Posts Tagged ‘hosting company’

24
Jun
2009

How much does web hosting cost?

2 Comments

When you have a website built for your company, there are a few hidden costs to consider in the overall price but nothing compares to the complexities of picking the right hosting company.

What is Web Hosting?

To understand what web hosting is, you need to understand that a website has a few key elements:

The Domain Name

This is the easily understood name that you share with people such as thisismyurl.com, thingsidoformoney.com, gamesgarrison.com etc. The domain name is the part of the website that we type into a web browser’s address bar to access the website. Generally a domain name costs between $7.95 and $15.95 per year, depending upon who you register with.

The Website

A website is the part of the process which visitors see, it’s generally a series of pages that make up a marketing or application package. Websites are scripted in a language called the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and are stored as a series of files very similar to how you would store a collection of Word or spreadsheet files on your local computer. These files are simply placed in a directory on a hard drive, which is accessed by a special software application called a web browser.

Web Hosting

Now that we can appreciate a website is simply a series of specially formated documents, we can appreciate that we need to store those documents somewhere for everybody around the world to look at. In most small offices there is a shared directory which allows people from all departments to store files for others in the office to view. In larger companies, we make use of remote file sharing which allows users in one location to share files with users in countless other locations, this is what web hosting is all about.

Your website, which is a series of files and folders, is uploading to a hard drive connected to the Internet and shared for millions to access and see. The website uses a special piece of software called a Web Server to serve both static (HTML) and dynamic (PHP / ASP) pages to your visitors.

The key characteristics of a quality web host are:

  • Connection Speed - How long will it take to load the website, this is a key factor as people will leave slow websites.
  • CPU Speed – For websites using CMS tools such as WordPress, a fast processor will help load pages quicker, just like a faster computer will load Word documents quicker.
  • Reliability – Sometimes referred to as “Site Up Time” this factor represents how often a website is offline for maintenance or because of hardware/software failures.
  • Storage Capacity - How big can your website be? Most websites are only  five MB (Mega Bytes), or a couple floppy discs in size.
  • Transfer Bandwidth – How many times can your website be transfered to customers in a given month? Remember, each page your website contains has a weight or file size. Each time that file (and all the graphics are transfered) it consumes part of your transfer allowance.

Web Hosting Costs

Now that we understand some of the basics of web hosting, let’s take a look at some of the pricing options available for customers:

GoDaddy Hosting

Economy – 10 GB Space, 300 GB Transfer – $4.84 per month
Deluxe –  150 GB Space, 1,500 GB Transfer – $6.79 per month
Unlimited – $14.95 per month

BlueHost Hosting

Unlimited – $6.95 per month

Bell Aliant

Standard – 1 GB Space, 192 GB transfer – $14.95 per month
Marketer – 3 GB Spage, 288 GB trasfter - $24.95 per month

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Posted in Web Site Advice

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15
May
2009

How do I make money with AdSense?

8 Comments

I think the Internet is awesome. There, I said it. The Internet is one of those amazing online places where anybody can make a great living and earn money while working from home. The web doesn’t make you go to work, it lets you stay home with your kids, work part time or even just earn cash after you’ve retired but the trick is that you need to know how to do it and I’m pretty easy going about telling people how to do it here on my site.

Get a website

The first step to making money on the Internet is to get a website. For those of you who think getting a website is hard work, you’re insane. Building a website is hard work but having one? It’s as easy as clicking a button and watching a few videos so step one to making money at home, sign up for a great hosting company like Bluehost and everything you need to get started.

Once you’ve signed up, installing an easy to manage website tool like WordPress is free and easy.

Get some advertising

What’s the biggest hurdle to making money on the Internet? The money dummy. Luckily Google makes it incredibly easy by offering a program called AdSense. How it works is pretty simple, you publish a website and they supply advertisers that what to put ads on websites about your subject matter. The more people visit your website, the more people see your ads and the more money you make. 

Write some content

So now you have a website and you have the ads setup so the next trick is to write content that people really want to read. Write often and write well, otherwise there is only one trick … write about something that people care to read about.

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Posted in Make Money Online, Questions and Answers

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30
Apr
2009

How hard is it to create a blog?

5 Comments

A blog (short for web-log) is a generic term used for a variety of website styles but most commonly it’s a place for a person or company to post articles. The benefits of a quality blog over other web publishing software is that common packages such as WordPress automatically publish content and help optimize it for the web, making the job of creating content much easier for writers.

How Diverse are Blogs?

A traditional blog looks and feels like a running dialog with one post preceding the other and little formatting to break them up but there are also some wonderfully complex installations of blogs these days ranging from major newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor to CollegeCrunch using the popular package WordPress. The platform is also used to power sites such as Rosie O’Donnell’s blog and the popular technology site of TechCrunch. The potential for powering websites is still somewhat limited but almost all commonly used forms of websites can be powered with blogging software.

How to Install a Basic Blog

bluehost wordpress install 300x209 How hard is it to create a blog? imageAlthough there are many blogging platforms, I have a personal preference and bias towards the WordPress platform. It’s a free, downloadable open source software package with an unbeatable plugin architecture and expandability. Most large web hosting companies already have WordPress installed and simply requires you to go through the installation process to place it on your website.

If you need to install WordPress without the help of your hosting company, you can download the package directly from http://wordpress.org for free as an archive file to your desktop.

After you have downloaded and uncompressed the file, you’ll need an FTP client to upload the content to your web hosting provider. CuteFTP is a small, simple FTP program for Windows which I often recommend for non-technical clients, it has a 30 day trial available as a free download.

Installing WordPress in the Main Directory

Many website owners accidently install their blog in a sub directory such as http://thisismyurl.com/wordpress/ instead of the root directory at http://thisismyurl.com/ this is a pretty easy mistake to make and can be avoided by first deleting the content from your main directory (often called public_html or www in an FTP client) before uploading the contents of the archive file directly into the root directory.

Setting WordPress Permissions

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of new web users become frustrated trying to setup web based software, luckily the nice people at WordPress made it very easy for normal people to setup the software through an easy to use interface however there are still times when users need to manually set the security settings before a web application can access the files. If you have problems on the next step, you may need to right click the wp-content folder of the WordPress directory (on your server) and set it’s permissions to 0677. There’s an easy to follow tutorial located on the Codex for those users.

Setting up the Database

WordPress needs access to a database in order to work. Most web host companies allow you to access a control panel and setup a database fairly easily, check the email sent by your hosting company when you setup your account and follow their directions to log into your control panel.

Once you’re in you’ll want to create a new database and assign a user with full access to the new file. Remember that you’ll need access to the information here later, so write it down!

There are a couple of tricks when setting up a database. The first is to find out where the database is hosted, often it’s at a special website address called localhost. This is literally the same place as your website and it’s the default location but if it’s somewhere else you’ll be told when looking at your database information screen. The second stumbling block for many new website owners is the database name. If you’re on a shared host, there is a very good chance that your database is named with a prefix. For example, if your username is thisismyusername, your database might be called thisismyusername_databasename so be careful and double check!

Installing WordPress

wordpress install 300x216 How hard is it to create a blog? imageOnce you’ve uploaded the WordPress files, open a new web browser and go to your website address (http://www.thisismyurl.com for example) and let WordPress begin the installation process.

It’ll ask you some pretty straight forward questions and when you’re done, it’ll send you an email with your username and password for the new website.

Accessing your new WordPress website is done through a normal web browser, you can surf the front of your website as a normal visitor by going to your domain name, or you can access the administration area through the /wp-admin/ directory. For example http://thisismyurl.com/wp-admin/ is where I store the admin panel for my site.

Adding a New Theme

The default theme that ships with WordPress is great but if you’d like something more unique, there is a whole directory of theme designs at http://wordpress.org/extend/ or you can search Google and find thousands of great templates for free or a small fee. When you find the template that you like, simply upload the whole folder to your /wp-content/themes/ and visit your Appearance tab in WordPress. You can test the theme or activate it from with your administation client.

Common WordPress Installation Problems

The most common problems installing WordPress appear to be related to setting permissions properly and errors connecting to the database, the Codex has a great collection of common errors and how to fix them.

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Posted in Blogging, WordPress Help

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23
Jan
2009

How to make a website for free

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So you want to make a website for free but you don’t know where to start? To make a website for yourself without paying any money you have to understand a few basic things about the Internet first. Let’s take a look at everything you need to build a website, and how to get started for nothing down.

UPDATE: Feb. 11, 2009 – Do you want a website for free? I’ll give you one, read my post at Get a Free Web Site to find out how.

Domain Names

A domain name is the address of your website. You can choose to have your own domain name or you can use somebody else’s domain name, often for free. Branding your business with your own name (thisismyurl.com for example) is the best way to do it but if you’d like to save some money there are many companies who will let you become a subdomain of their website (i.e. thisismyurl.theirdomain.com) for free. Registering a domain name costs about $10 per year.

Web Hosting

Web hosting is sort of like renting a storefront for your business. If you’ve elected to use a domain name, you really do need to pay for hosting to take full advantage of it. You don’t need to pay for hosting but if you want your website to be on the Internet reliably, try somebody like BlueHost. They’ll cost you $75 for the year which includes your domain name.

Coding a Web Site

Once you have your address on the internet (your domain name) and a place to rent (your web hosting) you need to construct the website itself. Building a website is a pretty complex task and building a good website is even harder. That’s one of the reasons I recommend to small companies that they look at a solution like WordPress, it’s a free tool which comes in two flavors:

  1. WordPress.com – a free, hosted solution for people just getting started.
  2. WordPress.org - you can download the WordPress engine and host it on a hosting company yourself.

In either case, building (or downloading) a great template is your first step to having a high quality, free website.

Coding a Web Site in HTML

If you’d prefer to ignore WordPress and want to code the site yourself, you need to understand the basic structure of an HTML website and how it works.

HTML is a tag based language, it’s actually really very simple once you get the hang of it. Basically you have to tell the web browser that your document is an HTML document (HTML is the short form for HyperText Markup Language, the real name of a web page). To do this, simply open and close an HTML tag. Tags are always stored between less than and greater than symbols like this <html>. To close a tag, add a slash like this: </html>. So put together, web browsers know that everything between the <html> and the </html> tag is part of a web page.

You need to do the same for the head portion of the web page. This is the part of the document read by computers, not people. The <head> and </head> tags enclose items such as the <title></title> tag which stores the document name. For example, if I wanted to create a document called My Great Web Page I would do the following:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Great Web Page</title>
</head>
</html>

View the results

 The document would be empty of course but would store the critical details needed to open and close a page, as well as tell the web browser what the document name is.

To add a visible portion to the page, you need to add a <body></body> tag. This represents everything the user can see and is inserted into the code after you close the <head></head>. The <body> stored everything the user sees and can have a multitude of tags, the most common being:

  • Headings (<h1><h2><h3><h4><h5><h6>) which represents headers just like you’d find in a book or technical paper.
  • Paragraphs (<p>) which breaks the text into easy to read sections
  • Ordered Lists (<ol>) and Unordered Lists (<ul>) along with List Items (<li>) which show up like bulleted lists in a document.

Remembering that each tag must be opened as well as closed, an effective web page can be coded using just these simple tags.

<html>
<head>
<title>My Great Web Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My Great Web Page</h1>
<p>This is my great web page. It’s great because:</p>
<ul>
<li>it respects the rules of html</li>
<li>it is a properly formatted document</li>
<li>it can be read by any web browser</li>
</ul>
<p>I can also add a numbered list:</p>
<ol>
<li>this is a list item</li>
<li>this is the other list item</li>
</ol>
</body>
</html>

View the results

This simple web page may not seem very impressive but what if we could easily add hyperlinks (links to other web pages) and images?

  • The Anchor tag (<a>) allows one web page to link to another. To use the <a> tag you need to pass a attribute called an href. Sounds scary right? Not at all. <a href=’http://www.thisismyurl.com’> That’s all there is to is. See, the href called the http (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) document stored at the address www.thisismyurl.com.
  • The Image tag (<img>) also need a special attribute passed. In this case, it’s the src (source) of the graphic file. It looks like this <img src=’http://www.thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/aboutpage-150×150.jpg’ />. You’ll see that the src is just the http:// address of the image. Easy as pie right? No so fast … unlike most other tags the <img> can’t have a closing tag. That’s right .. there’s no such thing as a </img> so instead we close the <img> tag inside itself like this … <img />. There are a few other tags like that but not many.

Here it is in practice:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Great Web Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My Great Web Page</h1>
<p>This is my great web page. It’s great because:</p>
<ul>
<li>it respects the rules of html</li>
<li>it is a properly formatted document</li>
<li>it can be read by any web browser</li>
</ul>
<p>I can also add a numbered list:</p>
<ol>
<li>this is a list item</li>
<li>this is the other list item</li>
</ol>
<p>I like this picture: <img src=’http://www.thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/aboutpage1-150×150.jpg’ /></p>
<p>Let’s go to <a href=’http://www.thisismyurl.com’>my homepage</a>.</p></body>
</html>

View it in action

Using these simple tags, anybody can build a website.

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Posted in HTML Programming

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04
Jan
2009

How to get a PageRank of 5

55 Comments

For those of you who know nothing at all about PageRanks and Alexa rankings, let me explain that they’re the modern equivenant of a Nielsen ratings for websites. 

Alexa measures your website performance by volunteer users, in effect millions of average people agree to allow Alexa to collect statistics about their surfing habits and from that data, Alexa tracks and monitors activity on the Internet. At Halloween this year, Alexa ranked my website at 2,291,883. Today it’s at 231,354 which is a 1790% improvement for spending about 20 minutes a day on my website.

Google on the other hand ranks your website by looking at who your website connects to and in return, who connects to your website. That’s a pretty over simplified way to look at it but it’s also the general gist of the method. It’s a bit like a popularity contest, Google believes that if websites with high page ranks (the system is from 0 to 10) link to you consistently, your content must be of a certain value.

So now that you understand what a PageRank and Alexa ranking mean, here’s how I earned my respectable rankings in both … (drum roll anybody?) … quality content, consistently posted.

I know that you’re all hoping for a much better answer than that but sadly it’s the truth. My very good friend Chris Bavota jumped from a PR0 to a PR4 in just three months, doing exactly the same thing … he posts great articles that people love to read and he makes sure that he does it regularly.

Chris and I followed some easy to understand advice:

Once that was done, both Chris and I did what any self respecting blog owner would do:

  • we used deep linking techniques to ensure our readers know about related content on our website
  • we posted links to other peoples blogs, helping our readers find similar content
  • we let other blog owners know that we had articles of interest for their readers

There are no scams, no black hat SEO techniques, no short cuts and no tricks. Quality rankings on a quality search engine takes nothing more than a little bit of effort, quality content and the determination to contribute something positive to the Internet as a whole.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

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10
Dec
2008

It’s easy to setup your domain name you don’t need to be an expert.

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Setting our GoDaddy settings to point to BlueHost

OK so the other day I wrote about the fact that you don’t need to hire a web guru to setup your website using something like Blogger, WordPress.com or BlueHost and yesterday I told you how to setup your own domain name such at a hosting company like GoDaddy or Domains At Cost but how do you combine them? Again, this is painfully simple and not just for spiffy web guys like me. Anybody can do this, so lets take a quick look at how it’s done.

In this example, I’m going to assume that you’re hosting your website at BlueHost and you’ve registered your domain name with GoDaddy, if you’ve done it else where the steps should be fairly simple to modify with a little bit of common sense and reading their Frequently Asked Questions section.

First … we need to point the domain name to the hosting company. We do this by logging into GoDaddy and editing something special called the DNS records. You can find this under your account Domain Manager. If you have multiple domain names, it will display a list and prompt you to select the one you’re looking to modify. At the top of the domain profile, there’s a button called Name Servers, we’re going to click that and expose the Custom Name Servers option where we simply type the name servers for BlueHost. The name servers for BlueHost are:

  • ns1.bluehost.com
  • ns2.bluehost.com
BlueHost setup process

BlueHost setup process

Once that’s done, setting up your hosting account at BlueHost takes about 15 minutes and requires very little technical knowledge.

Now that you’re in the Add Domain screen, specify the name of the domain you wish to setup and the wizard should fill out the rest of what you need for you.
Please note, in order to assign a domain to BlueHost the first step at GoDaddy must already be complete, sometimes this takes a few hours so my advice is after you’ve completed the process at GoDaddy take a couple of dollars from the money you just saved and go have a coffee.
Now you’re done. Your website will take between 24 and 48 hours to propagate which is a fancy Internet term for point to the right place. Once it’s done you’ll be able to setup your own emails and put up a website at your new address, which I will talk about later this week  so why not sign up for my email notification or RSS feed to stay connected.
In the interest of being honest, BlueHost pays me to refer people to them but I’d do it anyways. While you’re waiting for me to write something else, feel free to comment on any of my existing articles.

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Posted in Web Site Advice

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17
Oct
2008

Simple tricks to speed up your WordPress website.

12 Comments

WordPress is a great tool but for those of us on shared hosting it’s important that as our web traffic increases we look at ways to decrease the amount of stress our sites put on the web server. I found a couple of wonderful suggestions on Lorelle’s website and I’ve added a few of my own.

There’s a couple of reasons for this, first we want to make sure our web pages load as quickly as possible but as importantly we want to ensure our website stays online. There are countless stories on the internet about websites that suddenly found themselves very popular and struggled to keep up with the traffic, only to have their account temporarily shut down by the hosting company.

WordPress is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database to serve up content. This is great except the content on your website doesn’t change all that often so why are you dynamically generating it for each visitor? Instead of rebuilding the xHTML for each visit, why not serve them a previously saved version? We call this caching a website and it can be done with the wp-cache plugin from Ricardo Galli Granada.

So the first step to increased speed of your WordPress website is to download and install the WP-Cache plugin. It allows you to set how many seconds between page caching as well as if any specific files should never be cached. Very handy. You should also make sure you’re on a reliable web host who can handle the traffic.

Diggproof & Speed up Your Wordpress Blog has a great and often overlooked suggestion. Upgrade your WordPress blog. This might sound silly but generally speaking the latest code releases for WordPress are stable and optimized, so taking a little bit of time to upgrade your site during each release is a solid idea.

Unused plugins can kill performance so before you go installing and forgetting about your plugins, make a habit of deleting unused plugins. Some people might assume deactivating them is good enough but personally I prefer to delete them.

Using a tool such as phpMyAdmin take time once a week to optimize your MySQL tables. If you don’t have access to phpMyAdmin, execute the following SQL statement from your command line to make sure your tables are in the best shape possible:

OPTIMIZE TABLE `wp_comments`, `wp_links` , `wp_options` , `wp_postmeta` , `wp_posts` , `wp_ratings` , `wp_terms` , `wp_term_relationships` , `wp_term_taxonomy` , `wp_usermeta` , `wp_users` , `wp_wpsb_users`

Arne has some great suggestions for MySQL Query Cache and PHP Compiler Cache options, they’re pretty technical but well worth it if your running into significant server speed issues. If you’re technical, give this article on how to configure Apache a read as well, it will help you optimize your whole site.

Paul Stamatiou makes a great point by writing “Every HTTP request, or loading each item on your website, has an average round-trip latency of 0.2 seconds. So if your site is loading 20 items, regardless of whether they are stylesheets, images or scripts, that equates to 4 seconds in latency alone“. So, take a good long look at your theme and determine what you really need in there. I saved a ton of time per page load by stripping out over 20 JavaScript calls and replacing them with PHP scripts which are cached once every five minutes. I also combined all my CSS files into a single file which decreased the number of HTTP requests my server had to take. Paul also have a great article on Compressing CSS with PHP that you should read if you still need to speed up your site more.

There’s another great suggestion from WPCandy that I’m extremely reluctant to do, but I know they’re right. First, use shorthand CSS so:

#commentarea li {
margin-top: 10px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}

should become:

#commentarea li {
margin: 10px 0px 10px 0px;
}

You should also decrease whitespace (that’s the empty space between tags), sure it makes it look better but it also takes up bandwidth.

Finally, decrease your overall database calls. WordPress gives us all sorts of great functions in our templates but really do you need to call the website name from your database? The simple answer is no, so let’s decrease the over all number of MySQL queries by optimizing our templates. Replacing with your title for example will help decrease the server load.

I hope this helps, if you have any other suggestions for how to optimize WordPress and speed up the site please let me know.

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Posted in WordPress Help

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09
Oct
2008

Can you put up a website for less than $100?

27 Comments

As a web professional, I love nothing more than opening my email first thing in the morning and having somebody ask me if I can build them a website for $100. Oddly, this happens a lot so I’ve decided to write a blog entry here on my site to help you do it yourself.

First, you’ll need to register a domain name.

A domain name is your address on the web, you’ll want to make it snazzy but simple. I recommend using a reputable hosting company to register your domain name. BlueHost will charge you $6.95 for a year.

Secondly, you’ll need a hosting account.

Again, I will recommend BlueHost since it’s where I host my website and I’ve had no problems in two years. Their basic hosting package is $6.95 per month which means your new website now costs $90.35.

Next you’ll need a website.

BlueHost comes complete with a service called Fantastico, once you’ve activated your account click the Fantastico link in your profile to install cool scripts on your new hosting account.

Look for WordPress, it’s the best choice to manage your website and is included for free as part of your BlueHost hosting account. Install WordPress in your base directory, when it’s done you’ll get a username and password as well as a link to your website manager.

Making your website look great.

Now that you’ve purchased a domain name, setup your hosting and installed WordPress as a website manager you’ll want to install a theme. Theme’s are what make WordPress websites look different from each other, there are literally thousands of free themes on the web. In fact, if you’d like to use one of mine, you’re welcome to use Minimalist Fixed, a free WordPress theme.

Update: October 18th – I’ve added two more themes in the last couple of days.

Adding Content

You can quickly add new content to your website by adding Pages in WordPress, this will automatically publish your new content to the website you setup earlier.

There you go, a fully functional website complete with a content manager for less than $100.

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Posted in Web Site Advice

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