 |
| Home |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Our Place | The Gallery | We Live Here | Genealogy Stuff | Holiday Destinations |
Liz ran the Potters Arf to raise money for Douglas Macmillan Hospice. Thank you to all sponsors! Not sponsored me yet? Still time to donate - click below. |
|
|
Race Pictures here. |
|
In this release 07/09/2008 
|
| Christmas Newsletters |
| Links and Resources |
| Technical Home |
| Louise's Cross-country |
| Trust PW-4105 UPS |
| Internet Domains |
Your own Internet Domain
The Problem
So, you've got yourself a nice website. You've spent a lot of time and effort on the content, but there's something nagging away at you in the back of your mind.Getting up and running on the web is all too easy these days. It can be free, too, if you are prepared to be flexible about the product and the levels of service.
But there are potential problems for some, and they might cause bigger problems than you might imagine. If you live the modern throw-away lifestyle, where people buy and dispose of mobile phones, have web-based email accounts all over the place, take advantage of free offers left, right and centre, it might not matter to you.
But ... what if you've become reliant on your email address either for personal or (worse) for business use? What if your website develops from a casual "let's see what we can do", so a serious hobby or (again, worse) a business site? What if all this is based on "freebies" from a whole host of suppliers, who have no interest in levels of service, or interoperability between the various services that you use, and you have just realised that you've become dependent on it all?
What if your ISP goes bust? Very often, your website and email accounts will go with it! Of course, you could just go out and sign up with another provider, and then it will be "business as usual", won't it? Well, no, actually, it won't. None of this might be a problem for you; but then again, it might just be a disaster.
What you can do about it
There is a whole host of technology and components involved in serving web pages and transmitting and receiving emails. You need to understand the various components, decide who should be responsible for each, and set things up so that you are in control, and not the latest 'me too' supplier of low quality Internet services.For most people there are three services that need to be managed:
- Connection to the Internet.
- Running a website.
- Sending/receiving email.
You are just a number - but that's OK
All computers that connect to the Internet are assigned a numeric address by their ISP. For convenience it is described as 'dotted-quad' such as 83.104.233.40, which is our (current) IP address, provided by Demon. If you want to connect to a web or mail server and you know it's IP address, you can just type it in and go...Numbers are not very friendly or descriptive, though. In general, you will also have a name such as ladymoor-gate.demon.co.uk which maps on to the IP address. In the example given, ladymoor-gate is our account name with Demon. They provide a name within their own domain of demon.co.uk for us.
You now don't have to remember our IP address, just our name. As we are based at Ladymoor Gate Farm, it's becoming a little more intuitive, hopefully.
This is all very well unless you realise that both the IP address and the name ladymoor-gate.demon.co.uk belong to and are controlled by Demon.
What if we want to or are forced to change ISP? A new ISP will give us a new IP address, so we'll be back on the net surfing again 'no problem', but if we archived our old website and loaded it onto the server at our new ISP, we still have a problem - no one will know where it is any more. The IP address has changed, and so has the URL. In our case, it will be something like ladymoor-gate.newisp.co.uk - it could be a real problem. Our email address will have changed too.
Get your own Domain Name
If you get your own Domain Name you are protected from all this. Getting your own Domain Name will do two things for you:- Give you independence from your ISP.
- Give you a more relevant Domain Name.
So I decided to buy our own Domain Name based on "The Sticks". I used Go Daddy to search for and buy thesticks.org . It was quick, easy and cheap.
It is true that there's a certain amount of configuring to be done, but it didn't take me long to set-up the account so that if you entered www.thesticks.org, you were forwarded to our server transparently.
Now it is entirely possible that I won't live at The Sticks for the rest of my life, so there's on more thing to do; and that's get a better, site-independent email address. We searchedGo Daddy again and came up with themailbox.name. So now you can send us emails to personATthemailbox.name We are now independent of our ISP, not that we are planning on changing at the moment. Although Demon are not the cheapest, they have provided us with good service in the past, and we are content to stay with them for now.
Issues
At the moment, in order to receive mail directly with SMTP, our server has to be on 24/7. It is at the moment, as it's our Web server, but if the machine goes down, which it does from time to time, the mail will bounce. There are ways of dealing with this, but you may need a backup mail server.Go Daddy provides mail accounts and hosting for websites. If you get your Domain from them, they will throw in a free email account. This can be configured (via MX records) to first of all attempt to send you mail via SMTP, and then, if it can't (presumably because your PC is down and out), it will store the message on their server for you to view / download later.
You can also get Go Daddy to forward mail from one account to another. So for example, if it can't send the mail to you immediately, it can forward it to your usual POP3 account (possibly with your ISP) for safe storage and later downloading. This is what we do at the moment. So, ideally the mail gets delivered immediately via SMTP. If this fails for any reason, it gets passed on to Demon for us to download using POP3 (which we do every 10 mins). This is reasonably robust.
I like Go Daddy. They have a great can-do attitude. They are helpful and reasonably priced.
Help and advice
If you need help or advice, you can email me and I'll try to sort you out. If you need a lot of help, I might ask for a few beers in exchange, though.Go to the top of this page
You may contact us at
 |
| There have been 321 hits on this page | This page was last modified: October 14 2007 17:07:04. |