Website and Email FAQs

Q. What are the costs of having a website?

A. There are four costs to maintaining a website:
  • You must 'lease' the domain name from a registrar such as Depending on the "Top Level Domain" or tld, (eg. .com, .net, .org, etc.) that you choose and the number of years, the cost can range from under $10/year up.
  • You must "host" your site. This means storing your website pages on a "server" that is connected to the Internet 24/7. These servers differ from your home computer in that the software they run is designed for multiple simultaneous connections and have very fast data transfer times. This means your pages display very quickly. This cost can range from free to very expensive. Free services normally place ads on your pages when they are displayed vs. Renting/Purchasing your own server where you have full control and responsibility.
  • Site design is the biggest cost. Depending on what you want this can take from 1 to unlimited hours to complete. A simple blog site can be setup in an hour or less. An E-commerce site setup with products and accepting Credit Card transactions will take many more.
    In simple websites, the first page or template is usually the biggest cost. From there all the other pages are just modifying the template. Ready made templates can be purchased to reduce this initial cost.
  • The final cost is the up keep and changes that need to be made over time. Depending on how often the site needs to change, this cost can vary greatly. Most website designers work on an hourly basis or price jobs based on estimated hours required.

Q. What else is there to owning a website?

A. There are many facets to web design. All are important but some are more visible than others.

As in houses, the "Design" accounts for the look and eye appeal. But without the framework and logic to do such things as interface with a database, the design is just a picture.

Likewise the site may have great structure and a great look, but never get seen. This is where SEO(Search Engine Optimization) comes into play as well as conventional advertizing. SEO gets you toward the top of the search engine results from such engines as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Conventional Advertizing such as newspaper, radio, TV and adding your website to your letter head and business cards gets the word out that you have a web site and invites people to come visit.

Q. What is DNS (Domain Naming Service) and why is it required?

A. When you 'lease' a domain name from a registrar, one of the conditions in the contract is that you setup and maintain two DNS servers. Most resistrars initially set their own servers up as default to provide DNS for your leased site.

DNS servers are machines that translate the typed domain names such as to numbers called IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. Computers understand numbers easier than english or other human languages. IP Addresses are like house addresses. Each site has an address for the client to send its request for a given site.

PC Source, Inc. provides DNS services to all sites hosted with us at no additional charge.

Q. Can PC Source, Inc. host email for my domain?

A. Yes, PC Source, Inc. operates E-mail servers as well as Web Site servers.
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