Cheap internet hosting doesn't have to be bad internet hosting. Many affordable web hosting companies offer tools and advice for making your site design as appealing and engaging as possible. Even the cheapest of cheap hosting services have a "Click-n'-Build" program to help you design your site. Containing a variety of such useful resources as fonts, graphic backgrounds and borders, clip art, photographic databases, color sets, and more, cheap hosting sites can really help you personalize your site to suit your tastes and reflect your uniqueness. Many cheap internet hosting services also offer templates of common website formats, as well as templates for such popular tools as event calendars, feedback forms, photo album organizers, and user forums. You can also find help designing your company (or personal) logo, a branding that can become one of your greatest marketing tools or your business's biggest crutch. You can find assistance from your cheap internet hosting provider on using Javascript, CGI, and Flash-based content. You can get help organizing and utilizing mailing lists and autoresponders. Streaming audio and video are other features extremely popular with web-surfers that the cheap internet hosting company you choose ought to be able to help you include in your site. Emerchants: even a cheap internet hosting package can help you set up your online store's "Checkout" counter, including helping you make your site secure and able to process credit card transactions. The user-friendliest of these web design aides uses a "drag and drop" technology that allows you to rearrange items and blocks of items on your screen much as you would magazine clippings in a collage or furnishings in a bare room. Usually you can preview your site with these design programs as many times as you like and test all the links out for accuracy. Some providers, even the cheap hosting ones, can automatically check your text for spelling and grammar.
Some hosting companies like to reward their customers by offering them significant discounts thru variety of ways - one-off offers, buy one get one for half-price deal, and so on. Here is a interserver coupon for you to consider! Other cheap internet hosting companies will offer a consultation, usually for a fee, assessing a website you've already built. Imagine, one on one feedback with an experienced professional telling you what does and doesn't work about your web design choices, and making ample suggestions about how to improve your site, with your specific goals in the forefront of their minds. What's that worth to you? Now ask yourself if you can really refuse such a valuable resource when it's so cheap, or worse, refuse it simply because it's so cheap. Even a cheap internet hosting company has to know something about site design; they got you to sign up, didn't they? I think this is a "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" type of situation. Never refuse outside feedback. Just be sure to use your own discretion in determining what suggestions to implement, and which ones to ignore. First and foremost, because there are so many inexpensive web hosting companies out there now, all competing for your business, that you'd get far less headaches and far more reward for your investment than if you try to do it yourself. Are you technologically savvy? Do you understand what it takes to secure a server? Do you have access to a broadband connection? Are you willing and able to devote the amount of time it'll take to solve the inevitable glitches that come your way one after another? To host your own server you will need: a dedicated computer (that means it must be used solely as a server and nothing else) with the capacity to handle the number of server requests that (you hope) will come in, a Network Interface Card (NIC) and a broadband connection with a high upload rate, Linux or another comparable O, and an internet service provider (ISP) that will support web traffic. If this sounds like it's trying to scare you, then you're following completely. With all the inexpensive web hosting options out there, you need a darn good reason to want to do it yourself. Disappointment with one (or even a slew of) bad web hosts is not a good enough reason not to seek out other inexpensive web hosting companies from the multitudes. If your site is promotional in any way - whether you're selling a product, a service, yourself - an amateurish presentation fraught with technical glitches and poor layout could cost you your business. The average web-surfer has a 20-second attention span, and if they encounter one problem accessing your site, they are unlikely to return. With minimal research, you can really take advantage of the fierce competitiveness in the inexpensive web hosting industry and find a service that offers mouth-watering promotions, and innovative features unique to your needs. More and more these companies are specializing, and you can find inexpensive web hosting companies catered to your specific operation. Most likely, if you're considering running your own server it's because your website generates a ton of traffic on more than one website or application. Fortunately, running your own server is not your only option. If you truly believe your capacity is going to be through the roof (high aspirations?) you can find many inexpensive web hosting providers that, for a fee of course, will designate you a dedicated server. This server will be yours and yours alone: you'll share bandwidth, memory, and storage space with no one. And the performance of your site will not be affected by the traffic and usage patterns of any other customer. With a dedicated server you will have your own IP address and root (admin) access. You have full control over server usage and software installation. Dedicated servers allow you an unlimited number of email accounts and databases and the speed is inordinately faster.
These packages, offered by many of your most common and familiar inexpensive web hosting companies, will often be divided into "managed" and "unmanaged". In an unmanaged dedicated server, you are the administrator. If you like the control, have the time and skills, but just don't have the hardware or connectivity, this may be the perfect option for you. Most folks, too tied up with the day to day of their online business, will prefer the managed option, similar to any other inexpensive web hosting package, simply with a dedicated server. Consider inexpensive web hosting as a viable alternative to running your own server and chances are you will sleep better at night. Is traffic important to you? If your online enterprise is anything more than a friends-and-family or vanity site, traffic is integral to your success. For the uninitiated, traffic is a measurement of the number of visitors clicking to and through your site. So how can an affordable web hosting provider still give you the help you need to get those visitors flocking to your website time and time again? One way millions of webmasters drive traffic to their site is through search engine optimization: essentially, designing the content in your site such that it appears more and more frequently on more and more search engine's pages, edging closer and closer to the coveted top of page 1 of search results each time. Before choosing an affordable web site hosting service, consider whether they offer any such tools, and if so, what? For example, does your affordable web hosting provider offer to review and analyze your site for search engine optimization? Do they help you select the keywords and keyword phrases that will best position your site where you want it to be? Will they help you generate meta tags, those all-important headers at the top of the surfer's browser? And while they're at it, will your affordable web hosting service also check your HTML for those detrimental inaccuracies? Another endless task of yours in promoting your site will be submitting your URL to every (relevant) search engine, directory, classified, and blog you can. And the more you do it, the more you'll find to submit to. Before you even make it to the bottom of your growing list once, it's time to resubmit to the top priorities. Fortunately, many affordable web hosting companies offer to automatically submit your site to the search engines, directories, classifieds, and blogs of your choice, and resubmit on an optimal schedule. Some may even make suggestions as to where and how often to produce the greatest results. Still others help you find websites with the same types of visitors you seek, and assist you in getting them to link to you. The most advanced affordable web hosting services among them will track the effectiveness of your traffic campaign so that neither you nor your automated mailer is wasting time. But let's say you've done all the proper and necessary submitting. How are you to know whether your site ever actually made it on the list? Whether from a scam, an innocent oversight, a technological glitch, or an error on your part, your listing may or may not wind up where you intended it to go. So one of two things is going to have to happen: Either you need to repeatedly check every search engine, directory, and blog to which you submitted your listing to make sure it's made it up there, or you can have your affordable web site hosting provider do it for you. But will they? That's the question. Having heavy traffic involves far more than just getting visitors to your site. You also want them to stick around for a while and explore. Traffic is not simply measured by how many times an individual clicks to your home page: it's also about how many links within your site they click to, and how much time they spend there enjoying your content. Yes, content. An affordable web hosting provider really ought to help you come up with a comprehensive, attractive, appealing, inviting site, both graphically and contextually. Can they help you make your site interactive? Animated? Even better.
Finally, and quite possibly most importantly, traffic is also about getting visitors to return to your site, again and again and again. You'll want to find an affordable web site host that gives you easy-to-use tools to update your site. Think about what features you'll need: a calendar, an autoresponder, newsletter, charts and graphs, etc. Each affordable web site host offers a slightly different twist on mostly the same selection of variables. Even if you're designing your initial site on some other third party program, when you realize how often you'll be needing to update your content (if, that is, you want repeat traffic), you're going to want facile point-and-click tools accessible directly from your affordable web site host. Find tools you like, because you'll be using them a lot. |
|