Website Administration

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• Website Administration
• For Business Owners
• Jason Flenniken
• Owner, Cadence Interactive, LLC.
• jason_at_cadenceinteractive.com

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What?

• What type of hosting do I need?
• Where should I host?
• What tools can I use to manage my site(s)?
• Whats the best platform?
• How can I prepare for disaster?
• Resources

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Types of Hosting

• Shared
• Semi-dedicated (Virtual Hosting)
• Full dedicated server

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A hundreds a crowd.

• Shared hosting involves lots of accounts on a
  single server.
• Pros
• Cheap. Thats about it.
• Cons
• You dont know where that hard drive has been.
• One bad apple spoils the bunch.
• Big Players
• 1and1.com
• Hostgator.com
• Godaddy
• Dotster

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Plays well with others.

• Virtual (Called VPS or Semi-Dedicated) allows a
  few people to share their own server inside a
  server. Its sliced up 2-5 ways.
• Pros
• Benefits of a dedicated server. You can install
  anything you want. Acts like a real stand alone
  server.
• Cost is more than shared, but very reasonable.
• If done right, disaster recovery is easy.
• Cons
• Shared hardware resources with others.
• Other Virtual hosts can slow down the machine
• Big Players
• Godaddy
• ThePlanet.com
• Aplus.net
• Hostgator

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Look Ma, My Own Box.

• Your very own machine. Isnt it shiny?
• Pros
• Complete control.
• All the hardware resources are yours.
• Cons
• Management can be tricky.
• Cost.
• Big Players
• Theplanet.com
• Rackspace
• Hostway.com

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Where to host

• Big boys
• Hostway.com
• Theplanet.com
• Aplus.net
• Hostgator.com
• Rackspace.com
• Godaddy.com
• Be wary of resellers
• If it looks fishy, it probably is.
• You get what you pay for.
• Tophosts.com
• The best indicator? Check user forums at the
  company first. Dont trust sponsored sites or
  ones with ads littered all over them.

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Management Tools

• Types of Sites
• Static vs. Dynamic
• Specialized
• Publishing tool, IDE, or platform?
• WYSIWYG. WYSIWhat? Website building for the
  HTML challenged.

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Static Sites

• Consist of HTML Files
• Manage with editors or publishing tools.
• Editors / IDEs
• Dreamweaver
• Microsofts Expression Web
• Publishing Tools
• Contribute

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Dreamweaver CS3

• Most popular Editor/IDE
• Integrates with other Adobe products
• Code and WYSIWYG editing
• Medium Learning Curve

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Adobe Contribute

• The Microsoft Word of publishing tools
• No HTML knowledge needed
• Easy workflow between authors
• Post from other office tools

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Microsofts Answer Expression Web

• Also known as Front Page 2.0
• Entire suite of products
• Good for MS environments
• Medium learning curve
• Code and WYSIWYG editing

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• Platform Choices

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• OS
• Web and Database server
• How will my files be served?
• Static HTML
• Dynamic
• Content Management Systems
• Specialized Systems
• Control Panels
• Open Source or Commercial?

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Linux or Windows?

• Only really matters in semi or dedicated hosting
• Linux is the most common shared hosting platform
• On dedicated hosting
• Linux has much larger learning curve
• Windows familiar interface, easy to manage

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Infrastructure Choices

• Web Servers
• Apache (50 of all web servers)
• IIS (36 of web servers)
• Databases
• MySQL
• MSSQL
• Programming Languages
• PHP
• ASP
• Java

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Content Management Systems

• Do you need one?
• What is a CMS?
• CMS vs. Blog software vs. ?
• Popular CMSs
• Joomla
• Drupal

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Joomla

• History
• Formally Mambo
• Around since
• Community and Add Ons
• 100k plus sites, very large community
• 2k add ons, many commercial
• What its best for
• What it lacks
• Joomla and SEO

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Drupal

• History
• Community and Add ons
• Powers many popular high visibility sites
• 2k extensions, all free
• What its best for
• What its not
• Drupal and SEO

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Specialized Platforms

• Blog it out
• Wordpress
• Movable Type
• Blog software as a CMS
• E-commerce
• Magento
• OSCommerce
• CRM
• SugarCRM
• Vtiger
• Salesforce
• Many host providers will offer software in a
  can easy to deploy on your site(s)

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Blog ORama

• Ideal for specific purposes
• Can be modified to use as a CMS
• Wordpress, Movable Type most popular
• Many themes available

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Sell Your Stuff

• Hosted or Roll Your Own
• Popular Tools
• OSCommerce
• Magento
• Monster Commerce from Network Solutions

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Whos Selling? CRM Tools

• What's a CRM? Do I need it?
• Open Source vs. Hosted

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Business Needs

• What if I need a blog, CMS, and a CRM?
• Where the lines start to blur
• Difficulties of having multiple systems

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Control Panels

• Types
• Domain
• Hosting/Reselling
• Major Players
• Cpanel
• Plesk

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Cpanel

• Pros
• Full featured
• Very common in shared hosting
• Cons
• Interface can be overwhelming
• Messy on dedicated servers
• Hosting interface is very confusing

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Plesk

• Pros
• Very clean, easy to use
• Smaller footprint on dedicated hosts
• Great backup and migration tools
• Cons
• Not quite as flexible as plesk
• Requires more system knowledge to tweak
  underlying sever

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Open Source or Commercial?

• Why Open Source
• You want lots of options
• Variety of solutions
• Customization
• Cost
• Why Commercial
• Guaranteed Support
• Trust, Availability of actual humans
• Need the power of enterprise level solution

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• Preparing for the Worst

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Oh that would never happen to me

• Until it does.
• What can go wrong?
• Software problems.
• Site hacked.
• Server hacked.
• Hardware failure.
• Data center problem.
• Evil trolls.

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Basic precautions

• BACKUPS.
• Did I mention backups?
• No matter what the platform, get some solution
• 2nd hosting account
• 2nd hard drive
• Something off-site, off ISP
• All the above (this is the correct answer)
• Most control panels offer different levels of
  packaged backups

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• Be thoughtful of where you host DNS
• Host it at a high level
• Most domain registrars offer DNS hosting
  (GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc)
• Why?
• Avoid DNS at a dedicated server level
• Be very clear of your ISPs backup and recovery
  policies. Dont assume ANYTHING.
• Only go with a host that provides 24/7 support,
  and test it.
• Consider Google Apps for mail.
• Use a monitoring service like pingdom.com

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Resources

• Reviews
• Tophosts.com
• Opensourcecms.com
• Cmsmatrix.com
• Forums at any ISP
• Tools
• www.adobe.com
• http//www.microsoft.com/expression/
• www.joomla.org
• www.drupal.org
• Pingdom.com
• Webmasterforums.com
• forums.devshed.com

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• Questions?