Archive for August 2011
Web Hosting – For The Beginners
Web hosting companies are plentiful these days. There are many to pick from and with so many choices available it can be difficult to decide which one is the best for you and your website. However, before committing to any one web host company, consider a few factors to help you make the best decision possible.
Budget
Whether you have a small budget or a large one, money is always a consideration. While there are many low budget hosting options available, there are also many that offer more robust and expensive features for those looking for the optimal services provided through their hosting company. By considering your budget and knowing how much you are willing to spend on hosting services you can easily weed out several hosting companies.
Services Provided
Before you pick any company, you should carefully assess what services and features you will need to support your website. If you need multiple e-mail addresses as well as ample amount of webspace and speed you should consider all of these factors. These features require special services that may only be provided through certain hosting companies. It is important to do this before you pick a hosting company because you do not want to end up paying for website hosting that ultimately doesn’t meet your needs.
Customer Reviews
Though you shouldn’t completely rely on customer reviews, you should consider what people are saying about the website hosting companies you are considering. Take the opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences whether they are professional reviewers or just average Joes who have used the website hosting company for their small personal websites. You may also learn of a few things that you didn’t think about before when reading through these reviews.
Consider Customer Service
This is particularly important if you are new to the website world. Get to know the customer service of the website hosting companies you are considering. Ask them some questions and see how they respond. If they are quick and courteous keep this in mind. If they don’t answer your questions in a timely manner, it’s not likely that will change after you make a commitment to them so keep that in mind as well.
Hidden Fees
Some companies offer what look like great promotions but forgo telling you that minor upgrades that are standard in other places will cost you more money. Make sure you are getting all the standard features you need included in the price they are offering or you may find yourself paying an arm and a leg for features that are included everywhere else.
There are many things to consider when picking a hosting company. However, you can learn how to easily navigate through the many choices by keeping in mind all of these factors and concerns. A well educated consumer is ultimately a happy consumer. Do your research, ask questions proactively and make sure you read all the fine print. If you do that, you will find the right company in no time.
Web Hosting – An Investment Or an Expense?
Is having your own website an investment or an expense? The following article will help you gain clarity on this issue.
First of all, let us consider the costs of having a website. A domain name with sufficient amount of space (that also includes a database support for interactive websites) costs under $30 per annum. This is roughly $2.5 / month.
Then comes the designing and maintenance costs. Depending on your requirement, web design can cost as little as $50-$100. There is no upper limit; it can go into several thousands depending on what exactly you want and who is doing it. Ideally, you should ask your friends and associates to refer web designers who have done a good job for them and also charged reasonably. Prepare your requirements in advance before taking quotes. Be very clear on what exactly you want for your website. This will save you a lot of pain. Be sure to cross check the quotes with sites like Elance. Discuss the maintenance charges also, if you need to update your site often.
There is another option where you can save on web design costs if you don’t need a very fancy / customized design. Most hosting providers will offer you site builder options at a nominal cost. In fact, you can even use a blog platform like WordPress or a CMS platform like Joomla and Drupal. Most hosting providers will offer fantastic support, which enables you to install these open source softwares with a few mouse clicks. I would advice you to first go with one of these options, preferably the WordPress / CMS option before you spend on web design.
Once you’ve worked out these costs, you now need to consider the returns. Business is all about ROI (Return On Investment) and you should seriously track all leads and / or orders you receive through your website. First of all, you need to accept the fact that you won’t start getting orders the moment your website is live. “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work here. You need to work towards promoting your website.
There are several online and offline ways to do this. For offline promotion, you should include your website URL in every piece of communication as you can, like visiting cards, yellow page ads, invoices, quotations, etc.
For online promotion, you should first make it a point to include your URL in email signatures and forum post signatures. Next, you should consider spending a little on PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. The most important online promotion is free traffic from search engines. If you want to win the SEO game, there are only three things that you really need to concentrate on:
1. Unique content: Don’t ever copy content from other websites, create your own. If required, hire a decent copywriter, but first start on your own.
2. Updated content: Search engines love websites which have new content added regularly, so make it a point to add something new to your website at least once a week. If there are no new products or services that you add, consider adding some latest news in your industry. Or you can simply add useful tips that cater to your industry.
3. Backlinks: The more websites that link to yours, the more weight search engines give to your ranking. So try to get more websites linking to you, preferably from related content sites. You can also write articles that are beneficial to your targeted audience and submit them at article directories. Remember to add your website link in the author’s bio (you are seeing this in action right now; check out the bio following this article).
These are the three pillars that SEO stands on. If you do nothing else except follow these, you will get much more targeted traffic than your competitors. You don’t even need an SEO consultant.
If you can generate enough business from your website, it makes sense in continuing it. It then becomes an investment with good returns. You should give it a try for at least 2 years, to track proper ROI. Once you’re fairly successful, you can think of other ways to improve your website. If you’re making more than you’re spending, its time to take your website to the next level. Start by hiring / outsourcing people to write content for you. Use lead generation tactics by giving away free reports in exchange for people to sign up to your mailing list.
While your website is certainly an investment worth making, you can also claim the costs as business expenses! Consult your accountant for details.
Root Server Hosting
This type of hosting has also been referred to as semi-managed hosting. Root server basically refers to a type of dedicated web hosting in which you have control on the server via access to the root and provides benefits as well such as a good infrastructure, security of the system and maintenance of hardware. A dedicated web hosting is a more complicated that can let you rent a server and still access various resources that it has to offer to host a number of sites. The advantages of this type of hosting are the flexibility and the benefits it has. Because root servers are semi managed servers, the company that offers the hosting service helps you in managing installations and the server hardware but software upgrades and back ups are your priority. The advantage however is that as a user of a this sort of server system, benefits such as administrative right of entry that basically lets you perform any operations on the server.
Another advantage of a this type of server is seen in its versatility, that is, you have a free pass with regard to carrying out different actions as you wish on the server. This may even be things like uploading your own site on the server at relative ease. These servers have long been used by individuals or companies with the need for more flexibility in their web hosting and usage needs. This is the advantage the root server ahs over the dedicated server. On the net, a server system denotes the operation by which domain names are kept and delivered to different routers. The server system is made up of 13 file servers out which the main one, also referred to as A is operated by the Company Network Solutions Inc. It is the first company that had exclusive rights to all domain names hosting before the coming of the others.
There are twelve companies that operate root server in the world that are often referred to as “root server operators” that provide server services to other sub letting companies. Thus on a daily basis, the list of 12 is copied to the various geographical regions of the world as dispersed file servers that are kept and taken care off by a group of agencies charged with these tasks. For the internet to reach the various places, the routing system now comes in handy to disperse it from the server to the small time end user. Every time you access your mail, you use a domain name that is linked to a root server that helps read it. Root servers have revolutionized internet technology with the quality and ease with which communication can be passed around.