Taking on the task of web hosting without technical knowledge is a daunting and pricey undertaking. Doing so also greatly increases the risk of the web site falling victim to viruses and other malicious activities. Experienced web hosting providers execute expert security measures to ensure optimal defense against would be hackers and others wishing to cause damage.

The web host selection process is not a decision that can be made overnight. Several key factors must be examined. They include: The concept of the site. Will products be sold? How much space or bandwidth will be needed? How many page views are anticipated? And so on.

After careful consideration of site requirements, one of the most important considerations of determining who should be the web hosting provider is dependant upon the ‘uptime’ they guarantee.

The term uptime refers to the amount of time that the website will be accessible. It is important to remember that unforeseen events do occur and that uptime guarantees are not written in stone. That being said, however, any established web hosting provider worthy of your business will strive to guarantee no less than 99.5% uptime.

Calculating uptime is rather simple. First the number of minutes in a month need to be determined. In an average month of 30 days there are 43200 minutes (30x24x60) an 99.95% uptime would equate to 216 minutes of downtime over the course of a month.

While this may seem like a large number to some, smaller and less complex web site owners hardly notice the downtime and a 99.95% uptime guarantee is more than adequate. More complex web sites, and those operating round the clock e-commerce may be better suited for web hosting providers with a 99.9% uptime guarantee as this affords them no more than 4 minutes and 32 seconds of downtime. Completely attainable with the right web host.

Simply because it is referred to as a “guarantee” it is best to understand that technical pitfalls exist, servers are complex pieces of machinery that require maintenance and upgrading on an continual basis and there may be blocks of time where the web site may be rendered inoperable. Conversely, in order to be successful a web site must be accessible the majority of the time. If the web hosted provider does not guarantee a minimum of 99.5% uptime, web sites risk losing viewers and consumers to competitors who’s sites are available and running.

A successful hosting experience does not end after a web hosting company is contracted and a hosting plan chosen. A knowledgeable webmaster understands the importance of search engine indexing in over overall website achievements. Having a website properly indexed by search engines is the only way for people browsing the Internet to be able to locate the webpage.
Each search engine indexes web pages differently and for all intents and purposes current focus will be placed on Google. In order to ensure that a particular website is visited frequently, and therefore becomes more profitable, it is important that the webmaster understand three basic elements of search engine indexing; how are web pages indexed; is every page on the website indexed; how will webmasters know if their pages are indexed?
There is often a time delay between routine website upgrades and how long it takes for a search engine to index certain web pages. The time delay is indicative upon many aspects, such as:
The overall structure of the website. Webmasters must pay clear attention to the structure and layout of their website from the moment they begin designing each page. Subpages pay a crucial role in assisting search engine bots. It is important to remember to create a sitemap containing links to every other page on the website as well as a return link to the main page. Adequate page linking will ultimately assist in the site crawling process that search engine bots follow in order to index a website.
Correctly utilize Robots.txt files. Using the robot.txt file, in the appropriate locations, on a website lets search engine bots know what web pages they should crawl and what pages they should not.
Incoming links are essential. Google is notorious for using incoming links and the quality of the sites they come from in establishing page rank. The greater the page rank value of the website the more likely it is that the site will be indexed. For this reason, it is important to link to additional pages than just the main page. Pay careful attention to the other external sites if participating in a link exchange, however, poor reputation of a linked website can have disastrous effects on every website linked to them.
Get rid of session IDs. The bots responsible for Google site indexing are unable to comprehend or make use of session IDs (or session tokens) and ultimately consider them to be multiple pages containing the same content. It is important to remember to remove session IDs as they can have a negative effect on the indexing process.
There are many other methods of increasing the probability of a website being favorably indexed, to check how many web pages have been indexed by Google a webmasters can do one of several things.
The most effective, and by far the simplest, method of monitoring site indexing is by entering site: before the websites domain name into a Google search engine box. Most often, each of the pages that have been indexed will be populated with the results.
Here are some additional tips to increase site engine indexation:
1. Add a new template with new navigation.
2. Cap and control excessive links leaving each page.
3. Add canonical tag to web pages to recapture lost link flow.
4. Get a variety of fresh deep links to inside pages.
5. Add content to stagnant site segments to increase post frequency.
6. Redirect dated content to new pages, subfolders of sub domains.
7. Build a master sitemap and ensure that it is included on every page.
8. Rewrite mediocre titles, meta data or similar content by establishing a main keyword for each page.

Starting your website tip 1:
When choosing your domain it’s best to select one that is short and to the point. If you own a bakery for example, by this point www.bakery.com is spoken for. However if you last name is Smith or your bakery has an individual name like Blue Hill Bakery, you can try Smithbakery.com or Bluehillbakery.com. Most hosting companies have a tool to help you figure out if the domain you want is already taken, but my favorite is www.instantdomainsearch.com. It’s simple and gives you suggestions on available .net .org etc. variations on your domain search. The shorter the domain the better, not only with this help with people remembering your domain, but it can’t hurt your organic page rank either. Also, make sure that your provider offers unlimited subdomains. Most do without question, but double check before buying, otherwise you could spend a lot more then you should for a site with only a few pages.

Starting your website tip 2:
Usually when you purchase a domain with a provider, chances are you’ll use their hosting services too. You can aim your site from a domain host to a site provider, but if you’re just starting out it may be wiser to host the site and domain with the same company. Depending on the function of the site, be it a blog, corporate, or retail site, you’ll need to decide your storage space and bandwidth allotments. If your site is going to have multimedia you may want to bump up these selections. I’ve found that it’s much easier to back down your package after a test month then it is to have your site crash or be billed for the overages. Once you have an idea of what the site is going to be, within your accounts Control Panel, or cpanel, there should be many options offered by your provider to help you install the needed Content Management Programs on your hosting server. Little tip, I’ve found that WordPress is the most efficient when it comes to blogging, but Joomla is the best I’ve found when setting up a retail site. Both are very easy to dive into and are very robust, but Joomla seems to have better options when it comes to shopping carts.

Starting your website tip 3:
Traffic and tracking are the bread and butter of the internet. Being able to drive customers and track what brought them there is the name of the game. There are many options when it comes to these topics, but I’ll give you what I’ve found to be the best options to start you out.
When it comes to analytics, Google is a staple. You can sign up for a Google Analytics account for free, and they will walk you through the set up process. Be sure to have access to the HTML code on your site because you’re going to have to place some Google code to allow the analytics to gather information. There are other options out there, many of them, but Google does an excellent job of tracking all information and seems to be the default in the industry.
Now, the age old question of “how do I get traffic”? I won’t go into too much detail hear because to be honest there is just too much to write about, but I will clue you in on the basics depending on your end goal. If you own a retail site and you’re pushing a product, your best bet out of the gate is to buy targeted traffic for your site. Be very careful, you really do pay for what you get. You can buy very cheap traffic and never have a sale, or you can overpay for targeted traffic that converts. If you have the budget, stick to targeted, if not, try a mix, but all cheap is definitely not the way to go. If you’re a blogger looking to drive traffic organically, well there are volumes written on this topic. What I suggest in the beginning stages is to make sure your topics are relevant and articles filled with great keywords. But more importantly starting out are links. Once you get some content, go out and find similar sites to yours and try to do a link share with them. The more links back to your site, the better your ranking will become.

I could go on for days about tip 3 but I’ll save those for later articles. I hope this gives you a good idea of what to look for when starting a new site. Be sure to ask questions. Most providers have large staffs waiting to help customers. If you find a good rep ask for their name and see if you can reach them directly if you get stuck. It’s a learning process, use all you can to help teach yourself. Once you get it down, you’ll look back a realize it really wasn’t that big of a deal to carve out your spot on the net.
By Adam Truszkowski

Well, essentially, they would be plugins which are developed by multiple people rather than just one and would deal with the "most popular functionality requests with superlative execution", explained Jane Wells, writing on the WordPress blog.

"There would be a very strong relationship between core and these plugins," she pointed out. This would guarantee "the plugin code would be secure and the best possible example of coding standards". It would also ensure "new versions of WordPress would be tested against these plugins prior to release to ensure compatibility", she commented.

A screen in the plugins section of the WordPress admin would be home to the canonical plugins "as a kind of Editor’s Choice or Verified guarantee", Ms Wells said.

For a system like this to operate properly, every canonical plugin’s development community will most likely require similar infrastructure to WordPress with things such as Trac and mailing lists.

Ms Wells has now called on people to provide a new name for canonical plugins, as many have no idea what it means and having to spell it out takes away the focus from the core ideas behind the concept. So, will web hosting users get involved and suggest a new, catchy name?

There are a number of options partaking web hosting users can choose, including Standard, Core, Premium, Validated, Official and, wait for it … Canonical. As for the latter, the WordPress team said perhaps once people are familiar with it, the term may not be so confusing.

The WordPress team recently announced that beta-2 of WordPress 2.9 is ready to be tested. Web hosting users can see what they make of it by downloading it at their own discretion.

Written by Jessica Lighthouse.

A report has been leaked outlining plans for more use of social media and applications by the public sector – something that many web hosting users will already be doing.

Talking about the report’s emergence Shailey Minocha, senior lecturer in human-computer interaction at the Open University, said: "I think you have to show the value that these technologies bring."

She pointed to another big organisation that has social media working for them, Marks & Spencer, which has a presence on both Facebook and Myspace.

"I am sure that these tools will become more and more a part of the culture of work of an organisation," Ms Minocha added.

In a recent post on the Facebook blog, founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the social media company is making amendments to its network structure so users can set their content to be available to their friends, friends of friends or everyone.

Written by Freddie Simmonds.

They are, of course, not the only ones. Facebook has just announced that its user base has hit 350 million users across the globe.

This huge amount of users may be a result of Facebook’s "more generic audience" in comparison to other social networking sites. He explained: "Broader social networks do offer greater breadth and depth due to what they are and what is provided to their audiences."

Other services cater for different markets, he pointed out. For example, Myspace, is more focused on entertainment, lifestyle and music, and Twitter "thrives on real-time conversations that can cater for broad subject matter and appeal".

Now that it has such a vast user base, Facebook needs to take privacy into account, especially considering the amount of data on the social networking site. This enables companies to carry out "profiling and research" and this may be "risky" for those firms that debate and champion privacy issues.

So what are companies doing with social media to promote themselves? Econsultancy’s Social Media and Online PR Report recently showed that nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of firms covered by the study had experimented with social media but had not done much.

Micro-blogging is now the most widely-used social media tactic among companies and is used by more than three-quarters (78 per cent) of firm respondents.

However, others are not jumping on the bandwagon, with a third of respondents (31 per cent) not spending any of their budget on social media.

Web hosting users can benefit from social media campaigns, especially if they are handled correctly. With proper management, such projects can bring many rewards and could give them an advantage over others.

Written by Alan Gorzanski.

Martino Corbelli, marketing director at on-demand computing and communication services provider Star, believes that the only companies that fear it are just those without a strategy for implementing it. He admitted that while cloud computing is not a "panacea", it does enable firms to move away from the cost and hassle of software licensing and moving to new platforms every few years.

"The software licensing model is dead basically, someone just needs to tell Microsoft," he commented. Of course, telling a behemoth of a company like Microsoft what to do may not be so easy. Would your everyday web hosting user be able to convince such a firm to shift its perspective? Hard to say.

Mr Corbelli believes some ground is being made, however: "But it’s getting there – even Microsoft can’t deny it anymore."

Written by Jermaine Jones.

However, the technology is still in its infancy and there are many areas that need to be improved, according to Chris Marling, editor at Broadband Genie. So web hosting users may not want to be too hasty in targeting the mobile market.

Provider coverage, dongle quality and reallocation of spectrum, the name that techies give to the airwaves wireless broadband can operate on, all need improving for mobile broadband to consistently hit headline speeds, Mr Marling commented.

He said that internet service providers "may very well have expected speeds to improve dramatically this year" with High-Speed Downlink Packet Access rolled out, "but it simply doesn’t seem to be happening". Will web hosting users be satisfied if mobile broadband isn’t able to reach high speeds? Unlikely.

"Two new technologies – Wi-Max and LTE [Long-Term Evolution] – are on the horizon, but just when we’ll see the benefit of these is open to speculation," Mr Marling added.

Recent test data from Broadband Genie revealed that two-thirds of users have had to deal with speeds below 1Mb this year – less than 15 per cent of the ‘up to’ speeds claimed by some operators. The average user received just 0.87Mb, while out of more than 3,600 tests, just 16 managed a speed of more than 3Mb.

So how many people will adopt mobile broadband use? Will web hosting users targeting the market see any significant gains? Well, the more people that do use . Although operators may need to up their game if this is to be the case.

Perhaps 3 may be a company to lead the way. According to ZDNet UK, the company is to let its broadband customers cancel their contracts or get a discount if their local 3G services are not good enough to support basic web browsing and email.

Written by Sarah Woolf.

Indeed, Dame Wendy Hall recently voiced her concerns at the Digital Media – Addressing the Innovations and Challenges for Digital Britain conference in London, suggesting that Digital Britain lacked "vision".

"We’re going to have two megabits [per second] everywhere, but we can’t get HDTV [High-Definition Television] on that. As a nation we need to have a much higher vision," she asserted.

Ms Hall stressed that just because the UK is bankrupt does not mean that optical fibre should not be going up.

If the progression of Britain’s digital future is mishandled, then the UK society will be a "backward one", she added.

Currently, £1 in every £10 spent is generated by parts of the economy that are accounted for under the Digital Britain report. So it seems web hosting users involved in retail or other paid-for services will be impacted by government decisions on the report.

But will web hosting users benefit from the government plans or does more need to be done to really benefit them as Ms Hall suggests? The government may end up making alterations, but only time will tell whether measures will go far enough.

Written by Jessica Lighthouse.

The study, published by the British Computer Society (BCS), also revealed that nearly a quarter (23 per cent) believe IT has not improved their lives.

A spokesperson for the BCS said that for some the reason they are not happy using technology boils down to accessibility. They simply cannot get hold of the right information, whether offline or online, she explained.

Awareness is also an issue, she commented, as people have the right tools but lack the knowledge about where to find what they want. Knowledge is also a problem as some simply do not know how to use the technology, the spokesperson stated.

"This issue goes beyond access. Even if people are able to access the internet for example, if they do not know how to keep their personal data safe, and are unaware of the resources available to them, then they may still fail to get the most from the experience," they added.

Meanwhile, a gender divide still exists, the research indicated, with technologically adept people more likely to be male, aged between 18 and 44, in full-time employment and educated to degree level or above.

The study formed part of a campaign that included a new website, savvycitizens.bcs.org. It is designed to help people by providing useful information and advice.

In a related development, National Institute of Adult Continuing Education recently released its Annual Survey of Digital Participation, which was carried out by Ofcom. It found that almost a third (32 per cent) of adults are unable to access a computer, while 37 per cent cannot regularly go on the internet.

Perhaps if web hosting users were able to support those without technological skills or knowledge, they would get more hits for their own websites.

Written by Freddie Simmonds.