Hands on: Take control of your server

Creating web pages is very often only a small part of putting together a website these days. As we’ve seen over the years, there are many other things you will need to do besides putting together a bit of HTML, such as writing web applications and scripts using tools like PHP or Perl, creating style sheets with CSS and designing your graphics.

There are other tasks too, which we’ve touched on briefly, and though they might not be things you’ll have to do every day, if you do a lot of web design and have sites that attract lots of users, you’ll probably have to think about them at some stage. Chiefly, that’s the more ‘administrative’ side of things, such as registering domain names and sorting out web space.

Simple solutions
If you have a very simple website, chances are you’ll be happy enough hosting it in the free space that comes with your internet access, or one of the many free hosting sites available online. But if you want to do anything remotely professional, sooner or later ­ and it’ll save a lot of pain if it’s sooner ­ you’ll have to consider setting up proper hosting for your own site.

This is where things can start to become complicated. We’re not going to look at all the options you need to consider when you choose a web host, but rather at the different tasks you may need to get to grips with if you choose anything other than the most basic hosting arrangements.

By those, we mean the sort of package where you approach a hosting company, or a domain registration outfit, and say: “I want to buy this domain and I need somewhere to host the pages too.” You can typically do this either way round ­ buy a domain and add hosting, or buy hosting and get a ‘free’ domain name. Either way, the net result is often much the same ­ you’ll get the domain set up and receive an email with the details of how to log in to the web server via FTP or SFTP and upload pages, without having to do much more configuration after that.

Self service
Once you start to go beyond that, though, you’ll find that unless you’re prepared to pay for a lot of hand-holding, you’ll have to set up quite a few extras yourself, which means getting to grips with server management, DNS, databases and various other things. This is what we’ll be looking at in this month’s Web Development column. In short, you’ve bought a domain name, so what do you need to do next?

We’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that you’ve rented a dedicated server, based on a Linux platform; it’s a common type of hosting and these days you can acquire such a server very cheaply. In fact, at the bottom end of the market, it may not be a truly dedicated piece of hardware ­ for which you’ll usually have to pay around £50 a month ­ but a virtual machine. Nevertheless, the principles are fairly similar.

The server will typically come with the Apache web server, scripting languages such as PHP, and a database server, which is most likely to be MySQL. It’s likely to come with mail server programs in case you want to set up mailboxes or lists as well, and there’ll be FTP or perhaps even Linux shell access to the system. And you’re most likely to end up with a welcome email that gives you a web address, a user name and a password.

So what on earth do you do next? If you’re new to arranging hosting, it can be quite bewildering.