Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
What You Need to Put Your Portfolio
on the Web
Hosts and ISPs
To simply get access to the World Wide Web from your home or office, you
need to have an
Internet Service Provider (ISP)
. You pay the Internet
service provider for access to the Internet and they provide you with the
connection you need to be wired to the Internet. The Internet service provider
may give you access to the Web using a variety of methods. Each ISP charges
you to use one method of getting on the Internet. This method is a hardware
telecommunications channel that is paid by the user for access to a host server.
Today, people get onto the Internet by using dial up, DSL (digital satellite line),
cable modem, or dedicated T line. Geography dictates availability of different
telecommunications channel's for Web access. Most metropolitan areas
provide a choice of any of the channels listed earlier. Each service varies with
location and cost. Speeds also vary. More remote areas may only have dial up
access using standard telephone connections at 56 kb per second while
metropolitan area Web users will have speeds from 1 MB per second on
average from DSL to 1.5 MB and faster from cable modem connections.
Access time is not only important when surfing the Web but also when you are
uploading files or downloading files from the Internet.
The Structure of the World Wide Web and Hosts
The world wide Web consists of millions of computers that are interconnected
over a distributed network. The population of computers is broken down into
two groups: clients and servers. All servers on the Web can be hit by any client
browsing the Web (Arpajian, 1996). This means that your Web portfolio needs
a server to reside on so that clients can hit your Web portfolio site or any Web
site. That's where
hosts
come in. Slice that we outlined earlier as hosts but are
really specialized for Web portfolios. A true most provides a Web-based
control panel which allows more extensive site manipulation and many technical
templated features. These features may include SQL Server capabilities, chat
rooms or message boards, hit counters, CGI scripts, and customized FTP
settings for uploading files and securing folders. All hosts will provide server
