Monday, May 4, 2009

Free Web Hosting - Should you get a free web host?

What are the problems with free hosting plans??

When you’re ready to choose a web hosting provider, many choices come up. One primary choice is whether or not to use a free web hosting provider.

A free web hosting provider will generally fit some people and their content. Want to host a blog? A free web hosting service can handle that with no problem. Want to have an online store? A free or even cheap hosting provider is not for you.

Free hosting plans generally come with some limit on bandwidth. Ever come across a link that comes up as: “This user has exceeded their bandwidth for the month. Please try again next month” These people are using free or cheap web hosting providers and hitting the limits. If you hit this bandwidth limit, for the rest of that month anyone going to your page will see that message. It wouldn’t matter if you posted an important update, no one could see it.

If you have a basic blog with a few updates for your family, bandwidth won’t be a problem. If you want to get past the basic web page and start setting up video clips, there’s the problem. Bandwidth on even a short video clip would equal thousands of regular text page views. One video clip to a few people can take up your entire bandwidth for the month.

Another problem encountered with free web hosting is advertising. A free web host has to make money somewhere. If that money’s not coming from you, they most likely sell advertising space. When you provide content to be published, they can link in to certain words to promote products, sell banner ad space on the sides, etc. They key here is that they are choosing what runs and what doesn’t. If you’re talking about the PETA movement and the abuse of animals - do you want a banner for a dog food company? The text of your article could provide keywords for things you’re speaking about, so it would be possible to get conflicting messages. What if you have something against a certain advertiser? With a free web host it wouldn’t be possible to refuse space for that advertiser, it’s free and you get what you pay for.

To decide on getting a free web host, take a look at what you want for your content. To publish an article or get a general blog going, a free provider can be a step in the direction you’d like to go. For more specific content or for a professional appearance, you’ll want to go to a reputable web hosting plan.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Web Hosting - Linux or Windows Web Hosting?

How do I choose between Linux web hosting and Windows web hosting?

We’re often asked this question and what difference it makes to your final site. Linux and Windows are operating systems and both have fundamental differences, but also many similarities. The truth is it all depends on what you need. Easy right?

Let’s start with the web site idea. When you begin to choose a web host provider you’re progressing beyond the “I need a web site” phase and starting to move into the “I want my web site to do this” phase. Don’t try to figure out a back-end right away, you’ll just confuse yourself and get bogged down.

Let’s start by thinking of a web site having a back-end and a front-end. The front-end is what your clients and visitors see - this is the image of your business. That face can be professional, whimsical, informational - anything you come up with. The front-end is where you decide on graphic design, visitor interface and content of the site. This is also the part you’re designing things on paper and not worrying about how it works - just how it looks.

The back-end is getting into the technical portion and most likely where you’ll need someone to work things through with you. This is the portion of the web site that no one will see except you. When you created a form in the front-end, what do you want it to do? Sure it can collect an email address for you to contact them - that’s a basic function. Now choose what to do with that information - do you want to store those email address, along with when they contacted you? Do you want to store that information just in your email client or do you want a database?

Now you have an idea of where you’ll be when you choose Linux or Windows for your web hosting. Now the tools will help us focus further. In our example your form is collecting email addresses. If you just want your information mailed to you and you’ll call them and delete the email - it won’t matter what operating system you choose they both have basic features such as email. Do you want to store those emails in a contact database? If so, do you already have a database to store those in?

Linux hosting will generally come with a MySQL database. MySQL is a major database, able to hold millions of lines of information and is supported by major companies and numerous web support sites. MySQL is also free to use, easy to set up (with the right help) and a web standard. It interfaces with major publishing systems like Drupal, WordPress, PHP pages and general HTML. If you don’t have a database for yourself it generally won’t matter what is setup - pick the cheaper one in this case. For your purposes if you don’t have a specific need - pick a Linux host, they’re generally cheaper.

Windows hosting is based more on the tools you use to publish, maintain your site or internal tools you’re using. If you currently have an in-house SQL database, it’s a cleaner and easier solution to host that database on the web using a Windows-based hosting provider. If you have tools or programming done with Visual Studio, those tools can publish directly to your Windows-based website or directly convert into a web page hosted there.

Either choice in creating a website can be a technical challenge and it’s recommended to talk with a technical consultant. Even an hour of time from one can help you save hours of work on your part.

How does one find a website hosting company?

Web Site Design is an exciting field to be in. The technology rapidly changes so there is always something new and exciting to learn and it’s a great outlet to release your creativity. website design is still a fairly new and emerging discipline. As a result, there are few publications that discuss effective methodologies for integrating user-centered design into the overall Web design process. Web site design is popular and prolific, meeting the communication needs of a large user community. Many of these sites are poorly designed.

Web site design is defined as the arrangement and creation of web pages that in turn make up a web site. A web page consists of information for which the website is designed and developed. Web site design is a creative work that needs some idea and creativity. For a lucrative web site design, each element of design should be in right combination and should have a dependable website hosting package. Web site design is not a one time activity. Almost all web sites alter their layouts periodically to give it a new and better look.

Web site design is the graphical, visual, and textual layout and arrangement of a website. It goes hand in hand with website development, which builds on the functionality of a site to achieve specific goals and enhance user interactivity.

Websites are constructed with many motives or reasons depending upon your company and business. Some companies in order to cover more customers build websites. Website design can be identified as the core service of our web site design house as the majority of the other activities performed by edesignerz.com revolve around this service. edesignerz.com is a web site design house that can be trusted with your web site design for the reason that we have the technical skills to promote the image of your company and product in the best way possible. Website development process involves certain software applications for overall development life-cycle. Specific methodologies, changes and additions are to be done for designing a good website.

Search engine optimization can directly impact the number of visitors you have to your site along with a bad ecommerce solution. Search engine optimization strategies, if not implemented correctly, can incur heavy loses to your website and business! Search Engine Optimization is crucial to the success of your online branding! Search engines can’t view your graphics. Alt tags are HTML tags the tell search engines what photos represent.

Search Engine Optimization and Website Optimization is not about tricking search engines, rather, about better helping surfers. Your entire site is indexed over time, so forget about keywords, write naturally and your site will include all the ‘wanted’ keywords you desire. Search engines can’t read Flash or Javascript as well as normal content. If your important content is presented using these technologies, the search engines won’t find it.