Having A Domain

<< flickr flash badge | Journals | Miss Saigon (2007) >>

Now that you have a Domain You can ...

Written by : Rommel Pascual November 05, 2007, at 05:24 PM

Do nothing

Except know for a fact that no one else can use http://www.helenpascual.com - but you. Well at least for the next 2 years and several more months after that, if you don't renew.

Take Advantage of the Free Website by Geocities

If I'm right - you get a free static website from Geocities. You can create your static html pages which is, more often than not, would be all you need if all you want is a presence in the web.

Subscribe to a Web Hosting Service

This is a can of options which could set you back from $10/month for a personal web space with interactive capability such as PHP, CGI and mySQL. If you prefer Microsoft, then look for a web host that supports ASP and SQL Server instead. The main advantage is that you have control of your site but not the worry of configuring a web server, ftp server, etc. You provide the content - they look after your site. They also have a fast upload and download speeds that makes your web pages load faster into browsers.

Build Your Own Server

This is getting serious, you would need a STATIC IP. Internode will charge you extra for it. Your website will only be as fast as your upload speed limit. On an ADSL1, this is anywhere between 64Mbs ~ 256Mbs. In some cases this is acceptable, if your web pages are mostly text. With a bit of technique, you can put all multimedia files on other servers and reference them only in your text pages.

If you don't have a static IP - you can configure your modem to subscribe to a Dynamic DNS like the one offered by http://www.dyndns.com/. The service is free for one dynamic DNS. What happens is that you will get a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), e.g. helenpt.selfip.com, for your modem from DynDNS. But since your IP is not static, your modem will report to DynDNS whenever you get assigned new IP from Internode. The world will know you as helenpt.selfip.com and DynDNS will simply keep track of the changes in your IP address.

If you are clever - you can add a CNET to your Domain to forward traffic from www.helenpascual.com to helenpt.selfip.com. In this way - the world will know your modem as www.helenpascual.com.

In your modem, you should Port Forward port 80 to your main computer which is running a Microsoft IIS Server or a Linux machine running an Apache Server. You may have to configure the web controls of your modem to listen in another port (other than 80, e.g. 8080), otherwise, people trying to access your site will get your modem controls instead.

The advantage is that it does not cost you anymore and you have full control of everything which also means - you must know everything!

Suck up to your brother and use his hosting

Building your server is a daunting task but it gives you all the controls of a real website. However, most people/business have, what you call, an "FTP site only". This means that you can only FTP your html, php, cgi , images etc in the site. This is in contrast to hosting your own server where you have a shell account and full control of all web configuration files.

In order for me to host your site - you need to change the NAMESERVER in your Yahoo Domain to the name server of my host. This essentially is giving me full control of your domain. You can take it back by changing the NAMESERVER entry to point to your own host - when you are ready. Until you take back control of your domain - there is absulutely nothing that you can do to your domain except through me.

To change your NAMESERVER, you would need to unlock your Domain. You will get some warning from Yahoo saying it will interfere with their ability to host your website or administer your mail. Then you could go ahead and change the settings to this:

 Name Servers:
    ns1.servage.net
    ns2.servage.net
    ns3.servage.net
    ns4.servage.net

DO NOT FORGET TO LOCK YOUR DOMAIN AGAIN AFTER SETTING THE DOMAIN NAMESERVERS

There are certain limits you should be aware of:

1. Your website can not exceed 250MB¹. This is larger than what you actually get in Geocities or Internode.
2. I have a 10Gb 3Tb traffic limit per month. This is generous and I'm unlikely to exceed this. Except if you start publishing movies, mp3s or pornographic materials where we would be inundated with visitors/hackers and suck up our bandwidth. So don't publish movies, mp3 or porno.
3. Do not publish any copyrighted materials like mp3, jpg or documents, unless you own the copyright or common rights. There are robots in the net whose sole purpose is to trawl for such materials. They will be able to trace you because your details are in the WHOIS database when you registered your helenpascual.com . If you do, you will be notified and I will be notified and I will be forced to close your site.
4. It takes 24-48 hours for the NAMESERVER to propagate around the globe. If you change the NAMESERVER entry in Yahoo, it will take a while before browsing to http://www.helenpascual.com would find their way to my host.
5. If I control your domain, I could redirect all mails for helenpascual.com to your GMail account. This means that any email to e.g. owner@helenpascual.com, bigboss@helenpascual.com, or any_address_at_all@helenpascual.com will go to your GMail account. You can't do that with your domain control in Yahoo.

¹ No imposed limit in the server although the total overall disk limit is 300GB.

Let me know which option you would want to take.

Not sure what to do yet ?

You can use this for now:

I have made helenpascual.com as a subdomain of rommelpascual.com. However, this will not take effect unless you change your NAMESERVER in Yahoo Domains. This protects you so that noone can set up a http://www.helenpascual.com without your explicit action of handing over control of your Domain.

You can build your site in my server via FTP using the following details:

¹ Your password is encrypted in this page, Hint: Use your Gallery Password

Until you have changed your NAMESERVER in Yahoo Domains, you can access this page using the address http://helenpt.rommelpascual.com(approve sites). When the change in your NAMESERVER is propagated it will become accessible as http://www.helenpascual.com