Peter Pollock’s “Web Hosting for Dummies”

My day-to-day job involves just about everything online – social media, web sites, blogs, online news sites, news portals, discussion boards, and basecamps of one sort or another. Outside of work, I’m involved in two online sites and this blog.

That said, I’m not a geek. My understanding and knowledge do not extend to all the terms, phrases, systems, and processes associated with the online world. Ask me how Twitter or Facebook work as relationship and communication channels, and I’m all over it. Ask me about the databases that sit behind Twitter or even my own blog, and I will likely give you a blank look.

I don’t program TV remotes, either.

And then I discovered that Peter Pollock had written a book for me, Web Hosting for Dummies.

No, I’m not looking to host my own blog site. But I deal with people who do host blogs, and web sites, and news portals, and I deal with them every day. Now I know what questions to ask to make sure I’m getting what I pay for.

What Pollock has done here is to take all of the technical underpinnings for web hosting and provided a comprehensive summary of everything you might want to know and everything you need to know.

And it’s written in plain English.

If I had read this a month ago, I would have understood a conversation two tech people were having about SQL inquiries, and why it was important.

Web Hosting for Dummies provides all the essentials – what it is and how it works; what’s essential to make it work (like databases, logs, and possibly scripts) (and what all those are); how to manage security (absolutely critical in this age of hackers and online thieves); troubleshooting; and what kind of server you should choose. And then the book gives a list of free apps, what your host won’t do for the money you pay, and some really good resources.

Pollock, who lives in California, is a blogger, web host, speaker, and all-around subject matter resource. I know enough to know he knows what he’s talking about.

Did reading the book make me an expert in all these technical things? No. But it did provide an base of understanding for the next conversation with the IT guy about issues with my blog site. So the next time I hear something about UNIX, I’ll know why it’s an option.

Peter Pollock, you have done the communications community – the non-technical side of the communications community – a real service. PR people, marketers, advertisers, authors, and writers owe you a debt.

(And for the record, the SQL noted above, short for Structured Query Language, is “a way of storing large amounts of data abd quickly retrieving, searching and storing that data.” It’s in the book’s glossary, not to mention a hefty explanation in the text itself.)