Once you’ve got cheap web hosting purchased and set up, you need to choose a domain. Choosing a domain shouldn’t be something you do in 5 minutes. You should take your time with it, and make sure you’re making the right decision. If you buy a domain and then realize a few months later that you’ve found a better one, go ahead and buy it. Unless your site is very well developed and already has visitors and search engine ranks, there is no harm in switching domains.
However, you should avoid all that hassle and simply take your time now. To start, select a domain registrar to buy from. I recommend Namecheap or name.com. I don’t recommend using your cheap web hosting provider to register domains, as that can cause complications later when you want to transfer them to a different account or even a different owner. Once you’ve selected a registrar, start thinking about words that would describe your niche or topic. Start narrowing things down, trying to find the perfect name. Check every name you can think of and make sure it’s not taken, even if you’re convinced it is.
I highly recommend getting a .com domain name. They are much more professional than any other TLD, and they are more memorable. I also recommend avoiding any names with dashes in them, or any potentially confusing names. Keep it as simple as possible. If you can, try to target a popular keyword phrase in your domain name, as that will help you in the future when you’re getting search engine rankings. In conclusion, just take your time and make sure that you are happy with your domain before you register it.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 30, 2009.
A lot of webmasters don’t have all that much time to develop their websites these days, so many people look for the quickest way to make a website. There are several ways to quickly make a website, but if you’re going for any sort of quality, I highly recommend Wordpress. I’m not talking about Wordpress.com, but rather, Wordpress.org. This free software allows you to quickly and easily build a great looking website, and gives you a very user-friendly control panel, very similar to the one on wordpress.com blogs.
Keep in mind that if you want to use Wordpress.org software, you are going to need cheap web hosting of your own. Cheap web hosting costs about $5 per month and is available from pretty much any host. It’s also known as shared hosting. I recommend getting a plan immediately and then installing the Wordpress software. After that, you’re ready to get started!
While the standard wordpress theme is functional and decent looking, I recommend spicing your site up a bit and adding a nice theme. There are plenty of good free themes available, so there’s no need to pay for a premium one. However, if you find one you really like, it may be worth buying as it’s basically an investment. Once you have selected a theme, install it and make sure everything works correctly. Once that’s done, you’re ready to start submitting content!
Start with some basic articles – maybe a welcome page explaining the site. Then progress into some more specific posts. If you plan on optimizing for search engines, now is the time to start generating keyword-based content and articles. If you have the ability, make some videos and post them on your site. If you do it right, you can have a fully complete website that looks pretty good completed in less than a day.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 29, 2009.
When it comes time to choose a host, you will be presented with literally hundreds of options. There are so many hosts out there today that choosing the best one for you is next to impossible – at least without help. Thankfully for you, I’m here to help! If you’re looking to buy cheap web hosting, or any type of hosting for that matter, here are some of the things to look for in a host:
1. Service
Service goes above all for me, and it should for you too. After all, saving money with good prices is good, and having a lot of storage space is good, but none of that will matter if your host’s support team is not there to help when something goes wrong! So look for hosts who have a good reputation for being helpful, quick and friendly when it comes to customer service.
2. Reliability
Reliability is also vitally important. You want a host who’s servers are going to be up the vast majority of the time, and who’s support team is going to be reliable and active. The last thing you want is to get stuck with cheap web hosting and end up having your server down half the time! After all, whats the point of paying for something if it’s not going to be there half the time?
3. Price
Price is definitely a factor, but it shouldn’t be the main thing that you consider. In fact, cheaper hosts are often lower quality, so if a price seems too low, you should be wary of purchasing. Look for hosts who price their plans in the middle of the price range – $4-$5/month if you’re talking about cheap web hosting. That way, you get an affordable price but know that the host is going to be reliable.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 28, 2009.
Whether you’ve got large sites or small, 10 sites or just 1, you need to be taking action to prevent disaster. Every day, webmasters lose months or even years worth of work in minutes. Don’t let that happen to you! Take precautions now so you don’t regret it later.
The first thing you should do to protect your sites is make a local backup. To do this, simply download all your files from your cheap web hosting server and store them on your local hard drive. Be sure to keep everything in order and in the right hyerarchy, so if you need to use the backup you can do it easily. If you have a second computer and/or an external hard drive, it’s a good idea to make a second backup copy just to be safe.
If you’re paranoid, I would also consider downloading all of your files, zipping them up into a single file, and storing it on a flash drive or another storage device. Also, remember that you should be doing backups almost weekly, maybe even daily if you update your site a lot. You don’t want to lose your files, then try to use a backup only to realize that it’s a month old and missing all of your recent work. I recommend following a set schedule, ie backing up every Saturday or something like that. That way you’ll just fall into a rhythm and not have to worry about it.
There are several other ways that can help you protect your files. The lengths you go to depend on how paranoid you are, or how cautious you are. If you have a regular income coming from your sites, you should definitelly use any means necessary to protect that.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 27, 2009.
While normal cheap web hosting plans are very popular and useful, some webmasters require additional features and options on their cheap web hosting plans. These features vary in price and functionality, but generally all hosts offer at least one web hosting add-on. If you want to spice up your plan or make it just a little bit more useful, check out some of the popular additions available below:
Dedicated IP
A dedicated IP basically means that your site is seperate from all others. With a dedicated IP, visitors can access your website by going to an IP instead of a URL. While that doesn’t necessarily benefit anyone, it means that your site is viewed as an authority by both educated visitors, and more importantly, Google. See when Google sees that you have a dedicated IP, they look at only your sites to determine whether or not you’re a “good” webmaster or not. However, when you’re on a cheap web hosting plan, Google looks at all the sites on that server. That means that you are technically credited with the sites on the server. That may seem like a good thing to you, but chances are there is someone on your server who is hosting spam sites, or even malicious hacking sites. If Google notices these sites on the same IP as yours, they may penalize your sites, even if they are completely legitimate and clean.
Extra storage space
Extra storage space is a great addition to any plan. Whether you think so or not, you’re probably going to run out of room on your server eventually. So, adding extra space now will serve you in the future. Most hosts don’t publically advertise this feature, but almost all hosts offer it, so contact their support team if you want extra space.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 26, 2009.
There are many things that should contribute to your choice of hosts, but I’m here to tell you that reliability should be one of the main factors. Reliability is important to you and your website for many reasons, but mainly because downtime or slow load times damage everything. First of all, down time annoys and turns off your visitors, which is a very bad thing. Often even a few hours of downtime can take a popular website from popular to deserted. After all, websites are supposed to be reliable, so shouldn’t cheap web hosting be reliable as well?
When I say reliability is important, I’m not just talking about uptime. I am also talking about customer support. In the world of web hosting, there always seems to be at least one problem. Even the most reliable hosting companies often have problems with their servers, and their customers suffer for it. While most of these problems are unavoidable, you want a host that has a dedicated support team that is there to help you. Many of the cheaper hosts just use call centers to deal with customer support, and the opperatives at these call centers often don’t know what they are talking about. So try to find a host that not only has reliable servers, but also has reliable and knowledgable support.
Determining the reliability of a company before you even buy their product is obviously a bit tricky, but it’s not impossible. I recommend using this site, as well as Google and other resources, to determine if a host is reliable. There are a lot of web hosting reviews out there, and more often than not they mention things about the support team and the reliability of the servers within the review itself.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 25, 2009.
Video sites are very popular these days, especially with the creation of video blogging and the increase in interest in videos. While there are only a few well-known video sites (youtube, hulu, etc.), there are thousands of sites out there that specialize in videos. If you’re looking to start a video site, you’re going to probably need something better than cheap web hosting.
While cheap web hosting works for most up-and-coming webmasters, those who plan on hosting large amounts of video will want to upgrade. I recommend getting a VPS, though an upgraded shared hosting plan may work as well. For now I do not recommend getting a dedicated server, as you won’t need that much space until your site gets big.
If you’re looking to save money, go ahead and start with a cheap web hosting plan, and then move on to a VPS once you’ve outgrown your old plan. If you do this, make sure your host offers VPS plans, so that you can upgrade and stay with the same host. Most hosts will give you some sort of rebate when you upgrade and ditch your old cheap web hosting plan, so you can save a few extra bucks this way.
If you do start with cheap web hosting, just be sure to watch your limits, both on storage and bandwidth. If you notice you’re nearing your limits, contact your host and discus an upgrade. They are the experts, and they can decide whether you need a VPS or just an upgraded shared plan. Also, you can discuss discounts or refunds with them, as you’ll probably have time left on your cheap web hosting plan.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 24, 2009.
Anyone can build a website, but making a useful, successful site takes much more time and effort. If you have a site and don’t get much traffic, you need to work on developing a steady stream of traffic. After all, what’s the purpose of a website that nobody sees? Especially if your site is meant to provide information and help people, you need visitors!
There are several ways to drive traffic, each with it’s own pros and cons. Some methods, such as search engine optimization, take ages to complete, but once the task is done, you’re pretty much guaranteed a steady stream of DAILY traffic. This is why I recommend focusing your long-term efforts on SEO, and doing daily work to develop what I call “temporary” traffic. If you just want a quick stream of traffic to promote a product or just get some visitors, read on.
One of the best ways to get some quick traffic is to write an article or produce a video that’s sure to be popular or odd enough to become viral. Once you’ve done this, post it on your site, and submit the link to social bookmarking sites such as Digg. This is not necessarily guaranteed traffic, but if your story does go viral, you can expect thousands of visitors per day for the next 2-3 days, possibly more. Be warned – Digg is a powerful tool, and it can sometimes be TOO powerful. See cheap web hosting is not unlimited, and if your host notices that you’re suddenly getting thousands of visitors, they may freeze your account. So make sure you know the limits on your cheap web hosting, and be ready to upgrade just in case.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 23, 2009.
Forums, or message boards, are extremely popular these days. Since the Internet is so huge, there is literally a forum for everything. However, that doesn’t mean there’s not room for more! In fact, forums are often much more successful financially than normal content sites or blogs. So if you’re looking to build a new website, you should definitelly consider a forum.
Forums are not particularly difficult to develop, and they can generally be hosted on cheap web hosting. Especially in the begining when you don’t have many regular posters, your forum will not take up much room at all, so cheap web hosting will more than suffice. Once it begins to grow and you have regular users, you may have to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server, but for now just keep it simple.
While setting up and building a forum is pretty simple, maintaining it is not, and that’s what a lot of webmasters fail to realize. Since forums are open to the public, there is a lot of opportunity for spammers to, well, spam! Nobody likes spam, and forum users expect owners and moderators to regularly purge the forum of all spam posts, and that takes a lot of work. To help combat spammers, I recommend either buying some anti-spam software, or “hiring” some moderators. I said “hiring” because most forum users will moderate for free, especially if they are regulars and love the forum. Outsourcing this type of work lets you focus on more important things, and keeps your forum up and running smoothly. If there are every any huge spam attacks, you can always load an old backup copy of your forum from your cheap web hosting account, therefore deleting any spam over the past day or so.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 22, 2009.
If you want to share your opinions and have fun, a blog is a great choice. Blogging can be a hobby, or it can be an actual career. Whether you want to make money or you’re just looking for a productive way to spend some time, I highly recommend setting up a blog. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to use cheap web hosting, or how to set up any kind of hosting. There are several ways to host a blog, but I recommend choosing carefully.
The first, and probably easiest way is to use a free blogging service like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. While both these websites are completely free and allow you to make decent blogs easily, they are limiting in many ways. If you just want a very simple blog and don’t think you’ll expand later, then a free blog will do just fine. However, if you want to do anything creative or possibly expand in the future, I highly recommend buying cheap web hosting and setting up a real blog.
A lot of people freak out when they have to deal with cheap web hosting, and they assume that since they aren’t using a service they will have to hand-code everything. This is simply not true. There are several softwares (most of which are free) that give you a control panel/backend similar to the backend you’d have with Wordpress or Blogger. The most popular blog backend is Wordpress.org, which offers a free software (called Wordpress). Wordpress software allows you to have a very user-friendly control panel, but doesn’t limit you at all like wordpress.com blogs do. There are a lot of guides on the Internet that explain how to set up and use Wordpress, so if you’re confused I recommend doing some research.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Nov 21, 2009.
