PHP is an acronym that used to mean Personal Home Pages and is now known as PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a Unix-based scripting language that has been around for over a decade and is fairly stable and mature. Some PHP applications are vulnerable to hacking, especially if they use global variables or are run in an unprotected environment.

Most Web programmers prefer PHP because it is free, and because the syntax is like C and C++ which they probably know and love. Likewise there is a lot of PHP open software available for free, which can be adapted for various uses.

ASP stands for Active Server Pages, a proprietary Microsoft product that is made to run under Windows operating systems along with IIS, .NET and .COM, MS-SQL and MS-Access. It uses Visual Basic syntax and can incorporate Visual Basic, which is easy for non-C programmers and ordinary folks to learn. .NET and .COM are powerful development frameworks but they require server overhead. ASP and all the other Microsoft goodies cost money, and Microsoft operating systems do not have a reputation for reliability. ASP is a favorite of many large business sites because there are many commerce, inventory and financial transactions written using ASP, making it easy to maintain compatibility with other businesses, and with systems that they may use internally in running their businesses. ASP alone can be run on some Unix servers, but .NET and other satellites usually require a Windows server running IIS.

JSP (Java Server Page) was originally a proprietary technology of Sun Microsystems that more or less fulfills the same functions as asp and php. JSP is now managed by the Java community. JSP implements a Java technology that enables dynamic generation of HTML, XML or other types of documents in response to a Web client request. The technology allows Java code to be embedded into static content. As its name implies, it is an extension of the Java servlet language.

Cold Fusion was originally developed by Allaire as a markup language that allows Web pages to interact with databases. It has been greatly extended by Adobe, which now owns the technology, and probably can compare well with php and asp technology (see http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/proven/ ). It claims to be specially suited for cross-platform development.

Different sources give conflicting advice on what sort of name to choose, because the choice of name depends on the type of Web site or the type of organization it represents. Below, we will try to help you find the strategy that fits you best.

How will people find your Web Site?

The first issue to settle before choosing a name for your site is how people are going to find your Web site. If your site is for a well established business or organization, you probably want to use a Web site that includes your off-line business name, such as www.macys.com/ or www.cnn.com. If you are a large organization or Web enterprise that is going to be known by advertising in the media and word of mouth, then you should choose a unique, easy to remember name like yahoo.com or google.com.

However, if you are small or medium sized site or business you may be depending on Internet search engines to drive traffic to your site. Choosing the right domain name can save you very large sums in advertising and spell the difference between a successful business or informational Web site and failure.

Choosing Top Level Domain Name (Domain Suffix)

There are numerous standard suffixes for Internet domains, including the following major ones:

ac – An academic research institution Web site.

arpa – a Web site of the old Arpanet

biz – A new designation for business Web sites.

com – Company/commercial.

Country specific: us, .nu, .co.uk, – Country-specific domain extensions that localize your site. They may require the owner or person registering the site to be a citizen of the given country.

edu – Educational Web sites.

eu – European Union

info – A relatively new designation for informational Web sites.

int – an international Web site.

gov – A government Web site

name – Can be used for private name Web sites, as for example John.Smith.name

net – Often used for a network of sites

org – Supposedly for non-profit entities.

store – A retail business store.

For a Web site that provides information or is the site of a non-profit organization, .info and .org suffixes may be best, especially if you are depending on search engines to bring people to your Web site. Google and others seem to give more weight to sites with these suffixes. If you are a business, it is generally best to use a .com or .biz suffix. Most people who forget the suffix of a Web site will use the .com suffix.

Choosing a domain name that people will remember

If you are counting on people coming to your Web site by word of mouth and advertising, choose a name that people will remember. It should be brief and special like Yahoo, Google, ebay or Amazon,. and it should be alliterative if possible.

Choosing a domain name by keywords

Most people get to Web sites by searching the Web using Google, Yahoo and other search engines. The search engines retrieve sites and pages for specific search phrases (called keywords) according to many different criteria. The pages with the top listings in search engines get most of the traffic. Studies show that an overwhelming proportion of searchers pick the first site listed by the search engine, and that almost all Web searchers ignore pages that are not in the first ten sites listed for the phrase they were seeking.

The domain name and filename of the page are important criteria for ranking a site in search in search engine results. If you do not have a big advertising budget then you need to invest a lot of though in constructing a domain name that will fit your keywords. For keyword shoes, all other things being equal, Google is going to list shoes.com/shoes.htm above joeblow.com/footwear.htm.

Each major page of your site, including the domain name and main page is going to be optimized for a different and unique keyword combination. If your business is shoes, then the domain name should be optimized for “shoes,” and main pages might be “Men’s Shoes” “Ladies Shoes,” “Children’s shoes,” “walking shoes,” “boots” etc.

Finding the right keywords – If you are constructing a domain name by keywords, choose keywords that:

Describe your product or Web site

Are popular in searches

Are not listed in too many competing Web sites

You can find which keywords are popular through services like Wordtracker or at

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Competition and popular keywords – You can find out how many pages are retrieved by search engines by searching for the keyword. For example, if you type footwear in Google, Google will tell you that it retrieved about 36,800,000 pages for that keyword right now. For shoes, Google retrieves about 216,000,000 pages as of current writing. Competition for “footwear” is less keen than competition for “shoes.” Most of those pages will not in fact be listed by Google, and most pages beyond the first thousand that are actually retrieved are not relevant, but the total number of sites gives you an idea of the competition. It is easy to get to the top Google listings for words that have less than 2 million pages, and very difficult for phrases that have more than a 100 million pages in Google. Overture returns about 880,000 searches per month for keyword shoes (multiply by about 8 or 10 to get the number of searches in Google), but only about 64,000 for keyword footwear.

Checking for existing names – Each domain name must be unique, so you need to check if the domain name you want has already been registered. You can do so at a number of online services such as

www.whois.net – retrieves information about ownership for existing domains, but does not cover all domains.

www.domainsearch.com/ – checks which domain name suffixes are free for a given domain name.

www.nameboy.com/ – suggests names of non-occupied domains for given key words.

www.dynamoo.com/webmaster/choosing_a_domain_name.htm – finds deleted domain names.

Plural or Singular? – Some search engines treat “shoe” the same as “shoes” while others do not. Check carefully when selecting the keyword to use, and use the most popular combination. Google seems to return different results for “shoe” and “shoes.”

What if the domain name is already registered? Chances are, if you choose a popular keyword like “shoes” – the name shoes.com will be taken. Consider alternatives like shoes.biz, or shoes.store, but keep in mind that you must not violate trademark law, and that choosing a domain name similar to an existing one has both advantages and disadvantages in terms of competition. You might consider our-shoes shoes-etc shoes-for-you and similar combinations.

Using separators – Is it better to call your site LadiesShoes or Ladies-Shoes? There are different opinions, depending on whether or not experts believe search engines can parse out the keywords in the names. Better not count on the intelligence of search engine spider robots: put a hyphen between each word.

Keeping out competition for domain names – If you are really serious about “capturing the market” for a domain name or keyword, then you might want to buy up similar domain names. If you are shoes.com, you may want to buy shoes.net, shoes.biz, shoes.store and shoes.us for example. If you are really paranoid, you may also want to register shoessuck.com and other vicious takeoffs.

Buying existing domain names – There are many domain names that are registered, but are not in use, that are for sale. A well known site or business that closed may be interested in selling its name as a business asset. Entrepreneurs have made a business of thinking up names that might be useful to someone and registering them as domain names. You would be surprised at how many domain names are taken up in this way, and offered at premium prices. In most cases, we believe there is no great advantage to be derived from using these name, unless the search word is extremely popular or the brand name is a household word.

What not to do – Don’t use your personal name as a domain name unless people are likely to be searching for it. If you are Jimmy Carter, Paris Hilton, Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce or Alan Dershowitz, it pays to have a Web site in your name. If you are Joseph Nrdspondilowsky, chances are people never heard of you, and your name is not a Web or business asset, unless that is the name of your business. Business names are valuable. Don’t use the name of an existing business as a domain name because you may be sued. Amazon.net domain name might be free, but Amazon owns that brand name.

Most large Web sites have a dedicated IP (Internet Protocol) address that is all their own. If you type the IP address of the Web site in a browser, it will always display the same Web site. Some Web hosting companies, however, use dynamic or shared IP addresses. In the latter case, when a domain name is sent to the server, the server looks up the name and connects to the correct Web site, which may be one of several at the same IP address.

Using one IP address for multiple sites frees up IP addresses, which are becoming a scarce resource. If a site has a shared or dynamic address, when a browser asks for a domain name, the server looks up that domain name and sends the correct page to the browser requesting it. In those cases, you cannot get to a Web site by typing its IP address into the browser.

If you have a business or other site that requires Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protection, for example, for financial transactions, you probably need a dedicated IP address.

There are rumors that search engines discriminate against Web sites with dynamic or shared IP addresses. These rumors have been denied by at least some search engine companies however.

SSL and TLS are technology for secure acquisition of sensitive information from Web site visitors and customers. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. TLS, which is the protocol that is replacing it, stands for Transport Layer Security, but most people still use the old name. SSL/TLS provides a secure, encrypted link between the Web server and the browser of the visitor on his or her computer. It ensures that all data passed between the web server and browser remain private and integral. SSL/TLS is an industry standard. It is used by millions of Web sites to protect transactions.

Given the proliferation of identity theft and of insecure Wi-Fi connections, secure connections are assuming greater importance. For Web shopping carts it is mandatory.

To generate an SSL link, a Web server requires an SSL Certificate. These come in two flavors. An SSL certificate may be generated for a Web site that has its own SSL mechanism or it may be generated for another Web site that offers SSL services. The latter is a shared SSL certificate.

When visitors are entering data using SSL, a padlock icon appears in the browser status bar.

SSL certificates are issued to legal “persons” – either corporate entities or legally accountable individuals. The SSL certificate will usually include the domain name, the name of the company or individual who owns the certificate, and the address of the owner. It will always include the expiry date of the certificate and details of the Certification Authority responsible for issuing the certificate.

When the visitor’s browser connects to an SSL-secure site, it retrieves the site’s SSL Certificate and it checks the expiry date to ensure the certificate is still valid, checks if it is issued for the site that is being contacted, and checks that the certificate issuer is a trusted authority. If any of these checks fail, the browser may issue a warning. The warnings can frighten some visitors, so it important to make sure the certificate is not expired, is issued by a firm that is in the “trusted” list and preferably is issued to your site, rather than being shared.

Virtual hosting provides shared resources on a single computer. If the user is given some administrative privileges, this may be called a “virtual server.” Virtual hosting and virtual servers provide disk space, CPU time and bandwidth within an actual computer or computers that may be shared by many different users.

The main advantages of dedicated servers are:

• You control every aspect of the machine and operating system and have supervisor access to the root directory.

• Your data are safer and cannot be hacked by other users in the same server.

• You control all the resources, so there is no chance that another site will hog bandwidth or bring down the server.

• The amount of disk space, CPU time and bandwidth depends only on the physical capacity of the server. There are no penalties for exceeding bandwidth.

Disadvantages of dedicated hosting:

• Dedicated hosting is significantly more expensive than virtual hosting.

• If you run the server, you are also responsible for software and hardware upgrades, scaling and repairs. Dedicated hosting on a single server usually cannot offer you redundancy schemes. You usually have one set of hardware and access routes to the Internet Web world. If there is a hardware or software problem, your site goes down. Some virtual hosting solutions can offer redundancy protection, so that your site stays up even if a specific computer or router has a problem.

Dedicated hosting variations – Managed dedicating hosting services will handle chores like hardware and software maintenance and upgrade for you – at a price. You can also buy your own equipment and have the hosting company manage it for you – this is called colocation.

You should only consider dedicated hosting if you have a really large Web site, or one with critical data that must not be accessible to outsiders, such as large and confidential financial transactions, medical records or data related to national security.

Note: Dedicated hosting is not the same as Static (dedicated) versus dynamic IP address. Most virtual hosts will provide you with a unique dedicated static IP address.

Top Level Domain types – Each domain name has a suffix that is called the “top level domain name.” The suffixes are supposed to tell visitors and search engines something about the Web site. The following are some of the most popular and significant domain types:

ac – An academic research institution Web site.

arpa – a Web site of the old Arpanet

biz – A new designation for business Web sites.

com – Company/commercial.

Country specific: us, .nu, .co.uk, – Country-specific domain extensions that localize your site. They may require the owner or person registering the site to be a citizen of the given country.

edu – Educational Web sites.

eu – European Union

info – A relatively new designation for informational Web sites.

int – an international Web site.

gov – A government Web site

name – Can be used for private name Web sites, as for example John.Smith.name

net – Often used for a network of sites

org – Supposedly for non-profit entities.

store – A retail business store.

Where to register a domain name? You can register a domain through several registry companies. The best of these is undoubtedly Godaddy. Important considerations are price, ease of update, ease of transferring domain name ownership and hosting details and choice of names. Godaddy ( http://www.godaddy.com ) has earned a reputation as the best place to buy domain names for international Web sites. It has slashed domain registration prices to $8 a year and less and provides near real time services. Godaddy is now the number one domain registrar in the world. Its innovative services include free emails and Web logs, free hosting, bulk transfer rates and more.