Archive for web hosting
13/01/2010 at 11:36 am · Filed under Crikey! It's Internet. and tagged: web design, web hosting
What is This All About?
Potatograss is a trademark belonging to AusBusiness Review Pty Ltd – an online company based in Perth, Western Australia.
Many of you would know that I no longer work for Fast Hit. After ten years of running the company I had to re-assess my goals and priorities, went back to uni to complete my MBA (at Curtin University) and currently look for a job, for a place to join another exciting team.
In the mean time, I thought I would do some web development work. I’ve got a lot of experience with Wordpress and running SEO/SEM campaigns. So, this is how Potatograss – web design Perth – was born. And here is our first commercial Wordpress site developed under this brand: Glass Pool Fencing Perth (The Glass Fence People).
So, if you need a site, or have too much to do – send some work my way.
26/09/2009 at 3:10 pm · Filed under Crikey! It's Internet. and tagged: web hosting
There are thousands of web hosting companies on the internet offering a wide range of services for all types of small and large websites (see web hosting reviews). With the development of virtualization technology and reduction of hardware prices, companies are now offering dedicated and virtual private servers (VPS) hosting. Dedicated hosting offers more power and security but it is not always the best option to choose for hosting of your business website.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the most common and the least expensive type of content hosting. It’s called “shared” because multiple websites and multiple database and email users share the same server hardware. Hosting technology is very well developed and allows single servers to be shared among many customers without breach of security of individual websites. Normally clients use a “control panel” that allows them to add domains, create websites and access their files from a browser.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is more expensive than shared, purely due to the fact that instead of hundreds of customers sharing the same server, the server is dedicated to one client. This client has full administrator access to the server and is normally responsible for server security maintenance, updates and server backups.
Shared is Better Than Dedicated
Unless there a specific need for a dedicated server hosting, shared accounts is a far better option for many websites. With shared hosting customers get more support, free server maintenance, server backups and server monitoring. Let me clarify this a little further:
With shared server, web hosting companies are responsible for the uptime of all websites hosted that each machine. And to maintain that, they normally perform the following maintenance tasks on shared servers:
- Hardware monitoring, for example watching out for RAM failure, hard drives, etc.
- Software monitoring – making sure that web server, database, email services continue to run.
- Service monitoring – if web server becomes unresponsive, failed services are automatically restarted and service logs investigated in order to fix the problem and prevent it from happening in the future.
- Powerful account management tools, including data backup and restoration features.
There are some companies that offer managed dedicated hosting, but additional services are usually included in the price that customers pay for their servers. Normally, at its best, dedicated servers only include hardware maintenance, and even that, customers need to know what failed before they can request a fix. So, with dedicated server customers need to organise the following service for an additional cost:
- Hardware monitoring (how will you know if your ram is faulty or the whole server is overheating?)
- Service monitoring. If your website goes down, who is responsible to login and bring the site back up?
- Security maintenance. If the server is hacked, who will login to investigate the problem?
- What about backups? How backups are preformed and what is the procedure to restore them on a new server?
As you can see, shared hosting is a better option for most of business and personal websites. Unless there is a specific need for power and security and the client has appropriate budget for security and backup maintenance.
23/09/2009 at 7:48 pm · Filed under Crikey! It's Internet. and tagged: domains, web hosting
The current shape of the Internet is heavily dependent on domain names for accessibility and online searches. And with the introduction of more and more new domain extensions, domains are here to stay. When buying a new domain it is important to understand the nature of the new website and select the online name appropriately. Here are a few suggestions that may be useful for beginners.
The Nature Of The Website
Ask yourself a few questions. What do you want to achieve by setting up a new website? What kind of website this is going to be? Is it for your existing company or a completely new venture? What is more important, being found by search engine or for the domain name easily remembered?
If you are setting up a website for an existing company, it is recommended that the domain name matches the business name as closely as possible. It is likely that customers will try to go to your-company-name .tld or similar URLs before they start searching. If your name is already taken, try to add “online” or “site” suffix to the end of the name. You will also find that search engines will favour websites that are closely relate to the business name on the contact page and next to the copyright sign in the footer of every page.
However, if you are registering a company or setting up a totally new online venture and will heavily relate on organic search engine traffic, it is suggested to register a domain name that contains keywords and key phrases that you think people will use when searching for your products. In this case longer domain names can actually be more beneficial than shorter ones as you are able to include whole words in it.
Geographical Location Of Target Audience
What, who and where is your target audience? Where do you expect your visitors to come from? Is your product or service region specific? It is critical to take into account the fact that the domain extension (e.g., .com or .com.au or co.uk etc) and location of the server that your site is hosted on, have significant effect on your online engine search results. For example, if your target audience is in Australia it is highly recommended to register a domain with an .au extension. In the same way, if your market spans across the world, you should not register a country specific domain name. There are some exception to this rule, however. Search engine webmaster tools allows website owners to specify the target market in their webmaster tools control panel. This feature, known as “geotargeting” however, is only available to top level generic domain extensions like .com or .net. In this case, if you use a generic extension and don’t specify your target market, the search results will default to the country where your server is hosted.
So, to sum it up:
- Choose a country specific domain extension if you targets this particular country.
- If using a generic extension, make sure your website in hosted by a hosting provider in your target country.
- If targeting worldwide audience, use a generic tld, such as .com or .net.
Waiting Period For New Domains
Search engines prioritize their searches based on the website (and domain) age and the number of external back links. When setting up a new site, keep it easy on SEO and other online promotion activities. You may see some good results at the start, but if you overdo it, you’re likely to be banned or “sandboxed” by search engines for a few months. Though questionable, many website owners report that this is the case. As with any other business idea, online marketing and promoting new websites take a lot of commitment and perseverance. Stay focused, have a plan of attach and make sure you devise an appropriate strategy before you launch on your online venture journey.
02/06/2009 at 4:40 pm · Filed under New Things at Fast Hit and tagged: co-lo, colocation, web hosting
It’s a good time to buy and co-locate a server. If you’ve been thinking of doing it, now is the best time. Australian Government offers 50% tax deduction on capital items such as computers and servers, but you need to do it now. Here are the small business tax deduction details.
Fast Hit provides colocation in Perth and colocation in Sydney. Let me know if you’d like more info on our colocation deals.