Web Hosting, Finding the Best Deal

Looking for a good place to put your website can be maddening. There are tons of places out there offering various deals. If you pick up slick tech magazines you are likely to see nice full page ads for hosting giants. So what is the best deal?

After looking I found HostMonster. These guys have a really good deal. Cleary has several websites which are hosted on HostMonster's servers. Here are some of the features I really like about HM.

600 Gigs of space:

When I first signed up it was 300 Gigs. It is moving up.

Host unlimited domains:

This means you can create one HM account and put lots of domains on it. On a later post I will talk about multiple website stategy. You will need to pay for registration, an annual cost, for each additional domain you want. But that is a nominal fee.

Unlimited email accounts:

Just plain nice. I forward all my email to GMail (Wow! Another article for later.)

6,000 Gigs of transfer per month

That's 6 Terabytes. That's HUGE! This is one of the main reasons I chose HM. We wanted to podcast sermons, both audio and video. Monthly transfer was really a bottleneck for quite a while. This gigantic allowance for transfer is awesome.

SSH or Secure SHell

I am a *nix guy. I like doing stuff from the command line and creating my own web pages. This was a nicety for me.

Finally the price. At a cost of $5.95 per month you cannot beat it. You do need to front the money for two years, $142.80 total. This is truly a bargain.

After signing up I discovered their online support chat is really pretty good. The folks are friendly and knowledgeable. I have not had an issue they could not resolve quickly. Most recently I wanted my account moved from an old server, with PHP 4, to a new server with PHP 5. No sweat. All of the request was online and it was done in a short amount of time.

They also have a nice affiliate program. So if you click on a link to HostMonster on this page and set up an account I will get $65.00. Once again, not a bad deal.

Overall, HostMonster is a good host with a great price.

-Ken

God is good all the time!

Fast, Free Web Content Filtering

We are in the process of putting up a WiFi Hotspot in our Activities and Recreation Center. One of our concerns is how to prevent folks from using the church link to hit inappropriate sites. There are a myriad of different ways to do this: appliances, open source gateways, lists, etc.

No one way will catch everything. When you add cheap and/or easy into the mix your options are even more severely limited.

While surfing recently I came across a very cool new site: ScrubIT. This is a DNS service free of charge that acts as your web content filter. It is really a very nice service.

Go into your router and change the DNS settings to:

Primary 67.138.54.100

Secondary 207.225.209.66

Ensure you have this pair of DNS servers being sent to your DHCP clients.

There are some obvious ways around this; though, I won't give them away here. However, for a free service, this will keep most of the folks from leaving the straight and narrow path.

-Ken
God is good all the time!

How to Use Blogger

I believe one of the most obvious ways for a church to use technology is a website. Blogger is an excellent, free way to make this happen.

Why have a website? Well, doesn't everyone? Seriously, the main reason to have a website is so you can give information to the public easily, quickly, and conveniently. In an upcoming post I'll discuss why Cleary Baptist Church has a blog.

Here's the How To:

Create a Google Account and a Blog

1. Go to Blogger.com.









2. If you do not have a Google account, create one. If you do have a Google account, sign in.








3. Choose a name for your blog. The name is important. However, it can be changed later. If you do decide to change it later, you may have some web pages saved in search engines with your old name. So, like the knight said in Indiana Jones, "Choose wisely."





4. Choose the blog address (URL) for your blog. You don't want to change this. Definitely put some thought into this before you type in any old thing.

5. Once you've chosen your blog name and address, choose a template. At this point it really doesn't matter. When you get going you can change templates out easily. This blog is not using the template I originally chose.






6. Voilà! Your blog is created. It is really that simple. Get in and play around with all the tools. Become familiar with them and use them. We will discuss lots of the Blogger features in later posts.







Set Up a Custom Domain

7 . Now for some coolness. The address I chose for this blog was clearytech.blogspot.com. That is a mouthful. It would be easier for someone to type/remember clearytech.com. So, lets make this blog respond to that address. First thing is to go to GoDaddy.com and grab your domain. This is very cheap, about $10 per year.

8. Once you have registered your domain choose your new domain.








9. Click on the Total DNS Control and MX Records link in the middle of the page.

10. The only block you will be modifying is the CNAMES (aliases) block. Remove all the hosts and add back yourdomain.com and www. Make sure each alias point to ghs.google.com and has a TTL (time to live) of 1/2 hour. Keep refreshing this window until no actions are pending.





Test Your Custom Domain

11. At this point ping your new domain name. If you are a *nix weenie (like I) you know what to do. If you are a Mac dude I am afraid you are out of luck. I suspect you click a button and it does it. I, however, cannot tell you as I do not know. In windows open a command window by pressing and holding the windows key + R. This pops up a Run box. Type in cmd and hit the ENTER key.


In your newly opened command window make sure you flush your DNS cache by typing ipconfig /flushdns. This will ensure when you do the next step you are getting a good look at what everyone else will see.



12. Now you want to ping yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. When you do make sure you see something like ghs.google.com answering both pings. If you do see that you can move forward with your next step.



Configure Blogger to Recognize Your Custom Domain

13. In Blogger, go to Settings->Publishing. There you will see an option to switch to a custom domain. Do that and choose Advanced Settings.







14. In the spot for your domain, put in your newly purchased and pinged domain. Ensure the box that asks if you want to redirect to yourdomain.com is checked. Finally, you do not want to use a missing files host. Once that is saved, you should be able to go to your blog at yourdomain.com as well as www.yourdomain.com.





Start Posting!

That's it. Lots of steps there. Hopefully you will find them all in order and easy to follow. If you have found this useful and would like to contribute you are welcome to purchase something from the Cleary Wish List and send it to:

Cleary Baptist Church
c/o Tech Team
1580 Florence Byram Rd
Florence, MS 39073

You know, this being a church and all, this would be a tax write off!

Thank you. look for more soon!

-Ken
God is good all the time!

Welcome

Welcome to this how to blog. I am the tech guy at a mid-sized church in rural Florence, MS. Currently we are running several websites: Cleary Baptist Church, Cleary Countdown, and Sold Out Students. We are trying to make the most of technology. Much of this I have had to discover on my own. And now I would like to share.

I have several completed, in progress projects currently. We are working on several others. As time goes on and I figure more stuff out I will post the details here.

So, if you are your church's resident geek, or would like to be, read on.