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Connectivity

You do not need to be connected to a wider network in order to use the Web. If your organization has an internal network you can run a Web server on it; indeed you can run a server on a standalone system. If you want to provide public access to documents, you will need to be connected to the Internet or you can contract a third party to host your Web server. There are several private companies that provide this service, some of whom also provide a design service. There can be disadvantages with this approach as you may not have direct control over the content and it may be difficult to get mistakes corrected or changes made promptly; also, you may not be able to make use of the feedback mechanisms that the Web offers, such as fill-out forms, queries and image maps.

There are many ways of connecting to the Internet, the most appropriate for any one person or organization being determined by a combination of the expected volume of traffic and the level of funding available. Internet providers offer a number of options, the cheapest being a dial-up connection, but with this type of connection people will only be able to connect to your server when your link is up, if at all. Many Internet providers do not allow incoming connections access if you have a dial-up connection, thus making it impossible to provide a public Web service. There are various types of leased line and ISDN connections that do not suffer from this constraint, but these are correspondingly more expensive. Usually the cost rises with the speed of the link, and it is worth shopping around.

If yours is the first department within an organization to establish an Internet connection, you may assume that inevitably, sooner or later, others will want to follow suit. It makes sense to plan accordingly as this will reduce the pain considerably when they do.

If you do not have an Internet connection yet, it would probably be a good idea to read one of the books available on the subject, such as Connecting to the Internet by Susan Estrada[9].

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.