These are notes on how this web site works.
There are several things you need to know to run a web site. None of them are hard, but they are not all commonly known. Creating a web site involves:
Domain names are registered through any of hundreds of companies around the world. They can charge any annual fee they want to, but because it is easy to move a domain name from one company to another, competition keeps the prices in check. Our domain name is registered with GoDaddy.com.
Our domain name is "ncha.info". The URL for our web site is "http://ncha.info".
Brad registered our domain name on February 6th, 2004, and the fees have been paid to register it for three years. It was renewed for two years in 2007. Sometime before February of 2009 we will need to make arrangements to renew the domain. The 2004 price to renew a domain name is $9.95 per year.
You can check on the current status of the domain by going to http://whois.info and entering "ncha" in the search box. This will show who the current registrant (owner) of the domain is, and when the registration will expire.
You can read more about domain names at GoDaddy's domain basics web page.
It is possible to have a web site without owning, or paying for, a domain name. I don't know of any free domain names, but subdomains and other kinds of urls are often free. Lesliesfunkystuff.tripod.com is an example of a subdomain within the tripod.com domain.
In order for people to see our web site we need to store the web pages on a computer that is running a web server. While it is possible to serve web pages from your home computer, it is better to use a web hosting service. The web hosting service is available 24-hours a day, has a very fast network connection, and is professionally managed to minimize the chance that the computers crash.
Wade set up our current web hosting account with GoDaddy. We bought one year of service on November 29th, 2004 for about $38. This has been renewed and is paid through some time in February of 2009.
The most common price for small, ad-free, web sites is currently $9 per month.
There are places that will host the web sites of non-profits for free. These tend to want a line on each page saying something like "Free web hosting by ...". Switching to a "free" site would take extra work on our part to make sure every page acknowledges our sponsor.
1 2 Wonder Web Services offers free web hosting for non-profits, and their definition of "non-profit" seems broad enough to include NCHA. There is some lead time on having the organization reviewed to see if we qualify for a free web site. If someone wants to investigate this further we could save the web hosting charges of $38 per year, but we would still have to pay the domain name fees.
We have GoDaddy's "Economy Plan" for web hosting. This plan includes other services such as e-mail boxes and sub-domains.
The easiest way to buy web services is with a VISA card. With a modest amount of advance planning we can send a check drawn against the NCHA account to GoDaddy and they will hold the money in a "good as gold" account. This account can be used to pay for the domain name and the web hosting. They will not accept checks smaller than $100. This will cover about two year's service.
We have an account with GoDaddy to manage our domain name and web hosting. The account number and its password need to be kept secret.
Web pages are written in HTML. There are web pages on how to write HTML. Many word processors can save a document in HTML.
It is important that the file names end with either ".html", or ".htm". The web server may do strange things with other endings.
Slashes, backslashes, and colons in a file name can keep a web server from finding and serving a page. Spaces and other strange characters in a file name can make it difficult to upload the web page. Try to restrict file names to lowercase English letters, numbers, and the characters dash, underscore, and period ("-", "_", and ".").
The content of the web site is placed on GoDaddy's computers using FTP. FTP stands for file transfer protocol. FTP is available on most computers, but it is different enough from computer to computer that instructions can't be written that will work for everyone.
Use ftp to copy files to www.ncha.info. Using ftp requires a user ID and password. This is a different user ID and password than the one that controls the domain name, and the web hosting service.
You have to be quick. GoDaddy will cut off the connection if the correct user ID and password are not received within 15 seconds of connecting.
All uploading of pages should go through one person to reduce the chance that an upload overwrites an existing page.
Information on how often our web site is referenced can be found at: http://www.ncha.info/stats
Go Daddy now requires a password on the stats directory. nchastats:NCHA2004a.
You can contact Wade at
web@ncha.info
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