ptg16476052630 LESSON 23: How to Publish Your Site
The second option is to lease a virtual server. Applications exist that enable companies to
treat a single computer as multiple virtual computers. They then lease those virtual com-
puters to people to use for whatever they like. So for a modest price, you can lease a vir-
tual server over which you have full control. From your perspective, it is your computer.
Companies such as Linode (http://linode.com) and RackSpace (http://www.rackspace.com/
cloud) offer virtual servers, as does Amazon.com through its EC2 service (https://
aws.amazon.com/ec2/).Free Hosting
If you can’t afford to pay a web hosting provider to host your website, some free
alternatives exist. For the most part, free sites do not offer the opportunity to create your
own pages by hand and deploy them. Instead, there are services that host particular kinds
of content, such as weblogs (https://www.blogger.com/home), journals (http://
http://www.livejournal.com/), and photos (https://www.flickr.com/). The tradeoff is that the
pages on these sites have advertisements included on them and that your bandwidth usage
is generally sharply limited. There are often other rules regarding the amount of space
you can use, too. Free hosting can be a good option for hobbyists, but if you’re serious
about your site, you’ll probably want to host it with a commercial service.Organizing Your HTML Files for Publishing
After you have access to a web server, you can publish the website you’ve labored so
hard to create. Before you actually move it into place on your server, however, it’s
important to organize your files. Also, you should have a good idea of what goes where
to avoid lost files and broken links.Questions to Ask Your Webmaster
The webmaster is the person who runs your web server. This person also might be your
system administrator, help desk administrator, or network administrator. Before you can
publish your site, you should get several facts from the webmaster about how the server
is set up. The following list of questions will help you later in this book when you’re
ready to figure out what you can and cannot do with your server:
n Where on the server will I put my files? In most cases, someone will create a
directory on the server where your files will reside. Know where that directory is
and how to gain access to it. On many hosting providers, this is the only directory
you will have access to.