How to Host a Site Network for All Your Friends

So about a week ago, I got a very nice email from a Somnolescent reader named Cyrano. I don’t normally post reader mail–for starters, I don’t get enough of it to make mailbag posts a thing–but this time, I got a mailer daemon every time I tried to reply. There’s nothing personal in it, so I’m gonna take the risk and post things on the blog. Hopefully you see this, Cyrano, and you don’t think I simply ignored you. Your reply address isn’t working is all.

Let’s start with the original post:

Hi there, my name is Cyrano, I hope this email finds you well!

To start, I absolutely adore your web-group and site, and I was wondering— how exactly is it hosted? Ie; How are you able to host everyone on their own subdomains? How is everyone able to go about editing their own pages?

I’d been pondering about hosting something similar for my small group of artist friends, but was never quite sure how to go about it, and I’m not very well versed in web architecture jargon, so researching as been a bit difficult…I’m sorry if this seems very out of nowhere, but if you could give me a hand in letting me know what I should be looking for, or what vocabulary I should be using when looking this stuff up, I’d really truly appreciate it. Thank you for your time and be well!

Somnolescent has a pretty unique setup as far as little amateur indie Web stuff goes. Everyone on somnolescent.net has their own account where only they can access their subdomains’ files, and potentially the files of domains outside somnolescent.net. Because I know Somnolescent attracts people who are in little online art collectives and Web groups and sometimes would like to know how to start their own site like ours, I’ve elected to lightly edit the book I wrote for Cyrano and post it here to Letters instead. Hopefully, someone finds the information useful.

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Hello! Firstly, thank you–a lot of work goes into our stuff and it’s always nice to know that folks are out there looking and willing to shoot us an email about it.

So honestly, hosting your own site network looks a lot scarier than it is. The good news is that you don’t need to know a whole lot when you’re first getting into it, and then you can learn more about terms, services, and the care and feeding of your site network as you go along. I didn’t know any of this when I first bought hosting for Somnolescent in December 2018.

Hosting a website consists of two parts–who will host your website’s files, and the domain name you’ll be able to access those files at.

Picking who will host your site network and how

I’m gonna assume you’re largely doing the same thing as us, which is static pages across a bunch of different subdomains. If you want a forum, a wiki, a blog, anything dynamic like that–this setup is still pretty doable, but you might have to check with your provider to make sure you’re not overloading them. Basically, there’s shared hosting, virtual private servers, or dedicated hosting.

• Shared hosting is where you share the same server with potentially thousands of other people–you don’t all access each other’s files, but you all use the same hardware, you’re just different users on that same server, like different accounts on a home PC. Shared hosting is what we use for Somnolescent, because it’s affordable and still pretty speedy. Occasionally our Apache-generated directory indexes lag on load for whatever reason, but if you don’t know what that means, you can disregard it.
• A virtual private server is a dedicated server where your metrics (bandwidth, storage, RAM usage) are metered out and no other customer of your hosting company can eat into your resources. While you’re still running on a shared server with a VPS (you don’t literally rent an entire physical server), it’s cordoned off from all the other servers on that machine. Think of it like a virtual machine. It can’t touch anything outside of it, and nothing can touch inside your server.
• Dedicated servers are the nuclear option. That’s where you do have an entire physical server to yourself. These and VPSes are a necessity for Web apps, forums, and larger services, but they’re pretty overkill for hosting static public sites.

After that, you want to decide where you want to buy the hosting from. I recommend everyone go with Dreamhost, always. Dreamhost has been nothing but good to us, the service is great, the customer support has always been excellent on the 2-3 occasions I’ve needed to use it in the past five-and-a-half years, and I think they’re pretty damn affordable for what all they offer. (Do I have to say not sponsored? We’re using their services, but I haven’t been paid for anything I say here. I don’t even have a Dreamhost referral link. Consider that proof, I suppose.)

Seriously, every little thing I’ve wanted to branch into as a webmaster, from playing with DNS settings to running PHP applications or writing my own, to email hosting for the somnolescent.net domain name, they’ve accommodated. I’ve also seen how they handle more high-risk customers (controversial websites that aren’t doing anything illegal, basically) and they’ve been nothing but courteous to them as well, so I know they have the ethics to back up the service.

If you’re wondering, I pay roughly $156 a year for the hosting and $18 a year for the somnolescent.net domain name. If that sounds like a lot, consider that, if you consider that monthly (and Dreamhost has no-contract monthly rates, which we used for a long time when I was still unemployed), that’s $13 a month for the hosting and $1.50 a month for the name. If you can’t afford $14.50 a month, I understand completely–but that to me is extremely worth it for what all we get and I doubt you’ll find much better pound-for-pound elsewhere. Having this site and having a domain I’ve wanted since I was 14 has fulfilled me greater than any streaming service I’ve ever used, I can say that much.

Domain names

You’ll also need a domain name, or the name of the site that you clack into the URL bar to visit it. Domain names are bought from registrars, and they’re a little addictive because of how cheap they really are. Domains are registered on a yearly basis, usually for between $10-15 USD per year, so I’ve seen people buy domains they wind up not using and I’ve done it myself.

For a quick hit of terminology, domain names have at least two parts, maybe more, a domain, a TLD, and possibly a subdomain (and you can have subsubdomains as well, but let’s keep it simple). Your domain points to a specific place online. The TLD, or top-level domain, is the .com/.net/.org/.moe bit at the end of the domain that defines its purpose usually. There’s tons of them. Optionally, a subdomain is a bit before the domain that takes you to a smaller site hosted alongside the main one.

So for mariteaux.somnolescent.net, “.net” is the TLD, “somnolescent” is the domain, and “mariteaux” is the subdomain. Each subdomain is its own independent site that isn’t tied to any others on the network–we have to link around to each other manually. (This means it’s a lot better for specific projects than just having a folder under your main domain. Any time I have a standalone reference or fansite, I make it its own subdomain.)

Anyway, picking a registrar mostly comes down to “who is selling under the TLD you want” and “who offers you the features you want”, namely WHOIS protection. WHOIS is a lookup you can do on ICANN’s site that tells you who registered a domain, when, and where they have the nameservers of that domain pointed at. WHOIS protection is hugely important, because otherwise, the name, phone number, email, and street address you register the domain under will be completely public information. (Instead, the information used will be that of the registrar’s.)

Good news is that Dreamhost is also a registrar, and also offers WHOIS protection for free. I’ve bought most of my domains through Dreamhost, and that gives you additional integration with the hosting you might buy from them. So basically, I’d recommend you buy your domain and hosting through the same provider, at least at first. You can buy whatever from whoever, but the issue becomes that you then have to get everything pointed the right way, and that’s not hard, but it is weird and technical.

The only time I’ve ever needed to care about integrating hosting and domain is buying certain “premium” domains, which are super short ones with fancy TLDs that you could only buy through certain registrars. Caby has a (hopefully forthcoming) commissions info site at caby.art, which cost me a crazy amount to get (it’s paid for itself since then through her commissions work) and I had to buy it through Hover, not Dreamhost, and then point Hover’s nameservers at Dreamhost’s Web servers. None of that, you’ll ever need to play with if you just buy your domain and hosting through the same provider.

So yeah, save yourself the headache and just buy them together–they’ll obviously use their own nameservers for the domain and everything will just work.

Multiple user logins

Another huge thing about Dreamhost’s Shared Unlimited plan (unlimited space + bandwidth, both huge boons) is that you can make an infinite amount of SFTP users. SFTP is a secure way to upload and download files from a server, basically. That’s how everyone on Somnolescent has their own private hosting space. I’ve set everyone up so they have their own private account, and I can then give each user any number of subdomains and subsubdomains that only they have access to through the Dreamhost control panel.

In effect, this is like giving everyone their own hosting altogether, so there’s no concerns about people playing with each other’s files or peeking through anything unfinished (not that I think the Somnolians would, but the privacy is encouraging nonetheless). I can also assign other domains I’ve bought through Dreamhost to specific SFTP users, and even ones I haven’t (like caby.art), so through one single SFTP login, someone can maintain an unlimited number of websites on different domains alongside their Somnolescent site.

You see why I like Dreamhost so much? Even their basic hosting scales unbelievably nicely. I don’t think somnolescent.net would be possible in quite the same way through any other provider. That’s not even getting into the email hosting, PHP, bash, and Python scripting for your site, the infinite MySQL databases you get, custom DNS records that let me forward stuff I host at my house through somnolescent.net subdomains (like gopher.somnolescent.net and radio.somnolescent.net), per-site logging statistics you can enable that literally give you nice pie and bar graphs of what browsers, OSes, and devices are commonly used to access your sites and even the most popular files that get accessed on your hosting.

Like, top-notch stuff. And most people aren’t as insane as I am, so they’re not gonna need half of what I like to play with–but you have the option. You have space to grow and to play with things.

Summary

Here’s the cliffnotes on the minimum you need to know going into building a site network for you and your friends. You can revisit everything I wrote as you buy hosting and learn your way around it:

1. Pick the hosting plan you need. Shared hosting is the most economical, so aim for that to start out with. VPSes and dedicated hosting are nice options if you wind up building a Web app or something, but they’re not needed for static sites.
2. Pick a hosting provider. I love Dreamhost, and I’ve heard 90% good things about them from everybody else too, so I think they’re one of the most solid options out there.
3. Pick a registrar. Registrars are the ones who sell you domain names. Make sure the domain comes with WHOIS protection unless you want your private information out on the live Internet. (Dreamhost is also a registrar who offers free WHOIS protection on all their domains, so to simplify things, I’d recommend buying your domain through them as well as hosting.)
4. We make extensive use of multiple SFTP users underneath my main Dreamhost hosting account. Not sure how common that is, but Dreamhost’s Shared Unlimited plan offers that. If you want something like that, that’s further reason to go with them.
5. After all the checks clear, you’ll just need an SFTP client to upload files through and you’ll be set. FileZilla is dead simple to recommend to people, but I also use WinSCP, mostly on my retro machines. See Dreamhost’s SFTP documentation (and really the entire Getting Started section on their knowledge base) for what details you’d give your client to connect properly.

If any of this helps any one of you out, do let me know! My email is mariteaux@somnolescent.net, and it’s always open for a chat or any questions. Alternatively, feel free to leave a quick comment under this blog post and I’ll see it as quick as I’d see an email.

Get out there and make some site networks for you and your friends!