RTFVerterra

In my previous post, I talked about the cost of running a small website. The cost calculated in that post is for small e-commerce site that accepts online payments and for website owners who don't have any technical knowledge in building a website. This post will focus about the cost of running a blog. Then you may ask, "What is a blog? Isn't that a blog is a website?". This post is not about blog and blogging, this is about the cost of running one, so here is a link to Wikipedia if you want to know what is a blog.

One of my previous post discuss on how to start your own website. This post will give you an idea on how much a website will cost you.

Small business owners realize the importance of putting up a website for better exposure of their product and/or service. Those who successfully staged their online presence enjoys the many benefits of having a website. Still, many are not doing websites; one of the factors is the cost, not because they can't afford it, but because they don't have any idea on how much it cost. This post will focus on costs in running small websites suited for small businesses.

Choosing which Content Management System (CMS) to use is as daunting as choosing which web hosting to go. Taking a pause and think for a while will pay off in the future. If you are going to search the web, this issue is almost as old as dot com era. Web developers, web designers, and online business owners, will need to choose for a platform to run a particular website. There are many discussion out there talking about this issue, and here am I adding a page in the web, hoping someone will be rightly directed.

If you want to have a space in the internet but you don't know how or where to start, then this post is for you. There are many ways to start your own website and I understand that it is overwhelming at the start. Now let's make it very simple. I am confident that you will learn how to run a website after you finish reading this post. So let's start.

Web host and domain

There are only two things you need in order to run a website: a host and a domain. A host is a computer where you save all your images, files, folders, and web pages. The host must be always ON so that it can serve request/s at any time of the day and night. The host computer is called server. Domain is the web address of your site, anybody can open your website by writing its domain at the browser's address bar. Example of a domain is rtfverterra.com, when you type rtfverterra.com at the address bar, the browser will land at the front page of this blog.

In my previous post, I discuss how to set up a local web server using XAMPP. Now that we have the local server running, we are now ready to install any web platform called Content Management System (CMS) to our local computer. There are tons of CMS available out in the internet. You can purchase one if you like but there are thousands or maybe millions that are free. We have DotNetNuke, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, Moodle, and MediaWiki to name a few. The most popular so far is Joomla. You can download them all if you want and try them all 'til you drop. But if you want to become a professional developer, master only one of the above because you have no enough lifetime to master all CMS.

This "how to" is intended for beginners and for those who want to learn to set up a website but don't have a professional web server. This is also useful for web developers, but this post is not for them, in fact I learned this from them. Some developers used local web server to develop a website and upload it when finished. This is also used by web designers in creating a new theme. You do not need this if you have no desire to learn beyond HTML.

About local web server

Web server is a computer that runs a program that accepts hypertext transfer protocol (http). To make these things simple, try to write in the address bar of your browser the address "rtfverterra.com" without the quote and noticed that it is automatically prefixed with http and the one you typed turned into http://rtfverterra.com/. Local web server resides in your local machine (your computer) with or without internet connection. You can have your own website, but this website is not available in the internet. It has an address of http://localhost/yourwebsite; the "yourwebsite" in the address can be any name.

What is a hard disk partition

Partition is a physical division of hard disk storage space. To make it simple, imagine a large room, divide that room into two or more rooms by putting walls in between. In hard disk, each room is called a partition, each partition can be formatted into any file system and can store any information, and each will logically act as different hard disk. If you partition your hard disk, it will look as if you have more than one hard disk installed in your unit.

What is Linux?

Linux is an operating system (OS) developed by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus released his source code under GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). The source code can be freely modified and redistributed commercially and non-commercially by anyone under the GNU GPL. Then what is an OS and how it works? So many questions, huh... When you turned on your computer, the processor will trigger the Basic Input Output System (BIOS), the BIOS will then look for the the boot device (it can be your CD/DVD, floppy disk, flash drive, but mostly hard disk). An OS must be in the boot device and when it loads you can see that the computer opens. In simple terms, OS is the one that will make your computer open. This statement however underestimates OS, and unacceptable in real sense. I recommend the following articles for more information: (a) Operating system (b) Windows Bootup Process

Secure site is mandatory not an option. Keeping your Drupal web site up-to-date is the best way to secure it. Periodically, Drupal.org will release a new upgrade, most of the time, it is a security update. Once a new release is announced, you need to upgrade immediately to avoid some serious trouble.

Upgrading a Drupal website is simple, but you need to backup everything, specially your database, before going with any upgrade. There is one very important thing I want you to note in upgrading your Drupal website.

Web badge is useful in link building specially if you are running a community website. Let your community copy a code and post it anywhere. The code is of course contains link back to your site. You also need to create web badges if you are going to do traffic campaign. Your badge will make it easy for others to link to your site. The process of creating a badge are as follows: (1) create an image and upload the image to your server, and (2) create a code that your readers may copy. As an example, I created a 125px × 125px badge that will link back to this blog.