PPPPP – Building a Successful Website


Anyone who has been in business for any time knows the meaning of PPPPP. It is the mantra that a person should learn early in their lives to be successful.

Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance (PPPPP) is a simple yet elegant reminder that one must invest time to plan projects. The more time spent planning, the more successful the results.

Building a website is a perfect example where the 5P concept works very well.

If the keywords for the topic of your website use are very popular and it will be very difficult for you to get listed on a search engine results page higher than number three, you are dead from the start.

To properly plan, you need a keyword research tool that helps you evaluate the various keywords of interest so you can isolate a niche where the competition is not too fierce. This will allow you to carve out your area of expertise and succeed.

The best web host will supply this keyword research tool to you as part of the web hosting fee. Do not settle for less.

Switching to Hosting Providers Without Downtime


How To Switch Hosting Providers Without Downtime?

Firstly there is this one important thing you need to remember, DO NOT TERMINATE YOUR EXISTING HOSTING ACCOUNT until the very last step. You may be very unhappy with your current hosting but it is essential that your current hosting account remains active until you are 100% sure your site is all operational with the new hosting provider.

If you follow the steps below you should be able to transition from one host to another without any downtime to your web site.

Create A New Account

Firstly you need to choose your new hosting provider, once you have chosen that provider sign up for the chosen hosting package and once the new account is setup you can move on to the next step.

Backup All Your Files From Your Old Account

This is a relatively simple process, but can be time consuming depending on the size of your web site. Go to your old hosting account and download all the files via FTP, and backup any databases in use. Remember that you cannot cancel this account yet even though you have backed up all your files.

Upload All Your Files To Your New Account

Once you have backed up your files on your old hosting account, it is time to go to your new hosting account and upload the backups via the new hosts FTP.

Create Your Mail Accounts

To avoid losing any of your email when you later change your domain name server addresses, it is imperative that you now create all the same email accounts that you had with your old hosting provider in your new hosting account. Once this has been done, all email addresses on the new account should match the email address on your old account.

Checking of Your Files and Links

Now it is time to check all the pages of your web sites and verify that all links are working correctly on your new host. To do this you will need to create a temporary URL to the web site. A quick and easy way to do this is to create a sub domain of another URL and point it to your new web site by the way of mirroring. Any good web hosting provider should provide you with the ability to create temporary a URL so you can test your new site.

Changing Your DNS (Domain Name Server)

If you are now certain that your files have all been uploaded correctly and the links within your site are working correctly, you can change your DNS (domain name servers). Your new host should have provided you with their DNS settings. If they have not, contact them and ask what addresses should be used for your domain name. Usually the addresses will look like this, ns1.domainname.com, ns2.domainname.com.

The place to change the DNS addresses is whoever your domain name is registered with. If you registered the domain name through a registrar, you will need to login to their control panel and change the DNS servers there. If it was registered with your old host, you will need to login to their control panel and change the DNS entries there.

Wait For DNS Changes To Propogate

After you have changed your DNS (domain name servers) you will need to wait between 24-48 hours for your domain to propogate across the internet. During this waiting period your site will still be served from your old hosting account, as the DNS propogates your site will be served from your new host. Once the propogation has completed all requests to your domain will be served from you new host.

Cancel Your Old Account

Make sure you wait at least 48 hours for the domain name to propogate, and make sure that your domain name is resolving to your new hosting account before cancelling your old account.

Final Words

By following these steps you should now have successfully transferred your web site from your old host to your new host without any downtime.

Web Hosting Uptime


What Is Web Hosting Uptime And What Does It Mean For You?

Web hosting uptime is a measurement of the time a computer server has been running, the longer the web hosting uptime the better the service (usually). Uptime is important to not only web hosting companies, but to any person or company that has a website, because if a website is down it could hurt a personal company’s reputation as well as the reputation of the web hosting uptime guarantee. Web hosting companies strive for a 99.9% uptime, which means that there would be less then 2 minutes of downtime a day.

Factors that impact a web hosting uptime are sometime unavoidable, but many companies strive to prevent downtime. Downtime can be classified in three ways: planned downtime which is caused when a server is updated or upgraded, semi-planned downtime which is caused when software companies find a security breach and a patch must be put into place, and the worst is unplanned downtime which can be caused by an overloaded server, a software/hardware malfunction, or malicious software.

Uptime guarantees made by web hosting companies are based off of past information. Web hosting uptime can be monitored and maintained a few ways. There are services that provide 24/7 monitoring. Large web hosting companies have their own departments that monitor their servers. A loss in web hosting uptime can be prevented by having a redundant server to fall back on in case the primary server goes down. For a planned single server change this method may be practical for a larger company, but the costs implied for an additional server in a smaller company or providing this for multiple servers in larger companies can be impractical. Unplanned downtime would also keep this method from working well.

For consumers, researching web hosting uptime can prevent a package from being purchased from a web host that has a lot of downtime. There are websites that track a company’s web hosting uptime and provide reviews on the company freely for review. Other places to look for information are on forums either provided by the web hosting company or on web hosting review forums.

If your website does experience downtime you can contact the technical support or customer service department to see when your site will be restored. Understand that no web hosting company can have a 100% uptime guarantee. If your website experiences too much downtime switching to a different company with a higher and better web hosting uptime may be your only option.

Service is King in Web Hosting


If you are an Internet business owner, you definitely have a website. Where you choose to maintain that site makes a big difference. You can’t afford to trust your Internet business to just any web hosting company.In my opinion Service Is King. what u think?

Yes, Service Is King. No one can dispute the fact that server speed and reliability, upgraded hardware and software and web hosting features are all important. After all, these are the features that will determine how fast your Internet business will be able to grow and expand. You don’t want to have to change web hosting companies in the middle of the game. Ideally, you want to stay with the same web hosting company for as long as you own your business. It just makes life easier.

These days, it is hard to find a web hosting company that focuses almost entirely on customer service. Yet, if you are able to find one of them, you will have hit the jackpot! A web hosting company that specializes in customer service is very valuable to you. Why? Because their aim is to keep you happy as a customer. This means that they will answer your calls promptly and provide you with the very best service. Additionally, because their focus is on you, the customer, this means that they want your business to succeed as well. It is in their best interest to make sure that they are providing you with the tools that you need for your business to be successful. Instead of trying to sell you a cookie-cutter web hosting package that has been sold to hundreds, perhaps thousands of businesses, they will listen to your needs and be able to customize a web hosting package especially designed for your business. In addition, they will:

* Provide customer support 24/7
* Give you real-time access to their server status
* Give you a money-back guarantee
* Assist you with moving your website from another web hosting company
* Have a toll-free customer support phone number
* Consult with you on customized solutions for your busines

One important aspect of web hosting that people frequently overlook is the service. Yes, price matters, but service matters even more. Low prices won’t mean a thing if your website is down. If your site goes down, you lose sales – it is as simple as that. Also, when you have an Internet business, time is money. You don’t want to waste time waiting for the web host to provide you with that much-needed support. Every minute, hour or day that you have to wait for answers is another day that you could have spent doing what matters most – providing service to your customers and increasing your bottom line.

Switch from a shared host to a dedicated host


How do you identify whether it’s time to switch from a shared host to a dedicated host?

There are 3 main indicators to stay alert for:-

Speed

If the traffic streaming through your shared server is slowing down your customers’ pace as they browse your site (or your employees, if an in-house site), it may simply be time to look for more unencumbered shared hosting. But if you’ve tried several shared hosting providers with the same results, then it may be time to remind yourself how impatient the average web surfer is. While you’re jumping from shared host to shared host trying to save a buck, your customers are jumping ship. Your ability to respond promptly and effectively to customer transactions and inquiries cannot be overemphasized either.

Reliability

The limits to your control are nowhere more apparent than in the areas of reliability and security. It’s not simply that problems can arise: problems do arise. It’s the nature of the biz. And if you don’t have unlimited access to your own operating system, software and database apps, etc., there’s not much you can do when one arises.

Customizability

If your company is growing fast, you’re going to be changing many aspects of your web presence along with it. You may regularly need to tweak your disk space and bandwidth and experiment with using different applications to better serve your changing needs. On a shared host, upgrading in such a way usually involves leaping from one “package” or “plan” to another. These packages are generally preset and may or may not serve your immediate needs. They may be riddled with programs you don’t yet need, for example, yet lack in the one singular program you do. Or the next leap up from your current plan has way more disk space and bandwidth than you need at the moment. With a dedicated server, you can make changes incrementally, step forward, step back, heck, step sideways if you need to — and when you need to.

Monitor Web Sites for Downtime


How can we Monitor Web Sites for Downtime ?

Many of today’s web hosting providers offer 99% uptime for their web servers. If you have already chosen one or if you are planning to use one with such a high uptime should you be concerned on the whole matter anyway?

Let’s see how much 99% uptime means. For a 30-day month you have a total of 720 hours. 99% of this is 712.8 hours. Are you comfortable with your web site taking a day off every month? And this if 99% uptime happens. Can your web hosting provider back up its uptime promises with real facts?

For those in the Internet business the availability of their web site is a major concern. The cost of downtime for web businesses can amount to $10,000 an hour. And this is without counting the losses caused by missed opportunities and lost sales. Losses in image and credibility these businesses suffer because eventual downtime is even harder to quantify.
The best way to avoid that while ensuring your business is online is to have monitoring reports available on your web host’s uptime.

For companies or individuals having their web hosting providers monitored by a third party is a guarantee not only that their money is well spent, but also, an most importantly, that their Internet business is up and running.

Monitored by a third party is beneficial even for the web hosting providers. That is serious web hosting providers. Offering reports of their uptime monitored by a third party and placing links to them on their home page is bound to boost the confidence of existing customers as well as the one of the prospecting customers in the quality of service that host is providing for its customers.

Having a web host that provides monitoring of its uptime by a third party is the best guarantee that you can get for your web site’s uptime. With such level of service you can be sure that the money you are spending for your web presence can give your or your company the best return of investment.

Myths and Facts of Free Hosting


There are many MYths about free hosting:-

1.The first myth we must know is: It’s not a good host if it’s free.
Fact: Sometimes we are paying for something that could be found for free.

Nowadays,I think, it’s not hard at all to find free decent hosting. All you need is to find a good host directory that possesses an excellent search tool, so we won’t have much trouble browsing across the hosts.

2.Myth: All free web hosts are either slow or clutter your website with ads.

Fact: The large free web hosting companies are usually like that, but I am actually aiming for smaller hosts, which brings me to another myth.

Some others are:-

Myth: Small free web hosts don’t provide good support.

Fact: On 90% of the cases the hosts have a forum. The admins frequently visit those forums, so it’s almost sure that you’ll get great and speedy support.

Myth: Those free web hosts offer very small webspace ammount and don’t allow a lot of extensions.

Fact: Believe me, you wouldn’t need so much webpace. In fact, 100 MB of webspace with 3000 MB of Bandwidth should sustain your free hosting website through out the month

One more myth is

Myth: Free Web hosts don’t support any kind of coding besides HTML!

Fact: You can find hosts for free that offer, domain/subdomain hosting, cPanel, Fantastico, PHP Hosting, MySQL, CGI/Perl, ASP and almost anything a paid host can offer.

I’d like to remind you guys that if you want large resources, you should go to paid hosting. I mean, you can’t get everything for free!

Difference between web hosting and file hosting


What is difference between web hosting and file hosting?

web hosting enables you to place your website on the Internet. And file hosting offers storage space, where you may store whatever you want – including movies, music, work documents and other pertinent files.

Thanx brinks

Why do we need file hosting?

The need for file hosting may arise if you wish to share files with friends and family, and your files are often large in size. Making floppies and burning CDs is neither economical nor it is an easy chore. Carrying physical media can be quite cumbersome at times. File sharing via email is not secure, and moreover, email cannot be used for large file transfers. In such a scenario, the best option available is file hosting and sharing. Unequivocally, there are 4 common types of files – video, images, music and data. If you desire a file hosting and sharing server, you may use the following keywords while you carry out a search on Google (arguably the best search engine) – “share files with friends and family”.

What Web Hosting Customers Want


Recently I have started a web hosting company and now I m looking for customer.With over twenty thousand webhosting companies competing for new customers, there’s been a lot of speculation over what people are looking for when they purchase hosting.

There are the obvious answers, of course – reliable servers, lots of features, reasonable prices, etc.

One thing that is almost always overlooked though, and I believe most people are looking for this, is “relationship”. After eight years in this business, it’s been my experience that cultivating good relationships with my clients is the best way to keep existing customers and attract new business.

While we can’t ignore essential elements of the business, like uptime and security, we must always remember that those faceless clients who subscribe to our services are real, living, breathing people with very real feelings, worries, and concerns. The better we can get to know our clients on a personal basis, the better we can address those worries and concerns.

Price Vs. Quality


As the Internet expands, demand for different web-hosting services increases proportionally. Additional numbers of people are joining the web world every day with personal sites for their business or organization. Many people choose low-cost solutions to host their web site, but it if your web site is important to you, you should consider quality as much as price.

Quality is most important in web hosting.

For instance, putting your site on a low costs web host can affect the speed at which customers access it. Many surfers on broadband connections get annoyed when site’s server does not keep up with their connection. If it does not offer fast access and downloads, people will be reluctant to revisit the site. They would leave the place with a negative impression about you result in long term economic loss.

A well-established web host may charge more for the facilities but in the long run they may offer better and latest services complying with the trends in the market. Some high quality hosts even offers free add-ones and promotions. The features like free web site builder or support for MySQL databases ensure that the ultimate cost involved in building a productive website are a lesser amount. These facilities may not be available when one goes for a cheaper web host – or you may have to pay extra for them!

Quality is more important than price.

It is advisable to check out a host’s reputation and quality as well as its price. The good news is, there are some web hosts that offer both outstanding service as well as competitive prices like cpwebhosting.net.