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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week July
14, 2005 |
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The changing costs of the Internet
The last
series I did on creating websites and their associated costs was back in
2001, and everything has changed now. It’s hard to watch tv without seeing ads for companies like http://www.register.com offering web
hosting for as they say – less than then cost of a latte per month, or
$ 4.95, and now your choices of website service providers are even greater. When the
WWW first started back in the early ‘90’s there was one company
authorized to sell website names – Network Solutions http://www.networksolutions.com ..
Now there are literally hundreds of authorized registrars, which means there’s now competition in the marketplace,
and prices have really been driven down. In my 2001
series on websites, the standard price for Domain name registration was $ 70
for 2 years, but there were companies that were charging much more than that,
in the caveat emptor world of the internet. To get
website Hosting – or a place to put your website after you had
registered and bought a domain name – was at a minimum $ 20 month upwards
standard for a minimal 20 mb storage. And after you had bought a domain name
and a place to host it, you had to pay web site developers to create and
maintain your site, which could be hundreds to thousands of dollars, and
ongoing monthly support costs. So just 4
years ago, to register a dotcom domain name for 5 years was around $ 175, and
to get website hosting for 2 years would be around $ 480 for a minimal site,
for a total of $ 655! In 2005,
using http://www.godaddy.com as a
domain name provider and web site hoster, you can
buy a brand new dotcom domain name for 5 years for $ 34.24, and get an
economy web hosting site for 2 years on an annual contract for $
66.00, total cost $ 100.60,
or less than 1/6th of the cost. And this economy
website hosting includes 500 Mb of disk space, 25 gigs of monthly data
transfer, 100 email accounts with email forwarding and spam and virus
protection, web site statistics, and other goodies. From the time you logon
to their site, you can have a website up in a couple of days. Godaddy’s prices are about 1/3rd of the same services
available at http://www.networksolutions.com
. Another
thing that has changed greatly is the ability now for the average business to
create and maintain their own website, without being dependent on programmers
or web development services. Most
of the companies that now offer web hosting also offer free or inexpensive
website creation tools for you to create and maintain your site. If you have
a really complex website, you need an in-house web developer, or use an
outside company. You can
now create a website using the program that most PC users use for word
processing – Microsoft Word – which allows you to save anything
you create as a web page. Last year I did a website for the old Bluesman
Mississippi John Hurt’s family foundation gratis (http://www.msjohnhurtmuseum.com/) and I used
Word to develop this site, and to show the foundation members how they can
update it themselves. When you
read my Raw Bytes transcripts online they’re all done with Word too. Microsoft
is still trying to sell their leading web page program – Frontpage – so they don’t really advertise
how you can use Word to do the same thing, but you can find a lot of
tutorials on Word for Websites on the internet and on Microsoft’s own
site Microsoft's
Creating Web Pages with Word. So the
internet is cheaper and easier – and why aren’t you on it? For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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