Cost of Web Hosting

An $4.95/month web hosting solution is really “Cheap”? In this article, we will discuss about the structure of the web hosting cost so that you will get a better understanding about the answer.

Basically, the overall cost of a web hosting is comprised of 3 parts:

1) Time spent on searching for a web hosting

People tend to forget this part of cost, and spend a lot of time to look for a perfect solution. But in this inperfect world, it would take a lot of time to find so call “perfect” one. So, if you really take care of your time, then you need to make decision when you find an appropriate one which is within your budget.

2) Another cost is what you will be charged by the web hosting service provider.

For most personal web site , small home business web site, the price of a web hosting is lower than $10/month. This is not big deal, it’s less than what you will have to spend for a lunch.

3) The last one is the maintenance cost.

Maintenance cost happens when your web site falls into trouble and need the support from the web hosting service provider. Poor support and even no support will put your business in risk and give you a feeling of hopeless. And then you might start looking for another web hosting service provider and transfer all your web site to the new place. Usually, this is the largest portion of the cost you need to consider.

In the real world, a beginner tends to too care about the fee charged by the web hosting vendor, and forget the other two. This is danger as analyzed in above, a cheap but not reliable web hosting will bring your business in risk.

Find a reliable affordable web hosting is not too hard, www.webhostingclue.com is a very special site which lists out the top web hosting based on the review from the web hosting expert and the customers. You can look for an appropriate web hosting solution there if you need.

How to Get Support from Your Web Hosting Service Providers

It would be very frustrated when your web site is broken and cannot be access. At this time, if you know about what kinds of support you can get from your web hosting service provider, you will be in a better position to get your site up.

If your web hosting service providers are really care about their service, you will be able to find 4 types support channel from them. You can leverage those services according to the serious level of your web site.

1) Online Knowledge Base

This is the documents center from your vendor, you can see a lot of online help document which will tell you how to handle some very common issues. If the issue from your web site is not too serious for you, and you also happen to have a lot of time, if should be fine for you to go through the online knowledge base to see if your issue can be resolved by yourself. And this is also very helpful if you want to learn some technical knowledge about web hosting.

2) Email support

In the most web hosting vendors site, you can find a place which will allow you to open a ticket to describe the issue you have met, and very soon you can receive an email from the engineer in their company to tell you how to handle your case. Email support system is treated as a very important part of the web hosting service. If they cannot manage this well, they will lose their customers very soon.

Try the email support if the situation is not too bad and you don’t know the answer as well.

3) Live Chat Support

Live chat support is the one I like most,. By this method, I can chat with the engineer immediately, and get the problem resolved steps by steps with the guide from them. But not all the companies will provide this type of service, you need to pay attention to their support system to see it is there. Usually, I only sign the offer with those who provider Live Chat support.

4) Toll free phone support.

This is for very urgent case, you want to get the problem resolved as soon as possible. At this time, you can pick up the phone and ask for help. The same as live chat support, not all companies provide you with this type of service, if your business is really very important to you and cannot be offline for even 1 hour, you should only work with those who provide toll free phone support, and it will be better that the support is 24*7 available.

As for above 4 types of support channel, email support is very basic, if a web hosting service cannot reply your email prompted, you should not work with them, since this is also happened in the company with very poor service.

And you should try to signup with those providing live chat support, which will ease you a lot when you are in trouble with your site. For toll free phone support, this is just a nice to have feature unless your web site is not very critical.

Reasons to Host Your Web Site with Linux Server

It’s more and more common that a person owns a web site, which can be for blog, family web site, small business web site or even forum. And the majority of those small-size or midium-size web site are hosted in Linux environement. Why so many webmasters would like to make tihs decision? I think below are 3 key reasons for it.

1) Stable

As an open source operating system, code of Linux is open to the public so that anyone can read it and suggest improvements or point out bugs. Over the years, Linux has been developed in various flavors (the most famous one is Red Hat). Thousands and thousands of people have contributed their time and effort to making Linux web hosting run faster and to provide simpler, more efficient and bug free code. With an open programming environment, improvements are made on a continual basis and problems are seen relatively quickly and solved with a minimum of difficulty.

And the same reason as why it’s stable, the security level of Linux is also higher than Windows.

2) Cheap

Linux is free to all. Unlike Windows, you have to pay thousands of dollars for a license. And this is also part of reason why the list price of linux web hosting package is much lower than what of windows web hosting packages.

3) Free Scripts

A lot of Free Scripts to Help Setting up the Web Site Open source world is just as beautiful as it could be. A lot of people contribute to it from different perspectives, such as OS, software development tools or applications. Linux, php, and MySQL have been a very popular platform to build an application. Right now, you can find many very good open source application to set up a forum, blog, image galleries, etc. And all those are free and easy to be installed. Even php and My SQL can work on Windows, Linux just a perfect platform for them.

There are more reasons that the webmasters want to choose Linux to host their web site. But a general guideline is that only if you want to use asp.net or sql server to build your web site, otherwise, Linux is always your best choice.

“Unlimited” Features in Web Hosting Package

“Unlimited” can be a key word for the web hosting industry in 2008. Starting from this year, there are too many web hosting service providers will give you an “Unlimited” feature such as Unlimited Disk space, unlimited bandwidth, or hosting unlimited web hosting. These features are included even from some very repuated web hosting service providers such as: lunarpages, hostmonster, or ixwebhosting.But, there are many articles telling you don’t work with the web hosting companies who providing “Unlimited” features. So, what can you do now? Below are my suggestion.

Enjoy it Get a unlimited feature from web hosting service providers is not a bad thing. A feature of “Unlimited web site” will save you a lot when you have more than one web site. And IXWebhosting will give you “Unlimited disk space” so that you have no need to be too worried about the space you might use.

Don’t Abuse it Every company need to make profit from their customers so that they potential have the capability to provide a good serivce for you. Now, even the very reputed web hosting service providers start giving you a unlimited feature, what the thought behind it? Let’s analyze one by one.

Can you really create unlimited web site? The answer is no, the hardest part of creating a successful web site is how to promote it, the value of unlimited web site is no more than a successful web site. A lot of people will only create 2-5 web sites so that they have time or budget to promote them.

For unlimited disk space, I host a web site in iPower and the connection speed to upload files at home is around 8kb/second, that means you have to spend one day to upload only 13M data. Let’s assume you don’t stop uploading file to the server, and in one year, you will only can assume 25G disk space.

What’s behind unlimited bandwidth? The same as unlimited disk space, a secret here is that web hosting vendor hasn’t tell you the connection speed. If you consume too much bandwidth, they can slow down your connection speed, and make your web site unavailable. They do not have any restrict the bandwidth, but the fact is that you just cannot consume too much because of the connection speed.

So, keep one word in your mind that “you pay for what you get”, when choosing a web hosting package for your web site, you need to pay more attention to the reliability, connection speed, and customer service from them.

What is a Domain Name

All websites typically have a name - just like we are called www.centeurlife.com - This is a name that points to the space on the web where your website is physically located. And we call this name of websites as Domain Name (sometimes, just call it as Domain).

A domain name makes up the address of your site and can end in .com, .net, .org, .info, .us, .biz, .tv and more, which we call the Domain Extensions. You have many domain extensions for choice, but the most common one is .com. And each country can have their own domain extension as well, such as “.co.uk” is a domain from UK, “.cn” is for China and “.jp” for Japan. So before you apply for a domain name, you will need to decide a domain extensions for your web site based on your target readers, if it’s worldwide, .com is the best choice for you, but if you want to only target Chinese, you can choose .cn (.com is also a good choice since it’s so common).

The WHOIS database is used to determine the owner of a domain name, or an IP address. You can use a web-based WHOIS clients, such as http://www.whois.net/, to query WHOIS database. This is helpful when you want to get know something behind a domain.

Domain name is the brand of your online business. It’s important to get a paid domain for your site instead of a free one. Everything promotion you have done for your online business are related to your domain. It’s not wise to waste your time to just save less than $10/year.

Does Amazon Host its Site in Their Own Cloudy Computing Data Center

Today, I read a news that Amazon is down for about 3 hours, which might bring Amazon millions of dollars lost sales. This is interesting. Amazon plans to provide a platform (such as EC2) for web application which is based on its cloudy computing environment, which is supposed to be very stable and fast. Now, the down of Amazon looks like to me is an environement issue, if Amazon cannot make its own site stable, how can it provide a hosting service which can give you a reliable environement.

The only reason to explain this is that its Amazon.com site hasn’t hosted in it’s Cloudy computing data center.

Install php 5.x in Windows IIS

Although php works perfect in Linux, for a lot of people, developing or debugging the php program in their Windows PC or Laptop is still something making sense, at least for me.

Below is a guide about how to install php 5.x in IIS in case you have the same needs as me.

1. First, you need to go to http://www.php.net/downloads.php to download the installation package you will need. Usually, it’s a Zip package.
2. Unzip the .zip file to a folder you want, we assume it’s c:\php in below case.
3. Add “;c:\php;c:\php\ext” to the end of environment variable “PATH”.
4. Rename php.ini-recommended in c:\php to php.ini.
5. Open php.ini and make below changes:
   • set extenseion_dir to “c:\php\ext”, such as extension_dir = “c:\php\ext”
   • Remove ‘;’ before below 3 items:
     extension=php_mbstring.dll
     extension=php_gd2.dll
     extension=php_mysql.dll
6. In IIS service, web site (Default Web Site)
   • Right click the web site, and select “Property”.
   • In “Home Directory” tab -> “Configuration …” Button -> “Add” Button to add Application Extension Mapping. Below is what we need to input:
     Execuation: C:\php\php5isapi.dll
     Extension: .php
   • In “ISAPI Filter” tab -> “Add” button to add new filter properties as
     Execuation: C:\php\php5isapi.dll
     Extension: php
7. Restart IIS

5 Ways to Get Listed in Search Engine

Getting listed in the search engine is the first step to the success of your web site. Considering about 85% of the people use search engine to look for the information they want, if your web site can be listed in the results with a higher position, you can image that a lot of potential free and high quality traffic will be driven to your site. But this is too beautiful to think about before your site is found by the search engines, since after it, you will still have a lot of work to do.

Submit Your Web Sites to Search Engines

Submitting your site to search engines is a good method to get it listed in the search result. It’s not the fastest way but it’s absolutely necessary. And there are hundreds of search engines in the world, should you submit your site to all of them? The answer is NO. This is a time-consuming process, some people choose to purchase a service from 3rd party to submit the site to them. But actually, you will only need to do it manually for some major search engines and for the rest, they will automatically index your web site when you promote your web site and build the inbound links.

So, what’s the major search engine you should submit to? They are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can follow below link to do it:

• Add URL to Google
• Add URL to Yahoo
• Add URL to MSN

For Google, you can get your web site indexed even faster by declaring the ownership of the site and submitting the sitemap of it to them.

Get Inbound Links from Other Related Sites

The best way to get listed in any of the major search engine is getting links from other related sites that point to your site. It’s not hard to get an inbound link and it could be free (actually, search engine doesn’t like the paid one). But in terms of getting listed in search engines fastly, in below, we will introduce the methods to get the link from the sites which search engines crawl frequently (daily or even hourly), so that your site will be found and indexed quickly. And for the other long run ways, they will be introduced in Web Promotion.

Submit an Article to Ezine Directories

There are some many web sites that Google crawl everyday, and Ezine article directories are part of them. Submitting a well-written article to Ezine article directory with a link pointing to your web site will greatly accelerate the progress for search engine finding you. You can go to Promote Web Site by Writing Articles to know more about the most popular Ezine Article directories and how they work.

Submit Your Site to Free Classified Sites

There are many free classified sites indexed by Google hourly, and the most famous one are classfieldsforfree.com and usfreeads.com. If your site are talking about the business or selling the product, placing a free classifield advertisement on them should be a good idea.

Join the Forum Related to Your Web Site

Forum is a place that Google crawl very frequently, but each forum has its purpose. Join the forum with the same topic as your web site. When registering in it, you will be allowed to put your web site in your profile. By doing it, your site will be found by Google in soon. But what you should keep in mind is that, not all forums are crawled by Google all the time, you will need to figure out the most popular forums related to your business.

Summary

Getting listed in the search engines is not something hard. By doing it properly, your site will be able to be indexed within 1-2 days. Even if you just submit it to the search engine without doing anything else, 7-14 days later, you will see your site is found by them. But the earlier your site is indexed, the better your business could be.

Webex Review - Try Meet Me Now for Free

Founded in 1996, Webex has grown into the worldwide leader in online meeting applications, with 64% market share. More than 3.5 million people use Webex every month to communicate and collaborate online.

You can get a web meeting solution from Webex no matter you are individual, Small&Medium Business companies, or large enterprise. You can hold the web meeting, host a webinars or even doing the remote support by leverage the tools from Webex.

Free Trial period of using Webex is 2 weeks, you can get it by simply providing your email box and billing information. After register, you will need to install a small software to start the web meeting with others.

Right now, Webex is part of Cisco Inc, which will reinforce the leading position of Webex in the industry.

How to Signup

• Input your first name, last name, email address, choose a password, and then click “Try it free” button to move to next step
• You will be asked to input your Billing address and your credit card, you won’t be charged until the trial period (14 days) is expired. And you can cancel the subscription at any time when you want.
• Then, you can download Webex MeetMeNow software, it’s a small software and will allow you to start an Online Conference.

How to Use it

After installing the MeetMeNow, you will see an icon in the taskbar of Windows, as below.

 

 

 

When you double click that icon, it will popup a small form, like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can click the “Start Meeting Now” to start a conference. The above form will be changed into form as below, you can send invitation to the attendees by email or paste the join link to instant message. The attendees can join the conference by clicking the join link. Quite convenient!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once people join the meeting, you can click the “Start Sharing” button (see above form) to share the document, and also you can change the presenter so that the people in the other place can present their document. And you also can allow people to control your PC if necessary. This is quite powerful.

All above are what you need to do to start an online conference, it’s just as simple as you can image.

Webex is also able to integrate with Instant message. Take Windows Live Messager as an exmaple, once you install Webex in your PC, there will be Webex “Start Meeting” button attaching to your chat form, you can start the webex Conference with the people you are talking to at any time.

 

 

Summary

As you can see in above, Webex is quite powerful but easy to use Web conference software. Right now, Webex provide you you will get 14 days as trial period which you won’t be charged a dime. This is good for you to get familiar with it and enjoy this powerful conference tool

Webex has made the signup process quite convenient for you. You can go to Webex, and follow the below steps to use the Meet Me Now immediately.

4 Types of Web Hosting Support

It would be very frustrated when your web site is broken and cannot be access. At this time, if you know about what kinds of support you can get from your web hosting service provider, you will be in a better position to get your site up.

If your web hosting service providers are really care about their service, you will be able to find 4 types support channel from them. You can leverage those services according to the serious level of your web site.

1) Online Knowledge Base

This is the documents center from your vendor, you can see a lot of online help document which will tell you how to handle some very common issues. If the issue from your web site is not too serious for you, and you also happen to have a lot of time, if should be fine for you to go through the online knowledge base to see if your issue can be resolved by yourself. And this is also very helpful if you want to learn some technical knowledge about web hosting.

2) Email support

In the most web hosting vendors site, you can find a place which will allow you to open a ticket to describe the issue you have met, and very soon you can receive an email from the engineer in their company to tell you how to handle your case. Email support system is treated as a very important part of the web hosting service. If they cannot manage this well, they will lose their customers very soon.

Try the email support if the situation is not too bad and you don’t know the answer as well.

3) Live Chat Support

Live chat support is the one I like most,. By this method, I can chat with the engineer immediately, and get the problem resolved steps by steps with the guide from them. But not all the companies will provide this type of service, you need to pay attention to their support system to see it is there. Usually, I only sign the offer with those who provider Live Chat support.

4) Toll free phone support.

This is for very urgent case, you want to get the problem resolved as soon as possible. At this time, you can pick up the phone and ask for help. The same as live chat support, not all companies provide you with this type of service, if your business is really very important to you and cannot be offline for even 1 hour, you should only work with those who provide toll free phone support, and it will be better that the support is 24*7 available.

As for above 4 types of support channel, email support is very basic, if a web hosting service cannot reply your email prompted, you should not work with them, since this is also happened in the company with very poor service.

And you should try to signup with those providing live chat support, which will ease you a lot when you are in trouble with your site. For toll free phone support, this is just a nice to have feature unless your web site is not very critical.

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