Web Hosting for Dummies

by Peter Pollock

Host your own website or blog with this unique guideIf you'd like to make the leap from a hosted environment to a self-hosted service, this book is for you. You may be making the move from casual blogging to professional blogging. Or, you might already be self-hosting, but want a good guide to show you how to get more out of your plan. In simple, easy-to-understand language, this helpful book breaks down all the functions of web hosting for self-hosted users, from setting up new e-mail accounts to backing up and securing your site, analyzing server logs, choosing a platform to install, and more.Breaks down the functions of web hosting for new self-hosters, including casual bloggers who may be moving into professional blogging Helps those who are already self-hosting maximize the services they are paying for Offers a one-stop, complete resource on web hosting, rather than just a few chapters, as in many blogging books Covers setting up and using e-mail accounts, working with FTP clients, backing up and securing sites, using cloud services, understanding domains and DNS, using built-in databases, and more Web Hosting For Dummies helps you take charge of your own web hosting and having fun in the process!

Genres: Nonfiction

360 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Peter is a blogger, author, stay at home dad, speaker, web hosting trainer and geek (he was so excited to get an iPad that he made up a song and dance about it). He is English by birth, but currently lives in California with his wife and three children.

Peter ran a web hosting business for nine years and has been building websites for even longer than that.

He has fallen in love with WordPress (possibly a little TOO much) and doesn't understand why anyone would use anything different to build a site!

His passion is to help others achieve their goals with their websites/blogs - and he believes that, with a little help, anyone can have an awesome site.

Reviews

[Adrianna Domingos-lupher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether you want to learn how to run the behind-the-scenes of your website or just want to be able to talk intelligently to your service providers, you need to read this book.

In true For Dummies style, you can choose to read this book cover to cover or pick it up as a reference to guide you through task-by-task. For the purpose of this review, I opted to read the book cover-to-cover, but you might not want to read it quite the same way.

The first six or seven chapters work perfectly as a read through; you'll want to go back and take notes, but overall you'll come away with a much clearer understanding of the basics. Chapters 7 through 16 are a little more advanced and you may want to take them a step at a time while actively sitting in front of your computer. I had to sit on my hands to force myself to focus on reading rather than immediately starting to apply my new skills in my cPanel.

Chapters 17, 18, and 19 comprise the standard For Dummies Part of Tens and you'll find 10 Invaluable Free Apps, 10 Things Your Host Won't Help With (for free), and 10 Essential Online Resources. Who doesn't love a top ten anything?

Another invaluable part of this book (as if I've found any of it to be less valuable), are the appendices. Peter provides diagrams for four of the most popular cPanels to ensure that you can apply your newly acquired web hosting knowledge to your specific hosting solution.

All in all, I consider this a must own for your professional development library. Not only is it a fun read (I laughed aloud several times while reading it resulting in really weird aren't-you-reading-a-reference-book-look from my spouse), it's a book you'll keep coming back to time and again.

[David Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book I read to research this post was Web Hosting For Dummies by Peter Pollock which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. There are 3 major types of hosting your website or blog. Hosted is when a company like wordpress let you have some kind of site that they look after, and it often entails joining a website. There is often a relatively large amount of rules which you must obey and your options for the site are limited. Web hosted is when you pay a 3rd party to host your website or blog. You have less rules and more options but the nitty gritty of running the site is left for you to sort out. You can usually use open source tools like wordpress & drupal to construct the site. Then there is self hosted where you buy a server and have a dedicated web site on it. This is the most expensive option. Another option is having a virtual server where partitioned space is used for the website and the server is also for other jobs or websites on different partitions. Don't be taken in with the idea that a more expensive web hosting company must be better. Many people find the smaller companies which tend to be cheaper provide better customer service. Most web servers use either Linux or Unix and these are a good choice. Most viruses are designed to infect Windows computers & using an unusual operating system excludes a lot of these viruses. Linux also is open source and free. The main reason some people prefer to use windows is they can attach a Microsoft Access database to their website. Many Linux users use the database MySQL which does a similiar job.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, it's a quick yet comprehensible read for a beginner who wants to understand the basic terms and knowledge about web hosting.

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