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Your website hosting service is critically important. Choose carefully
Website Hosting Service
For Your Website
What is website hosting?
Your web site is just a bunch of
files. To get them on the internet you have to have them installed
on a server that is connected to the internet. Not only do you want
it connected to the internet, but you want a connection that is very fast
and can accommodate many users at once. Not a dial up line.
You could use your own computer for a server, and purchase or rent a
high speed phone connection, obtain some server software, and manage your own server. Most people
don't want to get into the server business and instead look to shared
website hosting service from a 3rd party.
Shared website hosting
Shared website hosting is when more than one site is on the
server. Many sites can reside on one server. If too many sites
are on the same server, the response time can suffer, but all of my sites
are on shared servers, and I've never had any problems.
Figuring out what you need is an important step. Next visit a variety
of hosting websites to see what they have to offer. This will give you
some good information on which to make your choice.
What is Required? UNIX or Windows Web Hosting: If the website makes
use of Microsoft technologies such as MS Access or MS SQL database, then
it is critical to choose a web hosting enterprise that makes use of the
Windows OS.
Will you need Front Page extensions from your website hosting service? How about a
shopping cart? In some cases, it might also be essential to
confirm if the server is SSL secure or not. These are important things
you need to think about.
When comparing packages, you will notice that the major differences
are cost, amount of data transfer and disk space available, number of
email addresses offered, and amount of bandwidth you will receive each
month.
Storing lots of pictures, videos or other media takes up a lot more
space than text. You should determine how much space you'll need before
choosing a web host.
A good web host makes it as easy as possible for customers to upload
files, manage email accounts, review site statistics and manage FTP
accounts.
Make sure you have access to the server logs, and log analyzing
program, so you can keep track of things like where your visitors come
from, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and all of those other
details which help you to manage your site.
One of the most important items on your list should be customer
service. Make sure you can contact customer service at any time if
you're experiencing problems. Having your website go down on Friday
evening can be really irritating if you can't get a hold of customer
service until Monday morning.
Choosing a web host that provides excellent customer service is essential. Since you're paying for their
services, you should expect their customer service department to be
efficient and easily accessible.
Over the years I've used 4 or 5 hosting services. The hosting
service I am now using, flarehosting, is excellent. They are fast
and friendly and have a very low price. So far, every time I've
had a problem they have quickly solved it.
I highly recommend Flare
Hosting for your website hosting needs.
One of the first things you do after getting a hosting service is to
make sure that they can handle concatenation of your URL. What is
that? you ask.
According to Matt Cutts, a Google spokesperson:
"Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word,
anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google.
Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are
several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most
people would consider these the same urls:
www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could
return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google
“canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best
representative from that set.
Google and possibly other engines view that as two distinct URLs and
when counting the incoming links it keeps track of them separately.
So even though the total of links may be the same, the value of the
links are far less. A site with 200 incoming links is way way
ahead of a site with 100 links. (This was probably one of those
internet marketing secrets).
My website hosting service charges me $1.00 a month for the permanent
re-direct of the johnlund.com version, and it is well worth it.
You can check to see if your site is concatenated as the call it.
If when you type http://yoursite.com into your browser's
address bar it automatically switches to the www version, then you don't
have to worry. If the URL in the browser address box does not
change to the www version then you need to contact your hosting service
and implement a 301 redirect."
Ready to build your website?
Building Your Site
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