[Courses] [Domains] Conclusion of domain names lessons (Mary)

[Steven Walker]

>
>This is the fifth and last lesson in the domain name courses series.


First thanks for the excellent resource you have prepared, it must have 
taken a lot of work. When you announced the subject I thought that I knew 
it all but there were all sorts of considerations that had not occurred to me.

As a hobbyist with low turnover sites my needs are different from those of 
most web hosts but several thoughts occur to me:


>  3. Shell access via telnet or ssh.

As a Linux user I like to do as much as possible myself. It is almost 
impossible to get a shell account with low cost hosting. I think the 
security aspects make it not worth the trouble for $100 pa. Apart from 
anything else it would be nice to be able to access my own server from the 
outside.


>  - you might host your machine non-commercially, for example on your home
>    broadband connection or at yours or a friend's workplace

That is what I do and when I go away for more than a week or so I move the 
server to the house of a buddy who hosts it on his ADSL. There is a day's 
down time each time I change the DNS and relocate the machine but it all 
works.

Finally it took me a little while identify most of the problems of hosting 
my own web pages without running a domain (now that would be a good 
course). My router would respond to any local request to the public IP 
address or the domain name. A quick edit of the hosts file sent the 
requests for the domain name to the local IP address. This totally confused 
the Movable Type blogging software http://www.movabletype.org/ as some 
addresses are relative and others are absolute. The effect of this is that 
sometimes the only way to add to the blog is to do it from outside the 
local network.

Steve