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Finding a promising webhost for your internet based business is an important piece to the puzzle. This is the company that has control of your server space, web services and file maintenance, so you want to make sure you are protected.

Here are 5 things to look for in a promising host.

1. Reliability There is nothing more important than reliability when it comes to selecting a hosting company. There are a number of things that can go wrong within an online business and it is assuring to know that your web host is there for you. Prior to selecting a company, take the time to look at the percentage of time their servers have been working properly. If the servers tend to be down 15% of the time or more, this shaves off valuable time your business is online.

2. Contact info Part of a webhost being reliable is also them being available. If your server goes down, you want to know that you can get a hold of the hosting company as soon as possible. The best way to check on the support personnel is to call them up prior to agreeing to anything to test them out.

3. Domain name With thousands of businesses on the web and millions of web addresses already taken, it can be difficult coming up with an original domain name. However, every web hosting company should be able to provide you with one for a reasonable price. Check into the support they give you for finding a quality domain name and the prices each host charges for a domain name.

4. CGI access Depending on the type of online venture you have, you may want to or need to run your own programs. In order to do this, you must have CGI access. Not every hosting company offers this, and not every host offers the same capabilities for their CGI access. When researching into a hosting company, check to make sure they offer CGI access that allows you to read, write, and execute on your server.

5. POP3 account Having a POP3 e-mail account is vital for your online venture because of the protection that it offers. A POP account gives you password-protected access to mail that is sent to your website email address.

There are quite a few things you want to look into prior to selecting a shared hosting company. The more questions you can come up with to ask the shared hosting company and the more good old fashioned research you put into your decision, the better off you will be.

No, ‘cheap’ is not usually a bad thing but when it comes to a services industry as competitive and with as thin margins as the web hosting industry, customers better watch out. Hosts offering ‘cheap’ services tend to offer the world for USD $1 per year but, usually fail to deliver even the most basic services. Surprised? I’m not. Let me explain some basics for the benefit of the vast majority who would still be unsure as to what I’m rambling about.

A “web host” is a company - well, most like to think of themselves as such but that’s a whole new article - that is in the business of procuring bandwidth (internet connectivity) and servers (glorified computers) with the intent to re-sell the same, in smaller bits, to people who need storage space for their e-mails and websites. This is usually (read always) accomplished by renting out dedicated servers with a decent hard drive and bandwidth quota and then using a hosting automation suite (control panel) to divide the server resources up into smaller chunks called ‘shared hosting plans’. The goal is to price these plans in a way that they remain affordable for the client while helping the host maximize profit from the resources it has.

Now comes the fun part…

Since there are almost no barriers to entry in this particular industry, new web hosts keep popping up every day. This helps keep the price for hosting services sane and should also mean better service for the customers since there are many hosts competing for their business. What really happens is that one Johnny-come-lately decides that the only way he can grab some market-share is by offering the lowest prices. Once customers start quoting his price to the host struggling for their business, the host decides to match it. Before you know it, everyone has slashed their prices by half! This, in Pakistan, can be seen every 10 – 12 months.

“Good”, you say? Read on…

What does this mean for the web host? Suddenly, all their existing clients are paying them half of what they used to. This means that in the coming year, they would have to generate twice as much new business just to make the same amount as last year! Is this considered growth? I think not!

Sadly, the number of clients does not magically increase with every price shave. So, the web hosts are left with little choice other than to cut costs just to make ends meet. Where there were 3 support people, they decide to make do with just one. Where there were 2 servers earlier, they decide that they can load all of the clients onto just one server resulting in lower operating costs. These measures, needless to say, do have a positive impact on the host’s bottom-line but deteriorate the services resulting in un-answered support queries and long periods of downtime (website/email inaccessibility) or extremely slow server response due to excessive loads on the server.

Now, if the host were to put their existing clients first, they would price their service fairly so that every client not only feels good in his wallet, but can also rely on the service being offered. I guess, all it boils down to is; whether a web host is in this business to provide a top-notch service with a long-term business goal or is just there to make a quick while competing with all the fly-by-night hosts who happen to come along.

Recently, I have come across at least three such hosting companies that are now in financial peril because they could not resist the urge to slash prices in order to try and capture some new business. Sadly enough, these are not people who are ‘new’ to the industry. Such an impact on the market is magnified 10 fold when an older host decides they would be better off by just slashing prices rather than improving on service. As a result, the younger companies follow suit and create a mess for themselves and more importantly their clients. The ultimate outcome is that frustrated clients decide to switch to foreign web hosts that provide a better service at a saner price.

From experience, I have learnt that providing a good service is what really matters. The rest falls into place when clients realise that they can only run their online business if the service they get is of good quality. After all, you get what you pay for. What good is a cheap service when you will eventually stop getting any?

Firstly, you have to know that hosting plans are quite simple to come across. All you have to do is simply look for them on the net and voila!!! Everything is not as easy as a lame “voila” and there you are with your site earning millions for your selling. It’s a litttle more complex than that for the single reason that it gets a lot tricky to opt the perfect webhosting for your site.

Besides, lets face it, we’re all attracted by those cheap web hosting offers that come showering down upon us through the Internet. But then are we making the right choice? Why put our business in jeopardy when you can calculate your risks and well, avoid them altogether. A really good web hosting package from hostgator is something that doesn’t have any hidden costs and gives your website the storage space that it needs. Then of course there is the requirement of the bandwidth because it is obvious that after your website has crossed the limit, your site is bound to be inaccessible.

Then of course, there is the customer support of the web hosting party which you should pray that you will never use. This is only in case of emergencies, i.e., should bad luck work in your favor or something like that. Your uptime should be the maximum no matter what. The minimum uptime that you should expect should be no less than 99.5% with 99.999% being simply perfect. Bluehost garantee 99.9% uptime. The uptime is nothing but the amount of time your website is to stay online.

One last recommendation to you would be don’t fall for those unlimited traffic packages that some web hosts offer you. Because unlimited may not always mean unlimited, since after a select traffic is targeted to your site, you might as ! well be costed heavily. So don’t be afraid to talk to website hosts and get any doubts cleared up before you sign up.

You are probably all geared up to create a web site but are un sure which format would work best since there are so many systems out there, then you might want to look at using a wordpress site. It is not simply used as a blogging platform for which it has become popular, but it can be put to lots of different uses too. Wordpress can be modified to produce sites or CMS (Content Management System) which has several intrinsic advantages over standard websites:

Making a Wordpress web site is simple, especially if one has fantastico in their website’s control panel then in a few mouse clicks you’ll have your wordpress web site online. Manual set up of your wordpress website can be done easily if you do not have access to fantastico web site hosting. This takes little more time but if you just follow the instructions you should set-up in no time. If you prefer you can always ask someone to do it for you. It won’t be pricey to have it done for you as it doesn’t take a long time for someone who has set-up a wordpress website before.

Refurbishing a website built by someone else can be a slow and costly exercise for the owner as you have to pay the designer, wait for his action, make alterations and wait patiently for the finished product. Using a wordpress system is much more user-friendly and simplier to learn. All wordpress website modifications can be done in real time as you can change your own site quickly appose to waiting for your webmaster to make time for you.

As part of the benefits of using a Wordpress blog, you can instantly access RSS Feeds, when you construct a web site using a Wordpress blog. Your visitors are now able to sign-up to the Really Simple Syndication feed and receive feeds regarding any new content that you may add. This is an ideal way to pull meaningful visitors to your blog.

What makes you scream when you stumble upon a website? For me, it is tasteless music with no way to turn it off.

Signs of Webmaster Newbies

All of us have been “newbies” at one point in our webmastering lives.We spent hours at dhtml, javscript and graphics sites looking for copy-and-paste stuff that we thought would make our sites look impressive.

You can generally spot a first timer’s website right off the bat because the webmaster adds a smorgasboard of javascripts, animated gifs and other components to the site, thinking it makes the site look technologically advanced. This only makes a site look amateur.

Creating an Amateur Image

You might have a brick and mortar business that’s been around for the last decade, with tons of satisfied customers. On the Internet, however, your visitors do not know who you are. To create trust, you want a professional image. When designing your website, here are some things to avoid so that your business does not look amateur or like a fly-by-night operation:

• Dark, heavy backgrounds with hard-to-read fonts - For a business website, it’s best to use a plain white background and black text so that your visitors can read it easily. Some first timers are tempted to have “fancy” backgrounds with different colored text. Not only does it make your text hard to read, but if you are including pictures of products, it is hard to make them blend in with the background.
• Pages that are larger than the browser screen - There’s nothing more irritating that trying to read a web page that scrolls across the screen. Generally, web users use 1024 x 768 as their desktop resolution. Try to stay within those confines.
• Sound effects - Everyone has different tastes when it comes to music, but even if you discovered music that appeals to every single person alive, don’t make it automatically load on your site. With a music site, there are scripts that will allow the user to click “play” at his or her option. This applies to audio advertisements or other background sound effects — have a pause button or an off button.
• “Cool” effects - About 8 or 9 years ago, it was real “cool” to have a flash presentation on the index page. Most everyone was doing this. This does not establish your online reputation. Flash introductions involve a lot of effort to create and when it is all said and done, many look silly. These intros can take a long time to load and most people will not wait around to view them. Another thing that beginners think is “cool” are page fading effects, animated images and scrolling text. I added these types of things when I first started out, thinking it made me look talented. However, the cold reality is that these effects are a waste of time and a turnoff. I’ve seen some sites, designed by supposed design specialists, where the links scroll by really fast and you have to “aim and shoot” just to be able to click a link. Don’t bother including these effects. People visiting your site are looking for specific information or products and are generally not looking to be impressed with the scripts you have embedded.
• No clear navigation scheme - Many people enter a website by the interior pages, not at the home page. You need to give them a way to easily navigate through your site. Menus that are positioned on either the left or the top of the web page are the most popular and will be most familiar for your visitors. Regardless of where you decide to place your menu, make sure that it is in the same place throughout your site. A surefire indicator of an amateur web design is the absense of a navigation menu.
• No search feature - Particularly if you have a large product line that you are selling or if you have a content rich site, always include a search box to help your visitors. Google’s fre search box is a tool that you can use if you don’t know how to include a search feature. This makes your site “user friendly” and shows that you care about your visitor’s experience on your site.
• “Secret” prices - If you’re selling products, include the price. Don’t try to force your potential customer into the shopping cart just to find out what the price is — it’s rude and many will not do it.
• Policies - An amateur site will not include privacy policies, terms of use and, when selling products or services, returns and shipping policies. In this vein, you should also provide contact information, particularly if you are selling products or services.
• Under construction pages - “Under construction” or “coming soon” pages are a surefire way to announce that you’re an amateur. Do not bother linking to pages under construction. Once the page is completed and uploaded, then you can add a link to your menu and sitemap.
• No online shopping cart - If you are selling a product, provide a way for people to purchase your product online. When people are looking to buy something online, they usually intend to buy it immediately. Chances are, they do not want to send you a fax with their credit card information or mail in a check or money order. If you don’t have a merchant account, consider Paypal or, in the case of digital products, consider using a service such as Clickbank.For people who already have a merchant account, there are free and quality shopping carts available, like Mals-e.com, which also provides an affiliate program option.

What’s Your Top Gripe?

Newbie or pro, you can voice your opinion about what makes a stinking website at the NotGuru’s survey about poor website design.If you’re looking for giveaways, software and tips to help your fledgling online business, the Not Guru blog delivers plenty of resources every day.Take the site design survey and feel free to voice your pet peeve in the comments - the results are quite interesting.

If you have one or numerous websites, it is vitally important to know how many people are visiting your site and where these visitors are coming from. Analyzing your website statistics should become a regular habit for every webmaster who wishes to improve website traffic over time. You’ll be able to test and track the popularity of your updated site content and even see how visitors are finding your site in the search engines.

There are many web statistics programs on the market, each one unique in cost and characteristics, but fortunately some of the best website statistic platforms already come free with most of the best web hosting plans.

If you are with a cpanel web hosting provider such as HostGator, then you probably have a whole bunch of web statistic programs built in. Cpanel is by far the most popular control panel for web hosting accounts today. It’s very easy to learn and use for regular website administration.

There are usually 3 different types of statistics you will find inside cpanel. These are known as Analog, Webalizer and Awstats.

Webalizer is a statistic program that shows you in a graph form how many visitors have visited your site month by month. This type of statistics is very basic and only takes a quick glance to receive your web site information. If you want more detailed information you will probably need to check out the other two statistic programs.

Analog and Awstats each offer different presentation styles. All the essential visitor information you probably wish to see is listed on Analog, but most people have difficulty finding it as it is primarily text based and requires close attention.

Awstats on the other hand, is usually the favorite web site statistic program on cpanel. Not only does it give you plenty of visitor information, from number of hits per day and month, it also tells you where they originate from, how long visitors stayed at your site, the country from which they are viewing your site, what browser they are using and much more. Basic colored graphs and simple to read layout make it a quick and easy task to find the information that you are looking for.

So if you own a website and would like to know more about your visitors check out your cpanel statistic programs inside your website hosting account. They can be extremely helpful in analyzing your site and attracting more traffic to it. Click here for a list of cheap web hosting plans that include cpanel.

Webhosting free is a service provided by webhosting companies that allows web sites to be uploaded or transferred to a server for worldwide access entirely free of charge. You can avail of this free webhosting over some sites, the most popular ones include FBhosting, Xoom, Hypermart and GeoCities. Webhosting free services can afford to offer service for free because they can generate profit in the following ways: placing banner ads on the user’s website, placing banner ads on the administration pages, sending users email from advertisers, generate more visits to the homepage URL given, members sometimes upgrade to paid hosting and they can cobrand webhosting free.

When choosing for webhosting free service, you should know what actually you need for your website. You can use power search and choose only the features you need. Webhosting free services impose different rules when it comes to setting up your account. Some allow users to get an actual domain name. Mostly, require a sub-domain under a primary domain, i.e. http://geocities/ctibene/… Some allow users to run own CGI Scripts. In others this feature is prohibited.

All webhosting free services provide limited disk space mostly between 5-10 MB only. They are strict about data transfer also. You must at least be aware of the number of users who will access your website. This way you can gage the data transfer requirements in your website. Webhosting free providers rarely, if ever, give 24/7 customer support. Webhosting free services do not have the staffs to attend to the users’ technical problems as hiring more staffs could mean additional expenses for them. Most webhosting free providers do not guarantee uptime. Most paid webhosting guarantees 99% uptime. Uptime guarantee is the most important thing for anyone who rely on the internet to advertise their services and products. Since downtime usually means no business could be conducted at all. Webhosting free services oftentimes do not assist the user in securing a domain name.

Webhosting free oftentimes leave you to your own resources. They do not have e-commerce solution features too such as email listing, shopping card and credit card which are necessary for online business transactions. Webhosting free also imposed limitations when it comes to using your own CGI scripts. They limits the disk space. You need to check the disk space limits before you put up your website for webhosting free to make sure that the disk space could accommodate your website. And in case you need to expand or add more contents and features, the disk space would be enough to accommodate it.

For those people who are novice to hosting or are using the hosting site for a temporary storage of their files, webhosting free is a better alternative. If you are putting up an individual site and if the domain name matters more to you than the simple features of free hosting service, then webhosting free is more to your liking. Otherwise, get a paid webhosting service for your website.

Any product or service that requires storage or access on the internet will use the services of a web hosting company to do this. Most people will require their services which may be provided as part of a package which will probably at a agreed price but could be free. Anything uploaded to a web host will be stored on the host’s server which means that other internet users can then access your website for what is essentially a huge digital storage facility.

A majority of providers even supply free hosting to individuals, not usually companies, where they can host websites and blogs for free. There are several limitations to non-paid web hosting services and they are not generally reckoned as a choice for serious web users as the disk space is not enough along with many other functions a web user may need. You can find on the Net for some of the paid hosting services but not all the packages have the same prices.

Initially, most users opt for paying for a shared server with their hosting company. When the need for more space and security is required then a dedicated server at extra cost can be obtained at A2Hosting. However, all this is worthless if you haven’t registered a domain name that you can use in conjunction with the web hosting and to send your files to. A file is anything that is stored on the server and can include images, documents, programs, video or audio files, in fact anything that can be stored digitally; prices for storage continue to fall so limits are constantly rising.

The benefit about paid domain names and hosting means that all your email addresses will bear your domain name in them and not that of the free service provider you may have been using earlier. 100megswebhosting offers free domain name with every hosting plan. Owned domain name email addresses are an important sign that a person or company is serious about their internet presence and gives a sense of credibility which cannot be achieved with the many free service providers available. Then you have bandwidth, which refers to how much data is being transferred over the internet, this is something that many people overlook simply because they’re enamored with the low prices of hosting packages and don’t consider how quickly bandwidth is used up.

If you only settle for a package with a minimum amount of bandwidth then there will be times when visitors will have trouble viewing your web site or using its facilities. This is extremely important if your website has many images, MP3 tracks or other large files like video clips; even a single web page can contain a great deal of information, all of which is considered as bandwidth. Some people and web hosting companies decide to become their own web host but this is not recommended as the security issues involved are huge unless you are proficient in this area, it is something to be avoided.

When someone has a reseller hosting account with a web server hosting provider, the reseller has the right to use the resources that they buy each month and repackage and sell those hosting services to their own clients. These third party clients of the reseller do not deal directly with the hosting provider, only the reseller. The web server hosting is purchased at a wholesale price by the reseller, and is resold to the customer for profit.

Users of reseller web hosting plans are simply entrepreneurs who are acting as middlemen. They offer the hosting services that they have leased from another web host’s server rather than purchasing and maintaining their own equipment. Most of the time, the quality of services that are offered by resellers is so good that the consumer is not aware that they are dealing with resellers who do not own their own web servers. Because they can pick and choose from many dedicated hosting services, the resellers are in a position to provide their customers with the best of web server hosting plans.

There are many reseller hosting businesses that are quite successful and profitable, and anyone who understands the margins and the numbers can turn some profit in this way. The basis of the profit comes from the fact that a reseller can purchase, for example, approximately 1,000 MB of hard drive space from their web server hosting provider for about $25 a month. They can then repackage that allotment of resources into smaller packages for numerous customers.

It is typical to be able to sell a web hosting plan that provides people with about 25 MB of space for a price of about $5 per month. The reseller then has the ability to create 40 hosting packages, and the monthly income could be about $200. While this is not a huge amount, it is basically turning a $25 per month investment into $200, and this process can be repeated to support as many customers as the reseller is able to find.

Often, when a new hosting company is first starting out, there isn’t enough capital to provide the necessary round the clock server maintenance, in addition to trying to market and grow their new web server hosting venture. In this case, a new hosting company can start out as a reseller of hosting services and operate that way indefinitely, or until they have enough customers and revenue to justify the capital expenditures to purchase their own dedicated web servers, and hire the support staff to manage and troubleshoot the equipment.

In most cases, the reseller hosting accounts that are purchased through the major web server hosting companies allows the reseller to customize the web hosting plans that they will resell to their customers. In addition, the resellers can “brand” the resell site and control panels of the hosting account so that they can build their name recognition with their customers.

Don’t miss best reseller web hosting for more information

There is good news for those who want to run an online website and who have even gone to the trouble of creating a website, but find that their available financial resources don’t allow them to use of expensive web hosting services. Discount web hosting services are readily available and many of them are good enough for anyone whose needs are standard and not too demanding. The reason why it is possible to get discount web hosting services is that resellers generally buy web space in bulk from an ISP (internet service provider) and then resell the space to customers at a cheaper price.

There are several different components that make up discount web hosting service. These components in turn allow you, the end user, to upload your files, documents, data as well as other forms of electronically created content in the web space offered at a discounted price and you can do all this in a convenient and cost effective manner. Generally, it also means that software running on the server will run HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol in order to deliver image files as well as HTML pages. In addition, you also can transfer files with the help of software known as FTP or file transfer protocol.

Great Demand

Even though you may not be paying top dollar for your web hosting service, discount web hosting services are still good enough to offer you sufficient amount of disk space as well as reasonably fast transfer speeds to make such packages quite attractive. There are more and more web hosts mushrooming up that are providing a variety of web hosting plans including discount web hosting plans, because of greater demand for discount web hosting.

It is advisable that you do an exhaustive comparison of various such plans and use certain criteria in order to properly evaluate each different discount web hosting plan, in order to reap maximum benefits from a discount web hosting package. You therefore will need to look at criteria such as the price, the profile of the web host, level of customer support, especially online support, and you also need to consider scalability before arriving at a decision.

You need to also compare discount web hosting packages on the basis of service offered, type of platform (UNIX or NT), space offered, traffic as well as email capabilities. At present, online businesses are booming and there are therefore many businesses that are dealing with ecommerce. So, it follows that these users also need to look around for suitable ecommerce web hosting.

To get the best deal, you will however, need to read up reviews (made by experts as well as by customers) and then do your own comparisons of various discount web hosting plans. Once you find some that suit you, you will then need to grade the best among the many and the one that scores the highest marks should be your pick.

Discount web hosting services are readily available and many of them are good enough for anyone whose needs are standard and not too demanding. View more article at www.webhosting.jsgenterprises.com.