How do we put up this site?

 

Occasionally we receive questions from friends who want to put up their own web site, and are curious about how we put up ours. Here's what you'll need:

  • A way of connecting to the Internet. If you're looking at this page, you probably already have an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This company gives you a way of connecting to the Internet and the World Wide Web. Some ISPs offer a limited web site service; you'll need to check with your ISP.
  • A web browser. You usually get this from your ISP or (intrusive federal meddling notwithstanding) preinstalled with Windows. We like Microsoft Internet Explorer.
  • A domain name of your very own. We recommend giving serious consideration to getting a .com address instead of a .org address. Our friend Bruce Oberg has oberg.org, and he complains that his less technogically savyy relatives keep going to oberg.com (some manufacturing company) or else to oberg.org.com (since everybody knows all web site addresses end in .com, right?).
  • A web server on which to put the files that make up your site.
  • A web publishing program like Microsoft FrontPage. You can also use Microsoft Office 2000, although we haven't tried this ourselves. Microsoft Internet Explorer comes with something called Microsoft FrontPage Express, but it's just a flimsy little toy and isn't worth bothering with.

We use Pair Networks to host the fabulous home of all things Miksovsky. I selected them on our friend Brian Fleming's recommendation, and we know he's a meticulous comparison shopper in these sorts of decisions. The bottom line is that, at the time we signed up, Pair had much lower prices than everyone else, and offered reliable service. We've been with them for over two years, and their rates are still competitive.

Pair offers steep discounts for people willing to sign up for a long subscription. We signed up for three years, and am paying something like $16/month for their advanced account. This includes the ability to use FrontPage to create the pages on our site, which we view as a requirement. Pair Networks is not an ISP, they just host web sites. A number of ISPs offer web site hosting on the side, but we like using a company whose primary business is just hosting web sites.

Signing up with them is very easy, and is done entirely on the web. We probably got through it in half an hour. If you're setting up a new domain, Pair (and other hosting companies) will help you register the domain name with the appropriate authorities, although you will be billed separately by those authorities (as of this writing, around $75 to register the name). After signing up, our web site was up and running (under a temporary address) three or four days later, and our official web site address was registered a few days after that.

We've been very happy with Pair Networks so far, and have no problem recommending them.

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