Web Hosting on the Cheap – Is it a Good Idea?

By admin | Published: August 28, 2009

People with online businesses, or any business for that matter, are always on the look out to save money wherever they can. Should this also be the case for web hosting though? Does the old saying that states “you get what you pay for” hold sway when it comes to cheap web hosting? Well, there really is no definitive answer one way or the other to this question.

In the real world, the usual reason something is cheaper than something similar of a higher price is because the quality is not as good. Or conversely you will pay more for the “name” of one service or product but the same service or product that is less is expensive because it isn’t a brand name, will be just as good. So which one of these scenarios holds true for web hosting? The short answer to that is both.

At the end of the day, although some companies may have the “name”, you always end up paying for the services that are provided, whether the brand is a famous one or not. You could very well find web hosting that costs only a few dollars a month, thereby saving you money in the long run; but will something come out of the floorboards and give you a nasty surprise in the long run? Let’s look at some issues surrounding cheap web hosting.

First and foremost are potential bandwidth issues. If the web host you choose cannot provide you with the sufficient bandwidth you require each month, then there really is no point in trying to save the few dollars. This is especially important for those who have graphic intensive websites.

Secondly, will the cheap web hosting company be able to offer you the ability to upgrade as your business grows? Quite a few of the cheap web hosting services only offer one type of plan, and that’s it. There will be no facility for greater requirements such as bandwidth, disk space, etc. If you are dead set on going cheap at the beginning, then make sure you do so with a company that offers upgrades. At least that way you know that you will not be at a dead-end should you suddenly find your business growing.

Thirdly, and probably most important of all, is the kind of customer support the cheap web hosting service offers. Bear in mind that many of the so-called cheap web hosting services are cheap for a reason and more often than not you will find that they have insufficient staffing to deal with any potential problems. You don’t want to end up with a service that only offers email support, for example. You could end up waiting days just for an acknowledgement of the email and then the same again for a solution to your problem. This will ultimately end up costing you more in lost business or down time than any amount you are saving with the cheap web hosts.

All these reasons are not to say that there are no decent cheap web hosting services because there are. Just make sure you check each service thoroughly before you sign up so you know what you are getting yourself in to.

Posted in Web Hosting | Leave a comment

What to Circumvent When Developing Your Website

By admin | Published: August 28, 2009

Developing and designing a website entails knowing and utilising many vital aspects. It doesn’t really matter how proficient an individual is at developing websites, or in fact how many websites they have developed or created in the past, there will be occasions when a slip-up occurs, and these can prove to be very costly indeed. And mistakes need to be avoided in today’s very competitive world. For developers trying to avoid making the odd mistake, there are a few things to be wary of.

The very first thing to be cautious of is using free web hosts. Quite apart from the fact that a user of this sort of hosting will not be able to have their own unique URL, they will also have to put up with obligatory adverts placed on their sites by the hosts. This will mean any potential visitors to the site could get easily distracted and click away.

Another major consideration to take on board is the fact that all visitors to a site will expect easy navigation as a matter of course as well as a not “to-in-your-face” homepage. Some splash pages have this affect as they take time to load due to their heavy use of graphics and images. Slow loading pages are definitely a turn-off for visitors and it won’t be long before they are clicking out of the site. The same would ring true for using flash animation; although it definitely has its uses, keeping it to the minimum and where absolutely necessary will help the sites webpage’s load faster.

Placing links on a website must also be done with care. They have to be checked to make sure they open properly and don’t just end up on an error page somewhere. The most frustrating thing for a visitor to a site to do is open a link that doesn’t lead them to where they thought it would. Not exactly conducive to visitor satisfaction! It can also give the site in question a bad reputation.

Something else that can be very distracting to the discerning visitor is pop-ups. Some visitors to sites do not take kindly to having their quiet read or browse interrupted by an annoying pop-up. Ideally from a web developers stand point, pop-up’s should be used very sparingly and only when and where absolutely necessary.

Some website designers and developers also make the mistake of trying to utilise colours that are either contrasting or just don’t mix well at all. This rings true for the text font and size as well. Text that is too small will make it difficult for visitors to read. Conversely, text that is too big may cause the site to have horizontal scroll bars, again making it difficult for a visitor to read.

To create a great website, developers have to take all aspects used in the creation of the site into consideration. By following some of the tips listed above, a budding developer will be well on their way to creating a great site.

Posted in web development | Leave a comment

Simple Link Building Pointers

By admin | Published: August 28, 2009

In an attempt to get higher rankings in the search engines for any of your sites, link building is one of the most important aspects of trying to do this. It is today considered to be one of the most important aspects of SEO (search engine optimisation), so it is sensible that any budding webmaster or online marketer should include link building right up the very top of their to-do SEO list. If you happen to be fairly new or inexperienced in the link building department, below are a few pointers to help you on your way.

Writing articles is a great way of building links. How, you may ask? Well, once you have written an interesting and relevant to your content article, you can then submit it to any of the hundreds of article directories on the web. The beauty of this is that these directories allow you to add an author’s box at the bottom of your article, in which you can add a link or two back to your site(s). The more articles you can write and distribute the more links you can potentially acquire.

Another technique is submitting your URL to web directories. Although there are many reasons for and many reasons against this technique, the general consensus is that quite a few of these established directories will benefit you in the long run. Could you spend your time more efficiently doing something else rather than spending hours submitting your site to numerous web directories? That’s for you to decide.

Another thing you can do is analyse your main competitor’s websites and try to find out where their links are coming from. There are many tools available online that let you achieve this. Once you know where all the links are originating from, you can try to acquire the same.

You can also try to get links from other quality sites that are directly related to your niche. It is well known that a link from a site that is relevant to your topic holds more weight when it comes to SEO than unrelated sites. These sites are easy to locate, and just by typing in your keyword to Google will bring up all the sites relevant to that keyword. From then it would just be a case of politely requesting a link (or link exchange) from the site in question.

Blogs are another way of increasing the links to your site. Nowadays blogs are highly regarded by the search engines, especially Google. Blogs that are updated regularly are even more so. Either creating your own blog in order to promote your site (or thereby linking to it), or trying to get a link from a popular blog, are sure to help your cause no end.

The above are just a couple of simple tips you could follow to start off your link building endeavours. The more experienced you eventually become, the more avenues will open up for you.

Posted in Making money online, SEO | Leave a comment

Site Visitors and SEO Tips

By admin | Published: August 28, 2009

Search Engine Optimisation is the best tool for assisting you in getting the most from your website. It will help you to make sure that your website is recognised and ranked with the search engines. You should follow the steps below in order to make sure you are getting all you can from search engines in order to increase traffic to your blog or your website.

The first thing you need to do is ensure you are using the correct keywords. Maximising your use of keywords will help you to ensure that you are getting the most from the search engines. You need to very carefully target the best keywords that you think you can optimise. They should ideally be keywords which are searched for frequently but have as little competition as possible.

The next thing to ensure is that the title of your website contains your main keyword. The title of your website explains what it is about and if you target the title as a keyword it will be the website name which will show up in the results of the search engines, which is ultimately what you want. If you don’t use a title tag, you can lose a lot of traffic as your web page won’t appear without a title on the search engines and this looks amateurish.

The next step for search engine optimisation is to concentrate on a description tag. It should make sense but also be full of your targeted keywords. It is important to make this description sound sensible but while still including keywords. It should not be too lengthy but should just include the key points you want conveyed about your website.

Using the keyword Meta tag is of ultimate importance. This is examined by search engine robots that use it to check what your website is all about and they judge your website on this tag. Whatever traffic these robots send to your site will depend on these tags. This is where you should place all your keywords but do this wisely to avoid the appearance of spamming.

The content of your website is equally important. It should be content which the visitor wants to read but should also contain your keywords. The reason someone uses a search engine is to find answers to what they are looking for. They do not want to be directed to a page that only has adverts or is mostly full of links to other websites. Readers want to find the information they are looking for and then hopefully for you, they will click on a link to find more information or will see a link to something they would like to purchase. A search engine will be looking for websites which are rich in content – they will ban websites which they consider to make no sense.

If you follow the advice above you will optimise your chances of having your website indexed by the various search engines. This will help to create traffic to your site and hopefully make you money by increasing sales.

Posted in SEO | Leave a comment

Making Money through Web Hosting

By admin | Published: August 28, 2009

One of the best ways to get into the web hosting industry with a view to making money from it, is by reseller hosting. In a nutshell, this type of hosting is when you, as a client, buy a reseller package from a web hosting company, and then resell web hosting yourself to third parties for a higher price. Therefore, if you increase the resell price, you make money. And it really isn’t that difficult a process. If you purchase enough bandwidth and disk space in your original package from the web hosting company, you can then use it in whatever way you see fit. And that way is to “rent” out some space and bandwidth to make a profit from the “rental fees” collected. Providing that you have clients, your web hosting fees actually pay for themselves.

When initially purchasing a reseller account, it is not normally too expensive; you could even expect to pay as little as $30 per month. With such a small investment it should be very easy to start turning over a profit fairly soon. Your package will be part of a shared server but this isn’t a problem as almost seventy percent of the worlds websites are hosted on shard servers. Considering the prices of dedicated servers, using their shard counterpart is very economical. Any potential clients you will have should not have an issue about using a shared server.

Although you will be the point of contact for any clients you may sign up, you wouldn’t really need to be doing much hands-on work at all. Nearly everything is automated and the web hosting service themselves will look after the maintenance and security of the server. The only thing you have to worry about is the actual content being put onto the server by your clients. Just be sure there is nothing illegal that will break the terms and conditions set out by your host, you should be OK.

You may be asking yourself one question though: how do you get clients in the first place? Well, it’s a simple case of going to search them out. Many people are after great deals on their hosting, and you could just be in a position to help them. Visiting such places as online forums or social media sites could open up a well for you, especially if you manage to hit into an “untapped” market. Once you do get a client or two, then it is normally a case of word-of-mouth, especially if you offer a really good deal while giving your clients great “customer support.”

Other methods you could try to drum up some business include setting up a blog or website to market your business. Make an online presence and be active; people will then start to find you. You could even try advertising – both online and offline. Never underestimate the strength of the printed media – it just might help you get rich.

Posted in Making money online, Online Business, Web Hosting | Leave a comment

Don’t Choose the Wrong Web Hosting Service

By admin | Published: August 28, 2009

Trying to find the perfect web hosting service for your personal requirements is a vital decision on your part. You have to take care because the qualities of the web host you ultimately choose is going to reflect on your users or customers experience with your website. Therefore it is essential that you don’t “take pot luck” on your decision as the wrong choice could ultimately come back to bite you. A great start would be to narrow down all those web hosting providers that are well-known in the industry, and have a good pedigree of being reliable.

Web hosting services that are unreliable, or even worse, bad, will lose you many visitors as it could prove difficult for them to load your site. Lost visitors will ultimately mean lost income, and no one wants that. Do an online search for the well-known industry leaders in web hosting and do a quick review of what they offer. There are plenty of websites available today that offer review comparisons of all the web hosts working on the net today. Use one of these review sites and look at the services that score high on all the reviews. Once you have a short list, you can try and whittle this down by comparing all the good points. Some of these points should include things like uptime, bandwidth, disk space, features available and of course, the cost.

All the good web hosting services are well aware of the customer’s requirements and have accordingly set out various plans to try and meet all these needs. Each plan would comprise of a different level of features which ultimately would all boil down to budgetary requirements – the fewer features, the cheaper the hosting will be. Normally though, there would be very few differences between the price ranges when it comes to the “essential’s” such as bandwidth and disk space – the price differences usually occur for extra’s such as more email accounts, dedicated ip addresses, and the like.

Another major thing to look out for before committing to one service or another is the customer service and technical support they offer their customers. But don’t just take what they tell you on their website for granted; do an online search of forums and social media sites and see what others are saying about their experiences. There are a couple of great webmaster forums online at the moment where you are bound to find information relevant to your query – namely the Digital Point forums and The Warrior Forum.

These places are a veritable goldmine of information and there are even sections dedicated to giving honest, down-to-earth reviews of all things web connected, including web host providers. Obviously, when it comes to the crunch, only you can decide what you really want for your own personal set of circumstances, so weigh everything up carefully and then make a rational decision based on what you think with the help of the information you have acquired.

Posted in Online Business, Web Hosting | Leave a comment

Different Types of Web Hosting Services

By admin | Published: August 28, 2009

People that want to create websites have to first think about what service or company they are going to get to host the site. But to do this they first have to evaluate the different types of web hosting service available and then make a decision based on whether these particular services meet with their current requirements. As it stands, there are four different kinds of services offered by web hosts today, each having their own particular advantages and disadvantages. The right one for your own particular requirements will depend largely on the specific needs of the website you want to host on them. Here is a rundown of each type of service.

The first type to look at are the free web hosting services. These are more popular for personal types of websites and the main advantage of these is fact that they are free, so no hosting charges are applicable to you as well as no domain registration or any other type of fees. In a nutshell, the website will be totally free of charge. There are downsides or disadvantages to this type of hosting though, with the main one being the fact that you will not have much control over what happens to your website. Templates offered by this type of hosting are limited, and you will always find yourself working within disk space and bandwidth constraints. Also, you will find that your site will not have its own dedicated name, for example, www.yoursite.com. Instead it will be something like www.webhostingservicename.yourchoiceofname.com.

Another type of web hosting you could take a look, and one that is probably the most popular around as well, is shared web hosting. What this means is that you basically pay to use a share of a main server which is located in the web hosting company’s data server centre somewhere. Fees are usually low, costing only a few pounds or dollars per month, and you will also have your very own domain name as well. More often than not, you will usually have the ability to upgrade at a future date should it be required.

Downsides include some companies offering limited storage space and bandwidth, as well as having to share the server with countless other sites. Because of this there could be privacy or security risks involved. Shared servers are not ideal for ecommerce ventures.

Next on the list is the dedicated server. This type of hosting means that only your site will be on this server and you will have plenty of bandwidth and storage to play with, while security and privacy will not be an issue. The cost is the downside though as you will be paying for an entire server.

Finally, there is the collocated server. This type of web hosting means that you will personally have to provide the server, while the web hosting company will locate it in their server centre, meaning you benefit from security, uptime, and sometimes, maintenance.

At the end of the day, deciding which is the right choice for you will boil down to what your website requires and the money this will cost.

Posted in Web Hosting | Leave a comment

Cutting Through the Jargon of Web Hosting Reviews

By admin | Published: July 31, 2009

Most people go through web hosting service reviews before they go ahead and choose a web hosting company for their requirements, and this is a very wise decision. But what exactly does all that jargon mean when you read through these reviews? Here is a very brief insight to give you a better understanding as to what to expect.

Domain Name Registration – More often than not, web hosting services that offer domain name registration get good marks next to their reviews. A domain name is basically your presence on the internet, or, if you happen to own a website, your sites address, and are in the format of www.yoursiteorcompany.com. Doing this separately could cost about twenty dollars or so each year, but there are web hosting services that allow their clients to register domains for “free” when they have an account with them.

Price – People are always looking for ways to save money or to get the best value for their money, so web hosting reviews take this into consideration when giving their information. All the good reviews will not only let you know how much you will be paying, but will also let you know exactly what services you will receive for your money. You will also be pleased to know that some services even offer discounts for signing up for more than thirty days.

Bandwidth – This can be described as the amount of information uploaded or downloaded from a server in a specified time frame. Basically anyone that browses a website, downloads items from it, views video or listens to audio from it, uses up bandwidth allocated to the website from the server used by the websites owner. Again, when it comes to the reviews, the better the bandwidth capabilities of a particular host, the better it will show up in the review ratings.

Disk Space – In a nutshell, the web hosting service will be renting out disk space on one of its servers to the owner of the website using it. When they say disk space, they basically mean the total amount of data (measured in bytes) their customer can upload to their servers, of which will therefore be available for the public to view. The more disk space made available to prospective customers, the better the review the service will get.

Unlimited – When a service offers something as unlimited, it normally means within reason. It is very obviously impossible for an individual to have unlimited anything when using a web hosting services servers, as these companies clearly do not have unlimited machines to work with. Nevertheless, those companies offering unlimited bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, or whatever, will score more highly on web hosting reviews.

Email Accounts – Any individual who has ever been online will know what email addresses are. Everybody who surfs the net nowadays has an email address. When web hosting services offer email accounts, they usually do so the client will have a specific address, such as you@yoursiteorcompany.com.

Posted in Web Hosting | 1 Comment

SEO and Bing – Things Explained

By admin | Published: July 31, 2009

Bing is the new search engine which has been introduced by Microsoft. It will eliminate the need to submit your website to various search engines and also decreases the need to get hundreds of links in order to be ranked on the search engines.

Most people are interested in finding out how to get their websites to the top page of Bing and the following will help you improve your chances of ranking on the first page of results for this new search engine.

The first thing to do is make sure that the title of your website is relevant to the content within. You also need to include links to other sites (which could normally result in a lower rank with other search engines); this is one area where Bing differs from its competition.

Another important factor to think of is content. In order to rank highly with Bing, you should include a lot of text. The more text the better and to rank higher, your pages should have at least 350 words.

You may rank higher depending on how long ago your domain name was registered. The older your website or domain name, then the better the chance of it getting to the top of the search engine results pages. You could look into buying older domains in order to bypass this particular element.

Proper use of HTML is preferred. All paired tags should be closed and all links should be working correctly. There are programs which can help you make sure your HTML coding is working properly, such as HTTP Compression, or W3C Mark-up Validation Service. You may have problems with the MSNBot if your links are broken and this can result in you losing visitors to your site.

You will need to include a moved web page’s original URL so that people can be redirected to the new webpage. You should also point out if the move is going to be permanent or temporary.

You need to allow MSNBot to access your website. If you have banned some web crawlers from ranking your site you should make sure to check that MSNBot is not on this list.

All URLs should be static and uncomplicated as this will make them easier to index as links. It will also help people to remember it and bookmark it. This will ensure that your webpage will benefit from links from other websites.

Make sure that any links from your website to another webpage does not lead on to another website which could contain malicious content. This could result in your website being highlighted as Malware in Bing.

The most important factor with Bing is to get as many clean links to your site as possible and to make sure that your keywords are related to your content.

Posted in Making money online, Online Business, web development | Leave a comment

Basic Web Hosting

By admin | Published: July 31, 2009

To describe web hosting in a nutshell, you would refer to it as somewhere to “house” a website. For very basic web hosting, there are four central components to consider – administrator, hardware, software and connectivity.

Very briefly, the administrator is the person who will be in charge of certain jobs in the web hosting process. These people basically keep an eye on such things as security, analytics, responsiveness and maintenance of the server, and backups.

When it comes to hosting, there are many forms of software that are used or required. These include the operating system utilised, analytics, encryption and credit card acceptance. As with software, there are some forms of hardware that are required for web hosting, and some that are optional. Hardware that is necessary for hosting includes the server itself, and routers and switches used in connectivity. Hardware that is more of an option can include uninterruptable power supplies (ups) and firewalls.

Finally, when someone mentions connectivity, this basically means the way in which your website is accessed; the faster the better.

Once an individual has a grasp of the basics of web hosting, they only need to make a decision based on their personal requirements when it comes to choosing the right type of web hosting. There are essentially four categories in which these fall – shared hosting, managed hosting, collocated hosting and developed hosting. Each one has their own admin, hardware, software and connectivity levels, with some more expensive than others. The most basic web hosting though, is the shared option.

Shared web hosting is not complicated and is most common for personal websites. Basically, the ISP will manage the hardware, software and connectivity needed for your website. Shared hosting is ideal for websites that do not require huge amounts of bandwidth, but are not as good for bigger sites as security does tend to be an issue. A good example of this is a site that would need to store personal information or credit card numbers. This would be a major issue on a shared web server as the machine is shared by countless other sites and could therefore be compromised. This will not obviously be a major issue for personal or smaller website that doesn’t need to store personal information.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you are a total beginner or a very experienced individual when it comes to web hosting it always pays to know the basics. If you are somebody who just wants to set up a personal or simple site or blog, then shared web hosting will be the way to go. If you require a more complex website hosted, you would be much better off having a look at the other types of webhosting available to you. You wouldn’t want security to be an issue if you wanted to store valuable or personal information about clients, for example, so see what is available in your price range and make the right decision.

Posted in Web Hosting | Leave a comment