The Internet is quite a marvelous thing but it's one that has many drawbacks and an evil side to it. If you're not careful, you or your family, especially your children, could find themselves in some very dangerous situations online. Every day you hear horror stories of child abductions that started off through innocent chat room flirtations, online banking users having their identity stolen by computer hackers or people losing money because they were duped through an e-mail scam.

Stuff like that happens all the time and if you don't want that happening to you or your family while browsing the web from your home you need to make sure that you know a thing or two about Internet safety. The first thing you should do if you have children that browse the web is to make sure you have a website blocker add-on installed on your browser that will block them from visiting certain websites that are not appropriate for children. It's one thing for them to visit a web design site on their own but it's another to visit a website promoting UFC fights.

You might also want to consider installing programs that monitor your children's Internet activity so you can see what they are doing online and with whom. Another good tip is to have your children create a screen name so that they avoid their real name ever being used online. You don't want to suddenly get spammed with e-mails from companies trying to sell your son or daughter their products because they actually signed up for their company's email when they thought they were actually signing up for a Barbie newsletter.

Other ways you can protect your children when they are online is by learning how to be computer literate yourself and block any objectionable material your children might come into contact with, keep the family computer in a common area of the home so that you can visibly monitor what your kids are doing with the computer, create a shared email so you can intercept any suspicious emails, bookmark websites your children visit frequently for easy access, never let your children enter private chat rooms, and always be checking the status of your credit cards, phone bills and online banking account to make sure you don't see some random charge from a company that you know you never made.

If your children ever receive obscene or threatening messages online it's best to forward them to your Internet service provider so they can deal with them in the appropriate manner. We also know that your children have access to the Internet outside of the home, with schools leading the way. Contact your son or daughter's school to ask about their online protection to make sure that it's up to par.

That should give you a good head start on protecting your children from the dangers of the Internet and you can now go back to being worried about non-threatening spam messages from Nigerian princes asking for donations or web developer companies trying to get your business.

When you're choosing your domain, you not only have to come up with something memorable and easy to type for your name, but you also have to choose a domain type that matches up with the type of site you want to have. The purpose of your website, whether it's to supply information on how to sell handmade jewelry online, will determine which domain extension you want to reserve for your website. Here are some of the most popular types of domain extension and what people expect when they visit a domain of this type.

.com

Dot coms were among the first types of domains and remain the most popular domain extension. A .com extension denotes a commercial website, so if you're making a website to publicize your business, you'll want a domain name with a dot com extension.

.edu

This domain extension was also created early in the days of the internet. .edu extensions are reserved for websites associated with education - specifically sites belonging to schools and universities. So if you're writing a site about web design with the aim of using it as a teaching aid in a computer science class, you could use a .edu extension.

.gov

Domains that use the .gov extension belong exclusively to the United States government. Its many branches and departments all keep many sites and pages that are full of information for the public or for interdepartmental use. You will not be able to make a .gov site unless you're working for the US government on an internal project.

.org

The org in .org is short for organization. When people visit .org sites, they expect to see a website for an organization such as a club, charity, or union, though sometimes this extension can be used in place of .com if the name you want is already taken in the .com extension. This is a good extension to use if you're setting up a site for practitioners.

.mobi

.mobi is a new type of domain extension that denotes websites that are designed with smart phones in mind. The small screens and limited processing power of smart phones often leads to display problems on regular websites, so you may want to create a mirror .mobi site for your smart phone users.

Country Extensions

You can also choose an extension that denotes the country your page belongs to. A company, for instance, might choose a .ca extension to attract Canadian customers rather than a .com to denote the fact that they are a business. Other country extensions include .fr (France), .ru (Russia), .jp (Japan), .cn (China), .de (Germany), and .uk (Britain).

If you're looking to get your very first website off the ground, you might assume that because you live in Toronto you're limited to hosting companies when it comes to someone to store your website on their servers. But through the magic of the internet, you can hire a hosting company from anywhere in the world, which means you have a lot of options. Here are some of the things you'll want to think about when you're choosing a company to host your website.

Cost - this is the number one concern for many people who are just starting out making websites because in the early days of a web based business, you're likely to garner little attention and make little money, making every penny you save on overhead important. You can get a one website hosting package from many popular hosting companies for under $7, but be aware that bandwidth is limited on most of these packages, so it won't be suitable any longer if your site becomes popular or if you want to host more than one site on the same package.

Trustworthiness - this should be your actual number one concern when choosing a company. Because web hosting is a largely unregulated industry, it's easy to fall prey to scammers who will hold your domain name hostage until you pay exorbitant hosting fees. Whenever possible, register your domain with a separate company and never do an availability search for a domain unless you're prepared to register it that instant, because your interest can end up raising the price of the domain. You'll also want a company with a good track record when it comes to downtime so that your site doesn't spend a lot of time offline.

Environmental impact - web hosting is a very electricity intensive process. Big companies may have hundreds of computers running at once with accompanying air conditioning systems to keep them all from overheating. If you're concerned at all about the environment, you can choose a company that runs on solar, hydro, or wind power or buys carbon credits to offset its emissions.

There are some services you need to engage in person, such as finding a personal trainer or hiring a new nanny. However when you're looking for web based services such as internet hosting, there's really only one place to look: online. Because web hosting is done remotely, you can contract out to a company based anywhere in the world. Therefore your options for web hosting are the same as they would be anywhere else in Canada or even in the world. The only real barrier is language. You'll want an English speaking company just in case you need tech support.

Most people who are starting up their own websites aren't doing so with the intention of using up a lot of bandwidth. They're just creating a blog or posting pictures of their pets online or creating an online business card that will serve as a landing point for people looking for them online. For these types of basic sites, basic hosting services on a partitioned server will do. Depending on the company, you can get one site hosting privileges for between five and fifteen dollars a month plus the yearly fee to register your site's domain name.

If you're planning on making a living online by creating many websites or creating a high traffic site with a lot of downloadable or streamable content, you're going to need a more heavy duty hosting package. Unless your company is big enough to hire a computer specialist to design and run your own server, you will need to find a company that offers dedicated server hosting. Buying dedicated server space is a lot more expensive - upwards of $100 per month - so if you're going to go this route you'll want to make sure that your site is extremely commercially viable or you may not break even, especially in the first few months.