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Choosing Web Server Hosting for your Small Business Website


Small businesses today depend on a dependable online presence online. They need to have a super-great website out there (that doesn’t bore people to tears) and they need great search engine optimization.

Sometimes though, they overlook the fact that the greatest website is dead in the water without excellent and competent Web server hosting.

Check out what’s available in hosting services online, and you get an astounding amount of choice. How you know which way to go for the most reliable service?

If you’re putting out a website, you probably have a website developer lined up. Now in your excitement, you might go out there and make a choice of Web server hosting service by yourself “just to be in readiness” when the developer gets done.

Now most developers wouldn’t be happy having that decision taken out of their hands. Any developer’s going to want to be in the loop when it comes to a choice made in Web server hosting provider.

You can talk with your developer about the kind of traffic your website will experience and how much bandwidth, disk space and traffic it would be a good idea to pay for.

Once you’ve cleared it all up, you can go through the services that your developer says he prefers or anything else you might like.

One of first things you want to look at is, the question of how much support you need. If you aren’t retaining a developer forever to keep maintenance work going on your website, if you’re planning on taking the baton once all the heavy lifting is done, you might need a web server hosting service that has a really good support department.

Some entrepreneurs try to do the whole website building thing themselves. If you’re not a whiz with this kind of thing, you probably want to go with someone who has great support – sometimes even helping you install applications. Some will provide this for a price and others will provide it for free.

How long it takes for the hosting provider to reply to a question or fix a problem can make or break your business. Go Daddy for instance, routinely replies within five hours over e-mail. And they don’t outsource support.

Often, businessmen who are inexperienced in how to run a website, can make all kinds of mistakes like overwriting their entire folder online. Having a conscientious support department on your side can make all the difference. You don’t want to just go by some marketing slogan.

Also, small businesses have multiple websites. You need to decide then if you wish to have a separate hosting account for each site or if you would like a virtual private server.

A VPS can be a great way to make your website a whole lot more manageable. In this way, your developer can get a root-level connection when installing stuff.

It depends on your budget and it depends on how serious your needs are.

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Website Monitoring Service


In this new epoch, your business requires a website that can be reached by your customer everywhere (over the world). Your website must be online 24/7. You  need to monitor your website performance.

There are many website monitoring services out there, such as dotcom-monitor.com. Dotcom-monitor is recognized around the world as an industry leader in website monitoring service.

Dotcom-monitor has customers who have been with them for more than a decade. This because their Services help your problems, provide answer and assist you continually improve the performance and avaibality of your website and web applications.

Dotcom-monitoring has serverview monitoring platform. It means that the platform checks web server uptime and performance  status of servers, networks and applications.

Web application monitoring is one of the important aspect that you should care about. Dotcom-Monitor’s browser-based web application performance monitoring services can analyze your websitefrom around the world and notify you when there are issues that affect user experience.

If you are new with this company, you can give them a try for 30 days trial. Yes, this company offers you free website monitoring 30 days trial.

Here are what you get if you want to try for a 30 days trial :

  1. Easy Setup For Website and/or Web Application Monitoring
  2. Customized Alerts & Notifications
  3. Monitor Any Task Up To Once Per Minute
  4. Full Access To Powerful Macro Recorder
  5. Complimentary Setup Assistance and Technical Support
  6. Detailed Charts, Graphs and Reports
  7. Access To All Online Demos and Tutorials
  8. Helpful Configuration Guides And Step-By-Step Instructions

 

If you need a demo, dotcom-monitor has a demo page that you can access. Dotcom-monitor provides live chat area. You can ask whatever you need to know about their service.

Monitoring your website is an important factor for your internet business. If your website is down, you might lose your potential buyer.

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What to Look for in Hosting


Web hosting is no longer something for the computer genius. There are many people that wish to put up a website that will either make them some money or maybe just a way to share with the friends and family they have.

No matter what the reason for wanting a website, you will need to find the right hosting for your needs. This is not the easiest thing to do because there are thousands of companies out there that are offering hosting and all of them offer different options.

The first thing that you need to do is decide what kind of hosting that you need. For those that are wanting to put up a simple website that features only a few pages you will need only standard hosting package.

This means that you will get just the bare bones version of the hosting without all the bells and whistles.

If you are planning on marketing several websites then you will need to get involved with the unlimited plans. On these plans you will be able to put up as many sites and use as much disk space as you possibly can without having to pay a higher fee.

These are available through many of the finest web hosting companies on the web and make perfect sense for the internet marketing systems on the web.

If you would eventually like to sell some hosting space then you will want the reseller hosting package. This package allows you to act as a hosting company and offer a fee based web package to other people.

This is something that is common with those people that are selling developed websites. They have found that by offering webhosting with the websites that the people of the world are more apt to buy them.

Now you will need to know what you are doing. First off you have to make sure that you are getting the right kind of hosting. The hosting companies all have different options as far as the hosting platform.

This can include Windows and even Linux systems. If you are not familiar with the Linux platform then you will need to go with the Windows based hosting system.

The most common control panel for hosting companies is Cpanel. This is an easy to use system that resides in the back end of the hosting for your websites.

Using this system you will be able to control the websites and even get real time tracking through it. Make sure that you are getting the most up to date version of Cpanel with the hosting that you purchase.

A word of caution: There are many fly by night companies out there and you should be careful. You should always ensure that you are dealing with a reputable company that has a long standing history in the web hosting business.

Otherwise you may end up losing all of the information that you have worked to store on the host when the company goes belly up.

Learning to do things on Photo Sharing Websites


Here are a few answers to common questions about how photo sharing websites work. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll work with the popular Flickr in these questions. These solutions should work with other photo sharing websites too.

Let’s start with privacy on photo sharing websites. Let’s say that you have photos on Flickr that you’re happy to share with the world.

But what you do when you have private family photos that you don’t want anyone seeing but a few close family members?

Certainly, you could mark sections of your Flickr account as private and for family only. The problem is, that anyone in the family that you wish to share the pictures with, needs to have an account of their own on Flickr too.

What if you just want to make things private but then show them to people you choose without requiring them to sign up for Flickr? Is this possible?

With Flickr’s Guest Pass option, you get to do exactly this. All you need to do is to create a Guest Pass and then send it to the person you wish to invite to see your pictures.

That person doesn’t have to sign up for a Flickr account to see anything on your account that you want them to see. To create a Guest Pass, all you need to do is to activate Share This Link on a certain set of photos that you’d like to share.

If there are any private photos and what you’ve selected, your Guest Pass option turns up on its own. You just fill in the e-mail addresses you want the pass to be sent to and it gets on its way. When you wish to take a Guest Pass away from someone, you just need to turn it off in your Guest Pass History page.

Everyone likes to know how popular they are. When it comes to photo sharing websites, they like to know what pictures of theirs have turned out to be the most popular. How do they find out which pictures these are?

On the Flickr photostream page, every photo, on its own preview, has a tag with this information. It shows you how many times it’s been viewed. If you just want your photos listed according to popularity, you just need to click on the link that says Popular at the top of the photostream page. There are all kinds of other ways in which you can have your pictures sorted as well. If you wish to see the ones with the most comments, you could.

What are certain upload restrictions that photo sharing websites impose on their users? On a basic and free Flickr account, you get to upload photos that get no larger than 10MB a picture; and you have a 100MB quota every month.

For a mere $25 a year, you could do whatever you wish. If you would like to upload an entire album on Flickr with as little handholding is possible, there are alternatives to using the Flickr website.

Flickr gives you a desktop uploader program that you install on your desktop. You just drag and drop photos into the icon and let it take care of everything.

The Right Idea in Search Engine Optimized E Commerce Website Design


E-commerce website design isn’t something you can bring a lot of innovation to. No matter what e-commerce website you go to, Amazon or a website run by a 12-year-old girl to sell pencil erasers, you basically have your list of products, your shopping cart and your checkout page.

There isn’t a lot of room here for innovation. The fact that it’s all the same doesn’t make it any easier on website designers or SEO professionals though. There is still a lot of expertise that goes into making an e-commerce website run smoothly.

And success here depends a great deal on how well an SEO professional working on a website knows his search marketing. Here are the basic principles of what makes an e-commerce website design really successful. As with most things, as simple as these principles are, very few websites actually follow them. If you do it, you could virtually guarantee yourself some success.

As far as successful e-commerce website design is concerned, the product details pages are the meat and potatoes of the whole affair. This is where every visitor to your website heads, for information and to decide on whether or not they wish to click on the Buy button.

For search engines, both internal and external, product pages happen to be the most important thing to pay attention to. With branded products, an SEO professional who takes his job seriously can easily optimize everything by product name, model number, SKU, product size, and so on.

What this means is, if there is an Internet shopper looking on Google for a specific brand or model of product, your e-commerce webpage needs to be set up to draw in such a searcher.

Everything needs to be set up and optimized so that people searching on Google by name for a product you list find it right away.

To do this, make sure that every single detail on your product details pages is superbly optimized. Make the perfect template for your product pages and use that for every product that you list. So what goes into that product template?

To begin with, you want to be completely certain about the way the name of the product appears on the page; you want to make sure that the <title> tag is perfect and that the two go together. You want to make sure that every single letter and character that you put on that page is accessible to the search engine spider.

For all the code that you use on the page, drive your developers until they cry for mercy to make sure that only fast-rendering, standards-compliant code is used.

You have to pay attention to how your pages are classified. How you classify your pages makes all the difference to generic searches on Google – ones that go by just the brand names without the model names attached.

For the best kind of search engine-friendly classification, make sure that your product pages belong to the right kind of product category and that those belong to yet another category.

If you sell laptops, you need to have a 14-inch laptop category, a 17-inch laptop category, put them both under a category called Laptops and have other categories laid out by brand name as well. They call this kind of hierarchy a breadcrumb trail for the search engines.

Internet Addressing – Is Chaos Ahead?


When you go to visit a website, most likely you simple enter a web address that looks like a name or combination of words. These are domain names, and they are used to make it easier for people to find web sites.

The servers that websites are actually hosted on hold I.P. (Internet Protocol) address, rather than domain names. The I.P. address is a string of numbers, and is unique to a particular server, or website, or other entity online.

A system called the Domain Name System (DNS) is used to link the easier to remember domain names with the far less memorable I.P. addresses. There are occasionally problems when a domain name cannot be resolved with it’s I.P. address, but on the whole the system runs well.

The problem is that the system that is currently in use is I.P. version four, and it will give a grand total of around 4.3 billion unique addresses. These addresses are starting to run out.

There are now so many web users and so many websites that there is only just enough I.P. addresses to go around. If the internet is to continue it’s expansion, we will soon need more numbers, or there will be none for new sites and only current sites will be able to continue. Read the rest of this entry →

Are You Sick of Browser Security, Filters, and Restrictions at Office? Here are Some Solutions


If you are also sick and tired of all this browser security stuff, and browsing restrictions at the work place then here’s some good news for you… In fact not “SOME”, but rather ‘PLENTY’ of good news for you

Internet censoring is now prevalent almost everywhere and even in my office sites like Orkut are blocked.

Some Countries routinely block many websites and interestingly entire blogger.com, orkut and other similar sites are usually banned in office throughout the world. No wonder many of us are looking for ways of accessing blocked websites.

A free web proxy is basically something to get around school/work filters to sites like Myspace and Bebo. Web proxies are also used to stay safe and hide your identity on the net. Read the rest of this entry →

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