Internet Service Providers Accounts

There are two major types of ISP on the market - access providers and content providers. Content providers provide large quantities of information which they hope there account users will use (like a subscription library) while access providers provide the basic connection and let you get on with the rest. Before the internet you had little choice, by now you can do almost the same thing with either type.

What services do I need?

To access the internet and make use of it's features you will need the following:

Electronic Mail

This was where the internet started and is a great communication tool. You will need a mail box (somewhere to store you mail) on a mail server hosted by your ISP. At regular intervals you need to connect to see if you mail box is full and to pick-up any messages. This facility can be fully automated to various degrees.

News Groups

These are discussion forums where anyone can 'post' a message and say what they like about who or what they like. Most newsgroups have a theme and try to keep discussions to just that theme. The style of writing on news groups has lots of abbreviations and short hand comments, as well as its own jargon.

Web Hosting

Space to store hypertext markup pages (htm) which can be viewed anywhere in the world. These pages must be on a high bandwidth server or else people trying to connect might get an error saying that the connection is busy