Skip to Content
Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition
book

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

by Matthew MacDonald
June 2015
Beginner
620 pages
18h 6m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Chapter 9. Getting Your Site Online

By this point, you know how to build a complete, basic website. You’ve written HTML pages, formatted them with style sheets, incorporated some pictures, and linked everything together. But all this work is for naught if you don’t put your page online so your legions of fans (or your uncle Dan in Fresno) can visit it on the Web.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how web servers work and how to put them to work for you. Armed with these high-tech nerd credentials, you’ll be ready to search for your own web host, a company that lets you park your site on its web server. All you need to do is figure out your requirements, see which hosts offer what you need, and start comparison-shopping.

How Web Hosting Works

As you learned in Chapter 1, the Web isn’t stored on any single computer, and no company owns it. Instead, the individual pieces (websites) are scattered across millions of computers known as web servers. And while it may seem like all these sites are part of a single environment, in reality, the Internet is just a set of standards that let independent computers talk to one another.

Understanding Web Servers

Web servers are the computers that store HTML pages. When you type a web address into your browser, the browser sends your request to the web server that hosts the site. When the server receives the request, it carries out a simple and essential task—it serves the corresponding page to the person who wants it.

For a busy website, this basic task can ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Matthew MacDonald
Web Site Cookbook

Web Site Cookbook

Doug Addison

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449374525Errata Page