Basic Concepts of Web Hosts

Web Host Web host refers to a computer connected to the internet. Web host can also be termed as ‘web server'. The computer that is playing the role of the web server needs to be more powerful than normal PCs and the function of this web server is to serve up websites. The website content of the user will remain will on this computer, so as the people who are surfing on the internet can get a way to access his/her website. There can be three main categories in which the web host can be classified based on the economic factor and common features: 1. Free Hosts: The users who are not professional but are making website only as a hobby then for them free hosting can be a good option. In free hosting space, bandwidth and other features provided are very limited. With free web hosting one can not only make his/her website successful but is also suitable for personal websites or for temporary usage. Generally free hosting enforces pop-up, text or banner ads. Reliability, best performance and customer support lacks in case of free hosting as well. When a user registers for a free host then the word free host gets added with the user's domain name that gives an adverse effect in the eye of the visitors. 2. Shared Hosts: The next type of the web hosting to be discussed is shared hosting. This hosting service is used by many of the web sites .This type of hosting service is Suitable for personal, small and medium businesses. This service can be used by paying $1 to $25 per month. The features provided by this service vary from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. The users host their website by this type of hosting service and it has its own top level domain facility. No doubt that shared web hosting is quite better than free hosting but still it does not provide 100% satisfactory services. In case of shared hosting one server is shared by the number of websites so its performance and availability gets affected. More websites usually means less performance. If less number of websites are hosted by one server then it will be more expensive, but in this case there are more chances of reliability. There are many companies allowing customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account. 3. Dedicated Hosts: The next type of hosting is dedicated hosting. This type of hosting is most reliable hosting. In this type of hosting a full server is dedicated to a single customer. Generally this type of hosting is used by large businesses, professionals and very active websites dealing with thousands of visitors daily. The customers having dedicated hosting can have their total control over the server as well as able to create as many websites as they like. Customers can run their own hosting company on a rented dedicated server. Payment module is mentioned according to specifications and services provided with the server, which varies from $100 up to about $800 dollars per month. 4. Collocated Hosts: Now the other type of hosting service to be discussed is collocated hosting. This service is very much similar to dedicated hosting. The difference between collocated hosting and dedicated hosting is that in collocated hosting the customer owns the server hardware instead of renting it. In this service the server will be placed in provider's data center. This service is more expensive than dedicated hosting. 5. Reseller Hosts: In reseller hosting the providers offers web server storage to their customers, and resells the web server storage to them. Generally providers offer resellers a discount price. 6. Other Hosts: Including the above type of hosts there are also many other hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these hosts will not be discussed in this article. Domain Name Domain name is the name which shows the place where one's website is located. The actual address of the website is a set of numbers. Each and every web server has its own unique address. Domain name indicates the real addresses of every websites. One can easily remember the domain name of any of the website. Remembering domain name is easier than recalling the IP addresses. Space / Storage Space is one of the services provided by the web host. It plays a very important role in the website development. It happens many times that the customer requires more space but the host fails to provide it, so customer should be very careful while choosing the web host. Storage is the amount of web server's disk space available for customer's website files, images and databases. Space can be according to the requirement; it can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Earlier prices of the space were very high but prices reduced significantly during the last few years. The hosting plans offering 3GB of space for less than $10 a month can be easily available. AdChoices Bandwidth Bandwidth can be defined as the amount of data transferred from web server to clients' internet browsers. When ever a person outlook a page the data is transmitted from the server to that person' PC. If any one is having audio, video and images in his/her website then the bandwidth consumed is more in comparison of the website having only text contents. The bandwidth available in free hosting can be as low as 100MB per month where as in some dedicated servers the bandwidth available is as high as 2000GB a month. The customers who don't want to pay more for bandwidth can easily find hosting plans offering 75GB of monthly data transfer for less than $10. Server Type Generally server means the operating system than runs the web server. Some common types are Windows, Linux and UNIX. Server type refers the server side scripting and database types. The difference between Windows server and Linux/UNIX is that Windows runs ASP and ASP.NET with Access or SQL Server databases where as Linux/UNIX servers usually runs CGI, PHP or JSP with MySQL or Oracle databases. The other difference is that Windows servers are more expensive than Linux/UNIX servers. Databases As server type is discussed earlier also, we are able to know that there are different types of databases available. The mostly used is MySQL as it is open source GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications' requirements such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, rather its features are limited. MySQL is sufficient for small concern but it is not powerful for the complicated large business sites. Large business requires more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Server. . Server Side Scripting Usually the new comers prefer to use PHP as server side scripting. The reason behind this is that there are hundreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that are able to fulfill the webmaster's requirements. However PHP also has some limitations in features required by advanced websites same as in the case of MySQL, due to this limitation some professional web developers prefer to use ASP.NET or JSP. Some other developers still prefer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL. Email Now the next very important aspect to be talked about is Email. At present no one can move further in this computer world with having his/her Email account. The one who is planning to do any kind of activity through computer such as to run a business or to provide any kind of service, then the first thing he/she need to do is to open an Email account. There are many hosting plans that include the feature of having some email accounts with customer's domain. The availability of number and size of email accounts totally depends on the hosting plan one opted. Generally this feature is not included in free hosting. Small plans provide only about 10 accounts where as big plans do not have the limited number. Usually those email accounts are web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) The other service is FTP. File Transfer Protocol is a usual way of transferring files across the Internet. Most of the webmasters used to upload and download their websites contents through FTP. The process of uploading or downloading is performed by using FTP client software. Webmasters require FTP username and password so as to access their web server. There are any hosts who use to provide more than one FTP account to their customers as per their requirement. Rather FTP is unspecified; it is not advisable as per the security reasons. Control Panel Control panel is the service available by many of the web hosting companies to their customers. It is a web based application that helps in managing websites. Some important functions performed by the control panel are that it used to manage email accounts, providing statistics, managing FTP accounts, managing domains and sub-domains and managing databases. The control panel application that is mostly used by the user is cPanel. There are many companies who use to develop their own control panel application. Uptime Now after having all the services, the thing of concern which remains is how the user keeps his/her website uptime most of the time. If anyone is having a website with excellent features but it remains down most of the time it will be of no use, as when ever the visitors visit his/her website and found it down then later on they will think twice before visiting it. In result he/she will suffer the loss of visitors. Uptime is very important feature of web hosts and that is usually measured in percentage. If a server remains down near about 30 minutes a day will have an uptime percentage of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most small to medium business websites. If any of the business website is not having at least this percentage of uptime then that website is not suitable for a business website. Mission critical sites cannot tolerate frequent outages, thus they may use web monitoring services to notify web administrators immediately when an outage happens. Price Finally the factor left is price. In this option also there is a great variability found like for example customer is having option to choose between the prices ranging from 0 to $1000 per month. For most personal, small and medium websites the total amount of cost involved is just $15 per month. Thus its not at all advisable for business website owners to select very cheap plans let say less than $5 because this price can lead to huge cost indirectly afterwards.

The Advantages of Using an Online Professional Website Builder

Reaching new heights and goals for your computer needs you to strive for new and exciting innovations for your business. One of the new frontiers in making a business grow is through the Internet. Popularly known as ecommerce, more and more businesses are going online whether it is just a small or medium sized business. SME (small and medium enterprises) though have problems in this area, some of them cannot afford to hire a staff to build and maintain their online website store. Getting professional and experienced web programmers and designers to build and maintain your site can be quite expensive, especially if you have to put up a department for them. Many would just opt to build their sites on their own. But, since most of us have no programming skills and graphic designing skills, making a professional website is difficult. It's not easy to know all the programming languages used in making a website, as well as have the necessary tools to make it very professional and user friendly. This is where an online professional website builder is the solution to this predicament. But what can an online professional website builder do for you? How will they help you in achieving your business goals? Do they have effective ways that can assure you that your web site will look more professional and captivating? ? One of the advantages of an online professional website builder is that you don't have to purchase any software just to create a professional looking website. You can create your very own website just by looking for a website that offers online professional website builder. ? Another advantage of an online professional website builder is that it allows its users to perceive practically what the site will appear like on the Internet. With this online website builder you can see an actual web site as you build it. ? With an online professional website builder, you avoid complex computer operations, and only deal with the creative aspects of making your own site. This program allows you to have an easy passage in building or constructing your own site. ? An online professional website builder can guide you through every phase in constructing your very own website. It usually offers its users with options about color scheme, page layout, kinds of pages you want. It can provide you with graphics that can enhance your web site. With this, you can use the graphics sparingly; avoid dancing, spinning and twirling animated images. ? With the help of an online professional website builder, you can create website that are flexible and easy to use. These two things are among the important things that can attract more clients to your website. ? An online professional website builder can organize the contents of your website so that finding them would be easy. An online builder can teach you on how to make logical categories and sub categories where you can put all your contents. ? Most online professional website builder can also help you in providing different or multiple payment options to your customers. With this website builder, you can provide a currency converter if you offer products or payment in other currencies. ? You can also find an online professional website builder that can provide you with security systems that can guarantee that the information provided by you and your client will not be hacked while transferring from your client's computer to the web server. Most of this online professional website builder can help you use a hosting service that is good, reliable, and can provide you with customer support at all hours. It can help you compare a few hosting services, and lets you choose the most suitable web host that you can use. Using an online professional website builder can really make your work more fun and exciting.

How to Generate More Traffic to Make Your Website Achieve Higher Ranking

A simple fact toward to achieve online business success is to drive traffic to your website - lots of traffic, without it, your website will hardly make sales and your online business will go nowhere. As an online business entrepreneur, one of your big goals is to achieve a good flow of qualified traffic to your website. To reach to this goal, you must do the work to ensure that your website has unique, useful and accessible content. To generate more traffic and to make your website achieve higher ranking in the search engine, and win over others in the competitive online world, following are some advices that you should take into consideration before you start your online business, or plan to do your next internet marketing campaign. 1. With have search engine in mind - When you designing or creating your website, think about you goal, such as the kind of results you expected to see. Although you can use various types of paid advertising to promote your website later, but search engines are your cheapest and best sources for targeted and organic traffic, so build your website with have search engine in mind is very important. Do not just simply build a website without even thinking about how you are going to get traffic to it. If you already did, then tweak it. It is more than just to have a nice-looking website. Many people make the mistake of focusing on how the site looks instead of how it works. Therefore, with have, a clear picture in mind will help you create a better-optimized website. 2. Unique, quality and useful content - You may already read many articles talk about it. Well, it is true though. To generate search engine traffic, especially the organic traffic, you need to regularly update your website and add you own unique with fresh distinctive content into it. Your website must contain adequate volume of information that relevant to the products and services you offer. Search engines just love that new fresh quality content because its' objective is to deliver to a searcher the most relevant results pertaining to their inquiry. So if you can update your website content consistently and it matches with what searchers are searching for, search engines will just pick your website URL and send you the traffic and boost your online business awareness. 3. Keyword effectively - This is a very critical factor you should consider when you design your website. It is an essential and do not avoid it! Select precise keywords that related to your website or products and then filling them into a keyword meta-tag. This keywords development will effectively help search engines find you and send traffic to your website. However, do not just search out a long list of words, which are not related to your website or products and fill them in the meta-tag, it is wasting time and it will not work. 4. Paid hosting - If you are committed to succeed in your online business and increasing traffic through being easily found by search engines, you must use paid hosting instead of use free hosting. 5. All links must be functional - Your whole website's links must be functional and there should no missing website links. This is an obvious thing, but sometimes due to many different reasons, online business owners just forgot this part. So, after you read this article, go back to your website, check out every page, and ensure your entire website's content, namely missing links and graphics among others are working properly. 6. Search engines - You should understand each search engines are different in how they operate; they do change over time. If you want your website to be visible on search engines, you should learn, know and understand the regulations of the major search engines, so regularly check these rules are necessary. But do not try to trick search engines. This is the deadly mistake if you did. By trying to trick search engines, you can get your website or page de-listed, downgrade or even banned. It is not worth your time of doing it. So don't do it! Here are the key things that search engines can consider trickery, which you must not do: - Do not use the same keywords repeatedly. - Do not use keywords, which you think is 'popular' or 'trendy', but they are in fact not related to your website at all. If those keywords not related to your website's content, no matter how popular the words are, or how many times other people have searched for, it will not help you with your website's visibility. - Do not try to hide your keywords or phrases by making them hidden or invisible. Every online business entrepreneur and marketer is working hard on getting more visitors to their website. The more visitors you receive, the more expected sales you will make. So you should consider above these advices seriously. Do not just read it and then forget it. If you did, then you will not be able to achieve your online business needs - traffic.

Web Site Tracking Software

There are ways to track who will be visiting your site. The more traffic you generate the more money you will make. You want to make sure that you have all you need to see if your getting the traffic you want. There are several ways to track the traffic on your site and each has its own pros and cons. It will fully depend on what you need at the time and how much you are willing to invest. Some devices simply tell you how many people visit you and some have actual reports with fine details. You would want to use a more sophisticated tracking system if you want to know which search engines are bringing in the most traffic or where people are coming from. The simpler methods are used just to know how many people have visited your site since it got up and running. These ones won't offer any other type of information such as how many per day or where they came from. 1. Counters: These are usually used by newbies. You won't see them on more professional sites. They will tell you and the visitor exactly how many people have visited your site. 2. Trackers: Tracking software will give you a detailed path your visitors take when they visit your site. This tells you way more than just a simple tracker and isn't seen by the visitor. For the free use you might be required to put a button or graphic up. Many site owners will prefer to put in their own tracking scripts onto their servers. 3. Use Your ISP Statistical Package: Your ISP provider keeps a log of every hit to your site. This will let you know where your traffic is coming from and what pages they are looking at. Make sure your hosting company offers access to your raw log files. 4. Web Traffic Analysis Software: this is a program that will take your raw log files and generate a report on your traffic. The quality will completely depend on what program you are using. There are some free ones that come with some hosting packages or there are the paid software packages that would generate high quality reports. Your web traffic statistics are an extremely valuable tool for information about your web site. You will be able to make decisions on improving your site through the information they give you. They will let you know what web pages are the most popular and also the ones that are very rarely used. A tracker will tell you who is visiting your site. You will learn which web browsers to optimize your pages for and which search engines are most useful. They can even tell when you get errors or have bad links on your page. Analyzing your web traffic can help you determine what type of marketing strategies work for you and your site the best. You will then be able to change according the most successful methods and boost your traffic and ultimately your sales. To your Success

Web Site Hosting Review

The basis of web site hosting You are probably asking yourself why you need web site hosting. Well, imagine that you have created a personal website, and you want everyone to see it; imagine that you want to develop an e-commerce web site and you want to have as many visitors as possible. This is the moment when you most need web sitehosting. It is true that you can place the site on your computer, but what would you do in case the internet connection fails. If you want your web site to be viewable 24 hours a day seven days a week, then a web site hosting provider is the answer for you. Several types of web hosting To make this web site hosting review complete, I should mention the several types of web hosting. Free shared hosting First, there is the free shared hosting. This is mostly beneficial for small personal web sites. If you are a beginner in this area, a shared hosting with no fee is perfect for your non-commercial web site. Unfortunately, you can not expect to have the same technical support, disk space, PHP support or bandwidth that other people pay for. Paid shared hosting Paid shared hosting is one of the most popular types of web hosting. Small, medium or large professional sites, they all use shared hosting. A whole server will cost too much, and a site will have no need for the whole space, so shared hosting is ideal for them. Besides the low costs, the sites will also have proper technical support, and some other features such as e-mail, PHP or MySQL. The disadvantage is of course the insecurity of shared servers. Dedicated servers For a large e-commerce professional web site, the dedicated server is the most reliable solution. This will provide you with all the necessary software; you will have a lot of space and bandwidth and all the other facilities that your web site needs. The only disadvantage appears if you are inexperienced in server administration. Just read aweb site hosting review or a forum before you make the final decision. Co-location A good web site hosting review would not overlook the co-location. This sub type of dedicated server is not so popular, and it is designed for everyone's personal needs. Also, because you will be the only one using it, the costs will also be supported by yourself. Virtual private servers The last of all the web site hosting types is the virtual private server. This is a type of web site hosting that is mainly based on dividing a physical server into several small virtual ones. It will give the same possibilities as a dedicated server but the advantage is that it will cost less. Now, that we have examined all the different types of hosting services, you can decide which type of hosting is the most suitable for you. I just hope that this web site hosting review will help you make the best decision.

Human And Search Engine Friendly Web Design In a Nutshell

Search engines like to index as much website as possible. Unfortunately many impatient webmaster sways to the dark search engine optimization. This article aims to aid webmasters to create an original, unique, and user-friendly website. Human must first like your website. After you satisfy humans you may tweak the website to meet search engine spiders. The Search Engine Spiders are a piece of code that crawl the web to index website.
Metadata includes the page title, keywords, and description. The page title of metadata tells the main topic, subject, or reason for the website. For example, Affordable Web Hosting Service shows that the hosting plans are easy on the pocket. The visitors can easily tell that the website sells hosting plans, and domains. The keywords of metadata are search terms. It is the words or text that visitor enters to Search Engine to find the website. For example, web hosting design company keyword finds companies who creates website. Lastly, the description of metadata describes what the web page or site does. With the Metadata information, the spiders check the relevance of the copy or content of the website.

A well-formed HTML website keeps the search engine spiders happy. The spiders repay you by indexing your website. Keep your website concise, and reasonable in length. Lengthy content bores any visitors who come to your website, and dilutes the keywords which tell the importance of your website. With proper keyword count, the website increase in importance. Not to mention, the content must relates to your keyword.

Content Management Software provides an easy way to build or create website. And, there are many of this kind of software. There are web-based and window-based. You may have to pay attention on the HTML that Content Management Software develops. If the HTML is well-formed, we recommend to continuing of its use.

The visitors of your website must find what he is looking in one to three links. So, keep the website as flat as possible. Besides, the search engine spiders stop crawling in certain level or deep. This is a protection against endless loops. Dynamic websites violates the most especially dynamic website with many parameters. However, spiders go thru dynamic website as much as static website. With many and complicate parameters, the spiders stops. Then, it looks for another website or page. Also, the keywords on the link lead the visitor to the information that they are searching for.

Sitemap page which contains the links of the website gives spider clues how to go thru the website. Google allows you to submit sitemap in xml format, while Yahoo allows you to submit a text file with all the links. Google sitemap are far superior. Webmaster can login to see Google spider statistics. The statistics shows top queries, link popularity, error page, and more. Be sure to include any new page and renamed page to the sitemap. For any renamed page, you may consider 301 redirects. 301 redirects safely direct visitor an old page to the new page. Another, 301 redirect is the only accepted redirect by spiders.

Good-looking website with extensive JavaScript, Cookies, Session id, Frames, DTHML, and Flash gives spider a hard-time. There is hope though. There is work-around them. Be aware of the work-around.

Bread Crumbs dramatically adds to the usefulness and functionality to the website. Bread Crumbs are a series of links that leads to the current page. The visitors navigate the website with ease, because the visitor can go back and forth with ease.

Choosing Your Web Host

It isn’t easy trying to choose the correct and best web hosting plan to best suit your needs. Even though there are so many web-hosting companies out there, some thought and careful consideration should be implemented. Two things you don’t want are:
You don’t want to end up having to pay for extra features that you realise afterwards you needed.
You don’t want your sites not showing up on the Internet due to excessive downtime by your hosting providers servers.

When choosing your web host you also need to consider your requirements. You will need to consider:

How many websites will you need?
How much disk space and bandwidth do you need?
What extras will you need eg email with auto-responders included?
How much do you want to spend on web hosting?

You should compare at least 5 hosting providers to see what they are offering. Here’s what you should look for

A reasonable price for your needs - usually a monthly fee.

Disk space and Bandwidth allowance – is your site or sites going to have audio, video or downloadable material?

How Many Domains – look for unlimited.

Sub Domains – look for unlimited.

Does it have an in-built Website Builder? Comes in very handy if you don’t know much about building websites.

24/7 email and phone support – this is important. Not everyone has this.

At least a 99.5% uptime 99.9% is best

Free set-up – no hidden charges.

Unlimited email accounts allowed.

FTP accounts.

Auto-responders included – you don’t want to pay extra to add on an auto-responder later.

Compare all other special features even though you believe you may not need them like

CGI.
FrontPage.
Streaming Audio and Video.
Hotlink protection.
Web stats.

When choosing a web host it’s important you take your time to compare hosting plans before you make the decision. There are some out there that are absolutely useless at web hosting, remember that anyone can become a web host. Your best bet is to go with a company that has been around a few years. Search for online reviews on the company you are considering.
If you are considering a new web host I would recommend you include http://www.hostgator.bloggers-guide.com
in your list of 5 web hosts to compare. – Visit the link. Go to “WEBHOSTING” Take a look at the plans – and when you make the comparison you’ll find that they will come out on top.