have to start with Google.  It has by far the largest audience and therefore is the big fish if you get top rating for the search terms you choose.

Google, like most search engine companies, tries very hard to keep those of us on the outside guessing about what exactly they look for in a site that puts it at the top of their list.  But even so we know that their patented Page Rank is an important factor.  Page Rank is like a measure of the percentage of votes a site gets from other sites indexed by Google.  Most people think that votes should be given by users, but that is too easy and also is information that is not readily available to Google.  What they use is the number of links and the quality of the links to your site.  This is a gross oversimplification, but for this first introduction to the topic it will do (we will delve deeper in other posts).  This means that if you get linked to by a web site that has great popularity then it helps you alot, whereas a link from a family web site that is unknown to the world at large is relatively less helpful.

The easiest way to get to know Page Rank is to install the Google Toolbar and enable the PageRank function.  You will likely catch on quickly when you see that www.Adobe.com and www.CNN.com are highly ranked.  Most of the web sites you encounter will either be unranked ("no data" or "0/10") or will be in the 2 to 6 out of 10 range.  If you can get your websites to 5/10 you are doing quite well and you have a shot a top 10 position for moderately competitive search terms.

I found this service being offered by Internet Service Providers (AKA Web Hosting Providers) that lets you use their Internet accessible storage as an always available file share.  I had heard of these services before, but I didn't realize that the prices were so low.  Companies like Godaddy are offering storage for under a penny per MB per year!  It sparked my interest because we are dealing with employees that are working from home or traveling more and more and I wanted to get rid of their VPN accessible home directories.

The one I am looking at using is here.

I decided to characterize this as Web Hosting because it is all about putting your resources on someone else's server so I think that fits.

When you embark on starting your web design there are two competing temptations.  To automate and make dynamic as much of the content as possible holds the allure of having the site take on a life of its own.  Allow users to contribute and you might get out of writing a web page ever again (dream on).  The other hand holds the getting to market faster and cheaper because dynamic content costs more in time and often money (programmers are not typically cheap). 

When you have static content there are those that argue that it makes it easier for you to get good search engine positioning and while the jury is out on that assertion, most people can whip out html with tools like your standard word processer whereas dynamic content typcially involves databases and very talented programmers to make even the first page display.

A solid and proven compromise is to start your web design and architecture by putting up a HTML page or two and then pin dynamic and static content onto that base as time goes on.  This gives you cheap and fast when you need it and still leaves you open to leveraging the power of dynamic technologies like ASP, ASP.Net, JSP and PHP to allow you to scale to thousands of pages tailored to the actions of your users.

Selecting a domain name sounds like it would be an easy thing to do, but with every day that passes the number of domains under registration increases and you will find that even names that seem unlikely to be taken in fact are already used or squatted on.  Squatting on domain names was a huge and very profitable industry for years, especially during the dotcom boom of the tech industry, but in the last years some legislation and court decisions have decreased this practice, but not eliminated it.  We will talk about the factors of getting a "good" domain name in later posts.

If your name is famous and someone else is using that name as a domain name then you may have a case to sieze the name to prevent abuse.  If you register a domain with the letters ebay anywhere in the name you can expect to get a scary letter form Ebay about how you are forbidden from using that domain.  Ultimately you can do whatever you want, but it behooves you to know the possible consequences.  While a company like Ebay cannot bar you from using a domain name that contains their name in it, they are also equally free to sue you over it.  If your name is Susan Debayer then you certainly have a clear right to own SusanDebayer.com, but that doesn't mean the legal machine won't send you a nastygram anyways.  (by the way I don't know anyone with that name and just made it up to fit my example, my apologies if I picked your name out of thin air)

Stick to names that are defensible by you or your organization.  If you pick a domain name that leverages someone else's reputation (even by a misspelling of that name) then be prepared for someone to come after you which will likely take both the fun and the profit out of the entire endeavor.

Many people will tell you that you can make money using the Internet and while they are correct, the details always seem to be a bit fuzzy.  There are many ways to leverage the massive audience potential of the Internet, but you have to remember that it is really just potential.  If you build a great website there is no magic that just lets people find it.  You have to either work very hard to get top position in the popular search engines, or spend a mint on advertising, or make the news of the site spread virally.  None of these is a pushover, but we will talk about all of them on this site over time.

Suffice it to say that the first option I listed, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is the one most in reach of those of use without mint or special audience and so that is a topic you will see here often.

Ultimately we have done our jobs well if we can demystify the whole Internet based endeavor experience regardless of whether you are selling, informing, rallying or just sharing pictures of the new baby with friends and family.