Posts Tagged ‘web hosting’

You had many choices to make when you made the decision to start your own website. Most likely you were offered many design choices, email addresses, blogging interfaces, and e-commerce choices. Once your decision is made on everything above, it is necessary to decide about hosting and the different kinds you would like for your website. Most of the people start the computer business in a small manner and hence they would not need too much on the hosting server. A lot of people decide to go with basic or deluxe shared hosting.

The meaning of shared hosting is that many websites are being hosted on a single served. Often, this is all that is needed by a small business owner. What if your level of business increases, or if your clients assume that their information and business will be handled confidentially? Are you nervous about someone hacking into your server and causing damage on your website? Can one ensure that one’s database and server are secure from unauthorized visitors? Definitely, there is. A dedicated server is how you can be sure of this guarantee.

In contrast to other types of servers, a dedicated server is distinct. Not like a shared server that is not secure. When hosting companies get customers ready to host, the selection of shared servers is used often, hard drive space and monthly bandwidth is shared by each customer on the server. If you use this method, you can have a lot of security issues with people on that server. The complete opposite of this is a dedicated server.

The only thing on that server will be you and your website. Only you can access and use a "dedicated" server. A dedicated server would be a good idea if you are running a highly confidential website such as a banking institution, doctor’s website, high traffic ecommerce site, and anything with content-sensitive material.

Numerous banks and hospitals employ dedicated servers for hosting their sites. A dedicated server can easily be obtained by asking for one from your hosting company. Be aware, unlike shared hosting, that there can be hefty fees associated with the monthly use of a dedicated server, since you have a server for you alone. There is no other way to share your costs. In order to view the dedicated server plans that are available to meet your website hosting needs, check with your present hosting company.

There are tons of pluses regarding using designated servers. One primary advantage is its security. Now it will be impossible for someone to hack into your website. You have the rights to the server and everything that is included in that. You have maximum storage space, more bandwidth, data transfer, and above all you have your own control panel.

Most control panels use Plesk Cpanel. And with the Cpanel come the many choices in software, for instance: Wordpress, PHPBB, Joomla (CMS), Drupal, Siteframe, phplinks, MySQL databases, phpAdmin, apache, and the list goes on! However, dedicated servers tend to be costly as it was previously discussed. Rather than renting shared space, often it is more cost efficient to obtain a dedicated server.

Consider all these things before you choose and then ponder over them for a while. Before making your choice to switch to a dedicated server or to stay with a shared server, decide whether or not you can risk any compromises in your website’s security. If security is not an issue as much as lots of bandwidth, then maybe you could upgrade your shared server. But if you deal with credit cards and other personal information on your site, you should really consider switching to a dedicated server hosting plan. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

If you need a dedicated server, Alojate.com is the best web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range of services for all business needs. Dedicated servers, factura electronica, web hosting & domain registration.

There is absolutely no argument than an online business must have a professional functioning web site to exist in the world of internet trading. Primarily they require a great competitively prices web hosting service to park their sites, and then they need the actual web site.

The choice of web hosting packages is simply astounding when we begin the search for an adequate web hosting service for our business. Each of them offers something a little different. Some will have absolutely masses of space, you would need to be Yahoo themselves to fill up, others will offer handy little email newsletters with all the latest tips and tricks to attract traffic to the site.

Thankfully, all of the serious web hosting providers offer something small business owners builders actually need when they are launching themselves on the internet, a straight forward and easy method of creating the web site i.e. website builders. Let’s just empathize that word "serious" shall we. A web hosting provider could not possibly be serious in their hope to attract signups without a quality site builder.

Business owners have enough to worry about when they establishing their online presence. Aside from having to manage the usual business activities and products or services required for all businesses, establishing an online presence is a mammoth task in itself for anyone that may not be experienced in internet site management. This does not even compare to the mind bending job of actually building a web site.

While many large corporations will simply hire this job out to some IT and web design professional, small businesses do not often have the funding available for such an expensive necessity. The only alternative is to select a hosting provider that offers a simple to use site builder.

Now don’t be fooled into believing that all WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editors or site builders are all the same. This is a far cry from the truth. Many "page makers" passing themselves off as site builders are little more than toys to give teenagers a way to express themselves on the internet, and are not at all suitable for developing an online business presence.

Others are so complicated to use one might as well leaning the seemingly secret codes of internet web site creation. There are also some pretty good web site builders that have been around for years, that seem to be business friendly enough, and are certainly not too difficult to use, unfortunately they have been around, and around and around for so long that internet trends and requirements have rendered them interesting relics.

To understand how a site building tool may help you launch your own site with easy we should examine some of the features a good site building tool should exhibit.

- Certainly it must be easy to use; we businesses of all sorts, not necessarily expert computer programmers and our attentions should be involved directly in our businesses not learning a new language.

- It should also include the ability to take advantage of the most up to date traffic magnet, ie the blog. The ability to easily include bogs on your web site allows you to present articles related to your product or service, or even keep your viewers up to date with the latest news and information.

- A good site building tool will allow you to keep a photo gallery of your products.

- All importantly a good site building tool will give you a huge variety of skins or designs to select from. These designs would be professionally created to the best effect and optimal impact.

- This tool should offer a selection of pages; after all we are creating an entire web site not a pretty single page.

- Other optional pages or features might include a forum, guestbook, perhaps even a resume page just to name a few.

. A good site building tool will allow you to have as much control over the feel, look and information as you would like and not dictate to you what you must have.

- Now I’m sure I mentioned that this should be easy to use, but this point cannot be stressed enough so I will say it again. It absolutely must be easy to use.

Certainly the hours saved by using a site building tool to create your website is convincing reason enough to insist that your hosting service provides this function. Add this to the fact that you will potentially save thousands of dollars to have a web site built for you, and that you will have little control of this site once you have paid out your money, without doubt makes the matter of selecting a hosting provider offering a great site building tool the best business decision possible when launching your online presence.

cPanel is short for Control Panel and is a graphical user interface or GUI that is web-based and designed to afford webmasters and web designers easy access to many aspects of the web hosting system.

It used to be hard, if not impossible, for most people to figure out what to do with their hosting once they paid for it.

cPanel is an interface that allows web hosting companies to offer a graphical interface to people seeking to set up and run websites on a number of RPM-based Linux platforms.

cPanel is usually interfaced with the end user via ports 2082 and 2083 with authentication accomplished through surfing to a specific web page and logging in. Because cPanel is graphically based, it is extremely easy to use and very intuitive for novice as well as veteran users to work with.

If you want to set up a blog, mailing list, php link directory or basic content management system, cPanel is the way to go.

By clicking on the happy face icon used by Fantastico, a user is taken a list of software that is grouped into various topics and offered as an easy setup and tracking system for just about anything the end-user might want to add to the Internet community.

As a result, a webmaster can concentrate on the content and quality of what’s offered from the website and not the technical aspects of getting the site up and running.

With cPanel, managing your MySQL databases are a breeze to manage, releasing hosting companies from endless help requests from confused people. cPanel manages setup and maintenance of email accounts using three different web interfaces for retrieval via the web of email coming into the account.

Raising and lowering email quotas, adding and manipulating databases, managing PGP keys, setting up crontab tasks, email and FTP tasks and more.

Via Fantastico, several add-on scripts automate the installation and upgrade of many of the popular applications like SMF, WordPress, Joomla, TikiWiki and phpBB to name a few. There are over 50 other scripts to choose from and it is constantly updated.

There are some pros and cons to using cPanel with webhosting. One of the biggest cons is in the ever increasing reality that cPanel is a hackers dream.

With identity theft being a prevalent and expanding phenomenon, the ease of making sub-domains portion and ease of using cPanel has been and continues to be exploited.

Vigilance is necessary to avoid having the account suspended due to phishing. A hacker will set up a sub-domain called aol.YOURDOMAIN.com or bankofamerica.YOURDOMAIN.com and point unsuspecting victims to the sub-domain on your site via bulk email.

After a few days, your site will disappear and you will receive an email where the web hosting company will shut you down due to phishing. If you receive this email, go back into cPanel and click on the sub-domains button.

It will give you the sub-domain in question, and you can attempt to get rid of it. Get rid of the contents via FTP and delete (or attempt to delete) it via cPanel. If you can’t get rid of it, contact your web hosting company. They will be happy to help you. Be sure and change your password because it’s passed around like candy in a schoolyard.

What makes cPanel so easy is what makes it so easy to exploit. Until lately, most of these scripts ran through a cPanel that was set to either X or X2 layout. Nowadays, the scripts can run under any layout.

That’s the only con to this great piece of software. It takes consistent monitoring; however, it is not something that happens that often. Hacking cPanel is just something that most webmasters need to understand. If you want to avoid it altogether, simply set up your site with 0 sub-domains or the exact amount of sub-domains you need for your needs.

Why would a business want a web site? I think the question is much too obvious nowadays, but since my twitch keeps reappearing I think I will mention at least the very basic points.

Keep in mind, although these points are very simple, they are not unimportant:

Presence

From the basics, the most basic and yet, the most valid. You MUST have a web site (of course, you will need also a web hosting account and a domain). Would you think to open a business without a phone line? Get real! With a web site your clients can find you, check your contact info, review your products and services and a long etcetera.

Attract New Clients

When a new prospect visits your web site, he/she has the opportunity to know about your organization before anybody talks to him/her. What could be better than a new client that already knows your company and has picked up the phone or sent an email to contact you? The sale is halfway closed!

Service Your Current Clients

Do you have a new product or service? Tell your clients everything about it trough your web site. Changes in prices? Post them in your site. New manuals, upgrades, new location? They must be in your web site! Did you just get a new phone line? Get a BIG announcement in your home page!

Describe in Detail

If your products or services require a detailed or technical explanation, your web site is the best tool. You can post as much information as needed: cand whatever you can think of. As you have additional info you can upload it and your clients will be able to instantly find it.

Constant Updating

Already mentioned, but this point is worth elaborating. Each time that something changes in your organization, you have the opportunity to tell all of your clients through your web site. Products, prices, service policies, press releases, anything at all! Did you change your logo? Let your web site show it. Give your site a quick check at least once a year (every 6 months is better) and make changes as required. Let your clients notice you are still there.

Show Off

Yes, your web site lets you show off the kind of work you’ve done for other clients. Ask for testimonials and include them in your web site. Prospects love these since it gives your business credibility (we will talk about the best way to post your testimonials in another column).

Many web-hosting providers offer their potential customers things that they simply cannot guarantee. Not only is this misleading and frustrating to customers when they find out that this is not really the case, it is on the borderline of false advertising.

For those who are looking at a web-hosting service, make sure that the company chosen is already providing what they are claiming to offer to their other customers.

Below are some examples of the types of guaranteed services that web-hosting companies offer their customers when they know that these services are impossible to guarantee.

100% Uptime
It is impossible to offer 100% up time 24/7 to customers. Even the most expensive, best quality machines are prone to fail some of the time. If the web host loses even a few seconds of uptime then it is fair to say that they cannot provide their customers with 100% up time. If a web-hosting company is offering this service, check to see if they will refund or compensate the customer if they do have any down time.

Foolproof Anti-virus
With viruses popping up all of the time and the people creating the viruses getting better at creating trouble, it is untruthful to say that any type of anti-virus is fool proof. It is impossible to be up to date with all of the definitions all of the time. Even the best anti-virus services fail to catch a virus at times. This doesn’t mean that the anti-virus service the web host has in place is not good, all it means is that nobody is perfect and there is no such thing as foolproof.

Anti-spam that never fails
Anti-spam is a great service, sometimes. All anti-spam services have their negative points. They are known to block emails that are wanted and let in the ones that are spam. Good anti-spam services allow the user to ‘allow or deny’ emails into their email box. But it is misleading to say that anti-spam services never fail.

Unlimited disk space
There is no way that a web-hosting service can promise unlimited disk space. Even the biggest data center has limitations and size restrictions. The point being put across to customers may be that the disk space being offered is ample enough for any website, however, unlimited space is misleading.

Unlimited Email Accounts
By definition, any control panel has to have a defined number of email account allowed.
This number may be very high, lets say a thousand. You will probably never use a thousand email accounts for your business and it would be crazy to try to handle that many. However, high as the number of email accounts may be, it’s still not unlimited.

While all of these services are necessary, it is important to remember that, although outrageous promises made by some web-hosting companies can be very attractive, customers should make sure that the web-hosting company can deliver what they are promising before signing up for them.

Alojate.com is the number one web hosting provider in Mexico.

How To Use Positive Feedback To Your Advantage

When a company receives positive feedback from the customers they serve, there are two main ways they utilize this information for the good of the business. Positive feedback can be used to enhance already existing products or services, as well as create more options for customers to choose from. The second way companies use positive feedback to their advantage is to use the kind words they receive about their business as a marketing tool. This is accomplished through the display of an online testimonial.

Web hosting testimonials allow potential customers to see how convenient, fast, reliable, cost-efficient or beneficial a particular service can be. This could be the defining piece of information about a company that makes a consumer choose a particular web-hosting provider.

Testimonials also make comparison shopping a much easier task. Sometimes the most reliable details about a web-hosting provider come from peer reviews. This is because potential customers become well informed about a web-hosting provider by learning how others who have used these services have faired. Reading testimonials may draw attention to a particular issue or feature that they may have not noticed at first glance, making decisions easier to accomplish.

What Makes the Most Believable Testimonials?

When it comes to viewing the comments left by satisfied customers, you should know that anyone can post a quote on their website with a random name attached. The more information that a company website provides with their testimonials, the better. Every extra tidbit of info or detail presents a more reliable testimonial. For example, Jane Webber from College Park, Georgia looks much better than a quote posted by J. Webber or Jane W.

When a testimonial offers additional information, such as a corresponding email addresses, this is especially helpful to potential customers. If any questions should arise regarding a web-hosting provider, individuals may contact someone who can provide additional information before a purchase is made. This not only delivers a link to positive promotion, but also builds a more reliable bond between customer and company. Most of all, the potential customer can feel more relaxed and satisfied on a web hosting choice when they have had all of their doubts satisfied.

One of the best, most reliable features of a testimonial is the inclusion of a photo accompanying direct quotes and customer details. This establishes increased human interaction with someone who has actually had success with the web-hosting provider in question. Putting a face to the product is a helpful way for customers to note that people just like "you and I" have found this particular web hosting provider a success.

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.