Starting Your Very Own Green Dragon - Part 2

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Nice to see you here once again.

Are you ready to dive into part 2 of this series? I hope you are, because today we are going to be talking about some of the legal considerations and covering one itsy bitsy thing in particular that I left out of the last installment.

Bandwidth

This is one resource you will always have to take into consideration when selecting a web host. You can never have to much bandwidth.

Some of you are probably scratching your heads right about now asking yourselves just what is bandwidth. Keeping with simplicity, bandwidth is what you’ll come to know as a measurement of how much data is transferred from your account or web server.

Each time something or more often someone visits your web site. A new request is made to the web server which transfers the data or in this case text, images, or any other content you have hosted. All of this content is sent to the computer that made the request.

All of this data, each image and every byte of text makes up the data you have transferred. It adds up to say the least. Depending on how much data you are serving up each request or how often your web site is visited. You can use almost no bandwidth or you can quickly find yourself exhausting all of the available bandwidth allocated to you and your plan.

You should also keep in mind that bandwidth is usually allocated to your account on a monthly bases. So after the end of each month your bandwidth is reset.

That covers just about everything off hand I believe that you need to know about bandwidth. Next we are going to talk about web hosts and our legal concerns.

When you pay for a plan with a web host, you are going into a binding legal agreement based on that web hosts terms which are usually available during and before the purchase is made. A hint is to look toward the footer of the page for a hypertext link that will often be titled Terms of Service, Terms of Use or Legal.

What is going to usually concern us when we search for a web host for Legend of the Green Dragon is what is commonly known as a CPU Limit. Web hosts will often impose a CPU Limit on the web server. If your web site has a request which attempts to utilize more than the allowed CPU time. The request will simply be dropped or terminated. This is a concern because Legend of the Green Dragon can be CPU intensive. The best thing you can do to limit the impact of high CPU time and restrictions imposed by the web host is to limit the number of modules you have installed.

To be more specific, modules that are commonly put into play in areas of the game that are heavily visited. Such as the village, forest or on every page. Think of it like your computer. The more processes you have running in the background and foreground the more your CPU and Memory will be utilized. Thus the fewer resources you have to work with.

Now it isn’t unheard of for web hosts to also impose a strict memory limit. PHP itself has a imposed memory limitation but so long as the web host does not tighten the proverbial noose you should be fine.

You should also keep in mind that these are not necessarily evil.

The only reason these limitations are imposed is to maintain the stability and reliability of the service the web host is offering. Imagine hosting a simple website, without these imposed restrictions another person who has an account and happens to be placed on the same web server as you could utilize the majority of the CPU or RAM and in turn either cause your website to become inaccessible or at the very least have a impact on how quickly the web server can process each request.

Last but not least. Do you want to register a domain and how do you register your domain.

Simply put a domain name is a descriptive or easy to remember name your visitors will use to reach you and your web site. Examples are google.com, amazon.com or other popular and well known domain names. You don’t necessarily have to register a domain name. You can use a static IP address or there are several free services available on the internet you can register for that will setup a domain name pointer for a sub domain you create. Examples are mysubdomain.domain—service—you—register—for—whatever—it—maybe.com but I wont vouch for any of these services and no that address is not real.

Most often you’ll find that your web host will register your domain name for you but there are registrars available you can use besides your web host. All you do is register your domain and point your domain name to your web hosts name servers.

The image here is a illustration of updating your name servers. Neither of those are actually valid name servers. So don’t go try to use them.

You should also know it can take up to 72 hours for your new name servers to propagate. Don’t expect a miracle but mine commonly taken about an hour or maybe less in the past. Depending on the registrar I am using.

Note: There are ways to circumvent this but I wont go into them here.

Next time I will cover some tips, hints and what you should consider while registering your domain name.

Posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 8:28pm under Category by admin.