HostEase Hosting Blog

There are many different types of web hosting available and thousands of different types of websites out there. The type of hosting required often comes down to the type of website. Below are some examples of websites and the hosting needs they have.

SHOPS

The type of business hosting required for the websites of retailers largely depends on whether or not they offer online shopping to their customers. If they do not and it is purely an information site then the hosting does not have to be particularly complex. The website may just have information on what they sell and where they are located, or any upcoming sales.

Shops with online shopping facilities need much more advanced hosting solutions. The site will need up-to-date stock information, such as what is currently available. It may require automated systems that can tell when particular items are out of stock. The hosting must also be secure so they can take payments online.

AIRLINES

Airline websites have become more and more advanced as far as the usability features are concerned. This means that the type of hosting required now is much different to that of a few years ago. With most airlines it is now possible to book flights online. It is therefore crucial that it updates immediately, as users must be able to see what is still available. They also need up-to-date flight information, such as take-off and landing times, and whether a flight is delayed.

Many airlines now have check-in facilities, so passengers can check-in before they leave home rather than at the airport. The web hosting needs to be sufficient to cope with all of these features, hosting which is able to cope with large and often updated databases will be required.

HOTELS

As with retailers, the websites of hotels vary in terms of the capabilities of their websites, and therefore the hosting that will be needed. Some will only contain information on the hotel such as their rates and directions. Others may have online reservation capabilities so guest can book rooms through the site. The size of the hotel will also affect the size of the website and the hosting.

GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS

Government bodies can have very large sites, which will require the appropriate bandwidth. Depending on the type of website there may be times when it is extremely busy and there is a large increase in visitors. With government websites is might be very important that a site never go down, so reliable hosting could be a priority.

RECRUITMENT WEBSITES

Recruitment websites need to be kept up-to-date as they have to make sure they are not advertising jobs that have already been taken. Many can take applications through the site so the hosting needs to allow this.

REAL ESTATE

Websites advertising homes to buy and rent also need to be constantly kept up-to-date. When a property comes onto the market it needs to be uploaded quickly and it must be removed once it is sold or rented out.

NEWS SITES

News is fast changing, and the latest news needs to be uploaded almost immediately. Hosting where this can be achieved will need to be purchased. News websites such as the BBC and CNN are very large sites and have millions of users, so the available bandwidth for these must be sufficient.

GENERAL INFORMATION SITES

The majority of the time general information sites may be able to cope with basic hosting. Although it is dependent on each individual website, they may only be providing information for visitors to read. If it is a fairly static site then this is even more the case, as it will not need constantly updating.

PERSONAL SITES

The operations of a personal site are not that important when compared to a business site where the hosting can affect income. It may just be for family and friends. Therefore, even free hosting may be adequate.

Tags: business hosting solution, Online business, website hosting

Nowadays, it is quite common for anybody to have his own business online. And as we all know the first necessary step is to pick out a reliable web server for your website. You should pay special attention to the reliability of the web hosting service. Following I will explain why.

The importance of reliability
Professional web master should know the fact that reliability is the key to the success of a website, especially one that deal with online business transactions or other mission-critical functions. Actually, whether your website is hosted on a reliable server or not can directly affect your website visitors. Imagine, how pity it would be if a visitor come to your website for only one time and never come back again because your website is down while he is looking for something he needs. Your website should be attractive enough for he to become your frequent visitor, unfortunately, you give up the chance if you invest your money on poor hosting provider. Well, if you do not want to have frequent website failures, data loss and sale loss, then the easiest way is to go for a reliable web hosting solution.

Some aspects of web hosting reliability
As you have noticed that an unreliable web server will drive away your visitors, then you will need some attributes to judge whether a particular hosting is of high quality or not. Then those following parameters are for your reference: customer support level, server configuration restrictions, web site speed and hardware reliability. If all of these are satisfying you, then you will be able to have a good sleep over the nights.

A.Customer support level
On the hosting marketplace, most of hosting providers claim that they are able to offer excellent customer support. However, not all the companies are in that position. From my personal point of view, it is not wise to believe in web hosting reviews nowadays, as most of them are paid by hosting company and will not give you a true picture about the real level of a particular company. However, you can acquire it by asking some pre-sales questions. By asking these questions, you can not only get the answer to anything you want to know, additionally, you will be able to understand the level of quality customer support that is provided by the technical support staff. By asking questions about their power supply, the specifications of their servers, information about network connection and data center, you should know whether they are responsive and professional enough.

B.Hardware Reliability
A good hosting provider will never sacrifice hardware quality for profits because they should know that low quality hardware will be equal to suicide themselves. Therefore, they will be willing to invest a fair amount of money in hardware and keep the server up to date regularly. Generally speaking, they will need some scheduled downtime for hardware replacements and maintenance. It is a smart idea to know some information about scheduled maintenance before you sign up. Base on my own experience, you can judge whether a particular hosting company is a larger company with their own data center or a pretty small company who simply lease servers from the large company and resell it to you via checking out the hardware they have.

C.Server Configuration Restrictions
I put this in the third place because most inexperienced webmasters will not need much server configuration options, however, some experienced webmaster would like to have more control over your website. You are strongly recommended to pick out one from a couple of most popular control panel, CPanel and Plesk so that you will be able to perform most configuration changes and run your website successfully. You will be allowed to do following task within Cpanel and Plesk:
•Manage email account and set up webmail client
•Manage file with built-in file manager
•Analysis website traffic with stats software, like, AWStats
•Manage domain and subdomain
•Manage your MySQL database
•PHPMyAdmin web manager
•More…

D.Server response time
You must have this kind of online experience: clicking on a particular search result and waiting for several seconds, you are still not accessing the website then you turn to the next option. These days, web users expect more and more from internet so if your website can not provide instant accessibility, they will not be coming back to your site again. Well, we can say that your website speed will directly affect your website traffic, your earning ability and finally you potential revenue. In fact, your server response time is the key factor to your website speed. When a visitor clicks on a link to your site, firstly, the address of the site is required to be looked up in the DNS records, and then it will be able to know the location of your server. Next, the request is sent to your server. Therefore, your server must responsive enough and handle the request in a quick way. To ensure this you should make sure that the CPU (which determines the “start-to-load” speed) of your server is not overloaded. In addition, you should make sure that you are offered with enough resource so that the loading speed of your website will not be affected due to limited bandwidth or other resource.

Obtain a reliable web hosting solution
If a hosting company cannot provide you with a reliable service, it can be very difficult for you to success online. 99.9% uptime guarantee has become industry standard, therefore you should never try one with a lower percentage uptime promise. Some companies are offering alternative infrastructures to enhance server reliability. Your web host should be your partner that helps you succeed with a website or online business rather than simply a supplier.

Tags: customer support, hardware reliability, high quality, Online business, Server, web hosting reliability

To run an online business, you are required to choose a suitable ecommerce web host. Since you need to conduct online transaction, your web host should have the great capacity to store products files, the sufficient bandwidth to handle website traffic, the flexibility for customization and the functionality for online transaction. As you can see, it is not an easy job to find an ecommerce solution, especially if you are not familiar with ecommerce hosting requirements. So to help you make a right choice, following are some tips and guidelines.

Your website requirements

First and foremost, you need to know your need in a web host. This is the fundamental step in the process of selecting the perfect ecommerce hosting for your internet business. Only know what you need, you will be able to find out a solution that will fit those needs. For example, what you will be selling will affect your hosting requirements. You need to have an idea of the size of your product images to select a suitable hosting package with sufficient disk space and bandwidth. If you are going to display your product with flash files, more disk space will be required. Try to estimate the number of visitors per month for your website, which will directly affect your bandwidth requirement. If you mistakenly purchase a hosting plan that provide you inadequate server resources, then the performance of your business website will be suffered without any doubt and you will be of high likely to lose customers. Website can be developed using various programming languages. Ask your web developer about the preferred scripting languages that will be used in your website, which will help you to choose the right operating system to host your websites. If asp scripting is not a must, you can simply choose Linux platform.

Uptime and customer support

Secondly, any downtime is unbearable to your ecommerce website. Either poor hardware equipment or server overloaded will lead to website outages, which is a big disaster for you. Your ecommerce website should be always available online, irrespective of wherever the visitors are coming from. To be exact, you need to find a high uptime percentage hosting, something above 99.9%. Only a responsible provider with redundant service can guarantee this performance. If any problem occurs, then you will need to make sure that your provider will give you help immediately. The availability of customer support should never be overlooked.

Shopping cart system

Another primary concern for online business website is a perfect shopping cart that will enhance the user’s experience. A shopping cart is a software application that typically runs on the web server, which allows your customers to do things such as searching for a product in your store catalog, adding a selected product to a basket, and placing an order for it. With shopping carts, it is very easy and handy to purchase. For the majority of online buyers, they like shopping online mainly due to the convenient of online shopping. If your website can not offer this advantage, they will certainly turn away from your website. Applying smart, feature rich shopping cart system will make your website easy to navigate hence enhance ease of users and allow a purchase to complete in a very short time.

Features to enable customer interaction

To make your ecommerce website with profession look and feel, you had better to integrate products reviews, forums into your website. This also one of the best ways for you to keep contact with your clients and it offers the buyers the chance to show their own idea. Ask your hosting provider whether they offer these features so that you can easily add such functionality to your website or not. Real positive reviews from your customer will increase your sale since it instills confidence in your site visitors. An active forum is a great way to increase your website visited by target audience. What is more important is that a forum with flesh content everyday will increase your website visibility to search engines.

Security measures
Security measures are required to protect your online transaction in safety. Your website should be encrypted with Secure Sockets Layer. Therefore, you need to make sure that your hosting provider will offer SSL certificate for you. Most of them will provide you with shared one. If you need to have a dedicated SSL, you may need to purchase for extra money. To help the transaction data secure from thieves over the internet, it is strongly recommended to at least hold a shared SSL certificates on your ecommerce website.

Settle your decision
After you have checked all the above key attributes of an ecommerce hosting, you are able to make your final decision. Keep in mind that high price is not equal to best service, especially in this competitive hosting market. As long as you are willing to pay some time and effort to search around the hosting reviews or forums over the internet, you will definitely find an ecommerce solution that best meets your requirements.

Tags: Online business, shopping cart system, support, web host

As long as you are involved with online business, you may care much about the traffic of your website. Different questions come into your mind. How much traffic did my site received last month? Where the traffic is mainly comes from? How can the visitor find your website? Which page is most viewed? How about the share of return visitors? What is the percentage of your visitors that convert into a buyer on your website? Is there any solution for you to know the answer of all these questions? Definitely, this article will show you an unexpected way to analyze your website traffic and finally help your success in online business.

As a website owner or a web site developer, you may have known that there are many traffic analysis tools available over the internet. For example, Visual Analytics, Memex, Orion Scientific, Pacific all offer commercial traffic analysis programs. Is there any free web stats and traffic analysis tool available so that you can keep track of your visitors without any extra charge? There is. Trust me. You simply need to make sure your web hosting provider offer you cPanel for you to handle your hosting account.

As we all known cPanel web hosting becomes increasing popular due to various reasons. Such as, user-friendly interface allows you to manage your website, domain name and sub-domain name easily. You can deal with many tasks with email files, FTP, CGI scripts etc. All these features can simplify the site building and maintenance process, which increases productivity. However, one of the most important advantages that I would like to address in this article is the traffic analysis tools that it provides. These tools are most important because the traffic analysis will help you to generate your website traffic, which seems to be the most important purpose of every webmaster. To make you convinced about the importance of analysis tool come along with cPanel hosting, I will show you how to improve your website traffic via these tools below.

The cPanel hosting comes with three incredible useful traffic analysis tools for every webmaster, namely, Analog, AwStats and Webalizer. All of them can be used with different purpose or in different condition accordingly. If you are a newbie to these tools, you may find a bit hard to use. However, if you pay some effort to study, you will find that the learning curve is not steep at all. As long as you know how to use them, you will get to understand the importance of website traffic analysis provided by them. To help you master these tools quickly, I will present an overview of each tool.

Analog
Analog analysis is the most comprehensive but not sophisticated one among these three tools. You are offered with all the information you will need to improve your website’s traffic flow. However, it is not sophisticated at all because it presents information in text format instead of images or graphs. You can see your website productivity in a very clear way, which will give you a direction about how to improve your website and your sales. In the simple text, you are also able to know where visitors found your website URL. It is a good practice to use Analog on a daily basis to analyze your website traffic.

AwStats
AwStats is a much simpler but very useful tool that offered by cpanel hosting. Compared with the first tool, it is fairly easy to use. In addition to the detailed analytical information, it also presents the information with the help of charts and graphs to make you easy to understand. With AwStats, you are allowed to analyze statistics all about email, media viewing and much more. If you are a experienced webmaster dedicated to more immediate forms of traffic generation, for example, social bookmarking, then it is highly recommended you to use this tool. With it, you are allowed to schedule comprehensive analytical reports for maximum productivity.

Webalizer
If you are not interested in the above two tools, or you simply need to know your website traffic on a monthly basis, then you can choose the final tool, Webalizer. Webalizer provides traffic report on a monthly basis via graphs, which hands over you a wider understanding of the long term productivity of your website.

Overall, these tools are all very important to your website traffic analysis, if you are serious about your online business, it is a good idea to combines all three of these tools together so as to achieve the maximum traffic. Keep in mind that traffic generation requires patience, simply like SEO. At the beginning, it may be a bit hard to figure out what works and what does not. After you try with different methods, it is a wise choice to know how much traffic is coming in and where it is coming from via the traffic analysis tools provided by cPanel hosting. Finally, hope you can use these tools correctly and achieve a better result.

Tags: Analog analysis, Awstats, Online business, Trafic, Webalizer