Category Archives: Internet

Domain Registration, Hosting, Internet

How to Create Your Dot Com Dream – Part 3

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So far we’ve got your domain name and an account with a hosting company. The domain is yours for as long as you keep up the payments on it, about ten to twenty bucks a year. Hosting can cost about eighty dollars or less, based on the shared hosting example we told you about last time. Initial cost for hosting, at least for the first year,  is sometimes as low as fifteen dollars. Didn’t we tell you that creating your own website would be cheap?

Today we’re going to fill you in on what happens next. From this point on it’s going to get a bit more complicated. This isn’t anything an average computer user would find difficult, believe us. The problem is that the process isn’t quite like anything else you would do on a daily basis. Although it makes sense when you examine the details, let’s just say that it’s not intuitive.

I’ve got a hosting account. Now what? 

When you set up your hosting account, you made up a username and a password. Once you are ready to go farther, you have to upload at least one file to the space that you’re renting from your host. That space is simply a folder on a hard drive on a server (computer), it’s easier if you think of it this way. Uploading a file is nothing different than putting a photo or photo album on Facebook, although it’s not as simple. When you put up a pic on Facebook, the photo data is sent from your computer to Facebook’s servers. Once you do this, that photo is in two places, right? It’s still on your computer and it’s also on the Facebook computer. For this reason, you should have a folder on your desktop that is a mirror image of your folder on the hosting computer.

Create a new folder and name it suzylovesflowers. When you create something that you want to put up on your site, make sure that it’s in this folder. Now, let’s get a file up to your hosting account.

FTP? What the heck is that? 

Moving files from your computer to your host folder is accomplished using a File Transfer Protocol client. All that means is that you download a bit of software, install it, give it some details of your account (username and password)  then tell it what files to upload.

We use FileZilla for FTP. It’s free, fast and relatively simple to use. Here’s a link to it: FileZilla The free FTP solution   We’ve written about FileZilla before. Check out our post here:

FileZilla FTP – how to use it

Photo of FileZilla
FileZilla is the best FTP software out there, that’s why we use it.

This software remembers where your files are as well as  your login details, from one session to another. That’s why putting a folder on your desktop is important. Later on, we’ll discuss other ways to sort all of this out.

Putting up a placeholder. 

If you’re all excited about your new domain name and want to tell your friends about it, it’s probably better to have something up on your site to greet them there. No, you don’t have a full site yet but you should have at least a bit of information there, something that says ‘come back later when we’ve got something here’. That ‘something’ is called a placeholder. It’s pretty simple really, just a small .html file that you can create in Notepad and FTP up to your account. Here’s where we describe how to do it:

Basic HTML Placeholder

Once you get more material on your site, the placeholder is changed and visitors will be able to see the real site. This placeholder is a bit like hanging a sign that reads “Out for lunch” or “Gone fishing”, basically that you’re not there now but you will be soon.

Where does the placeholder go? 

On your desktop, you’ve got a folder named suzy. You need a matching folder on your host server. If you have one domain name, you need a folder on the server that feeds data to anyone who access that domain. If you have more than one domain name, you need a folder on the server for each one. For now, you would head to your host account and be totally confused by this menu (we’re joking, it’s not that complicated):

Photo of C Panel Menu
Lots of icons but you’ll only ever use a few of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The photo above is the CPanel menu. This is what you see after you log in to your hosting account. Why are we showing you this? Because there are actually two ways to get files from your computer to your site. FTP is the quickest and easiest but, right at the start anyway, you can use the File Manager that is part of the software on your server’s computer. What you want to do it to create a folder that will hold everything related to your site. That folder is technically called a ‘directory’ and any other folders inside it are really called ‘sub-directories’ but ‘folder’ is what you’re used to calling them in Windows.

If you’re confused about CPanel, think of it as the software that controls your website, just as Windows controls your computer. It takes all of the inner workings, the things that go on behind the scenes, and arranges them into a GUI, something that is essentially point and click. Every version of CPanel has videos that show you exactly what to do so don’t run away screaming, “This is too complicated!” It’s not. Watch the videos and you’ll see what we mean. For now, search through the videos to find the one that tells you how to create a new directory.

Tip: What if your host doesn’t use CPanel? There are other control panels that you might encounter, depending on which host you choose. No worries folks, they are all essentially the same. All have icons that you click on to bring up menus which allow you to interact with the server. All have videos to help you through every step of the process.

How do I get my domain name and my hosting account linked up? 

Good question! That’s why we asked it. If you have your domain with one company and your hosting with another, as we suggested at the start, you have to point the domain to that folder you created on the hosting server. Remember the directory we made? You have to give your domain company the route or map to that folder. It’s easy, don’t worry. We described it in another post so check that out :

Nameservers – How to set them

Once that’s done, typing  suzylovesflowers.com into your browser will magically bring up your placeholder file. You have to wait a bit after you’ve set the nameservers but in a relatively short period of time, your site will be up and running. Sure, there won’t be much on it but it’s there and it’s yours. Pat yourself on the back! Believe us when we say that there is a huge surge of satisfaction that runs through you when that placeholder page appears. You’ll get an even better feeling when people start to read the words that you write. It never gets old, that’s for sure.

Questions, suggestions, comments on anything we’ve written about are most welcome. Fill in the form below or, better yet, ask us on our Facebook page. Here is the link:
Computers Made Simple on Facebook 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Domain Registration, Hosting, Internet

How to Create Your Dot Com Dream – Part 2

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We explained one half of the ‘dot com’ process in our last post, that being domain names and how to get your own. Today we’ll tell you about hosting, the second half of the process.

What is hosting?
Every site you visit on the Internet, from Facebook to this one, is fed to you by a computer called a server, somewhere in the world. In our last post we discussed domain names, the things that identify a site. When you type ‘facebook.com’ into your browser, you’re telling it to find the various files related to the Facebook domain, somewhere on a computer or on many computers (servers) wherever that may be. You don’t have to know how this is done, simply that the domain relates to a group of files that actually make up a website. Those files are hosted by Facebook themselves, in some cases, or by gigantic hosting companies such as Amazon. Our site is hosted by a much smaller company than Amazon. There are dozens of hosting companies in every country all over the world.

GoDaddy, as we mentioned in our last post, is a domain registrar that also hosts sites. We suggested that you keep your domains with one company, ours are with GoDaddy, and use another company to host your site. By doing this you are not putting all of your eggs in one basket. You don’t have to take our advice on this. It’s just a suggestion.

Photo of Graphic of Shared Hosting
One server, lots of connections…that’s shared hosting.

What types of hosting are there? 

Quite a few, actually. If you’re just starting out, we’d suggest looking at shared web hosting. This is what we use on our site, simply because it very cost efficient (read: CHEAP!). Sure, the site is a bit slow sometimes but the yearly costs are very minimal. Shared hosting means that many sites are served out by the same computer. In other words, this site plus who knows how many others sit on one server/computer at our hosting company, sharing that computer’s resources. Because the resources are split between a number of sites, the loading times can be affected, depending on how busy each site is.

An alternative to shared hosting is free web hosting, something we wouldn’t suggest, which is supported by ads. You get the free hosting, the hosting company gets the money from the ads that show up on your pages.

Once your site gets bigger and busier and, hopefully, starts making money, you might look at dedicated hosting. This means that one server is dedicated to your site, no others. While you don’t own the server itself, you are the only customer who uses it. Expect to pay much more for this service.

Lastly, and we’ve seen this work quite well, you can host your own site from your home or office. You’d need certain technical skills to do this but it can be done. There used to be an interesting site out there that was hosted on a very old MacIntosh computer, possibly a Mac Plus. If you are interested in starting a hobby site, one that doesn’t necessarily have to be up 24/7, do-it-yourself hosting just might be the ticket for you.

Here’s what a file hosting server looks like:

Photo of Hosting Server
Racks of servers, each hosting one or more websites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How do I decide what hosting company is best for me? 

Price is probably the thing you want to check first. After that, reliability of the hosting is next. You can either do searches for reliable and cheap hosting yourself or get a Twitter account and search for hosting suggestions there. Do a search to see if any of your candidates have accounts. Once you narrow that down, search through their tweets to see what others are saying about them. Don’t let the fact that you’ve never heard of a company’s name deter you. Unless you’re involved in websites now, most or all of the hosting companies will be strangers anyway.

Here’s a sample ad from our hosting company. We’ve removed the name since we’re 50/50 on whether you should use them or not. Plus, they’re not paying us anything for the plug!

Photo of Hosting Ad
Lots of information here. Messy but full of enticing offers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of the hosting companies are similar to this, good prices for the first year, then a sizeable jump to their regular prices in subsequent years. This company is offering shared hosting with unlimited disk space, bandwidth, names hosted, etc. In addition to all of this, they have free tools to help you set up your site. While we haven’t found the free tools that important, you might be able to make use of them.

Tip: Choose wisely, folks. It’s a royal pain to move a site from one host to another, specially if it’s a WordPress based site. If you’re going to jump in and create your online dream, do your prep work beforehand.

Thanks for reading! Tips, comments, questions and suggestions are always welcome. Like us on our Facebook page to get a direct help line: Computers Made Simple on Facebook 

Domain Registration, Hosting, Internet

How to Create Your Dot Com Dream – Part 1

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If you were to believe all the ads from GoDaddy, you’d think that owning your own website is pretty darn easy. Well, guess what? It is! For the remainder of this week, we’re going to show you just how easy it is. Stick around and follow along with us as we show you how to take your idea from a .com dream to reality.

The Basics: 

A website is made up of two main parts. The first is the domain name, which we’ll deal with today. The second part is called the host or hosting. A domain name is simple, brianmahoney.ca is ours, while hosting can be a bit more complicated. Don’t worry, the whole thing is easy enough and very cheap. We’ll take things step by step, just to show you how easy and cheap it is. So, domain name and hosting. Off we go!

Dot Com, dot Org, what’s best?

A domain name is made up of two things, too. The first is the actual name of the site, facebook, for example. The second part is everything after the ‘.’ , .com for example. You can choose .com, .net, .org, .info,  but you have to make a name that pops to mind when someone is looking for your site. (Yes, we know that brianmahoney.ca isn’t easy to remember at all but you can learn from our mistake, right? )

A commercial site would use a .com name, while a charity site might use .org. Work on the first part of the name first, suzysellsflowers for example, then decide on what type of domain you want. Suzysellsflowers.com makes sense, since selling things makes it a commercial site. Suzylovesdogs could be a .org or .info site.

Lastly, if you’re going to use a string of words, think of how the words run together. Will people know that the s at the end of the first word isn’t attached to the second word? Here are some examples of domain naming gone horribly wrong:

Funny Domain Names: The Most Inappropriate URLs On The Web

Once you get a feeling for the kind of name you want, you need to find out if that name is available. We would suggest doing that when you’re actually ready to buy the domain. What is ‘buy the domain’? That’s when you cough up the money to take possession of the name of your future site. Once you actually get it, you have to renew the name every year in order to keep it. Let’s say that Facebook.com forgets to renew its name. Theoretically, anyone could snap the name up and claim it as their own. Watch out for that, OK?

Let’s use GoDaddy as an example. We are not recommending GoDaddy but we use it to be our domain name service. We’ll get into that later but let’s see if our domain name is available. Head over to godaddy.com:

Photo of GoDaddy 1
Type in a name then check to see if it’s available.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you get there, type in the name that you’ve come up with. We’re using ‘suzylovesflowers’ . Click on Go and see what comes up:

Photo of GoDaddy 11
Well, guess what? Suzylovesflowers is available!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were lucky this time, weren’t we? Our domain name is available. Better yet, it’s cheap, only $9.99 a year. Below the main section, you’ll see that other variations of that name are also available. If you’re going to buy a domain with the hopes of making it into a popular site, you might want to think about buying up all the other variations of it at the same time. Why? Well, if suzylovesflowers.com becomes famous, anyone could start a site named suzylovesflowers.org or .net and siphon away some of your hits. If you think facebook.com is the only domain name that facebook owns, type facebook.org into your search bar and see where it leads. Try any other variation and you’ll see that Facebook has covered their bases quite well.

If your name is available, snap it up. Create an account on a site such as GoDaddy and pay for one or two years (or more since it’s cheaper at the start to buy a number of years than it is to renew it after one or two). GoDaddy will offer you all kinds of extras as you go, things that will add privacy and security but, you know what? We only take the name, nothing else. The price of the additional ‘stuff’ really adds up so we don’t bother with it. All of our domains are with GoDaddy, mainly because it’s a big company and probably won’t go out of business any time soon.

At this point, you’ve spent ten bucks on your domain name. Didn’t we tell you it would be cheap? You can’t get much for ten bucks these days but you can get a domain name and armed with that, you can head out and make a website. Well, almost. You’ve got half of what you need. Next time we’ll talk about hosting the site, the second part of creating something on the web. Yes, GoDaddy hosts sites but we found them to be quite expensive for this so we headed off and got a much cheaper setup with someone else.

TIP: Just as there are two parts of a web site, there can be two different companies involved with holding it. GoDaddy is our domain name server, nothing else. They keep our domains safe and renew them periodically but they do not host our sites. We strongly suggest that you keep your domains with one company and your sites with someone else. A domain name server simply routes Internet traffic that is looking for a domain it holds to the computer that hosts that site. When you come to our site, you go through the GoDaddy computers first. They point your browser to the hosting company’s computers which then bring up the content that you see here. That part is complicated but you don’t have to worry about it. Let one company hold your domain name and let another company host your content.

What’s in a name? 

Hindsight is 20/20 they say and, if we could do this site over again, we’d use a name that is better suited to its content. Keep that in mind. When we first started out, we used a real name, not a generic product or service name. While brianmahoney.ca has worked quite well for us, we suggest that you choose a name that matches what your site’s main thrust is going to be. Anyone can own a domain name, that’s the easy and cheap part. It’s what comes later that makes the difference overall but the name is where you start. Make it good the first time

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Geocities, oocities

Oocities Revisted – Karma strikes!

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We’ve posted about the theft of original, copyrighted material before, here’s the link: Geocities Isn’t Dead  There is an organization which calls themselves ‘oocities’ that’s somehow saved vast amounts of the old Geocities site and have posted this material on their own ‘.org’ site, telling the world that they’re doing everyone a favour by archiving or preserving the old Yahoo site. Well, that would be great except they are making money from the copyrighted material. There are ads on every page and, even though they say they aren’t making enough money to cover their ‘hosting costs’, we think differently.

This week we’ve received two emails from someone named Angelique. These emails came to a private email address, not one associated with this site, and we’re not sure how they got it. Regardless, we’re going to share these emails with you. We think you’ll see the perfect karma here. By the way, this is the Facebook page that they are referring to:

Oocities.org on Facebook   (We have nothing to do with this page but we hope you will like it and support it. If you had material on Geocities, please ask oocities to remove it. File a DMCA request with Google, as we did, and get your stuff removed.)

Here’s the first email, rather cryptic to say the least:

Start

“Hello,
Herewith we kindly ask you to stop hijacking our name on Facebook
kind regards,
Angelique”

Here’s the second, adding a bit more detail:

”

Good morning Mister Mahoney,

Oh well L First of all be ensured:

We are very s o r r y you felt so strongly against “oocities” and other GeoCities archives!

In the past year some people confused your Facebook page with our support contact,
so that their conversation attempts were delayed unnecessarily.
To avoid continuous confusion it will help when you will not use the oooities Header as a Facebook title picture
and slightly change the name of your Facebook page from exactly “oocities.org” into for example “i hate oovities”

Along the way some more details maybe answering some of your complaints:
– Parts of GeoCities were archived and kept online to prevent their loss and knowing that most authors agree.
Those were filtered automatically and manually to avoid spam, copyrighted material and too personal pages.
For oocities the focus originally was a finer screening for scientific material but we only saw demand and positive feedback to keep as much as possible. oocities was carried by 28 volunteers sorting pages, answering some emails and/or donating hosting costs not matched by ad impressions.
Even when >99.9?% users are happy, complex things are hardly completely perfect.
We try to give those who aren’t happy full attention.
Some people request to delete their pages or comments, which we try to solve quickly.
Your page was deleted after 2 days without asking back. It had no visitor in the archives.
– While we don’t understand if/why your cause is to disturb “oocities” particularly(?)
we agree there are unanswered questions about the relatively young topic of web archival that we follow curiously.
And, again, we are sorry it “stressed “ you to find your old page, which surely wasn’t our intention.
When a vast cultural Inheritance, that still has a present and historical relevance is threatened (,since the abandoned GeoCities became commercially toxic to the company that ran it), but a befitting solution to save it is not going to happen – What differntly would you have thought of it if you had felt the opportunity and responsibility in 2009 to save Geocities contents (besides trying to contact everyone if possible)?

All the best,
Good luck blogging,

Angelique”

End. 

We find it ironic that these folks are upset with whoever is using their name on Facebook  while they continue to make money using copyrighted material. This is what we mean by karma.

Thanks for reading. If you had material on Geocities and you happen to find it on oocities, we suggest that you fill out a DMCA removal request to get your stuff taken down. Here’s the link:

Removing Content From Google  This form will ensure that Google, the largest search engine available, does NOT list your material on oocities in their searches.

If you have material that you want removed from oocities, here is the email address that sent us the emails above:  oocities@gmail.com   Some of our readers have found that this account either does not work or does not respond to requests so you’re on your own. Good luck!

 

Free Phone Calls, Internet, Save Money, VPN/VOIP

How to Quit Cable – and save big!

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We’re in Canada, as most of you know. Up here, we don’t have as many choices as far as TV or mobile phone providers that residents of the U.S. and Europe have. All the same, even Canadians can save a huge chunk of money by choosing to ‘break the cable’ addiction. Before we begin, we should say that our total costs per month are less than $110.00 for our home phone, unlimited DSL Internet, Canadian long distance, Netflix, VPN (more on that later) as well as unlimited text, data and voice calling on our cell phone. That’s right, less than $110.00 with all taxes included. Here’s how we did it:

1. For around $20.00 we picked up one of these antennas:

Photo of HD Antenna
A $19 HD antenna, available just about anywhere.

With this antenna and a high definition LCD/Plasma or LED TV, we get more than 25 OTA (over the air) channels, some of which are not even carried on cable. We’re in Toronto, Ontario and are fortunate to be in a relatively large media hub. With Buffalo to the south, Rochester to the south-east and, of course, all of the Toronto stations, we don’t lack for entertainment. (This does not mean that your area is much different. Every major network and hundreds or thousands of independent stations broadcast live OTA all across the U.S. and near the Canadian border. Your mileage may vary, as they say.) HD signals are the same as the old UHF signals so even a simple bow-tie antenna will work for local stations.

Photo of Bow-Tie Antenna
A simple bow-tie antenna.

TIP: Head over to TVFool before you buy the antenna. Once there, plunk in your address and postal code or zip code. TVFool will then give you a cool diagram with all of the channels available in your area. They even tell you what strength and direction those stations broadcast. All for free, of course.

If you live in a condo, you can put the antenna against a window or on your balcony. You do not need a tower to get good reception, just the antenna.

TIP: OTA reception is uncompressed. Cable compresses HD. Believe us when we say that the OTA signal is way better. Once you see it, you won’t believe your eyes. OTA is pure HD, the way it’s supposed to be seen.

2. In parts of Canada, Worldline offers high-speed DSL, home telephone with all the features (call display, call forwarding, voice mail, etc.) as well as Canadian long distance for $62.00 a month. Starting at $49 a month, a network fee and taxes bring the total up to $62. Bell Canada wanted $36.00 just for home phone, no features and the prices kept going up. Switching to Worldline was a no-brainer. The DSL is the fastest we’ve ever used and the VOIP  phone(voice over Internet protocol) is crystal clear and dependable. We didn’t necessarily need the long distance because there are other ways to get that but it’s included so we took it.

Photo of Worldline.
Worldline is who we use but there are probably similar alternatives in your area.

Here is the link to Worldline: http://www.worldline.ca/

TIP: Two things about VOIP phones. First, the 911 service doesn’t work in quite the same way. It’s still there but you need to update a database if you move. The 911 operators won’t know your location as easily as on a normal phone. Second, you can’t fax on VOIP. There are free and cheap faxing alternatives but if you depend on faxes, you can’t use VOIP. We should say that we kept our old number, too.

3. Once we got unlimited and fast Internet, we opted for Netflix to provide cheap movie and TV entertainment. Netflix is $7.99 a month, no tax on top. If you’re not happy with the Canadian selection of movies and shows, it’s easy and cheap to access the American Netflix.

Photo of Netflix logo
Netflix is cheap and reliable. The best thing out there.

 

4. Once we found out that the American Netflix offers substantially more content than the Canadian side, we decided to pay Unblockus $5 a month to provide us with a U.S. IP address. Unblockus uses VPN (virtual private networks) to make it appear that we’re in the U.S. This is not cheating anyone, by the way. Netflix doesn’t care where you access their service. As a matter of fact, Unblockus can make it appear that you are coming from England, Ireland or Brazil, if that is what you want. Netflix offers services in those parts of the world. If you travel, for instance, you can log into your Netflix account and get the local offerings. Unblockus offers you a free week to check out their service. We use it on our PS3, our smart BluRay player and some of our computers. Everything works just fine and if there is a problem, Unblockus has great support. Here is the link: http://www.unblock-us.com/

5. As far as sports and cable channels go, many events are available online. The only thing that we sometimes miss are the sporting events that are not broadcast OTA. For those, including UFC events, there are many sites out there that stream these things live. Since this gets into a grey area, we’re not going to put the links here but we don’t have a problem finding them so you won’t either.

6. Once it appears that you are in the United States, you can access Hulu and get a total TV package via Internet streaming. Each American network streams its shows online but you have to be in the U.S. to see them. With Unblock-us, this isn’t a problem.

7.  Since we wrote this, we’ve changed our mind about Wind Mobile. Their customer service is terrible, totally the opposite to other companies we have dealt with. Stay away, that’s our advice. We’ll do another post on companies that offer better, and much more responsive, deals and customer service. Stay tuned! 

Lastly, we picked up a terrific mobile deal from Wind Mobile. Wind offers us unlimited data, text and local calls for $30.00 a month. How unlimited is the data? We sat at the airport watching Youtube videos for two hours one evening waiting for a late arrival, no interruptions, no delays and no complaints from Wind. The deal we got was offered in August through to early October. Wait for it to come around again. It’s a ‘back to school’ special but you don’t have to be a student for get the deal.

Photo of Wind Site
Wind is only in Canada but we’re pretty sure that there are alternatives like this in your area.

 

8. We mentioned earlier that we didn’t need the Canadian long distance part of the Internet/phone package. Why not? Because there are many different ways to get long distance telephony for free. Gmail, for instance, offers free calling from your Gmail account to landlines or cellphones across the U.S. and Canada. Skype to Skype is free as well. There are at least two alternatives, probably more, that are available on your Apple or Android phone. Some names to check out are TextPlus and Fongo. We also use WeChat for video calls and text. There are lots of free apps out there. Don’t feel that you have to lock yourself in with cable or ‘Ma Bell’. Be smart and save your money for important things!

9. Our monthly bill does not cover the initial hardware outlay, of course. That cost would not change even if you did decide to use cable. These days, most of us are using computers as PVRs (Personal Video Recorder) anyway so the cost difference is very small, much less than the cable companies charge you for their ‘free’ PVRs.

10. If you’re hooked on sports, no matter what that sport is, you can sign up for a full season package from virtually any national league. Use your PS3 or Xbox or any ‘smart’ device to access these packages. Add the cost to our monthly tab and we can guarantee that your total per year is far less than any of the packaged or bundled options from the ‘big guys’. Many of these packages will flow over onto your mobile phone too. That way you can keep up on your games when you’re away from home.

Total all of this up and you get about $105.00 a month. We think that if you pay more, you’re wasting your money. Even if the big companies ‘bundle’ a few things to make it seem cheaper, we’d bet that you’re paying way more than this for similar services. Be smart. It’s your money. Save it!

Thanks for reading! Questions and suggestions are welcome. Just make a comment at the bottom of any page.

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