Business Web Hosting 101

This blog entry was posted on April 30, 2007.

The web server (computer) is where your web site’s html files, graphics, etc. reside and is known as the web host. A Web Hosting Service provides Internet users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the web.

Web hosting is typically includes email services, databases such as MySQL and statistics packages that track volume, how visitors arrive and what pages they view. Web servers typically use one of two primary operating systems. Apache (Linux) accounts for approximately 60% of the market and Windows (Microsoft) accounts for about 30%. There are a number of other players that make up the remainder. Apache (Linux) is frequently referred to PHP hosting.

Businesses need assurances of uptime and reliability. These frequently are missing on inexpensive hosting providers. Business web hosting should include regular data backups, 24/7 monitoring, and email filtering for virus and Spam. Other important features are FTP access, multiple power backup systems and multiple Internet feeds are present.

Web hosting companies typically offer other services such as domain names and digital certificates. Some will offer other web services such as web design, content changes and web programming.

At Doug Williams and Associates we offer a full range of business web hosting, design and programming services. We offer PHP database and web application programming. In addition we offer Search Engine Optimization and marketing consulting services so business owners can have a single source for their web marketing and maintenance needs.

If You Like this posting please +1 it!

Filed under: Business Web Hosting

Comments (3)

Analyzing Website Traffic

This blog entry was posted on April 25, 2007.

Analyzing your website traffic is a valuable tool for understanding how many visitors your website is receiving and how they are coming to your website. Website statistics packages are part of most business hosting plans. Our hosting plans provide both Webalizer Web Stats and AWStats (Advanced Web Statistics). Here are 5 key areas that website statistics supply insight into your website visitors.

1. Activity: This is the number of visitors that visit each day, week or month. AWStats shows visits and unique visitors for each month. Unique visitors are first time visitors while visits include new and returning visitors. You can see how many pages were viewed and what days of the week and month that visitors came to your website.
2. Location: This is the location your visitors are coming from. This will show the country where your visitor was from.
3. Robots/Spiders: You can see which search engine spiders are indexing your website and how often they are returning.
4. Navigation: You can see how long your visitors are staying once they arrive, which pages they view, entry pages and exit pages.
5. Source: Track which search engines are sending visitors and see which keyword phrases are being used. You can see which websites are referring visitors to you.

The purpose of these statistics is to understand your website and look for problems that you can fix. You may need to adjust your keywords or maybe visitors are leaving as soon as they arrive which means you need to change your home page message or graphics. This is essential information for your Internet marketing campaign.

If You Like this posting please +1 it!

Filed under: Business Web Hosting

Comments (0)

SEO Web Hosting

This blog entry was posted on April 18, 2007.

Can the business web hosting you choose improve your SEO results? I think it would be more accurate to say that choosing the wrong web hosting provider can really hurt your search engine results. For your business website, you should not make your hosting decision based on a cheap price. As a web optimization firm, we carefully select our web hosting to be search engine friendly.

What should you look for? First, find a hosting plan with a dedicated IP address. The best situation would be to have your own server and only place your website on this server. Now this is not practical for all but some very large businesses. The next best thing is to have a dedicated IP address on a shared server. The search engines place more importance on websites that have a unique IP address.

When you locate your website on a cheap web hosting server, you need to be concerned with your neighborhood. Cheap web hosting seems to attract spammers which leads to sites being banned the server being blacklisted. If a website is blacklisted on the same server, or even on another server in the same facility, your website URL may become grouped into the blacklisted IP address range. Choose hosting with a “no Tollerance” policy toward spam.

Choose web hosting with a 100% uptime. If a web crawler finds your website inaccessible (404 error) on multiple attempts, your website will be de-listed from the search engine rankings.

Choosing a quality hosting provider is very important and the price difference between the best and a cheap provider is very minnow when compared to the cost of a SEO campaign.

If You Like this posting please +1 it!

Filed under: Business Web Hosting,SEO Strategies

Comments (0)

Business Website Hosting: 17 Requirements

This blog entry was posted on April 4, 2007.

How should a business choose a business web hosting service? The decision should be based on reliability, service, spam filtering, security and similar business required services. Today, bringing website visitors and search engine visibility are critical to businesses. In general, hosting is so universally inexpensive that price should not be a major part of the decision.

So what should a business look for?

1. Do you need a Windows or Linux hosting server? If your website uses PHP, you will need a Linux server, Apache+Linux is better. Your web hosting service should support use of PHP, Perl, and JAVA.
2. Client access to Control Panel for setting up email accounts, and configuring website settings.
3. Website statistics and traffic reports to track visitors.
4. Support multiple domains per hosting account.
5. 24/7 FTP Access.
6. 24/7 Server Technical Monitoring.
7. Dedicated IP address – Important for SEO.
8. Daily, weekly and monthly Database and Web Page Backups.
9. Email virus filtering.
10. Multiple Email spam filtering options.
11. WebMail Access with secure login.
12. MySQL databases for web applications
13. Webmaster support available for content changes.
14. PHP Programming support available for changes and troubleshooting.
15. SEO (search engine optimization) services available.
16. Digital certificates purchase and installation available.
17. Ability to purchase and maintain domain names.

If You Like this posting please +1 it!

Filed under: Business Web Hosting

Comments (3)