Designing a Website - Finding a Reliable
Hosting Company
Once I had my site designed, the next step was to find a
reliable hosting company. This will take some research on your
part as any hosting company will not do. There are many issues
that will be covered below. The range for a
hosting package can be anywhere from just a couple dollars per
month to $200 or more on a monthly basis. You will have to
decide on what you are looking for, whether it be virtual
hosting or a dedicated server. A dedicated server will end up
costing you more money. Taking into consideration the budget you
have for hosting and the options available, you will want to
find a hosting company that has little down time. For
instance, for my website, the first hosting company that I
chosen, I did research and even had a friend refer them to me.
But in just the first month, my site ended up being offline for
2 days straight. This is surely something that you want to
avoid. So, needless to say, I decided that it would be best to
cut my losses and find another hosting company. The problem with
downtime is that this directly affects the amount of traffic
that your site will receive and you could be loosing potential
customers. Also, this can affect your rankings as well if a
search engine spider comes to your site and it is continuously
down. When deciding upon a list of hosting companies, there
are a number of things to take into consideration. The amount of
bandwidth needed, unique IP address available, UNIX or windows
server, are logs available (with error logs and usage stats). It
is highly advised that you choose a hosting company that has
logs and that you have the option to have them updated on a
daily basis if possible. Are You Canadian? If you or
your company is Canada based, then you might want to consider using
a Canadian hosting company who's servers (IP Addresses) are located
in Canada. This will help with targeting Canada, but will also be
sufficient for the rest of the world as well. Choosing a hosting
company in Canada will help you show up when someone searches Google
Canada, and chooses the option (pages from Canada). Shared IPs Shared IPs are
more common as not all hosting companies can afford to put every
single website on a unique IP. If the hosting company you choose
to go with does have this option available, it would be advised
to look into this. But it is still quite common for a number of
sites to be hosted on a single IP. Why Have Logs? It
is highly advisable to have logs enabled on your site. Logs
track all visitor activity on a website. This can tell you the
amount of traffic each page is getting, the amount of repeat
visitors, see what search engine spiders have visited your site,
and see what keywords are people are using to find your site is
just some of the valuable information logs capture. Take it a
step further if you have the available funding and buy some Web
Analytics ROI Software (there are a variety of sites out there). You
will want to find one that covers both SEO and PPC campaigns. Google
AdWords and Overture do have their own tracking software now, but
ideally, you will want something that tracks everything on your
site.. Unix or
Windows A lot of these depends on what you created your
site in. If you have chosen ASP or ASPX pages, then you will
want to go with a windows platform hosting provider. Also, if
you wanted to possibly expand into asp/aspx pages in the future,
you would want to choose a windows platform as well. Always do
some research when looking for a hosting provider. The cheapest
way is not always the best, sometimes you will have to spend a
bit more money to get a good reliable hosting provider, but in
the long run it will be worth the investment.
Gerard Manning
Search Engine Marketing
Company
Manning
Search Marketing offering
Managed Search Engine Marketing services
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