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!

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!

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?

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.

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.

• Try to visit another website.  If you can’t get to any other site, that is a good indication that the problem is not with your hosting company.

• Make sure you are connected to the Internet by checking both the physical connection and checking the icon on your computers Internet connection.

• If your Internet connection is live and you still can’t connect and you may want to try and reboot your cable modem and router.  This is usually done by simply unplugging them both and then plugging in the cable modem, waiting for it to initialize as evidenced by the flashing lights, then plugging in the router.

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.

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

• Hyphens. Although they are technically allowed, they are not intuitive so it may lead to confused customers or lost web traffic.

• Similar Letters Running Together. An example would be billsstore.com where if heard and not seen, a prospective customer would not know if the s was being used once by both words or twice. If you can secure both versions, I guess that would make it better, but I prefer to stay away from these altogether.

• Words with silent consonants. Until you are a recognized brand (and even then), it will be hard to know whether your site is normal.com or gnormal.com.

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.

• ASP
• .NET
• Front Page
• SQL database
• Cold Fusion
• IIS

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

• PHP
• mySQL
• Ruby On Rails
• WordPress
• php MyAdmin
• Apache

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.

Send your questions to: questions @maximwebhost.com