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Accepting Payment Through Your Website
If you're doing business on the Internet, accepting payment through your website is an absolute must. If you're not processing orders online, you're losing a great deal of money in lost sales. Studies have shown, you can increase your online sales...
Flash, SEO and Optimization - How to properly use flash on your websites
Flash movies can be a great thing. They can help catch eyes that are otherwise bored with static looking pages, and they can help tell a story better than plain text. However the use of flash must be tempered with the ability to rank in search...
SEO Sitemaps Give Websites a Boost
A lot of web pages will find an SEO sitemap useful in improving
their performance. SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization",
the process that aims to create or revise Internet sites so that
it can be better found by search engines. The...
Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website - Step 1: Keyword Selection
This is part one of ten in this search engine positioning series. In part one we will outline how to choose the keyword phrases most likely to produce a high ROI for your search engine positioning efforts. Over this ten part series we will...
Website Promotion: 10 Search Engine Optimization Blunders to Avoid
If you want to develop a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, go out of your way to avoid blunders that limit search engine rankings. Here are 10 to keep in mind: 1. Don't use frames. Why would you want to use frames if SEO is...
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Provide A Good Home For Your Website.
Selecting a web hosting company is like sending one of your children off to college. You may have complete confidence in your son or daughter’s abilities but unless they are placed in the proper environment they will not have the opportunity to thrive. Likewise, no matter how sophisticated or impressive the website you have designed may be, if you do not place the site where it can perform optimally you will likely be disappointed in the results.
Selecting web hosting is not simply finding a place where your website can reside. It is finding the company that offers the resources that will allow your website to operate effectively and to grow as the business or public demands. This means that you must be able to store and transfer enough data so that your site functions smoothly but also remains affordable.
Free web hosting services normally require that you allow ads to be placed on your site. These generate revenue for the hosting company by enabling them to display ads to visitors to your website. Only you can determine if the ads are appropriate for visitors to your site. In addition you will have to decide if the amount of storage and the available bandwidth will be sufficient for the type of website that you want to display. A free service may be completely appropriate for a personal website that is periodically modified. But trying to operate a site with significant traffic or a commercial focus may be “penny wise and pound foolish.”
All commercial web hosting companies are not
created equal. Of course, cost is an issue but reliability and service will likely be major factors in the decision making process. You should expect your host to be up and functioning 100% of the time but you will likely only see guarantees of 99-99.5% uptime. Less than this is unacceptable.
If you will personally be managing much of the activity for your site, make sure that you are comfortable with the Control Panel. Some hosts present Control Panels that are cumbersome and complicated. You want to easily navigate through routine functions.
You will also want to make sure that the hosting company has functionality that you may not be using now but will likely use in the future. These would include PHP, MySQL, SSI, .htaccess, SSL, etc. Examine the offers for email and autoresponders also.
Many web hosting services offer very low rates if you commit to a year or more of hosting. While this may turn out to be an excellent value in the long term, it may be advisable to pay each month until you are confident in the service and, quite importantly, the quality of the technical support that they provide. Getting accurate responses to questions quickly will make your life as a webmaster less stressful.
About the Author
About the author: Terry McDermott is an Internet marketing professional managing a portfolio of websites. He has had adventures with a variety of web hosts and now operates his own hosting website at http://www.alphawebhosting.com. He can be reached at termcder@gmail.com.
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