ACC | General | Domain Names

ACC does not have a limit (at this time) on how much web space is allowed. However, ACC is not a full-service ISP, so some advanced web authors find the limitations of ACC's accounts frustrating. If you are in this situation, first you should contact IT. Even though the usual accounts do not support CGI and ASP scripting, some provision can be made for this. As I understand it, ACC does not at this time have enough IT staff to provide help for people who want to learn to do these, but if faculty and staff know how to do them and merely need an account with appropriate access, something can often be arranged. (I believe that is an account on www3.)

Free, supported by ads: There are numerous places where people can get free web space. The "price" is to have some advertising appear with some or all of your pages. There are numerous options. ZDNet PC Magazine had a review of these in May 2000. Their editor's choice was Homestead , with Yahoo Geocities ranked second in their ratings. But all of them were quite good. Most free web space is restricted to personal (not business) pages, but Homestead allows business pages. I'm not sure whether teachers putting up instructional pages is considered business use or not. When you are deciding which to get, look at the amount of space, whether you can have one or more levels of subdirectories, and whether they provide the additional features you'd like to use, such as scripting or FTP access.

Free with something else you pay for (no ads): Most ISPs provide some free web space with dial-up accounts. That may or may not be restricted to "personal" pages. Whether a teacher putting up information for students is "personal" or not isn't very clear to me. Probably that varies with the ISP. In many cases (at least here in Austin), those ISPs provide more web hosting service in terms of support for CGI scripting, etc. than the ACC accounts. I know of several faculty members who are using such commercial web space for their applications that require some scripting and just put links to that from their ACC web pages for their students.

Low-cost: A few ISPs, such as Illuminati Online, provide some low-cost web space ($10/month for 10 megs) for people who don't need dial-up access. This is titled "Telnet Access". I sent a message asking them about teachers using such space for material for their classes and got this response.

*** Updated by: kitfox at: 05/24/00 11:33:00 ***

The web space we provide with any of our accounts is yours to do with as you see fit -- business, personal use, your classes -- anything that does not violate the law or our terms of service, and what you mention here is certainly acceptable under both those provisions.

Should you need more space, you can also get it from us inexpensively at $2 month per addition 5 megabytes, and $25/month per additional 100 megabytes.

Please let us know if we can assist you in any way in the future.

For about twice this fee ($18.95 per month) from Ace of Space Designs you can have 200 megs of space, hosting your own domain name and including a various other popular features. I have bought graphics from them before and found them knowledgeable, helpful, efficient, and pleasant.

Make friends with a techie: Maybe you have a friend who has set up his/her own web server. Maybe that friend will host a web account for you. I got a friend of mine to host a domain name for me, so I have some web space there. This was in spring 1999, when the best price I could find elsewhere to host a domain was around $300 per year. In January 2000, domain registration was opened up to more competition and the prices for a minimal presence plummeted. (See below.) Now, with free and low-cost web space easily available from businesses and organizations who have good support services, and really low-cost domain name hosting available from a variety of businesses, you have lots of choices. When you get a friend with a web server to do it for you, there are some difficulties and responsibilities with this. He's not set up to provide web space for the public, so he doesn't have any help pages available or a mail server. When you have questions, you have to call him personally. You have to use the uploading methods that he likes, whether you like them or not. And when he changes those, you have to change too. And, if he is just using his server as a "development server", so it's not important to him whether it's up all the time, then he may try some new and complicated stuff that crashes it from time to time so that your pages are unavailable to the public.

Did you ever wonder how people get their own cool domain names and how much it costs? Internic has extensive information on this, including a list of various providers and a good FAQ page. I've browsed a bit and found several that will register your domain name and host a page or so for a regular price of about $30 per year. At that price, I didn't see any with any significant amount of web space. You'd probably need to have some of the free or low-cost web space to put virtually all of your pages in and then just use the domain name account for a page to make links to your other pages. Many providers, including every ISP I've noticed, will host a domain for you and provide a substantial amount of web space. Here's one for under $20 per month.

Last updated May 24, 2000. Mary Parker