Build Your Place in Cyberspace

Step 3: Stake out a piece of cyberspace.

There are enough sites on the net to fulfill just about any imaginable need, so naturally there are a few sites devoted to helping you find an Internet service provider (ISP) that will host your Web site. At The List, for example, I found a catalog of 4,200 providers in the United States and Canada. I visited both that site and ISPCheck.com, where I was able to survey ISPs that offer Web-hosting services and to compare costs.

Pricing for Web hosting is, like the Web itself, a free-for-all. Monthly price tags range from $3 to several thousand dollars. There are tiny outfits offering the basics, such as Granite State Internet in Weare, New Hampshire, and large providers offering services throughout the country, such as AT&T WorldNet.

I narrowed my choices by focusing on national ISPs that had a track record, that would be accessible 24 hours a day - and that would still be in business next month. My search yielded two well-known Web-hosting services: MindSpring and Netcom.

Netcom offered to set up my site for an initial charge of $50 ($45 per month thereafter). In return, I'd get 30 MB of storage space and around-the-clock access to my Web site. MindSpring offered to take care of the domain-name registration and the fee, and to set up a 20-MB, full-access Web space for $120 ($49.95 per month thereafter).

Coordinates: The List, www.thelist.com; ISPcheck.com, www.ispcheck.com; Mind-Spring Enterprises Inc., www.mindspring.com; Netcom On-Line Communication Services Inc., www.netcom.com

Step 4: Lease a piece of the Web.

If your site requires a sophisticated online database to track customers, a place to store thousands of pages of product information, and a direct, high-speed connection, you'll have to pay thousands of dollars for a hosting service. My site didn't need all that, but I did want to include dozens of articles, as well as sound and video clips. So I cobbled together a list of questions to ask the people at MindSpring and Netcom.

How much storage space do I get? I figured that my site would initially take up about 25 pages. It would be mostly text, with a couple of tiny pictures and one 60-second video clip. All that would eat up about 5 MB of storage space, with the video clip alone accounting for almost 2 MB. The moral: If you plan on uploading lots of multi-media bric-a-brac, get as much space as you can afford. I decided that 15 MB would give my site enough room to grow.

How much bandwidth do I get? Bandwidth refers to the amount of information that visitors to your Web site request from your host server. Each time some- one hits your site, the bandwidth demand goes up. If your site remains relatively obscure, then the 2 GB of bandwidth per month that MindSpring allots in its basic package is probably enough to handle all of your traffic. (Netcom's introductory package delivers 1.5 GB per month.)

However, if you put pictures of a naked Pamela Anderson Lee on your Web site, more people will hit your page, your bandwidth will rise precipitously, and you'll end up paying more. Some companies charge as little as 2 cents per additional megabyte of bandwidth; others charge as much as $1.

Since my site would be PG-rated, I decided that the standard allotment would be enough to handle my traffic.

Do you support streaming audio and video? Most of the gee-whiz sounds and animations that pop up on Web sites are simple files - audio clips with WAV or AU extensions, for example, or video clips with MPEG or AVI extensions - that you can download to your own site. But it's easier for visitors if you use streaming audio and video, which plays even as the visitor downloads the file.

I wanted to include streaming audio and video clips on my site, which meant that my Web host had to have the proper server software - such as RealNetworks's RealAudio and RealVideo, or Macromedia's Shockwave. It turned out that MindSpring's basic package supports streaming audio and video. But Netcom requires that you make special arrangements up front to use this technology.

What's your "uptime rating"? It's hard to get a good read on how Web hosts measure up on the customer-satisfaction scale. That's because there's no accepted standard that rates Web-hosting companies. But you can get clued in on their reliability by asking about their uptime rating, which tells you how often they encounter problems (software glitches, electrical outages, hacker attacks) that knock them offline.

When I put this question to several ISPs, I didn't always get a straight answer. Some companies report an outage only when their entire system shuts down - which certainly doesn't help if you're on the part that keeps crashing. So I visited sites that run on the Web hosts that I was considering and emailed inquiries to the sites' creators. It turned out that users were pretty happy with both Netcom and MindSpring.

Coordinates: RealNetworks, www.real.com; Macromedia's Shockwave, www.macromedia.com/shockwave