Why Free Blog Hosting is a Bad Idea

Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under blog hosting, blog strategy, blogging, free blog hosting, setting up a blog | Leave a Comment

Starting a blog seems easy enough; just go to Google’s Blogger or WordPress and get started for free, right? WRONG!

Sure, you can start a blog for free, but what you don’t want to have happen is to start blog that grows into something that you want to continue to develop only to have it shut down by the powers that be. I know this first hand as I had a profitable blog shut down once in the past. That was all it took for me to learn how to do it on my own. I will be honest, my first blog sucked. I used a lame free template which had lots of limitations. But during this period, I learned about blog hosting, plugins, widgets, tagging, pinging, and social media. All of the elements that help make a blog successful.

I STRONGLY recommend starting out with your own blog so you maintain full control over it. The few extra steps you take in the beginning will be well worth it and you will learn some valuable skills in the process.

This isn’t meant to be an all inclusive guide to blogging, but just a list of things you need to keep in mind and some resources. As a disclaimer, this is based on using WordPress, which is probably the most used blogging software out there. There are others and you are free to do your own research, but I think it is a waste of time. So many people develop free resources for WordPress blogs that it’s a no-brainer.

Anyhow, here is my list:

1. You need a domain name. I recommend having a dot com domain and I recommend getting it from GoDaddy.

2. You need a hosting company that hosts blogs and blogging software. There IS a difference. when I was getting started, I tried several different hosts before learning this and finding a great blog hosting company.

3. You will need to choose a template. You can build a custom template if you are a web designer or pay to have one built, but there are plenty of free WordPress templates out there to start with.

4. You will want to use plugins. These are software components that make your life easier, give your blog more features, and allow yor users to have a more enjoyable experience at your blog. Here is a great list of recommended WordPress plugins.

If you need professional assistance with getting a blog set up or a corporate blogging strategy, please visit Web Traffic Team.

Happy Blogging!

Website Monitoring is NOT Provided by Your Web Hosting Company

Posted on March 27, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized, website monitor | 2 Comments

Many people don’t realize that if their website goes down, normally no one from the hosting will call them to let them know about it. In fact, many times I have alerted a web hosting company of a server error before they even knew about it.

So what’s the best way to monitor whether or not your site is up? First, let me start with how “not” to do it:

1. Manually checking the site every day. While this is better than nothing, it leaves lots of room for downtime, taking away from the benefit of having a virtual sales rep 24/7.

2. Waiting for someone to contact you to tell you that they can’t reach your site. Chances are they won’t, unless they know you and that means losing customers.

3. Pay a company lots of money to do it for you. Why not? Because you don’t have to. Now, the caveat here is if you have a site that brings in a lot of money, you obviously need to take additional measures to keep it going. I used to work on a web support team that hosted large websites such as American Airlines an Saks Fifth Avenue. Without disclosing pricing, let’s just say there were at least three operations engineers in the NOC (network operations center) at all times - 24×7x365.

so what “should” you do? There are several services out there that will perform these checks for you, and send you a message if they do not get a response from the site. They are not infallible, but for the most part do a great job. Currently, I use Site Uptime, and I have it monitor, not only the website, but also the mail servers. If there is a glitch, I get a page via text message, as well as emails at multiple addresses to ensure that I see it as soon as possible.

Site Uptime offers a free monitoring plan, but I recommend upgrading to at least the $5 per month plan because you get a few more valuable features.

Happy Hosting!

11 Things That Make a Web Hosting Company Suck

Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under reliable web hosting, web hosting | 2 Comments

Does your web hosting company suck?  Plenty of them do and I have had the misfortune of running into them over the past decade as I have used numerous different web hosting firms for both personal, business, and client websites.  Maybe I am just a difficult customer because I actually expect a company to deliver on their promises and because my background is in supporting websites for Fortune 500 companies? (I don’t think so)  Although I’d love to name them all, I won’t because I still use some and don’t want any of my sites to mysteriously go offline.

So what kinds of things make a web host suck?

1. Screwing up a DNS transfer allowing a site to go down, then not having anyone in support to fix the problem.  Earthlink did this to me back in 2000 I think.  I don’t hold a grudge, but they never really owned up to it. I think they should stick to being an ISP and not trying to be a web host. In my genius, I had them transfer it on New Years Eve since I figured there would be little traffic, but instead, I got paged at about 2AM while at a party by the company who actually helped fix the problem (kudos to HostMySite for stepping in and taking care of that).  I also stayed on hold with Earthlink for three hours (using my cell phone and a headset) while I conducted a training class and never got a response.

2. Having your site go down in the middle of a press release, but not due to high volume of traffic.  One day back in 2006, I had a press release go out and as I was checking the site, I noticed it was down.  I called the company and they gave me some lame excuse about a script running on another machine on the same box.  Ahh, excuse me?  Why not turn their site off instead of letting mine go down (clown).  Or better yet, transfer me to another box.

3. Have your web host not perform maintenance after hours.  One day, actually earlier this year, I had a killer blog post (not on this blog) and when I went to the site later and noticed it was down.  I thought to myself, well it was good, but it didn’t get enough traffic to bring it down.  I contacted the host and they told me they were doing maintenance.  Hmm, no warning and no website and much of the US was still awake.  Bad call.

4. Not having your stats tracking unless you go in and manually turn them on.  Just dumb - Thanks iPower.

5. Shutting down your website even after you have paid your bill because their email system sucks and they didn’t realize they got paid (and not at the last minute either).  Thanks again iPower.

6. Having mail servers that delay and lose mail then claiming to not actually have a problem. Also, getting phone calls from your friends saying “dude, your email bounced back” (happened today).

7. Blocking ISP’s from sending or receiving mail from their network.

8. Having incompetent web hosting technical support staff that arrogantly claim to know the answers when they are wrong.  With a little knowledge, you gloat and send them the trace route to show that they are wrong - dead wrong.

9. Making it really hard to cancel then continually billing you for services you don’t want.  Thanks 1&1.
(I recently had a colleague mention that she was having problems with them as well, so it made me feel like I wasn’t totally off base).

10. Web Hosting companies that host adult sites and other corrupt sites that you wouldn’t want to be linked to without being open about it.

11. Web hosts that don’t use any kind of server monitoring.  I have had to call various web hosts to ask about whether or not they were having server problems, only to be adamantly told that they weren’t, only to later be told that they were.  For the love of all that is sacred folks, please know the status of your friggin network before answering the phone.

So after all of this, who do I recommend?  HostGator.  That’s who this site is hosted on and for as little as $7.95 per month, you can host multiple sites on the same account.  This is great for those starting out and want to launch multiple websites or blogs for one low fee. And yes, that is a HostGator affiliate link.  Why shouldn’t I get paid for saving you lots of trouble?

What You Need to Know About Web Analytics

Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under Web Analytics | Leave a Comment

A critical component of monitoring your success is web analytics.  This is the software often provided by your web hosting firm that tells you all about your visitor patterns.  By viewing your web analytics, you can see who has come to your website, where they cam from, how long they stayed, and more.  This is valuable information because it will not only show you that your business is growing, but it will confirm what marketing practices are producing for you, so you can determine how to adjust your marketing campaigns.  If something is working well, then by all means, keep on doing it.  If something is not working, but rather draining your wallet, by all means stop.

Type of Analytics
There are two types of web analytics traditionally used; log based and javascript based.  Each of these has its merit, and I recommend using both.  The good news is that you should be able to have access to both log and javascript based analytics for free.  Many web hosting companies provide server log based analytics and Google offers a free javascript based analytics tool, called Google Analytics.

What to Look For
Some of this is pretty basic in that you want to watch your numbers daily, and expect to see increases in visitors, page views, and referrals.  Referrals are critical because this tells you where you customers are coming from.  If you have tapped into an effective means of web traffic, then look for ways to increase traffic from that source.  If you are not seeing traffic from a source and you feel you should be, find out what is going wrong. The perfect scenario is having web stats grow weekly and show a steady increase in visitors, search engine referrals, and referrals from Social Media sites.

Help! My Website is Down!

Posted on March 17, 2008
Filed Under web hosting | Leave a Comment

You sit down at your desk and open up your web browser to check out your pride and joy (which is set up as your default home page) and nothing happens. You hit the refresh button, and still get nothing.  You start to wonder if others are trying to access your site and how much money you could be losing.  As your blood pressure boils, you scramble for the phone number for your web hosting company’s support line to give them a piece of your mind for letting your site go down.  You call and tell them that your site is down.  They do some checking and assure you that “everything is fine on their end” – frustrated you hang up the phone. As you hang up, the phone drops and when you lean over to pick it up, you realize that your network cable is not plugged in – oops!

Let’s talk about a few things you can do if your website doesn’t come up before making that dreaded call to hosting support where you will be greeted with geek-speak after your whatever hold time you have.

If everything else checks out, you might want to give it a few minutes before calling your hosting company. Sometimes devices need to be rebooted which could take your site down for a quick

If you do have to call the hosting company, make sure you have all of your account information readily available, such as login name, domain name, and any password info. For your security, they may not talk to you unless you provide this information.

Choosing a Domain Name

Posted on March 15, 2008
Filed Under buying domains, domain names | Leave a Comment

Choosing a domain name is a very critical part of starting an online business. My personal belief is that naming a company should go hand in hand with selecting a domain name because the ideal scenario is to have both be the same. As online buisnesses have continued to develop over the past decade, many of the much desired “dot-com” domains have been acquired, leaving newcomers with other top level domains such as dot-net, dot-info, dot-biz, and dot-ws. My strong advice is to do whatever you can within your power to secure a dot-com domain; if not, you will surely help build whatever dot-com domain is related to the domain that you choose. For example, if you secured companyx.net and another company owned companyx.com, there is a high likelihood that many of your customers would mistakenly find the other company. If you offered a similar product or service, you’d likely lose that business.

A word to The Wise
There are also a few things to be cautious of when selecting domain names.

Are All The Good Names Taken?
It may seem that it is difficult to secure a dot-com domain. The good news is that due to business failures and domain squatters giving up the dream of a big payoff, every day domains expire and go back into the public domain where they can be registered. Take your time and be creative; it will pay off in the end.

Looking for a domain name? I recommend checking out Dotster or GoDaddy.

Web Hosting Platforms

Posted on March 14, 2008
Filed Under Hosdting Platforms, Unix Hosting, Windows Hosting, web hosting | Leave a Comment

In general, there are two different platforms that you will be running your website on.  It will either be Windows (Microsoft) based or Linux (Unix) based.  You must do your research and know what kinds of tools or applications you will be using to build your website and also what languages your developer or designer is familiar with to know what web hosting platform to choose.
A Windows (or Microsoft) web hosting platform is recommended/required for the following web programming languages and applications:

A Unix (or Linux) web hosting platform is recommended/required for the following web programming languages and applications:

Keep in mind that some web hosts only offer one “flavor” of hosting and even those that offer a certain platform may not support the specific application that you need to host.  The most common example of this that comes to mind is Cold Fusion hosting. Although many web hosting companies offer Microsift Windows based hosting, a majority of them do not offer support for or the ability to host sites build using the Cold Fusion platform.

The moral of the story is if you do not see the specific application listed on a web hosting companies website and you are considering using them, call them and ask about it before investing your time and money.

Welcome to Maxim Web Host!

Posted on March 10, 2008
Filed Under web hosting | Leave a Comment

We are your one-stop destination for web hosting information.  We are a continual work in progress and you can play a role in our development by asking questions.  We will credit you with the question providing a link to your website (certain restrictions apply).  Look forward to much more as we grow.

Send your questions to: questions @maximwebhost.com