Archive: Business & Technology

Dr. Digit 'Splains It All

Within the next week or so the Lansing Star will be coming to you from a different Web host.  If all goes well you won't even know it.  The fact is that many people I have talked to recently about Web hosts don't know what one is.  If you don't have a Web site I guess you don't really need to know.  But since I am in the throes of switching ours I thought this would be a good time to explain.

You could say there are three pieces that make a Web site work.  They are the same things that make a house work.  You need a plot of land.  You need an address.  And you need a house.

Web sites are the same.  The plot of land is space on the hard drive of a Web server, a computer that is configured to store everything you need for your site plus send a copy of your pages to other computers when tell it they want to see your site.  Domain names (like lansingstar.com) are the address.  That's how people find your house, and it is the same for your Web site.  And the house -- that is all the text and code and pictures and everything that makes up your site.

The thing is that if you wanted to you could hook up your own Web server to the Internet.  It could be a computer in your house or garage.  But if your electricity went out or the dog ate the power cord to the computer, of a toddler inserted a jellied English muffin into the DC tray -- your Web site would go down.  That's where Web hosts come in.

A Web host is someone else who hosts your Web site.  The good ones have secure facilities filled with computers configured as Web servers.  They have backup electricity and at least two connections to the Internet.  And everything is more redundant than systems at NASA.  If your Web site is hosted on a good one, the chances of it going dark are low.  Many of the good ones advertise 99% up time.  That's pretty good.

A domain name is a pointer to the real address of your site on the Web host.  In a way it's as if your tax map number were your real address and 123 Main Street were the human-understandable version that people can use.  The only difference is that a domain name can be pointed to one host or another. 

I suppose it's more like a telephone number.  Once you move to Maple Street your phone number can be made to ring there, rather than at your old house on Main Street.  So a domain name is an address that really works like a telephone number.

When you make a Web site it resides on a host, has an address pointed to it, and you upload your content from the computer on your desk to the host computer, which could be anywhere in the world.  Our old one is in Pittsburgh.  Our new one happens to be in Texas.

You rent storage space and services on a Web host.  The storage space is a maximum amount of room on a hard drive in the Web server computer.  The services have to do with what you get in terms of being able to access the back end.  For example do you get statistics on who is visiting your site?  Can you access your site via FTP?  Or SHH so you can tweak things on a command line level?  How many data bases can you create?

The main reason we're moving our site is that we want a LOT of storage space that is not available at our current host.  We archive all our articles, and even though Web-optimized graphic files are pretty small, they have filled up our available space.  Our new host boasts unlimited space, so we will be able to continue to offer you access to every article we've published since we began in 2005.

Moving a Web site is a little trickier than building a new one.  For one thing, hosts are set up differently by different companies.  So something that worked great on your first host may not work at all on your new one.  You have to create a mirror of the original site, and test, test, test!  Once you are confident it is working you repoint your domain name from the old host to the new.  Within a day or so after that everyone who goes to that address sees the new version, not the old.

And that is what we are hoping will happen shortly.  The Lansing Star is a fairly complex site involving a couple of databases plus a good deal of proprietary programming code, not to mention content that numbers over 4,500 articles and an estimated 7,500 pictures (and counting) not to mention a few stray videos, java applications and odd items.  We want to make sure our email works after we pull the switch, as well as our emergency alerts system, our automatic backups, and everything else.

Most of that work is done.  When it is we'll attach our address to our new plot of land, and with any luck you will still be able to see our house.

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