Internet Marketing is Nuts!

Choosing a Hosting Plan for Your New Website

Selecting a hosting plan is a critical step when you want to start up a website.  In prior posts I discussed choosing a domain name and creation of web pages.  Which brings the subject of hosting into play:  Choosing a hosting plan is a primary step in launching your fledgling web presence.

Once you have created the pages for your website, now you want to publish it to the internet.  To have your website seen on the internet you will need to choose a hosting plan.  A hosting plan is different from a domain name.  You own your domain name but you rent a hosting plan.  In it’s simplest terms a hosting plan is paying a company to broadcast your website onto the internet.  The key considerations for choosing a good hosting plan will be discussed here.

SERVICE  The most important consideration is the level of service provided.  Bells and whistles and fancy features will do you no good if you can’t get customer service in a timely fashion.  After you have published, or “gone live” on the internet, the last thing you want is for the website to go down and become unavailable to potential customers.  Therefore should a problem occur it is important to select a hosting provider that is readily available and will resolve the issue in as timely a manner as possible.

UPTIME  Does the hosting provider you are considering offer an “uptime guarantee? The better hosting providers will offer up to 99% uptime.  That sounds great, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time, which means over 7 hours out of each month! If at all possible, choose a host guaranteeing up to 99.9% uptime.

SIZE  How large will the website be?  Most hosting providers set the pricing on their hosting plans according to the space taken up on their servers by the website.  If your website will be media rich with videos or music or photo files, or a large e-commerce site with a lot of catalogue pages, you will have to take space into consideration as a criteria for choosing the right hosting plan.

LINUX OR WINDOWS  Which operating system should your hosting plan use?  This question has no relevance to the brand of operating system you are using on your computer.  What programming language was used in the Web site design?  For example, if you designed a website using ASP or ASP.NET, you’ll need to find a Windows hosting plan. If you have a Web site that uses CGI or PHP, you’ll need to get a Linux hosting plan.  Note that if you are simply publishing a basic html website, the choice of hosting Operating system won’t really matter as much until you get into more advanced languages such as PHP or ASP.

TRAFFIC  How much traffic or how many visitors do you expect monthly?  Most hosting providers sell their hosting plans on a sliding scale according to bandwith usage.  The more visitors or traffic you expect on your site, the higher the bandwidth you will need, and the more the plan will cost.  Usually the best way to proceed here is to start with a basic low bandwidth plan, and upgrade later as the traffic begins to flow to the website.

SHARED OR DEDICATED HOSTING  The question of shared vs. dedicated hosting is really answered in a very simple way:  A shared hosting plan is exactly as it sounds, and means that your website will be stored on a server along with lots of other websites.  In this hosting format you generally have no ability to make changes to the resident software on the system, meaning you cannot change or upgrade the operating system, or the database management system, etc.  You will have to work within the software structure provided by the hosting company.  Dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting is different in the sense that you will have full control over the environment that your website resides in, and you will have the only access to that space.  Dedicated server hosting gives you full control over setup of the operating system and auxilliary programs such as database management or shopping cart or database management software.  Generally customer support will be low to non-existent, since this type of hosting is geared to the advanced user who will be using his own custom setup.  The best advice I can give to the newbie is to use shared hosting at first, until you gain more experience and abilities and are ready to take the plunge into something as advanced as dedicated hosting.

At StartYourWebsiteToday.com our uptime guarantee is 99.9% and we offer 24/7 customer service.  The hosting plans that are offered include a variety: shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting, and dedicated hosting plans with either Linux or Windows operating systems for every need and budget ranging from the small personal website to large online multimedia sites to those interested in ecommerce website building. To review the options we offer, click HERE: Hosting plans.

Blogging for Professionals

Pro blogging is a very new idea with a deal of potential for enterprising individuals who have insight, drive, and a basic understanding of today’s innovative web technology. The ranks of so-called pro bloggers are still quite small, and there are very few people who make their living entirely off of their weblogs. The amount of individuals that successfully use their weblogs to supplement their income, increases every day. Although the popularity of blogging is increasing every day, no one can anticipate whether it will continue to do so.

Entering the circle of professional bloggers is a dream many bloggers share. There are very few people who happily devote an hour or more each day to their blog without at least from time to time wishing that they could earn some kind of fiscal reward for all of their work. Various patterns exist for making money with a blog, the most common being to sell advertising space through Google’s AdSense program or directly to a firm that wishes to reach the demographic that your weblog appeals to. Not that many people, nevertheless, can earn enough money to live on just through advertising on their weblog.

A lot of the individuals who read weblogs are also bloggers themselves, in part because of the fact that the individuals who use blogging technology on a daily basis are most likely to be engaged in what other authors are doing with the medium. A good sign of this is that people who claim the most pro blogging success have actually been bloggers that write about blogging itself. More than any other subject, pro bloggers turn their attention to the issue of blogging itself. A lot of pro bloggers make the matter of blogging the stunningly self-reflective ongoing center of their weblogs.

In the future blogging will be much more complicated than it is at this time. In the current moment, pro bloggers who attract the largest audiences and make the most money are mostly concerned with investigating the blogging movement and with offering advice to amateur bloggers. Blogging demographics are projected to change rapidly as the software becomes more user friendly. In actuality, it is very possible that the world of blogging as a pro will start to ponder the changes Indeed, it is very hard to predict precisely what kinds of blogs will be reaping the greatest financial rewards five or ten years down the road. Part of the fun and exhilaration of pro blogging is that it is ever modifying and growing.

Facebook Marketing

After dating websites came the social networking websites, such as MySpace and Friendster. This is a great social networking site that will enable you to keep in touch with your friends and acquaintances as well as meet new people and make new friends. With Facebook, you will be able to connect with friends, acquaintances, and with other people who you study and live with. This is considered by a lot of people as the best place to go to when it comes to marketing and networking.

With all the tools and applications that Facebook has to offer, you will see that it is a lot of fun and it will definitely provide a great way for you to interact with other people with accounts. With over 62 million subscribers from all over the world, you will see that this website is truly the Internet marketer’s dream. While the opportunities are huge, it still requires a little knowledge on the part of the user and there are now a number of tools that can help to make the most of this site.

By creating a great profile page you can be sure that you will be able to attract a lot of targeted traffic. You have to remember that this is a social networking website where you will need to make friends and build relationships. Facebook as well as other social networking websites are now just beginning to see their potential. If this isn’t enough to wet your appetite, consider the possibilities of joining other groups of people you may want to market to or even starting your own group. It can be groups containing members of your target niche and it can also be groups of Internet marketers where you will be able to help each other out advertise your business or your products and services.

You may also want to syndicate your blog using RSS. Also, you will be able to reach out to more people as well as get a niche market for your products and services. These are just some of the things that you can do in Facebook to effectively market your website or your business. Through these tips, you can be sure that you will get a lot of viewers in your profile page and increase the chances of getting them in your business website or get them to buy your products or services.