Creating a Web Site on a Dreamcast
Before you can make a web site on the Dreamcast, you first must have somewhere to put it. There are three main types of web hosting services out there - free non-advertising supported, free advertising supported, and commercial. Naturally these all have their pluses and minuses and you should decide which is right for you.
Regardless of which web host you select, you should make sure to pick one which supports FTP so you can use PlanetwebMaster's editing features. Even if your web host has a nice web interface for editing pages which works in the Dreamcast now, if they change it later and it doesn't work in the browser you could have difficulty switching to a new service.
These are the type of web hosting services most people really want, but there are some limitations that tend to keep people from using these services. The main limitation is that there are very few services of this type available. Additionally, since they are providing completely free services with no advertising, they typically provide less disk space, less features, and less reliable service. But if you're averse to having advertising banners show up on your site (at least ones you're not getting paid for), then it may be worth looking into, especially if this is just a site for fun and reliability and space are not big issues.
 Internet Trash (20 MB space)
These web hosts are what is most commonly used for personal sites and smaller sites. They typically place an ad banner automatically on your page, although some allow you to configure how the advertising is displayed. One popular method for Dreamcast users is to set your ads to be displayed in popup windows, as those won't actually be seen on the Dreamcast. But if you are thinking about this, don't forget about your computer using friends, who'll probably find the popups quite obnoxious. Some of these services offer nice web page editing tools, free scripts, and if you're really lucky, they'll even let you post your own scripts and offer domain name hosting. Most offer at least 5 Megabytes of space, and some offer quite a bit more. Unless you're planning on having a lot of large images or sounds files on your site, don't worry too much about the available space- you can fit quite a lot of small images and web pages in even 5 Megabytes.
Some free advertising supported web hosts are:
Angelfire (50 MB space, free scripts)
TalkCity (12 MB space, stats)
Tripod (50 MB space, Perl CGI, free scripts)
Xoasis (20 MB space, CGI, PHP, stats, free scripts, domain hosting)
The Free Webpage Provider Review
Why would you want to pay for web hosting when you can get it for free? Well most people don't, but if you have a fairly popular site or you want to take advantage of some advanced services like databases and server side scripting, you'll find commercial web hosting services generally provide a lot more than the free ones, as well as better customer support and reliability. Commercial web hosting services with good packages tend to run $10-$30 a month. How much you'll need to spend will depend on the features you need, and also how much you want to pay for good customer service. When selecting a commercial service, be sure to read reviews first, and send them email with questions to see how fast their response time- there are a lot of really bad ones out there, and you don't want to get stuck with one that doesn't even answer your email.
Some places to look for a commercial web host:
Commercial Hosts
Compare WebHosts
CNet Web Services - Web Hosting
TopHosts.Com
Contents:
 Next Section
Where to Host
Should I Get a Domain Name?
Learning HTML
Adding Spice
Adding Functionality
Checking Your Site
Making Your Site Faster
Making Sure Your Site Can Be Found
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