best web hosting reviews

There are two main components to your website: your domain name and web hosting.  Your domain name is the URL and the address people type in their browsers to reach your website. A hosting plan provides you with space to put your website on.  You then take all the files pertaining to your website and upload them to your web host.

The Free Hosting Temptation

Most web hosting providers offer free registration of at least one domain, when you sign up with them.  How wise is it to register a domain with your host?  While not utilizing this convenience may sound criminal, you could be doing injustice to yourself.

I am not saying that all web hosts that offer free domain registration are not good, as even some of the best hosts offer this service. This all-in-one solution of having everything at one place seems ideal for many marketers and makes perfect business sense to them.

Keeping Your Domain Under Your Control

Experienced webmasters suggest separating the domain registrar from hosting.  If there is an issue with your web hosting provider, you still have control over your domain and can shift to a different host, without this move affecting your website in terms of downtime or loss of visitors.

The one critical aspect of maintaining a website is to ensure you have control over all aspects of your web presence at all times. Your domain name is your identity on the web and excluding it from being part of your web hosting provider ensures you have full control.

Why Your Host Should Not Be Your Domain Registrar

Moving your website can be a hassle – Placing all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea. Having your host as a domain registrar can prove to be a hassle when moving your website to a new host. This situation can arise if you are unhappy with your host a few months down the line. Moving your website involves changing web servers and this can take time with some hosts, sometimes even days.  While it easy to transfer the domain name when purchased from a registrar, it is not always so when dealing with a hosting company. If your domain registrar is separate, then you just need to point the DNS to your new host and you are all set to go.

Problem when transferring domain name to a new registrar – If you wish to transfer your domain name to a new registrar, your host has to give the approval and with some hosts it may even take weeks.

Domain name not registered on your name – In the worst case scenario, there are some web hosts that register the domain in their name and the domain is legally theirs. Most webmasters may not know about these terms that limit ownership.

You are at the host’s mercy – In some cases, all these issues can lead to losing your domain name to the hosting provider, if you wish to shift to a new registrar or shift hosting. In a situation where you do not wish to give up your domain name, you may have to stick to the host unwillingly on their terms and conditions, so as not to lose your domain.

While there are web hosts that offer excellent service and with whom shifting a domain name can be a breeze, there is always the risk of landing yourself in a tight spot with the wrong host.  To play it safe, the ideal situation would be to separate the two and trust your domain with a domain name registrar.

If you really do not want to let go of the free domain name offer, make sure you do so with a site that is not critical to your business and with a host that has been around for a long time and has a great reputation.

The moment we create a website and have been round for a while, we start talking big, using “appropriate”  terminology, because everyone else is and that is the only way we are seen as knowledgeable.  But how many of us really know what all those traffic terms mean?

What is the difference between hits and page views?  I know at least some of you are stumped!!

I did not say all, so do not be offended if you are a high-flying marketer that actually understands everything.

We all know that to achieve perfection in something, we need to dig deeper and gain familiarity with all related aspects.  It is the same when it comes to assessing your traffic.

The various traffic analyzing solutions out there give you a host of details related to your website traffic, which can help you work on your SEO better.  But what good are they if you do not know how to read them?

Let “read” some of the more important stats:

Visitor: A human visitor coming from a particular IP.  We are not talking of bots here.

Unique visitor: A human visitor that has never visited any part of your site before and is visiting for the first time.

Repeat visitor: Clearly, it is someone who is not visiting for the first time and may have visited one or more times in the recent past.

Hits: A web page consists of several files; each of these files is considered a hit when the page is loaded. Hits are not necessarily loading “pages.” There may be several different elements on a page, such as pictures, images etc. Whenever a visitor opens any of the elements on a page, it is considered as a hit.  Visiting a number of elements makes it “multiple hits.”

Page views: When the visitor loads one of the pages on their browser. It is considered to be a page view when a visitor looks at a page on the web site, irrespective of the number of hits on that page.

Visits: When a human visitor or a bot visits your web site, it is counted as a “visit.” There can be a number of hits or page views in a single visit.

Multiple visits:  Made by a single visitor that visits your pages more than once.

Bounce rate: This is the rate of visitors who visit a page and leave from the same page without going further and visiting any other pages.  This helps determine the effectiveness of an entry page.  A web page that has the capacity to lead visitors to different pages on the website will show a low bounce rate.

Time on site:  This is the time visitors spend on your site and when they spend long, it could mean that they find your site interesting. However, the problem with this is that many visitors may just leave their browsers open even when they are not viewing your site, giving you misleading information.

%Exit:  This reveals the number of visitors that exit from a particular page on a website.

One of the most common myths is that the website needs lots of hits, because hits are felt to be synonymous with traffic. For example, if there are 20 images on one of your web pages and the visitor opens some or all of them, it generates hits.   There can be hundreds of hits from a single page view.  If someone tells you that they had X number of hits, you now know that it is not an indication of the number of visitors to their site. There are many webmasters who mistake the number of hits as visitors.

The most appropriate way to measure your website activity is by assessing a variety of traffic stats, such as the number of unique visitors, number of page views, search engine traffic, keywords through which your organic traffic landed on your web site, files that were downloaded the most, the way these visitors move around the site and a whole lot more.

Knowing what these stats reveal helps you, as a webmaster, in several ways.  They can come in handy even when you are buying a website, because most people selling sites show elaborated stats, which may not always reveal the exact status of a website.

Many webmasters spend hours on the creation of their website and then do all the elementary stuff needed to bring traffic to the sites.  Once the initial flurry of traffic is seen and their site has a good ranking, they assume that it will continue to build up, and shift their concentration to their next site.  What they do not realize is that they have just given birth to a baby, and their job is never completely done, as their site needs nurturing to continue ranking higher in the search engines.

Day-to-day management in the form of regular checks of a website is essential to ensure it is well optimized and shows the expected results.

Check your Website Code

While this may not always bring to the fore any issues, it is a good idea to go back and check your website code once in a while.  Whether you find a problem or not, you may want to do something to enhance or bring it up-to-date for search engine optimization.

If you look at Diagnostics under Google Webmaster tools, you will find if there are any missing title tags, duplicate title tags, long title tags or short title tags.  If you find that there are duplicate title tags, you can fix that, as that can create problems with your SEO.

Indexing of Your Site

You obviously know that your site and the pages on the site need to be indexed for the search engines to bring them up in the search results.  Tracking the indexing of your site reveals important information about the number of visitors your pages are receiving from a search engine. This shows the pages that are actually generating traffic.

Checking the indexing details is also important to see if there are any issues with duplicate content indexing or exit URLs on affiliate sites etc. You will also have to check if the number of pages indexed by Google is showing the same as what is seen through your Google analytics account.

Appropriate Keyword Usage

As the practice of SEO keeps undergoing a sea change every so often, what you have done a year ago may not be appropriate today.  Check your H1 tags, page title tags and meta description to see if they cater to the search engines today. See if the appropriate keywords are used in the post title tags.  Check the meta tag description to ensure keywords are used appropriately.  If you have not used H1 tags earlier, then it is time you did as this helps with optimization.  Search engines also love finding keywords in the url and the content of the page.  Use keywords appropriately without stuffing the pages with non-relevant keywords.  Work on this on-page optimization and see the difference it makes to your ranking.

Page Not Found Errors

Those 404 errors you encounter when visiting websites are “page not found URLs,” that can happen for a variety of reasons, such as when post slugs or permalink structures have been changed.  They are one of the worst errors that a website can encounter as it increases the bounce rate.  It can be a problem with the search engines or the internal and external links keep on sending traffic to the old URLs.

Google Webmaster Tools gives you a list of all the 404 errors found by the Googlebot and you can also use a plug-in to get notification to your email whenever such an error comes up.  Fix them immediately so that your visitors are not shown the door to your competition.

These are just a few things that you need to keep checking often to ensure you stay fully optimized and stay in the good books of the search engines. If you have too many websites to handle, forget the dud websites and go back to the pages that are actually bringing in some traffic and work on them to ensure they do better and rank higher.

Blogging is not just about creating blogs and posting quality content, expecting visitors to make way to your blog. It doesn’t work that way.  There is a reason why search engine optimization is talked about so much.

Creation of a Blog

Preparation to drive traffic to your blog starts even before your blog is created.  Sounds confusing?  Well, what I mean to say is that it is important to choose the right software for blog creation. While the most popular blog solutions are Word Press and Blogger, if you want to be creative with your formatting and functionality, you can build a custom blog. Whatever you choose to use to create your blog, the idea is to make it easy for you to post, receive comments, archive, categorize and use multiple feeds.  Another most important thing to keep in mind is to ensure your blog is hosted.  Free blogs are a big no, if you are looking at developing and promoting your blog in the search engines.

Post Title Tags

Your post title is crucial for SEO. You must know that there are two audiences your blog is going to attract – people visiting your blog through your RSS feeds and those visiting from the search engines.  To attract the first kind, your post title tags should be short and catchy in order to catch their eye.  For the second audience, since it is the search engines that are driving them to your blog, keyword usage becomes imperative. Keyword phrase in the post title tag appeals to the search engines, as long as there is no over usage.

What many successful bloggers do is to write title tags for the RSS feeds initially and once they see some traffic coming in, they go back to their blog posts and change the title tags to attract search engine traffic.

Leave the Comments Off

A blog without comments is certainly not attractive, but for a new blog, it takes time to attract visitors.  From personal experience, we all know that we find blogs with a lot of comments attractive and trustworthy. To ensure your visitors do not get any negative vibes, leave the comments off till your blog traffic builds and your RSS subscribers increase. This way, your visitors will not assume that you have no traffic.

Appealing Blog Posts

You find some blogs attractive and some blogs boring.  This is because of how those blogs are treated.  Pages and pages of text, even if it offers the most useful information, can be quite boring.  Make your posts interesting by using images, bullet points, graphs and multimedia content to ensure it is visually appealing to the reader.

Conversational Blog Posts

Text book like wording in blog posts is a big No. Blogs are seen as a very informal way of interacting with your visitors and your voice on the blog should be such. It should elude honesty, authority and compassion. Do not boast about yourself and do not sound egoistic. While what you say on your blog is important, how you say it is even more critical. Because of the existence of RSS feeds, there is nothing you can do once you publish a post, so read carefully before you do.

Distribute Your Links

One of the best ways of driving more traffic to your blog posts is to participate in related active blogs and forums. Post in other blogs that consist of a large community and distribute your blog links through forum discussions. This may sound too simple, but you will be surprised at the number of people that will make their way to your blog.  Social media networks are another great source to spread your links wider.

Backlinks

Backlinks are very important for search engines. Getting as many backlinks as possible is important while the key is “high-quality.” Relevant backlinks from relevant sites make all the different for your ranking.  It need not be said that the higher you rank in search engines, the more the traffic.  It has been seen that more than 80% of the search traffic visit the first two results on Google’s first page. Imagine what would happen if you put in the effort and get there, with your competition trailing behind.

Watch Your Competition

Your competition plays a major role in increasing traffic to your blog.  No, they are not going to be generous and send their traffic your way.  Your competitors are blogs/sites that rank higher than you.  They can provide useful insights into what they are doing to gain that rank and you can get there by emulating them. Check them out thoroughly and do what they are doing – better.  Use Market Samurai for competition analysis. It’s a great tool being used by most marketers today to get an edge over competition.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an free tracking software by Google, which provides you in-depth information on the traffic to your blog.  It lets you track your visitors and lets you know which posts they like, which they are not visiting and where the traffic is coming from.  This information can prove to be vital in improving your blog.

Fortunately for us bloggers, today we have a lot at our disposal.  There are tools available that help us get the much needed information in the easiest way possible.  There are several ways we can increase the traffic to our blogs without getting hassled. It just takes a little knowledge of how to go about it and you are all set.

Just a short blog post AND TIP for my readers out there ….

As you guys know Alreadyhosting.com deals with many web hosting affiliate programs, some programs are great and some are terrible.  Today I found ResellersPanel.com and I must say, this program looks great!  I would say that the potential of earning a lot of money is very possible with this affiliate program.

ResellersPanel affiliate program is free to join and you will earn 10% LIFETIME commission on every sale that you generate!  All you need is roughly 9-10 sales and you will be earning an extra $1,000.00 each year!  We all know that this is not a hard task, and will lifetime commission you will only make MORE and MORE money in time.

Normally I do not suggest or recommend web hosting programs but I thought I would be nice today and share with you this tip… Be sure to remember me when you start earning thousands haha… Hope everyone had a great weekend!

You can sign up for this affiliate program for free by CLICKING HERE or on the logo at the top of this post!

Many a website security is compromised because of lack of proper monitoring systems in place.  Websites can be infected with all sorts of viruses, Trojans, iframe injections and a zillion other forms of attacks.

If your website has already been hacked, you need to take instant action in regaining control. The first thing that needs to be done is to check for problems on your computer. It could be happening from your computer itself.

Scan Your Computer

Towards this end, it is essential to first scan your PC with an anti-Malware program and an anti-Virus program.  After checking with the anti-virus program that is installed on your computer, you can double check with a variety of free online anti-virus programs available.

Some of the free programs available are:

• ABG Free anti-virus scanner
• AdAware Free anti-malware scanner
• Microsoft Windows Defender, which is a free anti-malware program
• Spybot Search and Destroy, a free anti-malware program

There are several others, but these are a few of the more popular scanners.

Take Your Website Offline

If your pages are infected with viruses, any visitor to your website will also be attacked. It is your duty to protect your visitors and this is the only way to ensure your reputation is intact.  The first thing that needs to be done is to take the website offline, which involves adding a few lines to your .htaccess.  If done right, a warning saying that the site may harm their computers will flash in Google and other search engine results.

If you think that this will harm your reputation, you must consider the fact that most visitors who find your site may not even notice this and there is a greater chance of them returning later; whereas, if they suffer from a virus attack because of your website, you would be losing them forever.

Another reason for taking it offline is because there may be a security hole that caused the site to be hacked in the first place.  You don’t want that to happen again until you fix all the issues and secure your website.  The hackers may also have installed a script to access the site.  Closing your site for a while will block them out and no script can help them get in.

Report To Your Web Host

Open a support ticket letting your web hosting company know what happened.  Try and explain clearly whatever you know.  There are many web hosts out there that will help you clean your site; of course not everybody does, but then it is always better to find out if they can help or give you some advice.  If you are using shared hosting, there is a possibility that the web host may know of other websites that are affected too.

Change Passwords

Once the PC is free of viruses, it is crucial to change the cPanel, email, FTP and database and all other passwords.  Make sure the new passwords are very strong and difficult for people to decipher. Try and use different passwords for each and everything.

Once you’ve repaired the damage done, it is time to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  You will have to manage your website properly keeping it safe and secure.

Here are a few tips:

• Install a good antivirus software program on your PC. You will need real-time continuous protection as scanning it once a day is not good enough. Malware has the ability to delete itself after causing the damage.

• Install all the latest security patches on Windows systems as well as all other internet-related software.

• Use strong passwords using upper and lower case letters, numeric as well as punctuations in the password.  Do not use the same password for everything.

• You must make sure it is safe before downloading anything from the internet; whether it is a script or something else.

You must give your website the same importance you would give the house you live in. Just as you would secure it properly to make sure nobody gets in, you must ensure your website is locked for all bad elements.

The word “catastrophic success” holds a lot of meaning here. It means an unusual surge in traffic that can bring a website to a complete halt. You have been successful at bringing traffic to your website but it proved to be catastrophic.

This happens due to unanticipated levels of interest when thousands of users visit the website, but the webmaster is unable to cope with them. Sometimes, the service may not go down but gets so slow that it becomes non-responsive. Such problems can be overcome.

Other causes of website failure include DoS attack (denial of service), which can also cause congestion and overload; poorly configured system components and out-of-date updates and patches on web servers.

The occasional outage is understandable and happens to all, but frequent downtime can cause delays in business. As we begin relying more on Web applications, Internet uptime is becoming more critical.

But there are things you can take care of to ensure you pave a smooth superhighway to your company’s website.

Content delivery networks (CDNs)

The public internet depends on content delivery networks to handle large amounts of media on huge sites like Amazon.com. Microsoft recently launched a free CDN to improve website performance. CDNs are made to route traffic onto private networks, thus removing the burden from the public website. In the absence of a CDN, sites with massive media files will be down immediately.

Better caching

One of the best and most popular ways of dealing with internet problems is to cache data that is frequently accessed. You can use Memcache or anything else and you will find several CMS packages that support this. But you must ensure you are careful with dynamic data.

Internet caching is similar to your computer memory caching, which holds the most popular content in a cached storage on the server to provide faster access. There are tier-caching products that help cache content within the website by making sure the content from the database is available even with there is a huge surge of traffic. This is one of the ways Twitter and Facebook deal with traffic surges.

Better programming

One of the new methods of dealing with traffic is to use better programming to withstand the sudden traffic spikes. Experts say that most websites cannot withstand any unanticipated traffic due to poor programming.

Using HTML5

Your website downtime is not always related to the hardware. HTML5 and other new standards have built-in mechanisms for increasing the reliability of websites. These involve advanced programming techniques. HTML5 is considered to be an important advance in browser capabilities.

Content optimization

You can optimize your static content by compressing images in order to make use of every kilobyte, but all the while making sure the visual quality does not get affected. You can also compress the content delivered by your web server. You can optimize your content management system by reducing the number of database calls you need to make for each page request. In Drupal, this is very simply done by disabling some of the modules. It is also advisable to separate the read and write databases.

Expires

One of the most important things is to add “expires” headers to content to ensure the same files are not downloaded continually as a user browses your website.

There is certainly no guarantee that your site will never go down. You will just have to find the right balance and implement what is necessary to ensure it has a high percentage of uptime.

You’ve learnt all you can about web hosts and finally chosen the one you think fits your needs perfectly.  You have even set the DNS for the website.  But wait before you heave a sigh of relief.  There is something else that needs to be taken care of.

You are now faced with the task of uploading your website to the web host.  Uploading means moving files from your hard drive or any local environment to the web server.

I can tell you from experience (initial days) that unless you know how to go about it, a lot of time can be wasted.

Although, there are several ways of uploading web pages to a host, the most common is by using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software.  But before uploading, once the web page creation is over, they need to be saved as .html or .htm.

Some web hosts now provide a control panel where these web pages can be uploaded. If this is not available, then an FTP program needs to be used or an HTML editor to upload files.   Whatever you decide to use, it is required to check if the hosting company supports the method. Most of the free web hosts do not provide these options.

FileZilla or WS_FTP are the free FTP clients that allow you to save your web pages to your web host or the remote server.

Download the FTP client of your choice, install it and create an FTP account.  After opening the FTP program, the FTP host address needs to be typed, which is usually “yourdomain.com” or sometimes “ftp.yourdomain.com.” You can check out both to see what works.  Sometimes only one may work and at others, both.  Next, you will have to enter the username and password that you used when you created an FTP account with your host, and finally click on the connect button to establish a connection with the web host.

In the FTP client, you will find a section for the local site with folders at the top and files at the bottom. The other section is for the remote host or the web host.

Web host help can be sought to find out where the files are to be uploaded.  They usually go into the root directory, into a folder called “www” or “public_html.”  All the website files need to go into this particular folder, so that they can be accessed by the public.  Files can be transferred individually or as complete directories.

While all other web pages can be given any name, the main page in all directories on the site should be index.htm/.html/.php.  This is the page that is displayed by default.

Files are moved with FTP in both binary and ASCII modes, and the FTP software may determine the method to use.  But at times, this may need to be specified manually.  The rule of the thumb is that all files that are opened with a text editor should be transferred as ASCII.  Graphics, media files and compiled programs are transferred in the binary mode.

We have discussed FTP at length here as it is the most popular method of transferring files from the local area to a remote host (web host.) There are other methods that can be used.  You will find that many website creation programs come with built-in transfer mode.  One of the most common is the Microsoft FrontPage. But before using it, make sure your web host supports it.  FrontPage takes care of uploads to the web host without any manual intervention.

There are also online site-builders that not only help create web pages, but also store them in the appropriate locations on the server.  These site builders are found on the control panel in the hosting account.

Happy uploading!

If you are looking to create or start your very first website for your small business, we can help you!  Creating your first website can actually be a lot easier than you may imagine and doing the work yourself could save your business a VERY large sum of money.

Every small business needs a presence on the world wide web; in fact, there is a lot of research that shows that many people are turning to the web for any and all purchases.  If your small business is going to survive and thrive during this poor economic period you must start your business website today!   It is very easy to do and can be done quickly and easily if you follow our step by step guide.

How to Create A Small Business Website:

Step 1: Brainstorm a domain name for your website (ie. www.AlreadyHosting.com), most basic domain names have already been taken so you may have to use come creativity during this step.  There is a cool website that will help you come up with a creative and available domain name, it is NameBoy.com.

Step 2: Register your domain name for FREE by signing up with one of our affordable web hosting recommendations.  If you want professional, reliable, and affordable web hosting I would suggest one of the three hosts below.. (Make sure you click on our link to receive a special discount).

• HostMonster – $3.95/month
• BlueHost – $3.95/month
• GreenGeeks – $6.95/Month

Step 3: Log into your new web hosting account CPANEL (you will receive an email with details).  After logging in scroll down and click the button named “SimpleScripts”.. Follow on screen directions and use SimpleScripts to install wordpress on your new web hosting server.

Step 4: You will receive another email with the user name and password of your wordpress account, use this information to log into your account.

Step 5: Google and find a FREE wordpress theme that is related to your niche and download it to your computer.  Upload the theme to your wordpress account… If you need help doing this there is a nice free guide to install wordpress here.

Step 6: Add content to your new wordpress website.  This is done VERY EASILY… But again if you need help, I found a useful guide to adding WordPress content.

Following these EASY 6 steps you can create a website for your small business… You will not have to pay anyone to create your website and the hosting will cost under $3.95 a month if you use our exclusive hosting links above.  I hope this step-by-step guide to creating a small business website will help your business succeed.

If you are considering building your first web page but confused about where to start this guide will tell you exactly what you will need.   A common misconception with beginners is that web design is expensive and VERY hard to do by your self.  Although some types of web design can be challenging, software provided by many popular web hosting providers make creating your first web site a breeze.

In this guide I will outline two different methods of building a professional web site with ease for only $3.95 a month!  If you follow these simple steps you will be on your way to building your first web page.

Method #1 – Using WordPress To Create Your Site – **Editor Suggested**

WordPress is by far the easiest way to create a web page for the first time. In fact, this very blog is created in wordpress and is very easy to maintain.  Most web hosting providers make wordpress installations very easy all you have to do is follow these steps to create your first web site.

1. Register for web hosting at HostMonster.  Web hosting with Hostmonster typically cost $6.95 a month; however, we have worked out a deal with them and can offer you the same hosting for only $3.95 a month!  To get this special rate all you need to do is click on our exclusive link above.
2. After signing up for web hosting you will need to go to HostMonster.com and log in your account.  After logging into your account CPANEL you will see a button toward the bottom of the page called, “SimpleScripts”, simply click this button.
3. From this screen you can select WordPress and follow the on screen directions to install wordpress on your server FOR FREE.  HostMonster makes the WordPress install super easy in comparrison to other hosting sites.
4. After installing wordpress you will be able to log into your new account (instructions will be emailed to you). Once logged in you can eaily install any free wordpress theme , AlreadyHosting.com offers a few free wordpress themes; however, if you Google wordpress themes you will find thousands more!
5. WordPress takes all of the design out of web design and all you have to do is sign up for web hosting at HostMonster and the rest is free, including your domain name.  There are custom wordpress themes for every type of website including: blogs, real estate, churches, schools, business, and so much more!
6. Congratulations you just built your first professional website in a matter of minutes and the best part is it will only cost you $3.95 a month!

Method #2 – Using SiteBuilder Programs

Many web hosting providers will include free sitebuilder software with the purchase of web hosting.  HostMonster, Bluehost, and JustHost all offer great and easy to use sitebuilder programs.

1. Register for a web hosting account at: Hostmonster, Bluehost, or Justhost (only $3.95 a month)
2. Login to your hosting account CPANEL (Instructions will be emailed to you after step 1)
3. Click the button that says sitebuilder
4. Follow on screen directions
5. Congrats, in only 4 steps and less that $4 a month you will have your very first professional web page.

Don’t let other companies fool you into spending hundreds of dollars on web design because in reality all you will need is a web hosting account (see above).  Follow the easy instructions in our guide to building your first web page above and you will be on your way to creating you first web site.