Consider the following web hosting blunders and do not allow yourself to make these mistakes that can have a seriously negative impact on your website.

Blunder #1 – Contact Information

Make sure your web host has contact information available to you 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. This should be in the form of phone numbers as well as e-mail addresses that correspond to the web host domain name. Make sure you are dealing with a real company that is serious about both their business and yours.

Blunder #2 – Lots of Bandwidth

If you are using a free or cheap web host then more than likely you will not have a lot of bandwidth which could cause you problems with your website. Even if you have to pay a little bit more money, it is worth it to gain additional bandwidth. Make sure you ask about this before signing up with a web host.

Blunder #3 – Generous Disk Space

Many times people find a cheap or free web host and just sign up without ever checking for the amount of disk space. A questing to ask yourself, what happens when the diskspace is filled up? Make sure that the hosts you are considering provide generous amounts of diskspace, if it is limited you might consider using a web host that is larger and offers more services.

Following web hosting blunders are also consider

Web Host Domain Name

Make sure the company domain name matches the web host company name before giving out your credit card information or hosting your website with them. On the Internet it is up to you to decide whether a company is legitimate or not, check out the domain and company name to find a match to be sure.

Security

Regardless of the web host you use and your website design you must ensure that you have secure websites for purchases where people will enter the banking and or credit card information. If your site does not appear to be secure, customers will leave. You want to avoid this at all costs and go to all lengths to make customers feel secure and confident buying from your site.

Plan Ahead

Make sure you have a plan for the future and an idea of your websites growth. Without this you could run into some serious problems if you outgrow your website, shopping cart, or bandwidth too quickly and do not have a plan on how to handle things. Make a plan for slow, medium ,and fast growth so you will know what to do in every situation.

This is a great thread with great information.

These are also consider-

Design

Make sure that whatever web host you use allows you to design your site for ultimate success. If there are any rules or regulations regarding your site design that will possibly impact your sales and the way customers perceive your site then find another host. There are plenty to choose from.

Checkout

Ensure the checkout process is clear, easy, and to the point. People want to buy their products without giving you a ton of personal information. Let them do that or simply make certain fields optional if you are trying to conduct market research.

URL

You want your own personal URL that reflects your business and services. Do not use a free host that gives you some kind of space using their URL with some additional information at the end of the URL that directs it to you. Spend the money and get your own URL that is unique, easy to use, and says something about your company. It will be worthwhile.

When it comes to budget web hosting, there are a lot of dirty secrets that can really hurt your chance of success. However, if you know about these dirty secrets, you will be prepared and better able to handle any possible problems before they arise.

Secret #1 No Experience

There are many budget web hosts on the web that have not been around for very long and have little to no experience at all. The last thing you want to do is sign up with a company that is brand new and inexperienced and be part of their learning curve. Instead, find a web host that has years of experience and is happy to outline the year they started, their growth, and total experience level.

Secret #2 24/7 Support

If you are a company looking for a budget web host, all you want is to be pay less and still get all of the perks of more expensive web hosts, such as 24/7 support. Some budget web hosts do not offer any information on their level of support, but some claim to offer 24/7 support and then actually don’t. Before you sign any agreements with a budget web host, make sure you know whether they answer the phone at 3 a.m. on weekdays or anytime on weekends. Whether the phone is answered or not will be a very good sign as to whether you should sign up with them or keep searching.

Secret #3 Service Level Agreement

Read the service level agreement that is provided by the budget web host. If they do not have one then definitely move on, and if it is not a strong agreement that outlines exactly what will happen and the type of service you will receive in the event of a problem, then you should move on as well. The reason for this is because all web hosts will run into a glitch here or there and you need to know how that will be handled and how it will affect you before entering into the agreement.

Another dirty little secret is many budget web hosts companies are not solely web host companies but offer a variety of other businesses or products as well. You do not want to be in a situation such as this, you want a web host that only focuses on web hosting. Ask before you sign any agreements or give credit card numbers what kind of business they are and where their revenue comes from. This will help you make a decision about whether or not this is the web host for you.

There are many other dirty secrets that are swept under the carpet in regards to the budget web hosting business. The best thing you can do is to simply ask a lot of questions, do a little research, and use the answers you find to help you make your decision.

In the first case the customer is really looking for a large shared hosting plan that allows multiple domains. More frequently in the industry you see the term “Multi-Domain account” to refer to these plans. These customers can be webmasters with a network of websites, web designers, or a company that wants separate websites for their different brands.

These accounts can also be less inexpensive then traditional Reseller plans because they do not need to offer all of the services such as Private label branding. They are essentially shared hosting accounts that allow for several domains.

The second customer is really looking for a turnkey business, a franchise of the parent hosting company if you will. These customers are hosting companies who do not want to carry the overhead of a datacenter or series of managed servers. Using a Reseller Hosting plan allows a hosting company to have a complete professional hosting company without all of the traditional startup costs. Like anything, there are trade-offs versus a dedicated server, but for a small hosting company or startup it is an ideal solution. It allows them to focus on growing a customer base and not infrastructure issues.

How can I Promote my new web hosting business?

Promoting a new company in the crowded industry of web hosting today is really hard. There are many tactics that work well and are legitimate, and you can use them to promote your company. Some of them are-

1. Referral Program

The referral program system is one of the best ways to get new customers. You can setup the system to make your current customers refer new customers. The customers have a special tracking id that they can give to other people they want to refer. This way, when an existing customer’s id has been used the customers receives a commission. Also, you should refer the customer an account where he can check the statistics of his campaign. It’s better to sign up the customer to the referral program so they can start referring people to your site right away. For the management and tracking mentioned above you can use some ready made soft wares that you can find on the web.

2. Word of Mouth

That’s just about the same as the referral program, the difference consists in not paying the commission to the customer that refers new customers. This is a very good way to promote your web hosting service. To make one of your customers refer other customers you should be providing a very good service to make that customer happy. So, make sure you keep the existing customers happy because a happy customer base means more business is coming your way.

You can ask your customers if they are happy and if the answer is positive you can ask them to submit a testimonial or to review your company.

There are a lot of good forums where web hosting is discussed. You can join this kind of forums and contribute and offer help to others members while keeping your signature with your URL at the bottom of your post. You can post in the signature your weekly or monthly special offers.

you can help others on these web hosting forums and can send new customers on your website, meaning more business for your web hosting business. But don’t just go there to post and ad, be active and be a part of the forum’s community.

By offering some kind of special offers you can literally see your traffic soar. You can make a special offer reducing the price of the bandwidth to half, if the price for 100 Mb would be $10 you could make a special offer to $5. This way the customer would save $5 and this is a thing a lot of people are interested in.

For a good profit special rules might need to be applied, like an offer being available for monthly payments only. This might not be a good idea since some potential customers might stay away because they want to prepay for a longer period.

This method might not be good for you but it’s good for the customers and if you will allow the customers to pay in advance that will bring in more customers.

Offering bigger discounts you can get more customers.

Give Bonus with every order.

This one is very good and is very easy to do it for your company. You could give a good bonus for purchasing anything. There are many things that you can give as a bonus, from a special template to a special e-book that the customer might be interested in.

How to Build a Successful Website?

Learning how to build a successful website can be a daunting task for anyone starting on the Internet. To do this, you need all the help you can get.

You need a web host to help you to research your market to see where you can find a keyword niche that you can carve out for yourself. If you attack a really popular keyword, you will be fighting an uphill battle against old established websites. If you are not on the first couple of search engine results pages of Google or Yahoo, you are probably doomed to failure unless you find an alternative way to drive traffic to your site.

You need help in planning your website construction so it flows well and your user can navigate it easily. If the viewer encounters any difficulty, “click” and “poof” the viewer is gone.

You need a way to easily build good web pages even though you do not know HTML code. This includes a way to construct the page and view it before posting it live.

You also need assistance in automatically updating your sitemap and pinging the search engines each time you update your site. This includes automatically posting the changes to your blog.

You need a web host that provides tools to monitor the traffic to your site so you can evaluate how to change the site to improve it.

Choose a web host that will help you to easily create forms to gather data from your readers. This is how you get your readers to tell you want they want and then you just fill that need. It makes you look like a hero. Once you gather the data, the web host should provide a data base to hold the data.

If you don’t have a decent Hosting provider, your online business is destined to fail. There is a chance you will encounter endless problems like down time, loss of data, poor customer service, and maybe even a hacked site. Before you choose a hosting provider you should first do research. I’m here to save you some time, and give you a few tips to use when choosing a hosting provider.

So you spent hours on your business plan, your web site is nicely designed, and you are ready to launch, so where are you going to put your site? Unless you are a large corporation with the budget to host your own site; you will most likely have to fine a hosting provider. Most people overlook this step and just choose any hosting provider without any prior knowledge of the company. So before you choose a provider here are a few things to consider…

* What kind of customer support do they offer?
* Does their hosting solutions fit your website needs?
* Can you upgrade your package?
* What happens if you go over your bandwidth?
* Are you tied to a contract?
* What is their up-time percentage?
* Do they offer any tools for design and marketing?
* Do they backup your data?
* What type of servers to they offer

I have dealt with websites in one form or another since the late 90’s, and in that time I have gone through lots of hosting providers. They ranged from crappy to excellent, cheap to expensive. To be honest the saying “You get what you pay for” is not always true when it comes to hosting. With the introduction of Broadband internet to the market and the cheap cost of servers, just about anyone with any IT knowledge can call themselves a hosting provider. Also since there is no standard on pricing homegrown providers can charge anything they want. So I advise you to do your homework. When you are searching for providers see if they are a member of any associations

When you are researching a web host and you come across one that does not have these 5 things just click away to find one that does have what you need.

5 Features Your Web Host Must Have –

1. Greatest Control Panel: The control panel is the place you will be visiting most often, so it should be easy to use, have all the features you need, etc. You can find a great control panel with cPanel, which provides one of the best control panel user experiences among all of the others. CPanel offers more than 42 different icons, 50 of the most used PHP scripts, shopping carts, forums, and even a WordPress blog – one of the best blog hosts out there. cPanel also provides an easy to use layout and navigation so when you do use it you can forget about frustration.

2. On 24-7: Your web host should be working for you around the clock. This will keep your website up and running 99.9% of the time, and the server should be able to locate and repair any problems as soon as they appear. It is rare that a server could become inactive, but if/when it does happen, you do not want it to happen to your website. That could mean lost sales, lost visitors, and maybe even lost customers for life. No one wants that. The web host should be working all of the time – no exceptions. It should constantly monitor your website at least every few minutes for problems, check your server load and RAM, and be able to let administrators know immediately so they can instantaneously fix the problem. Your web host should also provide a fire wall to keep your website safe from hackers, viruses, and anything else that could effect your website.

3. An Outstanding Server: If you want to avoid regular problems and too much downtime (all that can be avoided) you need to find a web host with a reliable server. The web host’s server should have multiple hard drives, good RAM, the latest CPUs, the best power supply, quality motherboards, a great cooling system, and a testing system for all new servers.

4. Linux Servers: No, you do not need windows servers. You should get a web host that uses Linux only. You don’t need to have Linux on your own computer to have a web host that uses Linux. Linux has been shown to be more reliable and able to handle larger loads than other server operating systems. It is even better at virus protection and has a better uptime than others.

5. Free Features: Your web host should provide you with a variety of free features, or features that you can use for a small fee. These features should include things that you can use for your website such as graphics, blogs, paid pages, sub domains, interesting facts to add to your website, forums, and more.

I am looking for a hosting provider that not only provides complete features but will also assist if any problem with their service? How can I know how responsive is the hosting company’s customer service before signing contract with them?

Accessing how responsive is the hosting company’s customer service before signing contract with them is a wise step, because sooner or later you will need to resort to them to solve problems, looking forward to receiving helpful response from them.

There are many things that you might desire to do. For example, you may want to upgrade your account before the next payment date. Or you want to use additional modules in order to make your program run. Or maybe you want to move your domain from/to another registrant to/from the hosting company. Such activities require you to contact your hosting service.

Now, before hosting your sites with a hosting company, you can test how fast and good are their responses. First, a good hosting company should provide a live chat facility. Make sure that facility is active. That means that most of the time there will be somebody to reach. Then it is up to you whether you want to ask some questions to them.

you may also check the forum. Notice how fast and helpful their replies are to the forum members. Companies with bad support may leave many questions unanswered. Just browse some sections which are intended for old customers as well as potential clientelle. Find out the way they solve their own customers’ problems.

A good web hosting company should also provide a ticket system. Just ask any important questions and notice how good is their reply. As a suggestion, it is not necessary to demand the “highest priority” when asking questions. Why? Because there may be other customers who need immediate attention from them.

Depending on the company, cheap web hosting can either be a blessing or complete nightmare. As with everything in life things are cheap for a reason. Whether your site will be hosted on an old server or whether it will have restricted functions, there is always a reason why a host offers cheap web hosting. Sometimes hosting will be cheap initially as the hosts hope to get you to upgrade to a more expensive hosting solution as you discover you need more functionality.

Before you sign up for cheap web hosting ensure that you get the right hosting for you.

The first thing to compare will be bandwidth and disk space. The key point to remember is that disk space costs a host very little whereas bandwidth is quite expensive. So if host A offers you 20gb of bandwidth and 100 megabytes of disk space and host B offers you 500 megabytes of disk space and 15gb of bandwidth Host A is making the better offer.

The next step is to ask the hosts to show you some sites that they are already hosting. You are asking to see these so that you can see the speed that the site opens at. Too slow and you should not use them. It is advisable to check these sites several times during the day as some servers get very busy throughout working hours but quiet for the rest of the time

Never combine your domain name purchases with your website hosting it will give the company too much of a hold over your sites and should you have a dispute they could prevent access to your site or domain. Finally, remember. If cheap web hosting looks too good to be true it most probably is.

Web Hosting – The Life Blood Of Any Internet Activity Online.

what u think?

web hosting is a service provided by companies that will allow individuals and businesses to have websites visible to people surfing the web. Many people browsing the Internet are not aware of the vast networks of resources used to display those websites. Web hosts come in all different sizes from the teenage kid working from his bedroom to the large multimillion dollar corporate giant. They are all fundamentally the same and work the same way. They provide space on server usually in a data center which in turn are connected to routers to provide access to the server when you type in the url.

The teenage kid may lease a server at a data center or more likely lease a small portion of the disk space on a server. Some servers may have 100’s of people using it’s disk space. Next door to that server may be an identical server owned by a large household name web hosting company. The only difference between them will be the cost and the level of customer service and technical support they can provide on a day to day basis.

you should choose your web hosting company wisely. As we have seen above, your host could turn out to be a college kid sat in his bedroom. When looking for a host it is always good to go with personal recommendations and not rely solely on how the hosting company’s site looks. A professional looking template costs very little and can often be bought for a few dollars so if you rely on how a site looks to choose your host you may be sorely disappointed.

Check the hosts performance statistics and ensure that they can answer any questions you have promptly. A few hours spent investigating potential web hosting companies now will save days of heartache and in the future.