April 18th, 2009
Updating your name servers is a simple process if you have access to your domain registrar’s account (the place where you registered/bought your domain name from, or the place where you have transferred it if you have done a transfer). You should be able to find a place in the account to update the nameservers (usually abbreviated as NS) in the domain account (check your registrar’s faq if you can’t find it). There will usually be two entries that look something like ns1.servername.com and ns2.servername.com, update these to the nameservers that your hosting company gives you (usually two of them is all that is needed) and wait anywhere from 24-48 hours for them to update. See How Long Will it Take My Site’s DNS to Update?
Posted in DNS | Tags: Name Servers | No Comments »
April 14th, 2009
A domain name is a name that points to a particular location or server on the web. (See what is a URL). A domain consists of the domain name plus a TLD, which is the part you see at the end of a domain name, the most popular being .com .net and .org.
The Web understands a domain name as pointing to a particular IP address on the web. The IP address points to a particular server on the web. The domain name is just a way of easily going to that particular site without having to type in or remember some long IP Address.
The domain for this site is webhostanswers.net.
Posted in Domain | Tags: TLD | No Comments »
April 9th, 2009
A database will make storing information for a website, especially a large website much easier. Websites that are run with databases are very popular nowadays and are known as dynamic websites. This will allow you to separate your content from your source code and keep and update the same template across a site while displaying different content on each page.
The content for each page is stored and retrieved from a database, making things simpler to manage. If you also want to keep track of users, a database is a must, as this will store all the information for each user, including password, name, email, etc. Think of it as a large file folder or information manager. This is why databases have become so popular nowadays, especially for managing a website.
Posted in Databases | Tags: Databases | No Comments »
April 9th, 2009
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a language that web browsers are able to understand, and then translate into a page that is viewable in your browser. HTML first began back in 1991 with the introduction of a few tags. Since then it has grown into different versions and is now replaced in many areas by the very popular but very similar XHTML.
You will find an HTML file beginning with the <html> and closing with an </html> closing tag.
Posted in HTML | Tags: Programming Languages | No Comments »
April 6th, 2009
You can use FTP by downloading an FTP client/browser such as Filezilla and installing on your computer. Then you should use the FTP login information that is provided by your hosting server to fill in all the connection details and connect to your FTP server, allowing you to upload or download files and pages off your website. (Note: to access databases, you will need to go in your Control Panel or use a program such as PHPMyAdmin, not through FTP.)
Downloads:
- Filezilla - Free Filezilla FTP Client for Windows or Linux. Works good.
- CuteFTP - More advanced FTP client with different payment options. Works on Windows and Mac.
Posted in FTP | Tags: Filezilla, FTP, FTP Client | No Comments »
March 31st, 2009
Including Files Using PHP
To include specific files into your webpage, you can use something like a PHP include() if your files are .php files or if you have your server set to handle whatever extension you are using as a PHP file.
Just insert the code
Server Side Includes
Another thing you can try is Server-Side Includes. A server side include looks like
Includes are a great way to display something like a sidebar on every page for something that doesn’t need to be changed for every page. It will save you plenty of time.
Posted in PHP, Server-Side | Tags: SSI | No Comments »
March 31st, 2009
A URL stands for (“Uniform Resource Locator“) and is the thing that you type in your web browser to go to a particular page or site. Usually this is a domain name, (such as webhostanswers.net), but can also be an IP address. It is the name of IP address used to point to a particular page or document on the web.
A URL address can also be an FTP location. Something like:
ftp://somedomain.com
which will point to the FTP location/folder of that website or server. An example of an http URL Resource could be something like:
http://mydomain.com or http://www.mydomain.com
Posted in URL | Tags: Domain, IP Address, Uniform Resource Locator | 1 Comment »
March 29th, 2009
You can get free PHP 5 and MySQL hosting with plenty of bandwidth and 1.5 GB diskspace over at 000Webhost.com.
Posted in WebHosting | No Comments »
March 28th, 2009
A 301 redirect is the code 301 sent by the server and redirecting the webpage browser (or spider) to another page. Technically, 301 means “Moved Permanently“, so this will cause most search engines to update their index with the new page if encountered. A 302 redirect on the other hand is temporary (“Temporarily Moved”) and shouldn’t be used in place of a 301 redirect.
If you have moved a web page on your site, and you want to redirect users and search engines to the new page and location, you can use a 301 redirect to accomplish this. Any time a user goes to the old page, they will be automatically redirected to the new page.
This can be accomplished using PHP, meta header tags, or more commonly an htaccess file. Some web hosts also offers options in there control panel to enter redirections (old page to new) and some CMS are also able to handle this also using plugins or build in components. If you know how to write URL rewrites, this should be fairly easy. Any time you move a page or change a folder on your site, always use a 301 redirect.
Posted in Redirects | Tags: 301 Redirect, htaccess | No Comments »
March 28th, 2009
Although this question can’t be answered specifically, the answer depends on the hardware and operating systems running, and maybe even on the version of MySQL as MySQL upgrades, but generally you should be allowed somewhere at least above 2 gigabytes (GB). Anything above this and your MySQL database is rather large, and a lot of times may even be dependent on the size that your hosting service allows (which could be less than 2 GB).
At this point, especially for basic websites this would be very hard if not almost impossible to achieve and could make backing up the database a little harder, but at the standard user level this is something that will not have to be worried about. I have one site with hundreds of posts, and the MySQL database size is only about 3.6 MB, so you shouldn’t have a problem. MySQL is very efficient in many areas including this one. Some hosts, in particular free ones, may limit the size you may have to something like 10MB.
Posted in MySQL | Tags: Databases | No Comments »