Wednesday, January 11, 2006

How to find good and affordable web hosting

How to find a good and affordable web hosting provider.
@ Kurt Geer

Finding a good web hosting provider could mean success or failure to your online business.

How good is your current web hosting provider? If are you looking to register an Internet domain name and start your business presence on the web, Where do you start? Good question.

1) - Let's start from the beginning. The very first step in finding and registering an Internet name is
brainstorming for the perfect domain name and/or product.

*Is the name you want already taken? Chances are this is a good possibility. Unless you hold the copyright on the name there is little chance you can get it inexpensively.

*Can you name the website after your product? A lot of websites have the product name in the Internet domain name. A lot of internet and drug companies are making up names that were not in our vocabulary before the products were introduced to the market.

*Can you rename the company after the product? Would you want to? Renaming your company has it's pros and cons. If your company is relatively new it may not be as big of a problem than if yourcompany has been established for a long period of time. You should note that there have been a good number of companies changing names with good success.

Brainstorm with this keyword research tool, making sure you include the best possible keywords before you register your domain name.(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)

There is also domain name generating software available online for this purpose also.

2) - How are you going to publish your website? It is not as difficult as it may seem to be for the first time website owner. If you are not going to hire a website designer to construct the website for you, there are many options available for you. Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage are the leaders in website publishing software. If you don't want to invest the time or money in those products make sure that your web hosting provider has a site studio or website creator available for you to publish your site. There also are inexpensive website publishing software programs available on the web.

3) - Picking the web hosting provider. Most important is that your provider has a good support system in place, if you need it or have any problems. If you are just starting off make sure that there is at least a 30 day money back guarantee. You should have access to an online help area with commonly asked questions and videos. You should also be able to open a ticket for help in this area.

*Does the hosting provider gives you access to a control panel? Cheap website hosting doesn't always give you access to the heart of your website. This is the place where you are in control of everything.

*Make sure hosting provider gives you a site manager where you are able to access and create sub domains, DNS records, FTP and Frontpage extensions. MySQL databases and php scripts that arebuilt into the site. All you do is plug them in. Password protected areas, Contrab (scheduling certain applications), SSL certificates for Secure purchasing and SSH (is a unique management and operations module for operating secure services ina corporate infrastructure), which you probably will not need.

*Does the hosting provider give you access to more than 1 email address? How many do you really need? 10? 100? How about auto responders? A one time auto response is a great time saving tool. What about spam protection, email forwarding and some mailing lists?

*Traffic statistics are an important tool in marketing your website. Can you tell where your website traffic is coming from with your current web hosting provider?

*How about some tools to help you improve your website and makeit sticky. PHP scripts like Ad Management - phpAdsNew, phpList,Blog - WordPress. Classified Ads - Classifieds. ContentManagement - Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Moodle, Nucleus, OpenRealty, WebSiteBaker, phpWebSite. Customer Support - CraftySyntax Live Help, Help Center Live, OS Ticket, PHPTickets,Support Logic Helpdesk. Discussion Boards - YaBB SE, phpBB2. E-Commerce - CubeCart, OS Commerce. File Manipulation - InvisionPower FM. Groupware Tools - DOTproject, PHProject. ImageGalleries - 4Images Gallery, Coppermine. Portal Systems - PHPNuke. Server Management - phplinks. Web Hosting Tools -phpFormGenerator, phpcoin.

*Last but not least, what kind of up time record does your hosting provider have? 100%? 95%? 90%? How can you track it? Internetseer.com provides this service for free. Submit your siteto Jaydee.com and you will automatically be subscribed to this service. Keeping track of your web host provider can save you money in the long run. If their service keeps going down due to technical problems, that means you are losing visitors and that is money missing from your bank account.

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Kurt Geer has been helping folks online since 1999.
1 Web Site Hosted for $6.97 Month
10 Web Sites Hosted for $16.97 Month
Visit <http://www.BuyDomainWebHosting.com> for a hosting
company with unequaled support, pricing and 99 % Up time
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