A Beginner's Guide to Web Hosting

What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.

Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to ‘store’ the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called ‘data center’. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

What are the different types of web hosting?
There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:

Shared Hosting

In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting), many websites are sharing the space on the same physical web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web server can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different websites at one time. You may wonder if a physical web server is shared by so many websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.

However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting would have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $5 - $20 per month.

Dedicated Hosting

In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 - $500 per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and extremely important website.

Co-location hosting

In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web hosting providers and customers only rent the web server during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed their web server within the web hosting provider’s secure data center. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location hosting range from $500 - $1000 per month.

Reseller hosting

In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, or system integration company who resell the web hosting as a add-on service to complement their other range of services. Commonly, resellers can receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the Internet and start selling web hosting plans under its brand).

To the reseller’s customers, the reseller is the web host provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the communication process taken place between customer to reseller and from reseller to actual web host provider and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer time to resolve. Unless you are running your own personal website or non-profit website and willing to take the risks of poor support from the reseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.

However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You don’t judge by the availability of toll-free number alone because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the reseller’s customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the reseller’s name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, don’t be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.

In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web hosting provider has solid company information such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background (here is just an example out of thousands out there). Moreover, the hosting price by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 - $10.Therefore, you should not strive to find the cheap web hosting companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Don’t expect to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your web hosting plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly more for your hosting plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web hosting plans to host your important website.

A Beginner's Guide to Web Hosting

What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.
Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.
A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to ‘store’ the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called ‘data center’. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.
What are the different types of web hosting?
There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:
Shared Hosting
In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting), many websites are sharing the space on the same physical web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web server can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different websites at one time. You may wonder if a physical web server is shared by so many websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.
However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting would have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $5 - $20 per month.
Dedicated Hosting
In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 - $500 per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and extremely important website.
Co-location hosting
In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web hosting providers and customers only rent the web server during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed their web server within the web hosting provider’s secure data center. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location hosting range from $500 - $1000 per month.
Reseller hosting
In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, or system integration company who resell the web hosting as a add-on service to complement their other range of services. Commonly, resellers can receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the Internet and start selling web hosting plans under its brand).
To the reseller’s customers, the reseller is the web host provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the communication process taken place between customer to reseller and from reseller to actual web host provider and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer time to resolve. Unless you are running your own personal website or non-profit website and willing to take the risks of poor support from the reseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.
However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You don’t judge by the availability of toll-free number alone because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the reseller’s customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the reseller’s name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, don’t be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.
In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web hosting provider has solid company information such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background (here is just an example out of thousands out there). Moreover, the hosting price by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 - $10.
Therefore, you should not strive to find the cheap web hosting companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Don’t expect to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your web hosting plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly more for your hosting plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web hosting plans to host your important website.

Website Sitebuilders: Easy to use Website builders Come with a Price

Professional web designers don't come cheap. A good web designer can easily charge you $1000 or more for a five page website. This high cost leads many people to tackle web design for themselves. How hard can it be? Get yourself an HTML editor, throw up a website and voila! Your website is live right? Wrong! There is a lot of knowledge you need to develop before you can get your self made website onto the internet.

What is a Sitebuilder?

More and more web hosting companies today offer Sitebuilder software that takes care of all the technical details to getting your website up and live on the internet. They allow a novice to choose a built in template, select some colors, throw in some pictures, and add some text. Once these steps are done, all the novice has to do is publish their website to the internet. All the hard stuff is taken care of by the Sitebuilder software. So what's the catch?

Next to Impossible to Move your Website to Another Company.

Most Sitebuilders in use by web hosting companies today are designed to make it as difficult as possible for their users to transfer their website away. Most, if not all the fancy features like counters, navigation, templates, etc... are built into the Sitebuilder and won't work unless you have an active account with that particular company. If you want to take your website elsewhere, you will have to build your website again from scratch.

Cookie cutter approach tends to look amateurish

Sitebuilders in generally lack the flexibility to allow the website creator to create a website any way they like. Most Sitebuilders out there will lock you into doing things in one way – their way. This leads to websites that can look like they were just thrown together and therefore look unprofessional.

Little ability to handle traffic growth.

Most Sitebuilders come with enough storage space and monthly data transfer to meet the average website's needs. If your website traffic truly takes off though, chances are, your Sitebuilder company will cut you off. Most hosting companies bank on the fact that 99% of it's clients will use relatively little resources. If your website starts to use too many server resources, most companies will pull the plug on your website. If your website is built with their Sitebuilder, you'll be out of luck and in the unenviable position of needing to rebuild your website right when a ton of traffic is hitting a dead page. Not pretty.

Sitebuilder or traditional web hosting account – which is for you?

If you have never put together a website before, and you have no desire to dive into the technical details of putting your website online, a Sitebuilder is probably your best fit. For maximum long term flexibility and growth potential, learning how to get your website live on a traditional web hosting account is well worth the effort. You will end up paying less, you won't be locked into one company, and you will be able to grow your website as traffic demands it.

How To Make Your Website Structurally Sound

You've decided to build a website. Great! Your first step is to determine its structure-the pages you want to include and the information you want provide to visitors. But how to begin?

Your first instinct may be to make your site different from everyone else's. After all, trying to differentiate your business is what you've been doing throughout your branding process.

Building a website is like building a custom home

When you create a custom house, you can arrange your floor plan however you want, paint the walls as you please and fill the house with furniture you love. Your goal is to create a unique space that stands out from everyone else's.

In the same vein, there are elements of your website where standing out makes sense. For example, the overall look of your site and your copy should be different from other sites-especially those of your competitors.

Differentiating your website is good for your small business-to a point. What you don't want to do is reengineer its basic structure.

Standing out isn't always the stable way to build

Underneath it all, even the most unique custom home has the same foundation and spacing between studs in the wall as every other house on the block.

By following underlying principles of construction, builders help ensure that the house is structurally sound. Why not use the same approach when it comes to your website? That way, your site is far more likely to work well for you.

To use site building rules, of course, you need to know what they are.

Rule 1: Do competitive research

Before someone sets out to build a custom house, they'll probably do quite a lot of research-looking at other houses, determining the architectural styles that appeal to them, and perhaps even checking out homes in the neighborhood where they want to build.

The same goes for your website. You need find out what you're up against. Once you're familiar with competitors' sites, you can make sure that your site will not only be different in the right places, such as look and feel and content, but that it will also be comparable in the right places.

Most likely, your competitors have been building their sites for some time-and probably updating them to answer customer questions and market their businesses more strongly. You don't want prospects to pass you by because your site doesn't answer an important question that a competitor has addressed.

Visiting other sites and making notes of basic structure, business information presented, customer questions answered and even relevant tools and articles gives you a jump start on creating a site that facilitates apples-to-apples comparisons.

Rule 2: Plan your site architecture

As you may suspect, planning your site architecture is like drawing up architectural plans for a custom house, where you plan just what you'll include and what will go in each space. For example, do you want a library? A formal dining room? And where will you put the piano?

Similarly, for your website, you must decide the pages you'll include and the information on each page.

When planning your site architecture, think about what you'd like your website to do for your business. Do you want it to bring in clients and close sales? If so, pricing information and even a shopping cart can help do that. Do you need your site to get media attention? Then a Media Room might be the key. Make sure to include the pages and content required to get the job done.

In addition, think about how you plan to expand your website in the future. At the beginning, designing a website of more than 10 pages can overwhelm a small business-both in terms of budget and time required to write the content.

But, if you create an expanded site map at the beginning-a website wish list if you will-then you and your website strategist can determine which pages will be most important in helping you reach your goals. You'll also have a clear road map you can use to add on to your website as your budget and schedule allow.

For more about the pages to include on your website, see this article: Pages To Include On Your Website.

Rule 3: Name your pages in a way that makes sense

Have you ever walked into an unfamiliar house and been unable to find your way around? You probably asked the hostess where the kitchen was so you could drop off your pot luck dish or the way to the bathroom.

On a website, though, visitors don't have the luxury of asking where things are. So you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find the information that they need.

Some small businesses want navigation button names to be clever or interesting. But, it's important to think about the website visit from your customers' or prospects' point of view. They often come to your site looking for specific information. Even if they're just browsing, they want an organized way to look around-where clicking a link takes them to the page they expect. Remember that visitors don't have a lot of time or the patience to bumble around your site.

You see the same navigation buttons on every site you visit for a good reason. Established usage conventions have trained visitors to look for names like "Services," "About" and "Contact" when they're out browsing around. Capitalize on this and your visitors will be able to find what they're looking for quickly-keeping your site and your business in their good graces.

Following these three simple rules makes it much more likely that your website is structurally sound and that your visitors will have a great experience there instead of a frustrating one.

Basics of Web Designing

In this current cut throat competition in the market it becomes very essential for the business houses to expand their way to market the products or services to maximize the profit. Business is now flourishing even over the web. All the businesses are now realizing that they should have an online presence besides their physical existence. And thus the importance & needs for the efficient and professional web designers are increasing day by day.

To start the design for the websites you must keep some important things. The first thing that you should always keep in mind that web design differs from print design. So, you must plan on "WHAT TO INCLUDE" and "WHAT NOT TO INCLUDE" on your website.

So how do you build up a great website that sells? Let's find it out.

The Foundation

Before building a house, it is necessary to build a proper foundation. Likewise, before designing a website you should keep in mind these basic things.

a) Remember that you are designing your site for the impatient online reader. They do not have the patience to read the whole contents. Instead they scan through .So you should learn to apply features and techniques that catch the attention of the viewers.
b) Uniformity is also important, while designing a web site. You should use features to which people are accustomed.
c) The web site should be user friendly. It should use web-optimized graphics.

The Superstructure

Now we move on to the super structure that is the house itself or the website concerned. Just remember these tips and go on to create a great website.

a) The web site should load quickly and be easy to scan. These are the essential prerequisites of web designing.

b) While designing a web site, you should keep in mind the needs of the potential customers. People visit the web site with a specific purpose, to get a solution to their problems. So you should focus on providing people with the specific information. You should also ensure that no information is more than a few click away.

c) The graphics should be so styled as to fit the content and not vice-versa. Often web designers complain that the content is not suitable to the web design. But you should remember that it is also important for people to read the content. The content provides information about the services and products. So attention must not be diverted from the content at any cost.

d) You should choose a font style and color that can be easily read. Frequent use of bold fonts makes the page difficult to read. The background color should also be kept light. Otherwise the viewers will have difficulty in viewing the pages.

e) You should use customized graphics to make your website attractive. But the graphics should not divert the attention of the readers from the content. The graphics should serve as an appendage to the content, which should be the primary focus.

f) Blinking images are to be avoided. They distract the attention of the readers from the content. Some viewers also consider them to be a nuisance and cover up these flashing images in order to concentrate on the content.

g) Avoid broken links. Make sure that they do not occur on your website. Concentrate on the link architecture.

h) Use contrasting elements on your web site. Placing contrasting elements side by side will easily attract the attention of the visitors. It is in fact one of the basic elements of web designing.

i) You should remember that the content should be aesthetically pleasing. Yet it should have powerful functionality at the same time. The website should be capable of giving out the relevant information in the least possible time. That is what readers are most interested in.

j) Don't concentrate all your attention on attractive graphics. Give an equal focus on page layout, error handling and structure.

k) Don't repeat your titles and page headings. Page headings are instrumental in focusing viewer's attention. Using the same headings will make them think that the information being provided is the same. This will decrease viewer retention.

l) You should make sure that the content and the page headings are grammatically correct. Incorrect grammar and syntax will reflect badly on the web site.

m) Lay stress on the keywords. Use of keywords help viewer's to ascertain whether the site is important to them or not. Most visitors flick through a website. So infrequent use of keywords will make visitors skip over a web site, even though it might contain relevant information. Here the needs of Web design with proper search engine optimization (SEO) grows up and up.

n) Pay attention to your homepage. That is what the viewers will first see. The home page should be attractive and provide useful information. If it doesn't satisfy the mentioned criteria then the readers will move on.

You must remember that the primary aim of web designing services is to focus on visitor's needs. Design your web site in such a way as to direct the eye towards the important features. The less important ones should recede into the background. Web page designing is extremely challenging. Viewers take only a fraction of a second to decide whether a particular site will be useful to them or not. So you should hit the nail on the head immediately. The web site should be attractive, easy to read and easy to navigate. Adhering to the above guidelines will help you to build up a website that sells.

Design a web site means you must make a convincing presentation. You should not include too many graphics, pop-ups, and flashing gifs in your web design. These take a lot of time to load. Your website should be easy to navigate. You must remember that the attention span of the average viewer is very low. You have to grab the attention of the viewer immediately otherwise they will wander to other sites.