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 Monday, December 19, 2005
We normally don't do much recommending, but given we are trying to share info here and alot of our time is spent looking for the best service in the hosting area, I figured this was worth the post.
The hosting provider I have started using has just launched a sale (don't know for how long) that brings the price of a new domain name to $1.99! You have to buy some other non-domain service to get that rate, but if you get hosting or email or anything then you get the rate.
This even applies to transfers so I am probably going to move my own old domains over and tack on email.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Brinkster has a very interesting proposition in their " Web Hosting for Life" campaign. For $299 you get to host a single domain with 3 GB of disk space on the server and 75 GB of transer (per month from what I can gather). If you assume that normal hosting costs just $5 per month then after five years, this is a very good deal. The terms and conditions actually point out that the deal is good for life or 60 years whichever is shorter. Since it says that you can transfer to another person then I guess the 60 years prevents a dynasty. I must say that this is a truly interesting offer, but I am still very cautious. In five years 3 GB may seem too small to care about. I expect that Brinkster will make alot of money on this, but unless you really think you can get 10 years of use out of it, you should pass. For the rest, you better act soon because they are claiming limited availability. Thursday, September 22, 2005
A key part to the success of any website is content. If you are basing the business on traffic then the more content the better. You can write that content yourself, buy it or you can design a site that causes your users to provide the content for you.
You have likely visited many sites yourself where you are welcome to share and contribute. Each time someone does, whether it is to vent, rant or console, the site benefits by the addition of more content. A big factor in all search engine ranking is the number of pages in the site. If you can leverage the work of others, it can make the difference between having dozens of pages (or hundreds if you are prolific) and having thousands of pages.
Ultimately unless it is completely out of place, think about putting forums on your site. It is the best way to get contributions without having to invent a new paradigm. If you are hosting on a dedicated server then you likely have to find the software yourself, but on most shared hosting providers there is already software in place for you to leverage. Wednesday, September 07, 2005
When you decide to host a website at a hosting provider then one consideration is what tools are available for you to build the site. If you don't have strong design or programming skills then you need to plan ahead. Many packages include site wizards that will whip up a site for you so long as you don't have special requirements.
Look before you leap.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Almost any web server software you use will have an option for you to specify where users go when they request a page that does not exist. This is the familiar 404 error. You want to handle this error gracefully for several reasons. First it is more user friendly and keeps people from having the impression that your site is broken. Most people won't blame themselves for not typing in a URL correctly, they will just assume you are not very professional. Another great reason is that it prevents hackers from being able to get information from an error page that you didn't design. The information that a typical "Page Not Found" page contains is not earth shattering, but we should always try to deny the bad guys whatever they are looking to get. Information is their first priority.
Depending on your web server software you will have to go and do different things to setup what your website should do when a non-existent page is requested, but in most cases it is just a setting. Some people will create a page that lets the user know that they asked for a page that either has never or no longer exists and this gives the added benefit if done well of giving the user all the navigation needed to get back to your site and buy or see or do something that is the reason you built the site in the first place. The other viable alternative is to just set the home page of the site as the destination when a 404 error occurs. This might annoy some users, but it should get them back on track to do what you want them to do fast. Of course if you are bold enough to try this technique, you better be very sure you don't have any broken links on your site as going in a circle will cause people to frustrate out very quickly and gives you no easy way to get real data of how many people are requesting pages that don't exist.
Monday, August 22, 2005
When you setup a website you will undoubtedly get a web hosting plan that includes not only a set amount of hard drive space for your pages, but also a budget of bandwidth that your site can utilize. This number can be anything from 100 Megabytes (MB) per month to thousands of Gigabytes (GB) per month. Often this vital statistic is ignored as people are looking forward to the problem of having too much traffic. While most web sites that are created don't consume massive bandwidth, don't plan for your own failure by completely ignoring this factor when you sign up with a web hosting company. At least ensure you get a reasonable amount of bandwidth based on what your site will be doing. For instance if you are hosting home videos for a large group you may find that even 10 GB per month is not enough. If on the other hand you have a modestly designed site that leverages background colors more than graphics you may find that 100 MB is more than enough even once you get the site to your desired user community.
The bottom line is to factor in all the relevant areas so you don't find yourself regretting your choices. Tuesday, August 16, 2005
When you go searching for web hosting you will encounter a sea of offers (many of them in SPAM) and a legion of companies that offer seemingly the same services. There are some rules that will help you not get burned that I live by and while they may not seem fair to the little guys, they are meant to minimize my (and your) pain in the long run. Start with bigger companies with bigger facilities. It is very painful when your site is not being served no matter what you intend the site to do for you. If you go with a small, Mom and Pop style hosting company then you run the risk that they suffer an outage and are exposed by a lack of redundancy. Larger providers have big, expensive data centers that are designed to endure power and even major Internet outages without letting their clients down. Another aspect of this same quality in a web hosting provider is that larger companies don't go out of business as regularly as smaller ones. Going direct is overrated in that most of the major hosting providers have resellers that sell the exact same services, but often will undercut the real provider on price. You get the same server, in the same datacenter and even talk to the same support engineers, but with the added benefits of better price and an extra layer of management to yell at when things go wrong. My current favorite in this space is SRAWeb.Net who front for Godaddy.com. As I find others that meet my standards they will be added to our list at the bottom of our left navigation area, but it is all about getting the best advantage you can. Once you identify a few competitors then look to price per feature. It is unlikely that a smaller hosting provider can compete so while you might like to support small business, the consolidation of the hosting industry has already happened so don't expect them to be there too long. Knowing what you want is half the battle and usually will allow you to use those well tuned consumer skills to make a decision once you have gotten this far. Sunday, August 14, 2005
When you sign up for a web hosting company to put your site on their server you are typically looking at a very low price (under $20 per month and sometimes under $5 per month) and in these cases the web hosting company is actually not using a dedicated server for your site. If they were then they would be out of business very soon. The fact is that in this situation you are signing up for shared hosting and that means that your website might me one of dozens or even hundreds of other web sites hosted on that same server. The advantages of this of course is the price. You could never get a dedicated server for the same price (they typically run over $100 per month for the bare bones package and can run into the thousands per month). The disadvantages are more numerous. On a Shared Hosting plan you cannot install any software that isn't already part of the package, you might be sharing the same IP address as many other sites and the server is distinguishing requests by address once they arrive at the server, and most importantly if someone on the same server as you compromises the server with their web application (in the case of dynamic code) then your site is going to be dragged down too.
This isn't an attempt to completely scare you off of Shared Hosting solutions, but be warned about the disadvantages before you jump at the price. I use shared hosting of simple sites that I consider low security, for everything else I go Dedicated Server all the way. Thursday, July 28, 2005
I found this service being offered by Internet Service Providers (AKA Web Hosting Providers) that lets you use their Internet accessible storage as an always available file share. I had heard of these services before, but I didn't realize that the prices were so low. Companies like Godaddy are offering storage for under a penny per MB per year! It sparked my interest because we are dealing with employees that are working from home or traveling more and more and I wanted to get rid of their VPN accessible home directories.
The one I am looking at using is here.
I decided to characterize this as Web Hosting because it is all about putting your resources on someone else's server so I think that fits. Friday, May 27, 2005
If you have a good, commercial connection to the Internet or if the site(s) or service(s) that you want to provide are targeted to people who don't mind using a special address to get to them then you might be a candidate to host your own Internet server. For the sake of simplicity we will focus on web hosting, but most of this also applies to FTP and other online protocols.
OK, so like we said you have a good strong connection to the Internet. If this connection is in you home then odds are good that your Internet Serviece Provider (ISP) will block the default port that web sites use to allow web browsers to connect. I know people that host family web sites this way, but this means that anyone who connects must know the alternate port and be savvy enough to put it into the web browser address to get there.
If you pass all these obstacles now you have to confront the issue of whether you want the headache. If you don't maintain servers for a living or really, really like it then you want to think twice about this route. Hosting is now quite inexpensive and if arranged correctly (with our help we hope) is much less costly in all senses of the term.
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