Guide to Web hosting for all businesses

Broadband

Broadband has enormous benefit for business, home users and students, giving prompt connections to the Internet, the opportunity to utilize broadband telephony (Voice over Internet Protocol - VOIP) and download video on demand.

Broadband can be connected 24 hours a day so there is no delay while you wait for a dial up connection. Broadband does not tie up your phone line, so you can make and receive calls while using the Internet. The cost of your Broadband connection will be determined by the speed of service that you require, and your estimate of the amount of material you send and receive. You decide how much you spend. Your internet service provider (ISP) can help you choose the package that best suits your needs.

The speed of Broadband greatly improves productivity for business, regular users, home users and students. Businesses can gain from the potential additional business, from other businesses or individuals around the world whom they may not have reached with traditional marketing. In reality, your office is open for business 24 hours a day to take enquiries and orders.

Students can take advantage of faster access speeds, a greater range of downloadable material and less time gathering online research material. Home users can benefit from the increased ease of communication, and the type of information they can send and receive. Stay in touch with family and friends sending photographs and video as well as standard emails. Study, shop, bank, pay bills and job search on line, save on telephone bills and view video on demand.

Broadband allows you to do all the things you are able to do with a dial-up connection, but faster and more cost effectively. The main selling point for broadband services is the upload and download speeds but what are the other benefits? And are there disadvantages?

What are IPs and ISPs?

• You’ll come across these two terms regularly in the context of Internet Connections. Imagine there are a number of people sitting around a table, two of them called Bill. If you direct a question to Bill, they may both respond at once. Although you could then explain which Bill you wanted, a computer can’t do this. Unless the names are unambiguous, conflicts occur and the network will stop working.
• Every computer on a network requires an identifier so that it can communicate with the other computers on that network. This identifier must also be unique for every computer on the network to avoid the scenario above.
• The Internet is also a network (the largest in the world) and creating these unique names becomes increasingly difficult. These unique identifiers are known as IP addressesand are made up of four groups of up to 3 digits each group seperated by a fullstop. An example is 192.168.0.1
• Most home computers won’t have an IP address and even business networks utilize IP addresses that although unique within the network are usually in the same range as other business networks. This is why an ISP is used to connect to the Internet.
• ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. Your Internet Service Provider is the company that you utilize to offer your connection to the Internet. With a dial-up connection you dial a computer at your ISP and they then offer you with an IP address so that web pages can be delivered to you. This IP address is different each time you dial up.
• With a broadband connection, you are connected to an ISP all the time and it is possible that you will have a static IP address. In other words your computer will have an address that is unique across the Internet.

Why do you need an ISP with a broadband connection?

• If as it says above, you can have a unique IP address, then surely you can communicate directly with other computers without the need of an ISP?
• The fact is that an ISP is still responsible for assigning an IP address. ISPs must register with the authority that regulates the Internet and obtain a range of IP addresses that they can then assign to subscribers.
• In addition ISPs also offer other vital services such as Domain Name Lookup. This basically involves querying huge databases of IP addresses so that you can find other web pages across the Internet. Your computer might have a unique address but no other computers on the network will know about it.

Can I still utilize my existing email and web site addresses with broadband?

• Another service provided by your ISP is to redirect mail and web page requests.
• You’ll find that most ISPs offer a mail forwarding service for little or no cost. This means that no matter who your ISP is, your email address of myname@myname.com can still be used to get email.
• The way it works is that when you sign up with an ISP they will give you an email address as part of the service and a ‘mailbox’ on their server. If you then tell them that you have an existing email address that will enter that address and your new address into a global database. So when someone sends an email to myname@myname.com the domain name lookup service will find this email address in the list and forward any email to your new address. It then arrives in your mailbox at the ISP where you can dial in and receive it.
• Web forwarding works in the same way.

What are the implications of an always on service?

• Apart from faster upload and download speeds, a broadband connection provides you with an always on service. This dispenses with the need to dial a number and get connected (often a lengthy process).
• The fact that its always on opens up many possibilities in terms of how you utilize services on the Internet. For example, if you currently utilize a dial-up connection you wouldn’t dream of looking up a telephone number on an Internet directory if you were in a hurry. However, with a broadband connection, you could have this directory open just as if it was another program on your computer.
• Other applications that spring to mind are online dictionaries and language translators. You can also utilize your web space just like another storage area and so have a reasonably high speed remote backup facility.
• So essentially, a broadband connection means that suddenly you have access to an almost limitless number of applications from your PC.
• This is just an idea of what you could do using existing applications on other web sites, but you could also have access to your computer from anywhere else (as you can have a static IP address). So if you were working away from home or office and needed some files, you could get then directly from any other Internet connected device.
• This latter scenario does come at a price though. Once you have a static IP address, you’ll find that lots of people will also want to try to get access to your computer. Often this isn’t malicious - they are looking for places they can store files (often of a suspect nature) for their friends to download.

Security and Networks

If you have an office network, and indeed if you want to connect up several computers at home to share a broadband connection, you have to be more aware of the security implications.

You may decide that the computer connected directly to the outside world will not have any sensitive information on it but if this is part of a network the fact that you will want to share files and connections means that there may be ‘holes’ in the security.

We would recommend that if you are serious about broadband then you should set up a home or office network (this doesn’t have to be very expensive) and utilize a piece of software to control access to the ‘outside world’. One such piece of software is called WinRoute which actually assigns random IP addresses to all information coming out of your network so that no one outside can tell the real IP address of your computer. This means they can’t get past this software and do anything further with your system. WinRoute also comes with its own email server so you’ll be able to send emails around the house or office.

On top of this it’s more important than ever to invest in some decent anti-virus software and to keep this up to date. (Remember you’ll probably be downloading far more than you ever did with your dial-up connection).