Your Site’s Basic Requirements

The first thing you need is a web domain, which will allow people to visit your site by typing in your business’s URI (Universal Resource Indicator). There are plenty of excellent hosting packages available online, and you should choose one based on the criteria that suit your business’s needs the best. Ensuring that you understand what your site is likely to need in the future is a good way to determine what type of hosting package you need now.

You might want to think about ensuring you have FTP capability for transferring files to the host—this is not entirely necessary, so wait until you have read the section entitled Transferring osCommerce to Your Live Site a little later on in this chapter. More often than not, you should be able to log on to your FTP account with your administrator’s username and password automatically. If you’re not sure what all this is about, then try the following URL in your browser (assuming your browser supports FTP):ftp://ftp.your_domain_name.com

If you are prompted for a password or are shown the contents of your home directory, then congratulations, you have an FTP account. If you don’t have one, then you should consider getting your host to give you one, or finding out from them how they upload files. Incidentally, instead of being prompted for your username and password every time you use your FTP account, you might want to send them in the URL, like so:ftp://username:password@hostname/

If you’re worried about security (by this I mean: you are worried about security), then it’s best to leave out the password and simply pass the username, because this can cause security problems if URLs are logged in a non-secure place.

A quick recap of the bare necessities you require from a hosting package is as follows:

• Apache: Used to serve web pages. Your host will need to make use of Apache as its web server of choice as opposed to something like Microsoft’s IIS.
• PHP: Your host must provide support for PHP since this is the language in which osCommerce is written.
• MySQL: You should also be able to obtain a MySQL account for use by osCommerce since this is what drives the data, or back end, of the osCommerce application.

You might also want to make sure the provider is giving you enough hard disk space to safely run the business. Remember that you will probably have a lot of log files and a fair number of images as well as data in your database. They should also provide some form of SSL support, depending on what your security needs will be. Beyond that, you should also look for fair pricing, reliability (specifically, look for percentage downtime), and ease of use, as well as email facilities.

Since many hosts have the three pieces of software installed by default, as part of their hosting package, it is quite likely that they also come with the option to simply enable osCommerce on your domain. It is obviously very easy to install osCommerce on your live site this way (generally it is simply a case of clicking on the osCommerce option and supplying a username and password for your administrative duties) and you should simply follow any instructions given by your hosts or contact their support if you have any queries.

If, however, your hosting plan does not come with the option to enable osCommerce by default then you will need to download a copy and ensure it gets to your live site in one piece.