Another reason to switch to WhyPark
Building Your Website, Domains April 28th, 2009
A couple of weeks ago Stephen Douglas from WhyPark commented about some good news coming later this month and boy was he right! WhyPark announced yesterday that the service they used to charge $99 for is now FREE! This is great news and the buzz is growing among domainers.
Now, there is no excuse to not try WhyPark if you’ve been considering it. I’m moving the remainder of my domain portfolio to WhyPark from Sedo because I’ve already seen what WhyPark can do with my first 100 domains.
While there is no catch, there are some things you should know. Yes, you can get the free standard service now which in itself is very good, but there are other services they offer which can be a boon to really monetizing your portfolio but those are not free.
Here’s a rough breakdown of the add-on services:
$10/mo Enhanced plan for all your sites
+ Premium Templates
+ 10 MB Image Hosting
+ RSS Feed Integration
+ Emailed Stats
+ Social Bookmarks
+ 5% Discount on Services
+ Premium Content
+ Comments in Articles
$25/mo Managed plan for all your sites (I use this one and am very happy with it)
+ Premium Templates
+ 100 MB Image Hosting
+ RSS Feed Integration
+ Emailed Stats
+ Social Bookmarks
+ 15% Discount on Services
+ More Premium Content
+ Comments in Articles
+ RSS Feed Publication
+ Automated Newsletters
Also, for a fee WhyPark can help with traffic building by:
- promoting your sites in various sites and blog directories.
- content development and syndication (WhyPark will research, write, and syndicate articles for you)
- RSS Feed Submissions (if you are using WhyPark’s add-on Managed service plan which allows you to have RSS feeds on your sites, you can pay a small fee to have the RSS Feeds from your site submitted to feed directories.
Of course, you can save yourself some money and do all the above yourself if you’ve got the time. I know I don’t have that kind of time so I’m going to try out a few of my domains using WhyPark’s Directory Submissions and Blog Placement services and will report back in a month or so on how the link building and traffic turns out.
WhyPark may have lots of potential for domainers
Building Your Website, Domains, Making Money April 15th, 2009
When I first started domaining a year ago, I thought I would buy a bunch of domains and park all but a few (with a plan that I would actually build a few into either a full ecommerce site and/or informational site that would generate revenue through Google Adsense and affiliate marketing). However, I have found that parking the domains has produced little in the way of revenue. I know the main reason things haven’t been so great for me personally: I have sucko domain names. Some of my domains have good type-in-traffic but aren’t high quality domain names. In any case, I have spent most of my time trying to figure out how to monetize these domain names. The answer seems to be mini-sites. That’s the “buzz” these days. It really is a great idea. Now, if you consider WhyPark.com a mini-site builder, then you may realize they are worthy of your consideration and hard earned cash. I thought they were so I gave them a shot.
I really like what I see so far. In just two weeks, my traffic has increased by 300%. The problem I’m finding (but I would have this with any other site with content) is I’m spending an awful lot of time trying to do SEO for all of them.
Let’s start off with the basics with regard to WhyPark. You do have the option to add keywords so if you do your keyword research and add those awesome keywords, you’ve got one small part of the SEO done. But obviously there’s so much more to do if you want traffic. I’ve tried listing my first 20 sites in five popular blog directories and four major search engines manually and it took a few hours - painful! And I have another 80 to do! Oh, by the way, WhyPark will do any or all of your SEO for an added charge - I haven’t tried these extra services yet but may consider trying out these services on a couple of my websites to see if they can do a better job than I. I’ll post back on this if I do try it out!
So, for my first 20 sites I also wanted to make sure I had visitor tracking so I initially used Google Analytics but found it has some problems with the WhyPark sites and Google Analytics, so I switched to StatCounter.com and I’m much happier. Actually, it’s nice because it’s more user friendly than Google Analytics. I also manually added sitemaps to each of the 20 websites to Google. Between adding all my domains to the StatCounter for my website statistics and then adding my sitemaps to Google, it took another few hours.
WhyPark has a section titled Site Settings where you can add your Statistic Code (from Google Analytics or StatCounter or your favorite tracker) and also a section for Sitemap Verification. Doing the sitemaps was a pain though going back and forth between WhyPark and Google: first, add the Domain Name to Google, click verify and then choose method (I chose META tag since it was simple to copy the one line of HTML code and paste it into WhyPark’s settings), then back to Google to click Verify and then adding the name of the sitemap to the just added Domain. By default, all the generated sitemaps from WhyPark are http://www.DOMAINNAME.com/google-sitemap.cfm so that made things easy.
As I mentioned, I have found that in the two weeks my domains have been with WhyPark, I have seen a large growth in traffic compared to what I was receiving through Sedo. But to be fair, I did get a lot of people coming in through organic traffic generated by the WhyPark content so I really can’t compare the two. Receiving organic traffic was surprising because I don’t think the WhyPark content is entirely engaging and actually some of it is out-of-date. But it did work nonetheless so I can’t complain!
All in all, WhyPark may be the way to go if you find your PPC sites aren’t generating the revenue you’d like to see and you’re looking for an alternative.
Domain development dilemma
Building Your Website, Business, Domains March 28th, 2009
So, I have this dilemma. A dilemma that I’m sure most domain owners (or domainers) face at some point in their domaining career. What the heck should I do with all my domains!? There are a lot of great things you can do depending on the time, patience and budget you are willing to work with. Things such as:
Domain Parking
Mini-Sites
Ecommerce Store
Wordpress Sites
Domain parking is great if you have a lot of good domains with natural type-in traffic because you will likely generate decent revenue for all the PPC’s that you receive. The only caveat is that there is a lot of talk about how the PPC earnings have gone down likely due to the economy and other factors. I personally think people have gotten more technically savvy and realize what a PPC site is and avoid clicking on the links.
If you’re new to domaining, some of the places you can park your domains are Sedo.com, Skenzo.com, Parked.com, TrafficZ.com, WhyPark.com, ParkingRevolution.com, or ActiveAudience.com,. Some of these sites have strict requirements regarding their acceptance of your domain portolio such as you must currently be earning a certain amount of revenue through your current parking provider or you must have at least 1000 domains, etc. I believe Sedo is the only one on my list above that does not have any requirements while the others do. (Sadly, I tried to get a couple hundred domains parked at Parked.com and I was rejected probably because my domains were not of the caliber they were looking for so for now I stick with the one that still loves me, Sedo. :) )
However, I’m considering WhyPark.com. Why? While it’s one of the few places where you PAY to park your domain, you have the greatest customization through them. You can add images (theirs or yours), relevant unique content, SEO, custom pages, etc. You can even ad your own ads! You can park up to 100 domains for $100 so that essentially costs you $1 per domain if you have 100 domains to park! (Sorry Sedo! I still love ya though!) :)
So, with that said about parking domains and stagnating revenues, there has been a lot of hype of a new way to develop domains called mini-sites. This is a neat concept but a fairly new one so I’m going to wait on this until the results are in. The concept being that you purchase a mini-site for your domain from a company such as MiniSites.com or AEIOU.com. The site or sites that you have created are usually a 1-page up to a 5-page site with a few articles written for that sites keywords and, of course, advertising so you can earn revenue. Costs vary but can range from $80-$250 per site from the two sites I mentioned. I’ve read mixed reviews on these especially regarding the actual results of their SEO generating a true increase in traffic. If that’s the case, then there’s always room for improvement and with a little time, who knows…maybe they can achieve true SEO perfection.
E-commerce is one of the more time consuming ways to develop a website; that is if you’re going to go the traditional route (eg. create website, get inventory, market your site and then sell/ship products). If you’re planning on creating multiple e-commerce sites at this level, then I’d have to say you’re nuts! 
It could be possible even if you hire a full-time shipping staff and leased a warehouse for your inventory, but even then, having just one e-commerce store would be enough of a management workout! One of the other ways that you could have your own e-commerce store with minimal management and no inventory is to have an Amazon Associate Store. I wrote a couple of posts about doing this if you’re interested: A great way to setup and online store and Instructions for setting on an Amazon Associate store. I’ve got a couple of AOM stores setup and plan on creating a couple more but need to work on the SEO for them (gosh, it seems that darn SEO is a full-time job in itself!)
Lastly, you can setup simple Wordpress sites. Those are probably the easiest to mass produce on your own. This is what I’m considering doing but WhyPark is still in the running.
Wordpress pros - free, lots of free templates
Wordpress cons - time, time and time (time to setup which isn’t too bad but the time it takes to maintain articles is going to be painful not to mention all the SEO that needs to be done for every site), plus I would have to pay for hosting all my sites.
WhyPark pros - I will have more free time then compared to the Wordpress option (even if I spent time customizing my sites through WhyPark)
WhyPark cons - it will cost me $1 per domain and I probably won’t know how good their SEO truly is until AFTER I sign up.
So for me the bottom line is how much is my time worth and which option is likely to generate a nice monthly revenue in the long run.
Joomla! - the quickest, easiest way to build a website
Building Your Website, Hosting, Technical Stuff March 22nd, 2009
If you’ve heard of Open Source software, you’ve heard of Joomla. Well, okay, you may not have heard of Joomla but you have probably heard the concept of Joomla because Joomla is open source. Open source is free and openly available software applications for your personal or commercial use. Yes, you heard it right. Free. Open source consists of software applications that are free and many of them are good. One in particular is Joomla!
Joomla! is a content management system often commonly referred to as CMS. CMS is your best friend when it comes to managing any website with content. Joomla! in particular is easy to install. Customizing how your content will be displayed will likely be the most time consuming thing but it will be the most time consuming thing regardless of the application you use to setup your website.
Joomla! can be installed typically two ways: through your hosting provider or uploading the Joomla! files and running the install on the hosted server. Of course, the latter is easiest because it’s literally point-and-click. My site, WebMom Domains, offers Joomla! and other open source applications with every hosting package. Of course, other hosting providers also offer Joomla! and other open source apps as well. You’ll want to check the hosting provider before purchasing a hosting package to ensure they have these apps if that’s your interest. You should also ensure that your hosting provider has Linux running PHP 4 or 5 (5 is recommended) and Apache 1 or 2 (2 is preferred). You can use Windows hosting but personally I think Linux will give you less headaches. Check out Joomla!’s technical requirements.
Just to give you an example of the simplicity of Joomla!, take a look at www.byebyediapers.com. I created this website in TWO hours. Of course, it’s not stellar nor is it complete but what you see took me less time I would have imagined. I installed it through my WebMom Domains hosting account by clicking the Install button.
Just to give you an example of the point-and-click ease of using my WebMom Domain’s hosting, take a look a these screen shots:
When I logged into my hosting account, I selected “Your Applications”
And then I clicked on Content Management on the left and then Joomla!
And then I clicked the red Install button.
For my website ByeByeDiapers.com, during the installation I chose to install Sample Data (which is essentially the Joomla! Demo Website you see on Joomla!). Ideally, you would not chose install Sample Data but I wanted to see what it looked like out-of-the-box.
I made a few changes such as changing the template under Template Manager and what took me the longest was how to figure out the Category, Article and Section Manager. Because I had installed the sample data, I had to disable or rename most of the information (that’s why I wouldn’t recommend installing Sample Data unless you want to play around with it and learn it).
With Joomla! you can get free Joomla! templates or you can pay to purchase premium templates. Just search “joomla template” on Google or your favorite search engine. Also, you can pay a PHP developer who is familiar with Joomla! to customize your Joomla! website. If you’re familiar with elance.com, you can hire a freelance Joomla! expert for a reasonable price.
Also with Joomla!, you can find an endless amount of extensions which really allow for the greatest customization of your website straight out-of-the-box. For example, you can add a Google AdSense Module or extension to display Google AdSense on your site. Or you can add Photo Galleries, Calculators, Maps, Rating systems…the list goes on and on.
You don’t need to know any programming nor do you need to know any HTML to install Joomla! Of course, the more you know, the faster you can get things done. :)
Instructions to setup an Amazon Affiliate store for your business
Building Your Website, Business, Making Money March 14th, 2009
I finally installed the Associate-O-Matic software on my website. The installation is very easy. It seemed a little intimidating but it really turned out to be straight forward. I do have a computer background so I have a good understanding of system administration so that might have made a difference for me but I hope you’ll find it as simple as I did. I went ahead and modified the installation instruction from Associate-O-Matic to hopefully make it more user friendly. I encourage you to try the free 30-day trial and see for yourself!
The website I created with Associate-O-Matic is http://www.identifygreen.com/shop.php. It’s not fully configured yet. I think that is the more difficult (and time consuming part)!
Don’t forget, you need 4 things :
1) domain name (WebMom Domains has this.)
2) hosting with Apache and PHP 4 or 5 (WebMom Domains has this also!) :)
3) Amazon Associate ID (free and quick to signup)
4) Download Associate-O-Matic software
Installing Associate-O-Matic on your website
| 1. | Unzip the files contained in the Associate-O-Matic ZIP file to your local hard drive. Make sure that you retain the original directory structures. You will want to see the /AOM directory after you unzip the files.
TIP: To unzip .ZIP files you need a program such as WinZip. You probably have a program on your computer that will unzip this file. Try double-clicking the ZIP file. If you have a Zip program, your computer will know what to do with it. |
| 2.. | Open your FTP client software (or use the control panel provided by your web host) and upload the Associate-O-Matic files to your server (web host).
TIP: Some FTP client software examples are FileZilla, CuteFtp and SmartFTP. I use FileZilla. My FileZilla FTP client application looks like this:
See the circles in red? This is where I initially type the needed information so I can transfer or upload the files:
Click the Quickconnect button and you will get connected to your hosting account (aka server). Now, on the left side of your FileZilla application where it says Local Site, change to the directory where you unzipped your Associate-O-Matic download on your computer. First, upload (FTP) the encrypted PHP files in BINARY mode which are:
To set to BINARY mode on FileZilla, go to the Menu Bar and click Transfer –> Transfer Mode –> Binary Looking at the Local Site using FileZilla, select the 3 PHP files mentioned above (hold down the CTRL as you select each so they all remain highlighted). You can right-click the highlighted files and select Upload -or- you can drag-and-drop them into your Remote Site folder. Now, you can go back and change the transfer mode to AUTO by clicking Transfer –> Transfer Mode –> AUTO. (By setting your FTP software to AUTO, it will decide the mode to use whether it be ASCII or BINARY for the remaining upload.) Now, in your Local Site folder, select the AOM directory and copy the entire directory to your Remote Site by either using the Right-Click –> Upload method -or- drag-and-drop the AOM directory from Local Site into Remote Site. By selecting the /AOM directory, you should be downloading all of the following files below.
Ideally, you would FTP the files to your main public site root directory. Typically, most hosting providers have you log directly into the Site Root folder so you shouldn’t have to worry about changing directories on the Remote Site. Just make sure you don’t overwrite any of your existing non-AOM files if they happen to be named the same. Example Store URLs:
I used my Domain Name identifygreen.com. So, my store URL is http://www.identifygreen.com/shop.php. Check out the #7 section of this article for directions on how to change the URL so you don’t have to type in shop.php at the end. The shop.php and related files can be placed anywhere on your website directories so long as the hierarchy of Associate-O-Matic files remains the same in relation to themselves. |
| 3 | Set the permissions for provided files/directories.
Normally this can be done by right-clicking on the file or directory from your FTP client. NOTE: Windows users should contact their web hosting provider to determine the best method for changing file/directory permissions. Most likely they will provide a mechanism to do this within their control panel.
The permissions for Linux/Unix users are as follows and can vary from web host to web host: NOTE: You may need to modify your permissions beyond the below recommended settings. You’ll know because Associate-O-Matic will give you cues that you still need to write and/or read enable a particular folder such as /aom. For example if 775 doesn’t work you may need to make it 777. Okay, so using FileZilla, you would Right-Click each file or directory below and select File Permissions and make sure the Numeric Value is set to the numbers below. (Don’t worry about the CHMOD part - that’s geek talk for linux folks!) :)
I checked all my files and the only one I had to change was AOM.PHP. It was set to 644 and I changed the Numeric Value to 777 and clicked OK. |
| 4. | You can rename your shop.php and admin.php files or leave them as is. I kept mine the same.
If you rename the files, be sure to keep the .php extension on the end. Also be sure to open the file in a text editor (e.g. Note Pad) and edit the portion at the top where it says “shop.php” and change it to the new name you’re using. The same goes for the admin.php file if you rename it. For example, instead of: You could name it: |
| 5. | Now that all of the files are on your server, it’s time to open the Associate-O-Matic Control Panel.
This would be the admin.php file or the new name if you renamed it. For example, in a web browser open the address replacing “yourdomain” with your domain name: Another example of an admin URL is what I have for my site http://www.identifygreen.com/admin.php. NOTE: The first time you open the Control Panel, you’ll be asked to enter your login username and password. Once set, you’ll be asked for this login on all subsequent visits. If you ever decide to change your login, simply delete the file in the /aom directory called cfg.login.php. You’ll then have a chance to reset the password. You can also reset the login from within the control panel. |
| 6. | Once you enter the Control Panel, you’ll see a number of settings.
At this point you’ll want to make sure you enter your correct Amazon Associate ID (Amazon Section) and the other information for your site (Site Section). It’s the first screen to come up so make sure to get it in there right away and click Save All Settings. Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of customizations you have at your disposal. You can actually save your settings at this point just to make sure everything works. Or go ahead and enter some more of your site details and then save. In the Control Panel Settings section of our online documentation, we describe in much more detail each of the various settings. You can login to your Control Panel at any time and update your settings. |
| 7. | If you would like your domain name to point to your store page (shop.php), please read this post in the Tips & Tricks section of our forum:
http://www.associate-o-matic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=52 One suggestion would be to use Domain Forwarding where your Domain Name is held. For example, if you purchased your Domain name from WebMom Domains, you would:
That’s it! (Note: It may take a few minutes for this to take effect.) |
| 8. | Congratulations! You’re done. Lastly, view your store from within a web browser. |
| IMPORTANT NOTE: If you see a blank screen or errors, please see our troubleshooting section. ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure you are using an Amazon Associate ID that matches the locale of your store otherwise you won’t receive credit for sales from Amazon. |
|
Reasons why websites need good content
Building Your Website, Marketing Your Website March 7th, 2009
You can have the coolest looking website around but if you don’t have much content or solid content, you will be guaranteed not to get many visitors. The reason? Search engines are not interested in stale content. If you have stale content, you will rank low with the search engines. If you have NO content, you will not even rank. If you have some relevant content that is updated a couple of times a week, you will get more noticed by the search engines. And if you are writing articles or posting to your blog multiple times a day with relevant content, you will rank highly.
The idea from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint is that you want to be picked up by search engines such as Google and you want to rank highly (that is, you want to appear on the first search page ideally…not several pages in!) In simplest terms, this is called Organic search results. You don’t pay Google for showing up “organically” on their searches. However, if you want to, you can pay Google through their Google AdWords program to show up in their Sponsored Links. More about that in another post.
So, back to content…
Where do I get this content you ask? Well, of course, the best way is to write it! You can also pull RSS feeds to your website but the problem is that others are doing the same thing and the more duplicate content that is on the internet through these RSS feeds, the lower your website will rank according to the search engines if you have those RSS feeds on your website.
Do I have to write it all myself? No, you don’t!
If you are in a position to write all your content, that’s great. However, if you just don’t have that kind of time, you can do a number of things. You can hire a writer through freelance service websites such as elance.com or shelancer.com or you can purchase PLR (Private Label Rights) Articles from various PLR websites.
How PLR Articles work is that you purchase the rights to an article and then you rewrite that article’s content for your website or newsletter and use it as your own. You can also purchase the rights to eCourses or eBooks to use as your own. Just be sure to read the rules for obtaining and using these rights as they can vary slightly from website to website.
A great place to purchase PLR Articles is EasyPLR.
The owner, Nicole, thoroughly explains PLR on her website and even compares against other PLR sites so you know what you’re getting through her website. This is a great place to start if you’re interested in using PLR Articles to build content on your website!
A great way to setup an online store for Amazon
Building Your Website, Business, Making Money March 6th, 2009
I just ran across a website that allows you to create a custom Amazon Associate storefront in literally minutes! It’s called Associate-O-Matic.
What’s an Amazon Associate store you ask? It’s your own online store featuring Amazon products. When people purchase Amazon products through your online store you can earn up to 15% referral fees through Amazon.
All you need is a Domain Name and a Hosting account with Apache and PHP (WebMom Domains has both for its hosting so you don’t have to worry about it if you sign up with us!).
You can sign up for Associate-O-Matic’s Lite or Full Version. The difference between the two is that the Lite version is FREE while the Full version has more functionality. They have a comparison checklist for both versions on their website that you can check out. You can also sign up for a 30-day Full version trial which is what I will be doing. I’ll report back to you on the ease of setup when I’m done!
Besides needing a domain name and a hosting account, you will also need to become an Amazon Associate which is easy to do. The sign up is FREE and once you create an account, you can use your Amazon Associate ID and build your online store with Associate-O-Matic. Actually, if you sign up for an Amazon Associate account, you will find there are many other opportunites to generate revenue. I will be adding those ideas later…
Using Social Networking to Advertise Your Business - Part 1
Building Your Website, Marketing Your Website February 22nd, 2009
Here is a brief intro to advertising your business the best way: the free way! :)
If you don’t have any accounts at the following social networking sites, you should create one for each:
Besides just connecting with friends and family on Facebook, you can also do a couple of important things to help your business: start a Group for your business or create a Page.
My personal preference is creating a Page for your business. Why? Because Pages are more customizable then Groups, you don’t have any limitations on the number of fans you can have and your personal information including your name does NOT appear on the Page unlike Groups.
Once your Page is created, you can post updates on your Page via the Wall message or just add Notes that your Fans can see. Oh yes, what’s a Fan? It’s someone who likes you or your company and wants to follow what your business is doing. By someone becoming a Fan of your business Page, it simply lets others know they like your business. When they become a Fan, it shows up in their profile for others to see. It’s displayed as “xxxx just became a fan of xxxx” and the link appears for those curious about checking out this newly added fan page.
You can also add a Link to your profile that will remain static on the left-hand side of your profile so your other Facebook friends will see it whenever they look at your Profile. That’s why it’s important to create a growing presence for yourself and your business on places like Facebook. It may be not huge but…it’s free advertising and has the potential to be huge or viral. (Viral Marketing in simplest terms is “word of mouth” marketing - your company URL or website info passed on from person to person.)
MySpace
With MySpace, you can have your MySpace page be your business or you can have your own profile and put your business and/or website info on it. Ideally, you would create the MySpace page with your business name being the name of the MySpace page. You will want to get a little personal without getting too personal. What that means is that you want your visitors to feel comfortable knowing a little bit about you but don’t give too much information about yourself since there are weirdo’s out there! Also, you can say “No Answer” to some personal info such as your religion preference, etc.
Here’s a great blog article on MySpace setup for your business http://onlinebusiness.volusion.com/articles/myspace-business-page
The difference between Facebook and MySpace is that ANYONE on MySpace can see your profile versus Facebook where you can only be invited by your friends to be added as a Friend on Facebook. A nice safety mechanism if you ask me! The only caveat is that while your Facebook profile is hidden from the general public, your Facebook Page is not. Anyone with a Facebook account can see your Page (not your Profile) so I would be careful not to put too much personal information on the Page.
Twitter is another popular place for social networking. Twitter’s concept is pretty simple and this model may or may not work for your particular business, but hey, it’s worth a shot. Okay, after you create an account on Twitter, you can put out messages on your Twitter account (which should be your business name) giving your Followers updates in 140 characters or less.
So you put out very short messages or as the industry calls them “tweets”. Other tweeters or followers may see those tweets and if interested, they will start to follow you. In these tweets, you can put out short messages such as “hey, I just read an awesome article on generating revenue for your business” for example, and then ideally you’d put a URL link to that article so people can click on the link (which is nice because it validates your tweet). The more followers, the more hits you’ll receive on your website.
LinkedIn is another great site although it’s more for networking from a career standpoint. However, it’s good to create an account because it’s another good inbound link to your website (helps with SEO). When you setup your profile, you should add your business information and URL link also.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more you can do with using social networking sites to boost your company’s business and I’ll be adding those in the next week or so.
What kind of hosting is right for me?
Building Your Website, Hosting February 16th, 2009
There are many types of web hosting options that are available. They start from the very basic hosting setup for beginners where you are sharing space on a server with many other customers to a server or set of servers completely dedicated to your business needs.
For example, WebMom Domains has a variety of hosting and server options from the very basic hosting for your personal website to an enterprise solution for a large company.
When you take a look around the internet, you’ll see hosting plans labeled something like beginner, economic or cheap. They usually offer a small amount of disk space, small bandwidth or transfer rate and most include email accounts, MS SQL or MySQL databases as well as software tools that would allow you to do things like create a forum for your visitors.
The larger hosting plans offer essentially the same things as the cheaper plans but the big difference usually is the amount of disk space and transfer rates - they tend to be much greater plus have many additional features.
Well, which one is right for me you ask?
Do you have a strong online presence already? Or do you have a lot of potential traffic coming to your website in the near future? Hopefully, you have done a business plan and have projected business growth for the next 5 years (or at least the next couple of years) which will help you determine how many customers you are likely to have coming to your website.
If you project high growth in the first couple of years of your online business, then you will want to get a premium hosting plan now. However, if you are not sure or you suspect business growth will be slow the first couple of years, then obtaining a simple hosting plan with minimal disk space and bandwidth would be just fine.
If you get a small hosting plan but then find you have a lot of incoming traffic or that your database files have grown to the maximum capacity for your current hosting plan, then you can always upgrade to a premium hosting plan. What that means is that either the hosting provider will give you more space and bandwidth seamlessly or you may need to move your website files to a larger server or a dedicated server with possibly just a tiny bit of downtime.
Web Hosting - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Building Your Website, Hosting February 16th, 2009
I’m going to break down web hosting into my three unique categories: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The Good (Not free but guaranteed NOT to give you any headaches!)
There are thousands of domain and hosting providers out there. Most of them carry decent hosting plans and most are similar to some extent but they are going to cost you money. Most of the basic plans start around $5 and go on up depending on the hosting provider and services provided.
They are yours to do whatever you wish with them. They are not ad-supported in any way.
Some things to consider…
You’ll want to make sure they guarantee 99% and higher uptime (in simplest terms this mean the amount of time on average that a hosting provider guarantees their servers and/or networks to be up and running). This is important because as an online business, you cannot afford to have lengthy downtime.
For example, what if you spent lots of money on a Google ad campaign for a weekend sale you were running on your online store and just as business started picking up over the weekend, the server your website is hosted on crashes or they take it down for maintenance (technically you should pay attention to any downtime notices given to you by your hosting provider and therefore you wouldn’t plan such an ad campaign during this time…right???) So, they take the servers or network down for 4 hours for emergency maintenance and all the people coming to your website during that time will find it unavailable. Not only will you have lost potential business from existing customers, you will have lost money on your ad campaign because you were trying to draw new customers to your website as well and it was not available. Most of those customers, especially the potentially new customers, will likely not return.
But wait, it’s not just this one weekend they have 4 hours of downtime, it’s every weekend or it’s an hour every evening and so on. That’s less than 99% uptime and that will hurt your business. So make sure your hosting provider guarantees 99% or higher uptime. WebMom Domains is one of many places offering 99.9% uptime. You can’t afford anything less.
The Bad (Semi-freebies, aka Free with a purchase)
Okay, this is not entirely bad (but it sounded kind of cool saying Good, Bad and Ugly, didn’t it?) Domain and Hosting providers such as WebMom Domains, Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Dotster, etc. offer free websites and hosting when you purchase a Domain name or other products from them. The only caveat is that while the website setup and hosting is free, it will include some form of their advertising on your website generally termed “ad-supported”. Some Domain providers may have pop-up ads that show up on your free website, some use ad banners at the top of your website while others use a small area of your website such as WebMom Domains.
Again, while it’s nice to have a free website, if you intend on running a business or blog for profit this is probably not the best route to take for the reasons mentioned above. If you want to have a place to put your family pictures to share with friends and family, then this is a great option.
Another good reason not to have a free website is that you are generally given a small amount of bandwidth, disk space, emails, etc. Say for example, you are the person that designed the SnuggieTM and you want to sell it online. After you launched your online store, business was slow but then through some aggressive marketing your business suddenly and exponentially grew. Let’s say the number of people coming to your website grew from 30 hits to 3,000 in just a month! If you have small bandwidth (meaning the amount of traffic going to and coming from your site), your site will slow down because it cannot handle all the traffic. If your site is slow, guess what? People are going to get irritated when they click to purchase that SnuggieTM on your website and it takes one minute for the web page to load! You will lose customers real fast. You need to consider paying for a decent web hosting plan if you are going to take your business seriously and you want to make sure you can upgrade your hosting plan easily should you need greater bandwidth, disk space, etc.
The Ugly (The Freebies)
Completely free websites.
That’s right…for absolutely free, almost no-strings attached websites, you can go to places like Webs.com to get your very own free website.
The catch? Like the free with purchase websites mentioned above, your website will have Webs.com advertising somewhere on your website (they have to make their money somehow since it’s free to you). This means that there’s some advertising competition between you and Webs.com should you try and advertise for yourself on your Webs.com website. I really wouldn’t recommend it for a business especially since you don’t have much control on where the Webs.com advertising will be placed on your website. Again, this would be a great place to put up your family pictures to share with friends and family. They might give you a hard time about the ads on your website but who cares!? It’s free.
Another reason why I wouldn’t recommend free places like Webs.com is your website name or URL is going to be essentially THEIR URL.
For example, your free website on Webs.com will be YourDomainName.WEBS.com (YourDomainName being whatever you name your website)
If you plan on running a business, I guarantee that you people will not take your business seriously if your URL is, for example, ShoeEmporium.Webs.com. (WebMom Geek Alert: in this example ShoeEmporium is what we call a Sub-Domain ) There is a caveat to this however, you can buy a domain name and forward it to YourDomainName.Webs.com. Check out my other post What is Domain Forwarding.
Free services like these are great for personal use such as sharing photos or stories or experimenting with creating your own website. Not a good idea for a business. If you’re going to start an online business invest a few dollars a month into a small web hosting plan.
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