Sunday, July 6, 2008

Avoid These Common Web Hosting Mistakes

By Johnson P. R.

Some common errors while creating a web site is that it is not search engine friendly. If the search engines cannot read what your site is about, it will not send you people who are searching for what you offer. You should choose your target market and stick to it. Websites that tries to do everything usually finds itself achieving nothing.

When it comes to web hosting, there are basically two kinds of mistakes - technical and general business.

This makes the site heavier to load, leading to many visitors just moving on and never actually looking at the site. It also makes it more difficult to find what they're looking for if the page is not found.

Another common error is creating a web site that isn't search engine friendly. If the search engines can't determine what your site is about, they aren't going to be able to send you people who are searching for what you offer.

A mistake that many people make when starting out is to choose a host solely based on price. This is obviously an important factor, especially in the beginning, but if you choose the cheapest host you may be limited in your scalability as the website grows in popularity and traffic.On the business side of things, the most common mistake is trying to be everything to everyone. You should have a plan for your website - a purpose for its existence - and build according to that plan.

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Saturday, July 5, 2008

Finding Good Quality Cheap Web Hosting

By Johnson

The best part of cheap web hosting plans is that setup fees, monthly fees or any other extra charges are almost negligible. In cheap hosting packages no doubt, prices are very cheap but you have to live with limited resources like CPU time and other server related resources. You also have to keep in mind that you are sharing servers with other customers so you are at the mercy of the performance of their sites as well.

Look for a web hosting company which has earned a good reputation from years of operations among its user base is considered reliable. Cheap web hosting companies and services must score well on the criteria of reliability, package value, customer service, and control panel, user-friendliness and server uptime.

Cheap web hosting service providers must give a sufficient space to store the data or files that structure your website as this industry is very competitive. A good low cost web hosting provider will also offer a relatively high bandwidth so that you website can be fairly busy before you hit any limits.

The best cheap web hosting companies provides 24 hours technical support. More advanced web site developers can make use any specialized software like a content management system, web log, customer support, discussion board or a shopping cart system in order to get the most out of the hosting package features. Most of the web hosting companies are offering user friendly website designs and editing tools like FrontPage, Dreamweaver or Coffee Cup support.

A quality cheap web hosting provider will support all the big programming languages and offer you a liberal programming environment so that you can develop your business using state of the art tools. Other reason is that cheap hosting providers adopts diverse business structure in comparison to older companies. Certainly, Web hosting business is severely competitive. Recently, the basis of competition is the tools and features provided to the user.

When one talk about this sort of strategy the major drawback is that every user doesn't require all the features provided by the concern hosting company. Several hosting providers deliver free backup services for all their clients without any biasness. Off course, Backups are expensive, and it is not required by everyone, but every user is compelled to pay for it due to concerned package offered to them.

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Thursday, July 3, 2008

Choosing a Web Host: About Web Hosting and More

By Matt Hedges

You must have worked very hard in creating your website, so don't let the work go in vain by adopting half-hearted efforts in getting the website online. You have three options to choose from in this regard. First, you can host the site directly on your computer, second is hosting it on a server, and the third option is to get a third-party host it. The first two alternatives are mostly used in practice and are good for people with a fast internet connection, and even for sites that are inclined towards businesses. Monitoring regularly is required for the maintenance of the web server in this case.

So the easiest alternative would be to use a web-hosting company. They are designed to put up your site using their server while you could access it via FTP to upload your files on the site. Web-hosting is of three types- free, paid and dedicated. Dedicated hosting is the costliest option available and is suitable only for sites that entail such attention. Your website is hosted by the company on their own server with their connection.

So the other alternatives are of course, free or paid. And the most common question asked is that why should I pay for something that I can obtain for free?

Then comes the two other options - free web hosting and paid web hosting. It is very normal if a question comes into your mind as to why anyone would pay for a service which he can get for free. There are many advantages which accrue to a paid web hosting.

Paid web hosting provides you with more number of features, like faster internet connection, good customer support, absence of irritating advertisements from the webpage, and also, as you are paying for the services, your needs will be taken care of.

The general features that are offered by web-hosts are listed below, but by no means is the list exhaustive. These are a few terms you need to be acquainted with to get your site hosted-

URL/ Address- If you have a domain name, it's all right. Otherwise, you are in need of having a URL address. This is very important.

Space- As far as the aspect of space is concerned, it needs to be said that usually a space of 5MB is enough for a small site and this much space is perfect for over a hundred pages. Normally, what happens is that the graphics occupy a space of about 35KB. Having said this, one must know that it requires a space of 15-20MB in case of a graphics intensive site or one featuring downloads.

The Aspect of Bandwidth/ transfer- This refers to a monthly account. This monthly account is of the number of files transported from your site in a month. Well, if you are thinking about the best deal of bandwidth, it is to have the facility of unlimited bandwidth because as far as experience goes, 1GB is the minimum requirement even for an ordinary site.

CGI-BIN- This is of paramount significance as far as your dealing with interactive scripts like guest-books, counters is concerned. It provides you with the facility of remote hosting also bearing the banners from the site that live up to the task of presenting them.

SSI: This is a special function which channelizes the server for inclusion of a given thing on your webpage. It could be text, or any other thing.

My SQL/PHP/ASP Support- if you desire to maintain a database on your site you need database formats like these. ASP generates key sites often.

Technical Support- paid hosts provide better technical support than free hosts as is obvious. Web-sites require constant monitoring and in case of any problem you should get support from some quarter or the other. You can opt for e-mail, phone or fax support.

Email: If you have a domain name, then emails will be given to you by most web hosts. If you have a POP3 mail service, then you will be able to get connection to their server and get your messages on your own, instead of them being re-addressed to you.

FrontPage Extensions: These extensions are required only if you use the facility of Microsoft FrontPage for construction of your website. Also, the FrontPage components can be added to your website as well.

SSL/Secure Server: This is needed for ensuring safe facilities for ordering from your website.

The Aspect of Statistics/ Log Files- This is responsible to let you view the usages i.e. the downloaded files and the visited pages.

FTP Accounts- The users are able to download files from an area of your site with the aid of an anonymous FTP. As far as the FTP accounts are concerned, they let you upload files on your website.

Paid web hosting service: most web hosts charge a monthly payment for paid services, and they remove the advertisements present on your site, besides offering you good technical support as well. So if you can do some research work and get hold of a good paid web host, you can get rid of the unwanted advertisements. The costs range from $5 to $75 a month, though the dedicated servers cost about $150 a month.

If you are paying your web-host you must enquire about certain things like, a list of the sites hosted by them. You could get in touch with some of these sites and verify the web-host details from the site-owners. And do ask about the technical support they are willing to provide you with as it the most important service they can render.

Lastly, always read the fine print. Go over the terms and conditions, since it has been seen that some free web-hosts claim ownership of the copyright of YOUR page and bar you from advertising on your own website! Keep in mind the restrictions and stipulations before venturing to put up you website on the internet.

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