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Privatization is the shifting of government functions into the private sector. Privatization is also the transfer of public assets into private corporations. This started in 1980. Today there is evidence suggesting that privatization has led to systemic government shutdowns and other negative unintended consequences including serious damage to the industrial base, colleges, universities, air transportation, the FAA, and the citizens of the United States. More Information and Buy

Finding a Web Hosting Service

Introduction

There are 3 broad ways to host a web site.

The first is to use a free service from communities such as geocities. The problem with free communities is that you normally can't sell anything, but most important is search engines will not spider your site. You are isolated.

The second is to use your ISP. If you are with a small ISP that may not be a bad idea. Small ISPs in the past setup their web servers so that they could work and build their own web sites. That meant that you could benefit from those advantages without being hampered as might be the case on a very large ISP which is more concerned about security and ISP connections. In all cases I would stay away from AOL.

The third approach is to use a dedicated web hosting service company. The advantage of this approach is that these companies do not have to waste precious resources on ISP connection. That takes both computing power and man power to handle newbees to the Internet. So the prices and performance appears to be better if your go with one of these companies. The disadvantage to this approach is that your free 10-40 MB that you have with your current ISP is idle.

There are a number of sites that specialize in keeping track of ISPs and web hosting services. The following site is not bad.

Hostindex.com This is a nice site that has a good selection of reseller links

If you chose to go with a web site hosting company, be aware that you can become a reseller of web hosting space. Although you may not want to resell space, you may find that you want to open multiple domains. This approach of becoming a reseller will reduce your costs.

Be careful of fast talking salesmen (and I guess women too). Your service should provide the following capabilities as a minimum, with no additional costs for use or setup:

• Ability to run CG I scripts
• Ability to run Server side includes that will work with .html, .shtml, and exec commands
• Ability to use your own .htaccess file
• FTP
• Telenet (some require secure telnet, which is painful, but ok because they also provide control panels)
• 5-10 GB of transfer per month
• Daily backups
• Your own IP address
• Its nice to also run as yourself, not as a super user <web> when your pages are accessed (this simplifies privilege issues)
• UNIX or any of its derivatives
• Its nice to have https (but you probably won't use it)
• Its nice to have SQL and shopping carts (but you probably won't use it, especially if you read the cassbeth report)

Registering your Domain Name

Although not required, its a good idea to register your own domain name. I would recommend that if you have created a site and you are still working with it 6 months later, that you definitely register your own domain name. So instead of folks arriving at your place with with a domain name like:

www.yourisp.com/~yourusername

it will be

www.yourdomainname.com.

Although there are many registration services, go to NetworkSolutions.com. They are a nice third party. Follow their instructions, pay the $$$ and be done with it. Do not use your ISP to register your domain name. Sometimes they take ownership of it and you can't leave the ISP. It is also a good learning exercise to go through the registration process. Although painful, you will feel good after you are done.

Analyzing the Network

Before signing up with a web hosting service or and ISP or and ISP which offers web space you should analyze the network. There are big differences and it shows in the analysis. The simplest tool to use is tracert on the PC. Just fire up a DOS window from your start menu and enter:

tracert www.theplaceyouarecheckingout.com

This will perform a tracerout from your current connection to the destination that you entered.

Tracert Example

 C:\WINDOWS>tracert www.fredsspot.com
 
 Tracing route to www.fredsspot.com [64.176.161.253]
 over a maximum of 30 hops:
 
   1   325 ms   337 ms   340 ms  hamster.magpage.com [216.155.35.44]
   2   335 ms   340 ms   339 ms  eth3-0.pm3-gw.phl.magpage.com [216.155.35.33]
 
   3   338 ms   339 ms   339 ms  Serial2-9.GW5.PHL1.ALTER.NET [157.130.7.253]
   4   338 ms   339 ms   339 ms  540.at-3-0-0.XR2.TCO1.ALTER.NET [152.63.38.194]
   5   355 ms   339 ms   338 ms  292.at-7-2-0.XR2.DCA8.ALTER.NET [146.188.162.253]
   6   336 ms   340 ms   340 ms  POS7-0.BR2.DCA8.ALTER.NET [152.63.35.193]
 
   7   357 ms   339 ms   359 ms  uu-gw.wswdc.ip.att.net [192.205.32.133]
   8   338 ms   339 ms   339 ms  gbr4-p50.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.9.54]
   9   336 ms   339 ms   339 ms  gbr5-p70.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.5.197]
  10   337 ms   339 ms   340 ms  gar2-p360.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.9.57]
 
  11   338 ms   359 ms   340 ms  12.124.234.10
  12   352 ms   339 ms   338 ms  BGW-VE2.dedicatedns.com [64.176.255.249]
  13     *      549 ms   338 ms  www.fredsspot.com [64.176.161.253]
 
 Trace complete.
 

The things to look for are number of hops and the time. Note that we left our ISP after 2 nodes, went to the ALTER.NET backbone, jumped to the att.net backbone, then arrived the the fredsspot web hosting service.

Folks have developed ping and trace programs using PERL, CGIs and the web. Just enter traceroute and or ping into any search engine and these sites with surface. Some folks have created nice analysis tools. This is a nice alternative if you find yourself unable to use tracert on your PC.

http://www.cassbeth.com/cgi-bin/trace.cgi

Using whois to weave through the maze

The nice part about a trace route is you can start to analyze who owns and operates various parts of the web using the whois capability. The best place to go is networksolutions.

http://www.networksolutions.com
http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois

 
 Registrant:
 L-3 Communications (L-3COM-DOM)
    640 North 2200 West
    Salt Lake City, UT 84116
 
    Domain Name: L-3COM.COM
 
    Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
       Brown, James  (JB7488)  brown@CSW.L-3COM.COM
       L-3 Communications
       640 North 2200 West
       Salt Lake City, UT 84116
       (801) 594-2836 (FAX) (801) 594-2722
    Technical Contact:
       ORME, Kenneth A  (KO591)  ORME@CSW.L-3COM.COM
       L3 Communications
       640 North 2200 West
       Salt Lake City, UT 84116
       (801) 594-7020 (FAX) (801) 594-2722
 
    Record last updated on 09-May-2000.
    Record expires on 22-May-2002.
    Record created on 21-May-1997.
    Database last updated on 7-Jan-2001 05:01:46 EST.
 
    Domain servers in listed order:
 
    DNS1.L-3COM.COM              128.170.244.4
    DNS2.L-3COM.COM              128.170.244.5
    GCSD02.CSE.L-3COM.COM        166.20.84.100
    SYS3.CSW.L-3COM.COM          128.170.20.2
    HERMAN.CSW.L-3COM.COM        128.170.20.150
 
 

Who are these Companies Anyway

www.mecklermedia.com

www.oneworldhosting.com
www.datapipe.com
www.hostway.com
www.internet.com
www.frontiercorp.com | www.globalcrossing.com | www.exodus.com | GX+FRO+EXDS
www.he.net
home.verio.com
www.communitech.net
www.webhosting.com
www.cihost.com

www.matrix.net

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3.5 5/18/2001 12:45:33 0 10234 0

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