Hosting in general

Rattle

Hi all,

First off, apologies if this is off topic, I assume this is the most appropriate board, but feel free to bounce the message to Nets/Comms or somewhere if necessary.

I am interested in the idea of running a wap site for my own amusement, and the short question is what do I need from a hosting subscription to be able to support that.

I managed to get a site running on Linux at home, but I would like something that could stay up permanently (this computer runs Windows most of the time). I could also end up using the host for collecing pages off the web and reformatting them for WAP. The original idea would have been to reformat the dublin bus tables, but their text message service has made that unnecessary at long last. I'm sure I'll have plenty more strange ideas along those lines.

I understand that most low cost hosting arrangements don't give you free run of the space you buy, but restricts you to html, asp or jsp, maybe a database. I want to know whats the cheapest way of getting an account where I can install whatever software I want?

Another possiblity would be to get my hands on a second hand machine to share my NTL connection, but bearing in mind NTL don't officially allow web hosting, and the extra floor space I'd need, I'd prefer to get an online account.

Cheers,
Rattle

tom-thebox

Well to be honest after reading over your post it looks like you have two choices


1. Go with a host that supports wap

2. or get a VSP or VDS package where you get a virtual root and can install what ever you like.

3. Get a dedicated server may cost you a bit more however.

mneylon

I agree with Tom..


What kind of software would you be interested in installing? If it doesn't use up too many resources some hosts might consider installing it for you. It doesn't hurt to ask.. though if it is very specialist you will probably find that the only way to get it is by going dedicated or co-lo.

HTH


M

The Corinthian

The only requirement is that your WAP documents send out the correct HTTP content-type header. The basic ones for WAP are:

Plain WML documents - text/vnd.wap.wml
Wireless Bitmap Images - image/vnd.wap.wbmp
Compiled WML documents - application/vnd.wap.wmlc
WMLScripts - text/vnd.wap.wmlscript
Compiled WML Scripts - application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc

Any hosting company worth it’s salt should have these set up as standard - I’ve noticed this happening for the last two years. Otherwise, you can always add the content type using server side scripting, such as PHP, ASP, JSP, etc. This will work too.

Rattle

Yeah, that makes sense. What I had set up here was a wap gateway with Kannel, but thinking about it thats not necessary. An ordinary, web server would be sufficient. Thanks.

I presume the only reason to set up a seperate gateway is to charge for downloading mobile apps, or to allow an encrypted connection.

mneylon

Adding extra mime types is easy.. just ask any host to do it for you

The Corinthian

Originally posted by Rattle
I presume the only reason to set up a seperate gateway is to charge for downloading mobile apps, or to allow an encrypted connection.

Actually, the reasons are much the same as for having an intranet as opposed to an extranet.