I-Primer

What is: a web site, hosting, dial-up, URL, search engines and meta tags, and all the other important questions- explained in English.
A web site is a lot like a yellow pages ad in a global phone directory. The difference is- there are no categories or single index- it’s a tangled web of different sites with many different interconnections.
Your site can be as simple as a yellow pages ad. A static page or pages, with pictures, copy and contact information. The other end of the spectrum is a database driven fully interactive site with constantly changing data. The difference between the two is driven by how much money you have and how well your customers needs can be solved on the web.
Most sites are found because someone saw it in an ad and went to the url (uniform resource locator) by typing it in- for example www.thenextwave.biz or by getting an e-mail with the url attached or a link from another site.
URL’s need a little explanation. The internet doesn’t really use letters to find your site- your site is actually a number- but remembering something like 66.96.238.136 doesn’t come naturally to most of us. So when you type in www.nextwavehosting.net your computer sends a message to a domain name server that keeps records of what numbers go with your name and quickly sends the number back to your computer so it knows where to go.
Domain names are pretty important, if you go to sony.com you expect to find Sony Corporation, makers of TV’s. computers etc. Your domain name is critical to your business- the shorter the better, the closer it is to your business name or a description of your services the easier it is for your customers to remember.
The suffix, .com, .net, .biz etc. are run by different registrars. We can help you find if your name is available, and help you register it for less than what most people can (we typically register names for $20 a year while others charge $35). You can have multiple names pointing to your site- and multiple suffixes. We don’t charge extra to point additional names- as many as you want to register — we’ll point. There is no difference to which suffix you choose except that some are reserved for special groups (.edu for education, .gov for the government etc). Be warned, there is one outfit called .new who have a whole bunch of neat suffixes available, but they aren’t understood by a majority of users (we only use universal urls).