Posts Tagged ‘cheap vps hosting’

It seems that nowadays everybody and their grandma sells Web hosting services. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first one to believe in good competition and I defend this principle firmly. Nevertheless, there are people who think that they can start a web hosting business without knowing the first thing about developing and maintaining a business.

Those who surprise me the most are the ones that offer hosting services at ridiculous prices. You can find people offering web hosting for $1 a year. Yes, you read right: one dollar for an entire year of service. If you consider that the prices of established providers go from $60 to $100 a year for a basic service, this will sound very attractive. But is it really?

Let’s do some simple calculations. Lets say a provider gets 1,000 clients, a reasonable number for a small web hosting business. If this provider sells his services at $1 each, then he will have the fabulous amount of $1,000 in a year. Do you think that he will be able to offer quality services, support and upgrades at this amount? I am hard pressed to think he will have enough for food alone!

"It can still be a good business if you get enough clients," some will say. Ok, just because I’m in a good mood, let’s continue with this example. Imagine this provider-for-a-dollar can get 10,000 customers (a very ambitious goal). Then it’s $10,000 dollars of income. Sounds better, doesn’t it? However, do you think a business can make it with this income for a year? Just imagine the cost associated with servicing 10,000 clients. Just the cost of rent, phone lines and power would be enough to deplete this small income.

As ever, the human mind is marvelous and searches for a solution. Clients that buy these services reason that if they get the deal for a year, it doesn’t matter if the provider goes out of business next year (which is most likely). They already got the service almost for free. Again I ask, is this true?

If your provider suddenly goes out of business, you will no longer have access to your services, and you will lose your email addresses and your web site. Even if you have your domain registered with another provider, you will not be able to get a new service for at least a couple of days in the best case scenario. That’s only if you didn’t make the mistake of getting your domain name with the same provider. In that case, you may even lose your domain name and will have to get a new one. Imagine the time wasted just notifying all your clients about your new email address. What if you lost important emails and documents too? Do you think this is worth the risk?

When you buy your next web hosting service, consider the support services, the promptness in answering your emails and phone calls and the time the provider has been in the market. Yes, do check the price too, but if it sounds too good to be true, it may be a good idea to look somewhere else.

But if you insist on getting one of these services for a dollar, we will be happy to help you when your provider disappears. Let’s hope the damage isn’t too bad.

So, you have built a website; however, you simply are not getting the results you have been looking for. You are not getting enough traffic.

If you are getting enough traffic, that traffic is not being converted to sales. Why is this? Why is your website not producing the results you want? Well, simply put, just putting a website up for your business is not enough, you have to make it work for you.

Here are some tips that can help you build a functional and profitable website.

1. Navigation. Your website needs to be easily navigated. Your visitors and potential customers need to be able to find exactly what they are looking for when they need it.

If you make your visitors hunt for anything, you can be sure that they will get frustrated easily and give up, which means you have just lost a potential sale. Therefore, make sure that all pages connect with each other and can be navigated to and from any point of your website with extreme ease.

2. Professionalism. Your website must scream professionalism. It must have a professional look, feel, and design. Your graphics should be clean and crisp, as well as appealing.

3. Lure Traffic. Make use of helpful advertising methods such as pay per click, AdWords, AdSense, and the like.

These are great methods of getting targeted traffic. Targeted traffic is crucial. If you are in the business of cake decorating, you want those interested in cake decoration, confections, and other aspects. Someone looking for pet food will have no interest in this website. Getting traffic is great, but if it is not targeted you are getting nothing but empty traffic.

4. Sales. To increase your sales, you need to increase your likability. This means you have to gain the trust of your visitors. You can do this by prominently displaying your guarantee, privacy policy, and terms and condition statements.

5. Build Your Customer Database. You can get contact information of your potential customers to ultimately turn them into paying customers by offering them something for free.

Everyone loves free stuff. Maybe a free report based on your niche would be perfect. You would offer this free report, e-book, or other product on each page of your website.

At the same time, you want to place this in an area that contains text boxes designed to grab your customers name and email address at the minimum.

All of the above tips are perfect for increasing your traffic and increasing your sales, which is ultimately what you are looking for. The success of your internet business depends on the success of your website.

Reliable web hosts aren’t as easy to find as you might imagine. There is considerable competition out there with an increasing amount of web hosts, and resellers who all claim to give the consumer upwards of 99% uptime.

For any website, reliable web hosting is incredibly important. It can mean the difference between a frequently returning visitor and one who doesn’t bother at all.

Pages often returned as not available can also impact your rating with today’s ultra-clever search engines who are also in a race of their own to beat their own competition (other search engines!) after all, a customer returns to good service.

Why is it important to have a reliable web hosting? Your peace of mind is one reason that springs to mind straightaway.

Imagine trying to build your website, to find that every time you go to upload new content or make any changes you can’t, because the service is down.

It becomes tedious and frustrating and we are no longer in the early 1990’s were that sort of thing was experienced daily.

Consumers are more demanding and won’t keep coming back to a website that offers less than perfect service. Whole businesses have been lost because of the same thing, and it’s this sort of problem which needs addressing the moment you realize you have it.

When is it critical to have one? It’s important anyway, very important unless you have a website you aren’t too concerned about people seeing; today’s new search engine methods mean that reports are made each time a URL is inaccessible and this can lead to a drop in search engine rankings after so long.

Running a business through your website though makes it critical to have a reliable webhost. You need at least 99.9% uptime, this may seem excessive to you, but in today’s modern technology it is perfectly possible to find web hosting businesses that can manage and in some cases even exceed this percentage.

Say your webhost was current providing you with 20% downtime (80% uptime) this could in effect mean you are losing up to 20% of potential customers, who cannot view your site due to this downtime.

This is affecting your earning ability, thus losing you potential revenue. Anyone you employ to help your business, in this case the webhost should not help you LOSE money!

How do I know if my webhost is reliable? You don’t, not at first. There are ways though that you can use to find out how likely they are to be reliable, or not.

There are free tools now on the internet which help you monitor up and downtime, and these are becoming more and more popular in the race to be top of the search engines.

More and more people are realizing the importance of server uptime, and these tools can become an invaluable resource if your webhost isn’t communicating too well with you.

If you are with a decent webhost then the likelihood is, you’ll either receive an email advising you of planned downtime, or there will be a portal on the webhosts website advising of any problems.

Webhosts who hide this sort of information do so for a reason, and that is because they’re frightened you’ll go elsewhere.

Perhaps your business is growing faster than your web hosting company can keep up with or maybe your chosen site just isn’t up to par with your sites’ needs.

In any case, the best solution to this conundrum is to switch web hosting companies. Before you dive blindly into what can be a sea of confusion, there are a few steps you should take to ensure the transition from one site provider to another is seamless and worry-free.

As with any type of renovation project, embarking on a web hosting company change will go much easier if you develop a plan and then stick to it.

In order to ensure a smooth and efficient transfer from one web hosting company to another, you should allow yourself enough time to complete each step and then run tests for accuracy and accessibility.

Generally this type of transition requires at least three to four weeks from the initial planning stage to the date your new site is up and running.

Once you have completed your research and determined which site you will do business with (bear in mind there are hundreds of thousands of sites you can form an alliance with, so this can sometimes be a daunting and often frustrating task.

However, doing your homework at this stage can eliminate a lot of aggravation later.), you can have your new site activated usually within 24-48 hours.

The first, and most important, step at this stage is to ensure you do a secure and complete backup of all the files on your current (old) web hosting provider’s site regardless of whether or not you have the files stored on a local computer.

Backups are like insurance, you never appreciate having them until a catastrophe strikes, so even though it may be tempting to eliminate this step, you may live to regret it should the proverbial "Murphy, what can go wrong will go wrong " be lurking in cyberspace to sabotage your efforts.

Besides backing up the customary HTML files, it is a good idea to have copies of script, database and server log files. Creating a directory structure that mirrors the one on your web server makes downloading files easier and the transition a lot more efficient.

Following confirmation from your new web hosting company that your account has been activated and your file transfer protocol procedures are operational, you are ready to upload your files to the new server.

Since you have already saved your files in a familiar directory structure, uploading your information to the new site should progress without a hitch.

Following completion of the above steps, you can now run some tests on the new web site in order to verify that all modules are working perfectly.

Once everything is working flawlessly, you are ready to change your old Domain Name Server (DNS) to the new one which would have been provided by the new web hosting company.

All that’s left now is for you to sit back and wait for the hits to begin.

Alojate.com is the premier web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range or services for all business needs.

Web pages used to be simple affairs, where everything you needed to do could be done in HTML, there was really one set of rules and one set of expectations. Today’s world is far more complex.

Web pages can be more complex and customers expect more from web pages. Terms like PHP and ASP now compete with HTML when starting a web page and it can be hard to figure out what option best suits your needs.

If you’ve ever driven an import car, you can appreciate the importance of being able to find support that meet your needs, if you’re going to kick the tires with your website and turn it into something exception, having a large community that can support you is critical.

PHP, Personal Home Pages has more support on the internet than ASP – Active Server Pages. The larger user base gives you more allies; more people who can help you develop your own talents and your website.

Another advantage of PHP is that it’s based on unix, giving it more cross platform capability than ASP as increasing demands of Microsoft’s operating systems level the cost playing field between Microsoft products and Apple, this is ever more important.

And did we mention that in the grand tradition of unix, PHP is free, while ASP needs support software that isn’t? For add-ons and additional tools, PHP’s open source has a strong base of free tools, whereas ASP demands that you purchase these tools.

You can find help for your PHP programming from free to paid. Most professional ASP support is very expensive by comparison.

Also, you have to consider the costs associated with a web hosting on Windows Server compared to Linux Servers. For most cases, you will notice a substantial difference in prices.

Not only that, but Windows severs do tend to be unstable and prone to failures, are more likely to be attacked by viruses, Trojans and exploits. Linux servers on the other hand are much more stable and the attacks windows servers suffer in a daily basis are non-existent in Linux.

If you are considering either a dedicated server or a shared hosting, your fist choice should be Linux. I’ve yet to find a problem that can’t be solved using PHP and Linux.

With all this, you might wonder why ASP still is out there at all. Part of it stems from ASP being based on the same methodology that’s used to make macros in other Microsoft products.

People that have invested the time learning how to use macros in Word or Excel will be more comfortable using ASP. PHP is based on C++, a robust computer programming language.

Before this intimidates you, the free tools that exist out there allow for a lot of this to be hidden, until you’re ready to take advantage of the power behind PHP.

Putting it all together, the power, the cost, flexibility, stability and support of PHP is far superior to that of ASP. If you’re going to commit to building the best web page you can, commit to using the best tools you can.

Investing in learning PHP will pay off when you’re able to pop the hood, invite your friends over and transform your web page from a normal, average, page to a sophisticated and highly toned performance page.