How to Find the Right Host for Your Web SiteDeveloping a professional web presence requires a comprehensive strategy to ensure success. The most important element to the overall success of your website is your hosting service. Your hosting service cannot guarantee your site will succeed, but it can surely devastate it. No matter what applications you use (streaming video, audio, discussion forums, etc.) or plug-ins (Flash and Shockwave), if your visitors cannot load your site within a few seconds your finished. Recent studies have shown that you only have 20 seconds to grab your visitor's attention. The longer it takes your site to go from download-to-live, the less time you have to retain your visitors. Remember, your competition is only one click away. The best way to choose a web hosting company is to follow these six suggestions. Remember, selecting the right web hosting company is vital to your success on the Internet.
Determine how much disk storage space and how much monthly data transfer your site requires? Disk storage space refers to the amount of server space allocated to your account. The files that make up your website are stored in your storage space. These files include your html files, audio/video, graphics, etc. The data transfer is how much data your site transmits each month. Generally, data transfer includes any outbound traffic from your site, with the exception of e-mails. In general an average HIT is about 10K. This would mean that a monthly data transfer account of 2.0 Gigabyte would allow approximately 200,000 hits. Remember, if your data transfer rate is higher than the amount allocated by your hosting company you will have to pay for any extra data transfer.
How should you Host? There are three different ways to host your site. The three ways are shared hosting, dedicated hosting and colocated hosting. Shared hosting means that your site is positioned among other "websites" on a single machine. This type of hosting is usually adequate for the majority of "text-n-gif" sites. Dedicated hosting refers to your own dedicated machine. As you add more interactive elements to your site, you may want to consider a dedicated host. The final is a colocated server. You own the server, but it is located in your host's facility. You chose the bandwidth and your host provides the access.
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How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 2)
Herman Drost
How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 2 of a 3 Part Series) Copyright 2002 by Herman DrostIn Part 1 of this series, we discussed the the different terms used to describe web site traffic language.
Ways to Track Your Visitors
1. Counters – these are heavily used on web sites by newbies but appear unprofessional. It is very common to go to a page and see something like "You are visitor number 12345 to this page". These numbers cannot be trusted as the page designer has the ability to seed the base number or to alter the counter such that it adds more than 1 each time.
2. Trackers – tracking software details the path a visitor takes through your Website, so they do more than just count your traffic: they track it. Tracking software tells you more than just the number of visitors -- it can break visitor statistics down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and countless other values.
Examples: Hitbox (http://www.hitbox.com) Sitemeter (http://www.sitemeter.com) Extreme-DM (http://www.extreme-dm.com)
Counters and Trackers often require you to place a button or graphic on your site in exchange for the free use of their service, which is not ideal for most site owners. So try to avoid using these services unless you don't have the ability or expertise to execute tracking scripts of any kind on your own server.
3. Using Your ISP's Statistical Package Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) keeps log files which record every single "hit" (request for a Web page or graphic) on your Web site.
Analyzing log data can give you a good idea of where your site visitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how long they stay, and which browsers they are using. Before signing on with a hosting company, make sure they offer access to raw log files. Even if you don't need them immediately, sooner or later you'll be glad to have them.
There are also different types of log files - access, referrer, error, and agent are the primary ones.
Here is a sample of a raw access log file entry:
Access log Analyzing the access log will give you information about who visited your site, which pages they visited, and how long they stayed on the site. This is useful information in determining whether or not your site is working as you intend. The record below shows the visitor's IP number or hostname, date and time of the request, the command received from the client, the status code returned, the size of the document transferred, and the browser and operating system the visitor was using.
nas-112-52.slc.navinet.net - - [29/Jan/2000:17:17:12 -0500] "GET page.html HTTP/1.1" 200 23443 "http://www.mydomain.com/page.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)"
Referer Log The referrer log contains referral information - the source that referred the visitor to your site. If the referrer was a search engine, you will also find the keywords that were entered to find your site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record below shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.com to the index page of the site.
http://www.somedomain.com/page.html -> /
This record shows that the visitor came to my site from a search engine link. Notice the keyword data is included in the record.
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=design+tips -> /
Agent Log This log provides information on which browser and operating system was used to access your site.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)
Error Log The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated by the server and sent back to the client. The record below shows the type of server, date and time of the error, client identification, explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to the file that caused the error.
apache: [Sun Jan 30 10:09:57 2000][error] [client 195.238.2.162] File does not exist:/u/web/mydomain/favicon.ico
As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about how your visitors are using your site. Now we will talk about how you get the relevant data extracted from the log files and compiled into a useable format.
In Part 3 of this article series, we'll discuss Web Traffic Analysis Software.
Herman Drost is a Certified Web Site Designer (CIW), owner and author of iSiteBuild.com Affordable Hosting, Site Design and Promotion Packages http://www.isitebuild.comSubscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. Read more of his in-depth articles at: www.isitebuild.com/articles
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What makes a good Web Hosting Provider!When building your website and getting it hosted online, you want your site to be up and running on the World Wide Web 24/7 without any hitches so that it is making you money all the time and all you have to worry about then is getting visitors to your site, doing seo, getting repeat visitors, maximizing your sites revenue, etc. You don't want to have to worry about your web hosting and it's stability.
So, when choosing a web hosting provider to host your website with, you want to try and get the best web hosting provider so that your site is always up and running smoothly on the World Wide Web.
So what makes a good Web Hosting Provider? There are many things that make up a good web-hosting provider. Some of these include good support, good uptime, good backup system in place, good hardware, offers loads of web hosting features including email features, scripting features and more.
So where can some good Web Hosting Providers be found? There are many places across the web where you can find some of these good web-hosting providers. A good place to start is probably using a web-hosting directory as you can easily compare these web-hosting providers against what other providers are offering that's listed within any individual web-hosting directory. For example, with http://www.1hostseeking.com you can easily find and compare a large amount of some of the top and most reliable web-hosting providers online. You can easily compare each web host against each other so that you can easily see what they offer for the amount of money that they charge.
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