Hosting.

Assuming you have registered your domain and have control over it you can go shopping.

Space is not an issue if you don't have a rather large picture collection. To put it in perspective Departures-Arrivals.com our travel domain has about 1500 page growing to 10.000 in the next half year and all we use is about 6MB space and 10 databases using another 12MB.

Bandwidth is to a certain extend but again if it's not graphic intensive or doing video streaming 1GB month is great for starters.

I strongly recommend to have unlimited subdomains , domain pointing, MySql, PHP, CGI, mail accounts and redirects with a front-end that is called cpanel. Also they should have multiple failover / best routing Internet connectivity.

Next is to check if the provider has a growth path. Why? OK so you set up on a shared account and traffic builds nicely, you want to move out of the pool into a smaller one and maybe go it alone soon.

To put it into perspective I buy a nice start account for up to 5000 uniques a day in the US for $6 and in CAD for the same. Next one up is a shared server with a maximum of 4 users to it (80$), after that go it on your own server (250$). All these are fully managed.

So how do I do it?

Here is a rough guide to serious ecom provision.

1. Set up domain on Register.com.
2. Get account on US provider.
3. Build out site. Install backup or take backup copy regularly.
4. Set up second account with a different provider very often CAD to which I will refer as shadow.
(Or make sure there is an updated access to an alternative ISP who can set up an account very fast)
5. Load live site to shadow.
6. Fully test shadow by using direct IP.
7. Write document to have all above handy when needed. Load document to various locations on the net (PW secured and/or encrypted) so I or the client has access at all times.

As I do both run my own sites and work for a select few of clients I have plenty of scope to test without having to revert to client sites to do so.

At the first sign of trouble I simply update the shadow with the latest version and if the db's are not synced upload a db backup.

No resolution time or answer within 60 minutes I switch DNS to shadow. As register is also a backbone DNS provider it usually takes about 4 hours for all intermediate caching to update and the domain is back in full business running on shadow.

Depending on what is going on I may simply replace some pages with temporary closed due to update notes on the "old" ISP.

Similar if a client suspects or tells me she/he experience trouble I simply start the switch procedure. It takes the pressure off immediately and all sides involved can than sort it out without undue pressure.

This is also very handy when the feared major upgrade is imminent. The shadow gets loaded with the new version and can be tested completely independently.

For peace of mind there are a range of very cheap services out there that test a site every 60 minutes or less and send alerts (SMS) and a nice little report once a week. These also show potentially deteriorating services in form of longer and longer average response times.

Contact me if you want to know more or even if you you are just curious.

How to run the Domain click here

PS MBGJ.ORG makes no profit on domain registrations as we use a slightly expensive but absolutely stable service provider from Rgister.com who has no nonsense registrations and no advertising etc.