Servers

OK, so I’ve taken the great leap and registered a domain name. It’s actually on behalf of a group that I work with. The problem is, not a one of us has a clew as to the mechanics of actually locating the website somewhere. Seriously, we are a pack of unreconstructed Luddites. So, I need some help with the real basics. How does one find a server to house the site? Preferably one that’s free, preferably one that’s not corporate (we’re all about anti-corporate). Really, we know nothing, and whatever advice anyone would like to offer about website administration would be greatly appreciated.

Right now we think the domain is on a server maintained by Register.com with a “we just registered our site!” message on it. We think we could put the site there but they would put an ad on the site over which we would have no control and that’s unacceptable.

I await your wisdom.

You will not find a free hosting provider willing to host your site without putting ads on it. You will need to pay money. You pay for the space on a web server to host all your files, and then you tell register.com to point your domain name to the server you are using. Many hosting providers will do this for you if you want. You need to shop around to find a good deal, and ask people for reccomendations. (I’ll give you my reccomendation if you email me; don’t want to post commercial links here.)

You may also find this helpful.

What kind of traffic are you expecting? Max concurrent users, presence or absence of large file downloads or streaming video, presence or absence of large Flash resources, etc?