Best of the Net: SEO, Marketing and Social

Blogging is one way of improving website rankings of your business site. It is capable of drawing traffic to your website, as well as increasing its number of backlinks. With effective blogging, your business site will have an excellent placement in search engines, which in turn makes it easier for you to reach your target audience.

In order to be effective in blog marketing, you need to make sure that your blogs will stand out from others. True, you can find free blog templates on the internet, but they only have limited features. By using free templates, it is impossible to make your blogs unique and effective. In case you want to succeed in blog marketing, then it is advisable to use WordPress.

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system, which is popular among bloggers and internet marketers as well. It has many useful features that enable you to customize with great ease the content, as well as the template of your blogs. Furthermore, WordPress allows you to install various plugins that will help you create an amazing content that will satisfy your readers.

Using WordPress to create effective blogs is only the first step in blog marketing. Even if your blog is very interesting, it will be of no use if people are unable to find it in the world wide web. To ensure that your blogs will be visible to internet users, you need to utilize WordPress web hosting services.

Many companies offer web-hosting services. However, you should be very careful in deciding which one to hire, since not all of them provide reliable services. By considering some key pointers, you will be able to determine which one to choose.

Things to Consider when Choosing Web Hosting Services

Here are the things you should consider before accepting a web hosting service:

1. Disk Space: WordPress templates consume disk space. Of course, you will never create a blog with templates alone, you need to stuff it with videos, texts, images, and other elements to make it interesting, which consumes a considerable amount of disk space. Therefore, you need to make sure that the web-hosting service provider has enough disk space on their web server.
2. Server Platform: You must also familiarize yourself about the type of server platform that the web hosting company uses because WordPress utilize various PHP scripts, including style sheets and MYSQL database. Make sure that their server platform support MSQL and PHP in order for your blog to work. It would be better to choose Linux-based platforms than their Windows-based platforms, because WordPress works better in Linux.
3. Online Backup System: Regular updates are necessary in WordPress. A thing may go wrong while update work is being done, which could result in the loss of your website files. Therefore, you need to make sure that your web hosting company provides an excellent backup system that will allow you to retrieve your lost files.
4. Server Uptime: This is one of the most important things to consider when it comes to web hosting. You need to make sure that the server has excellent speed and availability. A good server uptime will ensure that your blog will be online at all times, and will load instantly when the user visit your blog.
5. Customer Support: You need to make sure that your web hosting service provider can provide customer support 24/7. More often than not, you will need assistance when it comes to maintenance, upgrading, or even installation of your WordPress site.

Nothing is more frustrating than being unable to finish your blog, simply because you cannot contact customer support whenever you need their assistance. Therefore, if you want to be effective and efficient in blog marketing, you must search for web hosting companies that can provide customer support 24/7.

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tool used today, which can help you succeed in your blog marketing campaign. It allows you to create templates that will make your blogs appealing to the readers. It also allows you to install plugins that will enhance the functionality of your WordPress site. However, aside from utilizing WordPress, you need web hosting services to ensure that your WordPress site will exist on the World Wide Web.

Considering the things mentioned above will lead you to the right web hosting company. With their help, you can feel confident that your blogs will be read by internet. In other words, a reliable web hosting service provider can help you succeed in your blog marketing campaign.

Scott is a professional online marketer who provides WordPress hosting services. He trusts WordPress, and recommends the same to all his clients.

Resellers are those who do not own the datacenters but have rented servers from datacenters and are reselling them as shared web hosting plans or reseller hosting plans. Apart from this fact, you can call them full-fledged hosts because they take care of security of the servers, manage the servers and give customer support to their customers. So, if they are resellers, they have the power to do most of the things involved in hosting a website.

Now the question is whether you should buy web hosting from resellers or from direct hosting providers. I cannot answer this straightforward but I am highlighting both the positive and negative aspects of buying from a reseller.

Why You Should Not Buy Hosting from a Reseller Negative Points

The reliability, speed, and performance of the servers do not depend on the reseller. They depend on the upstream provider, that is, the original host behind the reseller. If the reseller has rented the reseller server from a good host, then things would be fine. However, in order to compete with other reseller hosting providers and make a huge profit, most of them buy hosting servers from the cheapest companies with overcrowded servers. This makes performance slow with frequent downtime. Thus, you (the end user who has purchased web hosting from a reseller) will suffer and may not get quality service.

Another problem of buying hosting from a reseller is the lack of knowledge of the reseller. Not all resellers have excellent web hosting knowledge. So, there may be a communication gap between you and the reseller when a problem arises, and the time of resolution will get longer, as the reseller will contact the upstream provider to get a solution to your problems.

Since resellers are a one-man army, they might not be able to provide customer support for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Some resellers outsource this customer support job, but still this is not a cost-effective solution. So, you cannot reach most of the resellers 24X7.

Why You Should Buy Hosting from a Reseller Positive Points

Resellers sell web hosting packages or webhotel pakker as the Danes refer to it, at really cheap rates because of the stiff competition with other resellers and with the upstream providers. The prices they set are affordable to everyone. So, if money is a factor you cannot afford to neglect, getting hosting from a reseller is the best option. You can buy from them and afterwards shift to some other provider as your business grows. Remember, not all bloggers or webmasters have the same budget to start.

Resellers often create a close relationship with their clients, as they get to understand the needs of the clients. So, a friendly and open conversation with the reseller solves many unknown problems, even if it gets done a bit late. For many people, a close conversation is more important than 99.9% uptime of the site.

What is more important to you quality of service or price and friendliness?

There is no doubt that finding web hosting service providers online is the easiest thing to do these days. The reason is the availability of hundreds of service providers, which are committing to provide the best services at affordable rates. However, here you need to understand that it is not necessary that what they commit to, will actually be what they provide. The best example can be of free hosting service providers, which claim to provide the most secure services but these hosting services are never recommended because of their low quality and unreliability.

Now the question is which type of web hosting services one should consider for creating a professional website. Are you concerned about the same matter? If yes then it is best to buy shared Joomla hosting services especially if you are planning to own a website for your medium sized enterprise. You will hear about various other content management software like WordPress, Drupal, and many more. However, Joomla hosting services are the best option to consider because of their outstanding features. The best part is that with this type of hosting facility, you can avail of a dedicated IP, which means that you will not have to share your website IP with any of the other available sites.

Keep in mind that Joomla experts are best to provide technical maintenance. This will be required especially when you will be having a Virtual Private Server. In simple words, you can say that this type of hosting can be considered the best for your site in terms of performance, reliability, and security. However, do not forget that all these facilities will require more investment as compared to other hosting services.

Once you know that these web hosting services are the most suitable to get for websites, then your most important concern will be how to find these services. There are many resources considering which you can find the best Joomla hosting service provider. The best source to search is the internet. Now the question is how one can know which hosting service provider is best for their site. Are you thinking of the same? If yes then to find this out, you have to consider two major factors, which are as follows:

• Reliability
• Cost

How to make sure that the hosting company is reliable?

To assess whether the service provider is reliable or not, the best way is to read blogs and forums online. The reason for this is that on blogs, you can get updated information about the service providers and on forums, you can read the users’ experience to get to know whether the company is capable of providing the promised services or not. Besides that, you can also read the online reviews about the service providers to ensure their reliability.

How to do cost analysis?

Doing cost analysis of different web hosting companies is quite simple. Just click on their official sites and ask them to provide you with quotes. Compare the rates of all reliable hosting or webhotel as it is called in Danish, service providers and select the best one based on your budget.

Everyone likes saving money, and you can save a lot by using web hosting coupons. Let’s face it, getting a good web hosting service is going to cost you a lot of money, so why not try to say a little? While using a coupon seems, and typically is, straightforward, this article is going to explain a few of the finer points so that you understand exactly what to expect from these coupons. There are many benefits to these discounts (aside from saving money), and the discounts usually only apply to a certain period of time. If you want to understand exactly how these coupons work, then read on to find out.

Benefits

The most obvious benefit to using web hosting coupons is that you’ll save a lot of money. Most of these coupons slash the prices by a significant margin, but there’s another benefit that you may not realize at first.

Every host is different, and every website has its own unique needs. While your standard HTML or blog website can typically work regardless of what host you choose, you still need to see the host in action before making your selection.

Many hosts have different features, control panels and interfaces that will make them special. Does your website work with the host, and do you like the layout? It can be difficult to judge the back-end area of a host before trying it, and coupons allow you to give the host a try without spending a lot of money.

Your web host is one of the most important factors in managing your website. It’s like the foundation of a brick-and-mortar business. It’s in your best interest to try out as many hosts as possible before you find the perfect one.

Discounts

Most of the discounts are either a percentage or a certain dollar figure off your invoice with the majority belonging to the former. Many of these coupons start off by offering you a discount of about 25%. There are many others that go up to 40, 50 and even 99% off your bill.

The dollar figure coupons come in many varying amounts, but you can expect to save about $20 to $50 or more with these coupons.

There are also others that give you interesting discounts. For example, your domain might be free when you buy hosting. Or the first month might be free.

Just remember to look around for discounts before you buy hosting.

Length of Time

Except for rare instances, these coupons won’t last for the duration of your time with the host. The vast majority of these coupons are only applied to your first invoice. If you want to save as much money as possible, then pay for a year of hosting in advance so that you get a year’s worth of savings.

Saving More Money

The coupon is going to run out, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t save money. Most hosts will discount their normal prices by about 30-50% if you pay for the entire year (or years) in advance. If you know that you’ll be working on your website throughout the years, then this is the best way to cut expenses.

Conclusion

Web hosting coupons are amazing because you can save a lot of money, but you need to know how they work. If you want the best discount, then be sure to pay for a year or more in advance, and continue doing this to save a lot of money on your hosting.

STEP 1:

The first step is to prepare a new hosting space. You will have to create a directory, so you can move your blog to your new hosting space. If you want to make the moving easier use the same directory name. Check if your new host can support multiple domains, if it does use the cPanel to put in an add-on domain.

STEP 2:

The next step will be reinstalling the WordPress. Use the cPanel fantastic tool, or famous 5 minute install from your new host. You have to be sure of these things:

• The WordPress you are installing is higher or the same as your current WordPress release.
• You will be required to use the same login and password as your current one, which will simplify things for you.
• When you have to fill WordPress address, use a temporary WordPress installation. This will be found in WordPress admin>settings>general. In addition to that change the blog address to e.g. http://MyHostServerIPAddress/MyAccount/MyDomain.com

Using the blog address you have made, visit your blog. Make sure the WordPress you installed works fine before adding a theme or your blogs. If you want to be careful you can keep a backup of your WP-config. PHP.

STEP 3:

Upgrade your old WordPress if you have installed a new version of WordPress on the new host. Check if you don’t or do require an upgrade, after that check all the plugins.

STEP 4:

Before moving any further backup all your current data, you can use free filezilla FPT for this. Also keep a backup of your robot.txt, wp-config.php, .htaccess files and wp-config.php. When done with this, be sure to make a backup of all your other folders such as temp, junk, download etc.

STEP 5:

Search for a tool called phpMyAdmin, it will be available in your cPanel. Make sure that you don’t use the export feature, only export your current WordPress database using phpMyAdmin. When using phpMyAdmin select the options as shown below:

• All WordPress tables, and SQL.
• Also add the option Drop Table/View/Procedure/Function.
• Then save as file. Once you click on the GO button you will be asked to save a database backup file on your disk.

STEP 6:

To overwrite the new wp-content folder, use FTP to connect and backup the data done in step 4. Be sure that the .htaccesfiles are uploaded to the new directory.

STEP 7:

To import your WordPress database go to cPanel, and open phpMyAdmin tool, select new WordPress database and click import. Then select the backup file created in step 5, so you can import data to WordPress table.

STEP 8:

It’s time to test your new blog, but right before you do a few settings need to be changed. Like in step 2, change general settings again as URL can now be your actual domain name. You will not be required to upload wp-config.php file.

STEP 9:

Before making it permanent, make sure you do two things:

• POP Download all mains from previous host.
• Copy all new comments, if any came during installation.

STEP 10:

Change the name of the server from the old one to the one provided by the new host; and make sure everything works fine.

These are some simple sets for web hosting. Scott provides excellent solutions for effective marketing to his clients. He can be reached over at scotheron.me.

Creating your first web site or blog can be a very exciting time. Unfortunately it can also be very time consuming and frustrating if you aren’t sure what web hosting service you are going to be using.

There are thousands of web hosts on the internet that you can choose from and many of them offer different services and prices, so how are you supposed to know which is best for you?

In this article we are going to highlight three different areas that you can focus in on, while also looking at review sites found in the search engines.

Find Review Sites

If you are completely lost and have no idea what to look for, one of the best ways to get started is to visit Google and perform a search for “top hosting companies”. This will allow you to search through the top ranked review sites which provide real feedback and ratings on the best hosting services out there.

Hosting Plans

The first thing to look at when choosing a web host is their different packages that are available. The majority of web sites and blogs on the internet are pretty small and should be fine with shared hosting packages. If you are going to run a high traffic site or online store you will need to look into some more advanced packages to run your site.

Hosting Costs

When it comes to hosting price you should look in the $10-$20 a month range. As mentioned, shared hosting is fine for the majority of sites on the internet and many hosts offer monthly hosting packages in the $7 range. You can always start with a small package and upgrade later on if your site grows in size.

Hosting Support

No matter what type of service you sign up to, support is always going to be important. When choosing your next web host be sure to check if they offer not only email support but also phone and online chat support. Sometimes you will have a quick issue and don’t want to get on the phone. For times like these online chat support is excellent.

Now that you have a good idea of what you should be looking for when choosing a web host you are already ahead of the game. Besides looking at the costs, support and hosting plans, you should also put into consideration the feedback and ratings provided by real customers on hosting review sites.

This article was written by Paul, who writes about web hosting at http://blogging.org.

When looking for web hosting for your site there are a number of features to look for. Among the most important is speed of access and reliability. You’ll want to find a hosting provider that guarantees its uptime percentage. This is especially the case if you run a high-traffic website or expect to in the future. Businesses that rely on e-commerce simply can’t afford to have hosting with frequent downtime and outages.

Unlimited Data Transfer Data transfer, often referred to as bandwidth, is the amount of data transferred from your website to visitors when they interact with your web pages. Many commercial web host providers advertise unlimited bandwidth as part of their offer to new clients. However, always check the terms of service carefully to ensure it truly is unlimited and there are no hidden charges for exceeding limits. Although data transfer is something to consider, for most sites resource limitation isn’t a problem.

SSL and Secure Shopping Cart If you plan to conduct any type of business activity online, then these facilities will be important. The first step is to be certain the hosting company provides them and whether there are additional charges. Businesses that plan to use credit card payments for purchases from their clients would certainly need SSL support.

Control Panel and Email Control panel, frequently referred to as cPanel, allows the user to easily manage all aspects of their web account. At the very minimum, clients are able to add and delete files, install platforms such as WordPress, change passwords, add sub-domains, along with other basic functions. Advanced users can manage FTP accounts and access visitor statistics with analysis software. Find out if the web hosting provider you consider offers email accounts for your primary domain. Some even include an auto-responder module that allows automatic replies.

Web Hosting Reseller Not every web hosting company owns or leases their servers. You’ll find many that are resellers. Although not always the case, one disadvantage of using a reseller is that they might not have extensive knowledge of the system they sell. If you have a technical issue that needs resolving quickly, it may take longer if support tickets are transmitted to the actual host. However, do not rule out reseller hosting as an option as many are fast and reliable. To get an accurate idea of different web hosting services and what they offer, the best bet is to visit a hosting review site and compare.