How To Choose A Reliable Web Hosting Company : A Tip For Newbies

Reliable web hosting is vital for anyone attempting to earn money with a business website.

Choosing a host for your website is not easy when you are an Internet newbie and don't really know bandwidth from Band-Aid. What selection criteria do you use? If you are a total newbie, about the only thing you will know how to compare is price but if you do a search for web hosting you will have ads coming at you for all prices from $10 per year to $25 per month. Should you go for the most expensive on the basis that you get what you pay for or should you go for the cheapest because saving money is a priority while you are getting your business running?

The first thing to rule out is free web hosting. There are many great free resources to be found on the Internet including excellent anti-virus and anti-spy ware software. Free hosting is fine if you have a hobby website but, if you are running a business online and wish to achieve credibility with visitors and search engines, free web hosting won't do the job.

I discovered the hard way that cheap web hosting is not necessarily the bargain it might seem. When I started looking for hosting for a new website, I already had top class hosting that had come with my first website. There was an option to add on further domains for an extra $5 per month. That was cheap enough but I thought it would be a good idea to have my new website hosted completely separately (you know, the old eggs in one basket caution).

When I started checking around, there seemed to be millions of web hosts all offering what (to my untrained eye) seemed to be the same thing but at wildly varying prices, so I settled on a cheap hosting package. The cost was £1 per month (which was about $1.70 in those days) and I certainly got what I paid for!

At first everything was fine: I paid up, they hosted my website. The trouble is, you don't realise you have bought rubbish hosting until things start to go wrong.

The first sign that all was not well came a few months later when I was unable to locate my website. I raised a support ticket and waited. Four days later came the reply "everything seems ok now". Four days of downtime without a sensible word from support made me feel more than a little uneasy.

Things seemed fine for a while after that but then another problem arose: when I tried to log into my control panel all I got was a message telling me the licence fee had not been paid. This time the reply to my support ticket was quicker, it only took two days. Unfortunately, however, it was completely unhelpful. The reply was "It seems to be a site-wide issue". Was I supposed to feel better because the whole site was messed up and not just my bit? They must have got round to paying the licence fee because after a few more days, login was available again.

After that, I wanted to move to a new host but I had never moved a website before and assumed it would be really difficult and technically challenging (actually it is extremely simple). As a result of this fear my website remained where it was.
The crunch came when my domain name came up for renewal. In response to an email from the hosting company, I visited their website to make the required payment. Their PayPal link and credit card options did not work and there were several error messages showing on the pages I visited.

Emails to their support and billing departments went unanswered. My only means of arranging payment was via their website, so I kept trying. Each time I visited, there were more error messages, nothing worked and it began to look as if the site was actually melting bit by bit. It seemed the company had just packed up and left their website to self destruct.

Enquiries revealed that the only way I could renew my domain name ownership was through the hosting company because they had registered it on my behalf and they retained control of it. As they could not be contacted, there were only two options available. The first was to pay an agent a pretty hefty (and non-refundable) fee to try to contact the hosting company and negotiate the purchase the domain name from them. The second option was to lose the domain.

When you have to choose web hosting, the first thing to look for is quality of support. To keep prices low, the easiest way for the company to economise is to provide sub-standard support. Forget the offers of unlimited bandwidth, hundreds of email accounts, spam filters and other freebies. If support is non-existent, give the company a miss no matter how good their other terms might seem.

Using cPanel to Manage Your Host Files

CPanel is an easy user-interface site that lets you control your host account environment. The main peculiarity of this operating system is that it so simple to use that your below average computer user can’t mess it up. It’s got great features embedded into its panel and some of the features are listed below.

Site Tools

There are such tools available for your use, which are Web Protect (.htaccess editor), Custom error pages, Redirects, Ability to edit MIME types, Ability to edit Apache handlers, Install/Uninstall FrontPage Extensions, Search engine tool submitting and File Manager.

Email

The email program provides you with the possibility to add, remove, and change passwords while managing email accounts. CPanel is also provided by Webmail for the accounts, Auto responders, Forwarders, Mailing Lists, Spam filtering and some more.

Backup

Backup allows you to create copies of account files and databases. The backup menu also allows you to download any automatic backups that were downloaded by your CPanel administrator.

Stats

Here are different tools to survey your site popularity and efficiency. Those are Webalizer web stats, Webalizer FTP stats, Analog stats, AWStats, View latest visitors, View bandwidth usage and View error log modules.

FTP

There is a module that controls FTP accounts (add, remove, change password for its access), Anonymous FTP controls; Ability to change FTP login message and Ability to kill FTP sessions.

Advanced Stuff

You have an ability to add or remove subdomains, Subdomain Redirects and its Stats.

Advanced Tools

You are provided with tools of SSH access tools, Manage GPG keys and Cron jobs.

There are also Pre-Installed CGI Scripts. Those are Interchange Cart, Agora Cart, Bulletin Board, Java Chat, HTML Chat, phpMyChat, CGI Wrapper (for non-suexec installs), Random HTML generator, Advanced Guestbook, Counter Generator, Java Clock Generator, Java Countdown Generator, Secure FormMail clone, CGIEmail, Entropy Search, Entropy Banner. Network Tools are DNS Lookup and Traceroute. Database Management tools includes Managing MySQL databases and phpMyAdmin access.

For beginners, CPanel has a lot of options that are easy to use. CPanel works with most of browsers, such as IE, Opera, Firefox and others.

Developing Cold Fusion Hosting

Cold Fusion Hosting is all about databases, really. Cold Fusion, a software suite brought to us by the fine folks at Macromedia, which allows web-interactivity with databases. With Cold Fusion web hosting, you can now query, update, index, and chart databases from any web browser.

Cold Fusion hosting adds versatility and interactivity to ecommerce sites. Cold Fusion allows you to publish and then have automatically removed from your site time-sensitive content, such as flight schedules or event calendars. It adds functionality to creating and managing mailing lists and business reports. It allows you to offer your visitors printable content and customized menus.

Anytime you see .cfm as the extension on a web page, as opposed to .htm or .asp for example, you know you're dealing with Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML).

Though cold fusion is built on the Java platform, CFML allows web developers the benefits of Java without its inherent technical complexities. You need not know Java scripting in order to use cold fusion. CFML is a tag-based language quite similar to HTML and XML which makes it easy for anyone with even the most basic knowledge of web scripting to learn.

Cold Fusion is a server-side language which means that any web pages using CFML are read and interpreted by the Cold Fusion hosting company's server and converted into an HTML page prior to being sent back to the user's browser.

Cold Fusion web hosting can be significantly more expensive than other forms of web hosting, and should therefore only really be considered if its unique set of tools are relevant for your site's intended uses. Cold Fusion hosting is usually run on Windows 2000/NT/2003 operating systems, though you can also find support for Cold Fusion hosting on Linux and Sun servers.

In addition to all the usual factors you must consider when choosing any web host - cost, disk space, bandwidth, uptime, scalability, support - you now also have to consider certain factors specific to cold fusion hosting, including: potential tag restrictions, additional security concerns, whether the cold fusion hosting company provides database support, and which version of Cold Fusion they're using.

One type of tag restriction that is also a security concern is "high risk" tags, such as those that can be used to find and erase selected files from a server. For some larger businesses, this functionality is crucial to their operation, though potentially detrimental if accessed by the wrong hands, in which case a dedicated server is probably in order. Fortunately, cold fusion hosting is offered on shared, virtual, and dedicated servers.

Cold Fusion is well worth considering if you'd like the functionality of the Java platform with the facility of a comparatively autonomous and user-friendly software system. Especially if your website is expected to generate an income, you may find that the intimidating price tag, in the long run, turned out to be a bargain.

Why Website Analysis Is The Key To Better Online Results

Website analysis is the key to more profits online.

What a lot of people who hope to make a living on the Internet do is throw up a site and hope it sells. They use a “hit or miss” approach. More often than not they miss. You see, it’s really not enough to have a great looking site. The big question is… “Does the site actually sell?”

How do you tell? The answer is simple. You set up tracking software and perform some simple website analysis. For instance, in the offline world one of the tried and true methods of improving response is to do an “A/B Split Test”.

You take 1,000 names and mail 500 of them one version of your sales message. The other 500 get the same message except for one change. Maybe you put a different headline in the second batch of letters. Maybe you offer a different price. Whatever. The key is to make only one change and then compare the results.

Usually, one mailing will out pull the other. You can do the same thing online. Actually, with modern technology, it’s even easier. By using tracking and testing software you can rotate headlines, prices, offers and whatever else you want.

Then you do a little website analysis to see which headline, price, offer, etc. gives you the best response. As you tweak each element of your site, you improve sales little by little.

But each increment adds to your revenue. Think about this: By doing a little website analysis – and making appropriate changes – you could increase response and sales by 1% per month. Do that for the entire year and your overall response shoots up to 12%.

That’s huge considering the average website tops off at a 2% response rate.

And that’s the whole point of doing website analysis. You make simple changes to your website in a scientifically controlled environment. In other words, the changes you make are deliberate and can be tracked. Then, you get the results based on testing, analyze those results and make the necessary adjustments (i.e. use the headline that brought in a greater response) to boost your sales.

If you were to do this type of simple website analysis on an ongoing basis you would exponentially increase your results. What are some of the elements on your site to analyze? The ones that matter most include: headline, price, offer and list.

By running constant website analysis tests on these elements your bottom line revenue will soar. You’ll be able to make intelligent decisions to get your sites ranked higher, drive in more traffic, capture more leads and make more sales.

That’s the power of doing smart website analysis on a continual basis.

Web Hosting Packages - Which Should You Choose?

So - you need a web hosting package for your new website or series of planned websites. You're in luck! There are at least 10,000 companies and individuals offering a barrage of hosting packages all guaranteed to suit your every hosting need. Now, it's up to you to determine what type of web hosting package will work best for you.

Generally speaking, there are four different types of web hosting packages available: personal plans, reseller hosting plans, VPS packages and dedicated server hosting plans. While there are a multitude of differences within each package type; in general, these are the basic hosting packages available.

A personal hosting plan is generally setup for you to maintain one website. These hosting plans often offer supple disk space and bandwidth - more than most accounts containing a single website would ever think of using. Sometimes web hosts will allow you to manage multiple websites from your personal account; only you do not have the capability, often times, to manage each website with it's own unique control panel. Rather, you will have to manage each website from within the file directory and only your main website will have a control panel. Typically these personal plans are affordable - where you can find a suitable package for under $10 per month and as low as $2-$3 per month. A personal hosting plan is on a shared server, meaning that other websites are hosted on the same server as your website or websites; this shouldn't be too much of a deterrent if you find a reputable and reliable hosting company.

Reseller hosting is somewhat similar to a personal hosting plan in the way that it is on a shared server. If you purchase a reseller hosting account, your websites will be competing with other websites for system resources, but again, if it's a good hosting company, you won't have to worry about frequent outages and downtime due to server overcrowding. A reseller account is not only good for reselling hosting services yourself, they are a wonderful asset for webmasters on a budget that run multiple websites. A reseller account typically offers a unique control panel for each website and a master control panel so that you can manage each website that is on your account. With decent packages ranging in price between $20-$50 per month, you are sure to save some money on web hosting if you have multiple websites that could benefit from the option of having their own unique control panel.

VPS web hosting, also known as a virtual private server, a virtual dedicated server or semi-dedicated server; is a step below an actual dedicated hosting account traditionally without the high cost of having a dedicated server. VPS hosting packages differ from reseller hosting accounts because they are on their own partition within a server; they have their own operating system and are not as susceptible to problems that other websites might cause that are hosted on the same server, only on a different partition. A VPS plan will often allow you root access to afford you the option of adding specialized software that many reseller hosting plans cannot; giving you the freedom to run your own applications in your personal hosting environment. VPS plans are usually more expensive than reseller plans with average packages running from $30-$70 per month.
Dedicated hosting plans are for the full time webmaster that needs ultimate dependability or runs process/bandwidth intense websites. These offer the most opportunity in terms of control as you almost always have root access; though depending on the particular package you've purchased from your hosting company - you may have to deal with server setup and management yourself. If you're not familiar with setting up an operating system, firewalls and server configurations you will need to purchase a fully managed dedicated hosting plan: these cost more but are absolutely necessary for the security and dependability of your websites if you cannot otherwise handle these administrative tasks. Price wise there are large gaps in dedicated server pricing - you can find some for as cheap as $80 per month all the way to $400 per month; really depending on your hardware and network needs and the hosting provider that you choose.

In conclusion, there are a lot of different web hosting packages available; to save yourself the time and headache of having to moving all of your websites to another package, you should choose a plan that will meet your long term requirements the first time around.