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Web Hosting for Non Profits

In the fight for web hosting prowess many hosting companies have gotten smart and offer free hosting accounts to non-profits. Some ask for nothing in exchange for the free hosting accounts, while others insist on a text-link or banner ad to be displayed advertising the host’s price and features. If you run a non-profit group and need to get a free web hosting account, you don’t have to look very far. A simple google search for non-profit web hosting returns thousands of results.

Non-profits can be a wide and varied group encompassing anything from concert venues to public schools. Some hosting companies are a bit picky about which non-profits they choose to be involved with. While ther are still more hosting companies that don’t publicly advertise that they even offer free accounts or deep discounts for non-profit groups. Sometimes all you have to do is call the sales number on the website and simply ask for a free hosting account. It may take a few days to get it setup but most hosting company owners will jump at the opportunity.

For example, the Lunarpages sales team was approached enough times by schools that they finally created a special hosting package designed just for schools. I have even heard of free accounts provided for every member of a high school web design class. Now, most smaller hosting companies can’t afford to give away 30 hosting accounts. But, for the larger web hosting providers it may not be a problem at all. If you find a host you like that doesn’t advertise non-profit hosting, just ask for one. If your non-profit is legit, you’ll have free web hosting in no time at all.

If your non-profit website is crucial to the success and funding of your non-profit, you may want to consider actually paying for web hosting. A basic web hosting account will only cost around $120 per year. IF your non-profit site gets a lot of traffic you may want to even consider a VDS hosting account or dedicated server.

28 January 2008 | Hosting 101 | Comments Off

Go Daddy Review

When it comes to domain names there is no single company with more name recognition than GoDaddy.com. From their controversial super bowl ads to their cheap domain names, Go Daddy has proven to be the one to beat. Go Daddy was the first registrar to sell domain names for less than ten dollars. But, since their first days in business they have proven to be a nimble company always saying yes when the customer asks for something. There is always a price tag but Go Daddy is always the quickest to fulfill the customer’s needs.

For instance, when Go Daddy customers asked for an easy website building tool - Go Daddy answered with the Website Tonight product. Website Tonight offered users a way to get a simple one or two page website published in a matter of minutes. When SSL certificates were first offered at a reasonable price, Go Daddy was the first to simplify the confusing and frustrating process of purchasing an SSL certificate for ecommerce websites.

Today Go Daddy is one of the largest domain name registrars in the World. There is some debate about who really is the biggest, but many experts believe Go Daddy is the winner hands down. With their size and stature, they have not been exempt from growing pains and major speed bumps. But, through it all Go Daddy has weathered the storm and kept the bulk of its customers happy.

The big difference with Go Daddy is its enourmous US-based operations center located in Arizona. While most web companies have outsourced their call center services overseas, Go Daddy listened to the customer and kept things local. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have an english speaking support person pick up on the other end of the line. Watch out though, their in-house training pushes every employee to be a salesman!

26 January 2008 | Domain Names | No Comments

Choosing a Domain Name

There are thousands of new domain names registered every day. The most common thing I hear from first time website owners is that their domain name is already taken. Nonsense, I say. With a bit of creativity and keyword research I can usually help them choose a better domain name than the one they had originally wanted. The biggest choice you have to make is whether you want a .com address or not. .NET and .ORG domains are still plentiful but new domain extensions are approved every year like .tv, .mobi, .info and .us.

One of the things I like to do first is to research the keywords or the potential search terms that you think people will use to find your website online. You can get a good idea on direction by simply doing Google searches and seeing what keyword phrases your competitors are using. Instead of thinking of a clever name and then advertising and marketing so people will find you. I think it is wiser to find out what the customer is already searching for and build a website geared to those search terms.

Many website owners are walking past the pot of gold by insisting on using their clever domain name instead of a clear and concise keyword based domain (ie: widge4u.com instead of handmadewidgets.com). We can use my fishing buddy for an example. He builds his own hand tied marabou jigs for fishing and has sold hundreds of them to his fishing buddies. When he approached me about a website, he wanted to register his name BobAndreeson.com for his fishing jig website. I later talked him into registering something like handtiedmaraboujigs.com instead.

You sacrifice a little in the length of the domain name. But, I believe the keyword phrases are far more important in getting traffic to your site. For example, if I’m searching Google for a hand-tied marabou jig, I wouldn’t search for “Bob Andreeson”.

24 January 2008 | Domain Names | No Comments

Website Monitoring Services

One of the worst feelings in the world is to go to your website to find that your website is down. With shared hosting this can happen quite frequently and all too often you will not be told why or when it even happened. Many times it is caused by “security updates” or “fixes” on your server. This can be very frustrating and can ruin your day, especially if you depend on your website to pay the bills like I do.

There are many website monitoring services out there to help you keep an eye on your sites uptime and load times. Some monitoring services are better than others, but they are all better than nothing. Free website monitoring services usually offer a simple ping service that checks to see if your site is online. The frequency is usually around one hour for free site monitoring accounts. To get multiple sites or more frequent checks you usually have to upgrade to a paid website monitoring service.

Atwatch Server Monitoring Report Graph Example

Here is an example of a paid website monitoring service called Atwatch. I signed up for their paid monitoring service and they sent me weekly status reports like the one above to show me what was really going on with my website. Notice the graph shows that on certain days the connect time was much slower than average. Although the site was never down there were a few performance problems that could be addressed. I have since cancelled my Atwatch account because I found it to be too expensive ($500/year).

Currently I am using a company called SiteUptime for my website monitoring service. They offer free accounts for basic checkups on one domain. But, I chose to upgrade to their Premium Plan so I could get more frequent checks on my 3 most important websites. The cost for 3 websites is only $48/year with SiteUptime. Which is a lot easier to swallow than the $500/year I was paying.

One common mistake that people make. They send their alert notices to the email address which is hosted on the domain being monitored. This can be a big problem since most alerts are sent via email, and if your site is down your email probably is too. Be sure to use a gmail account or an email account hosted on a different server. You can also choose to recieve text alert notices to your cell phone with some paid monitoring services.

Remember, any monitoring service is better than nothing at all. Signup for the free monitoring service from SiteUptime.com and see what you think of their service. So far, I have been very pleased with their services.

23 January 2008 | Website Security | No Comments

Switching Web Hosting Companies

At some point in time most people become fed up with their current hosting provider and set out to move to a new hosting company. Many people do not realize how much work is involved with moving a website from one web host to another. Since I just finished moving a few dozen websites I thought I would blog about the proper steps to make things go as smoothly as possible with a website transfer. If you’ll follow these steps you will avoid some of the most common pitfalls.

Moving my site from Go Daddy to Hostmonster

The first and most important step is to backup all of your website files to your local computer or laptop. Be sure to backup image files as well as any html and php files. If your site has a mySQL database you can dump the DB as well, either in ZIP format or as a .sql file. If you have created several email addresses it is a good idea to write them all down, including the passwords for POP3 so recreating them will go smoothly.

The next step is to choose a new web hosting company. If you haven’t already selected your new host be sure to find one with a similar control panel to what you have been used to. This will minimize the learning curve and help speed things along. If you don’t mind learning how to use a new hosting control panel then the field is wide open.

Once you have selected your new web hosting provider, I like to login to the control panel and create the email accounts first. A common mistake is to forget this step until you have switched DNS and start wondering why you are no longer recieving emails. This can be disastrous if your emails are mission-critical to your site or web business. Try to keep the same passwords if you have several employees using POP email accounts. Otherwise, you will waste half a day setting up everyones Outlook accounts for them.

After your email accounts have been created, you are ready to upload the site files. Make sure you set the directory to the correct name as many hosting companies have different defaults (ie: public_html/, httpdocs, var/www/html/, etc.). This can cause a lot of problems if you upload all the files to the wrong directory. If your site has a database you will need to recreate the Tables and Users. If you dumped your database correctly you will have the structure and data intact. If your moving a blog there may be other steps necessary, sometimes you have to re-install the blog software.

After your email accounts are created, site files are uploaded and mySQL databases recreated you are ready to test. Most hosts will give you a test URL when you signup, if you have a dedicated IP address you can type that into a browser to test the functions of your website. Make sure that all the files are uploaded and all the links are working. Sometimes you may have to set permissions on certain directories to get things working right. Get it right, because once you switch DNS all of your mistakes will be amplified and public for all to see.

Once you are convinced that you have covered all the bases, you are ready to switch the DNS over to point to your new host. Once you switch the DNS it can take up to 48 hours for the changes to propogate across the internet. A recent site I transferred took 3 whole days, while less than 12 hours is the norm. If possible I like to move to a new host at least 30 days before my old account is expired. This gives you a little wiggle room if something goes wrong.

If you missed a step and broke your website badly you can simply switch the DNS back to the old host for a few days while you get things fixed. If you got lucky and everything works then it is likely that nobody even knows you have switched web hosting companies. It should be seemless even to your employees if their email accounts were setup properly.

The last step is to contact your web host and cancel your old hosting account. If you have any remaining days on your hosting plan, you can usually get some of your money refunded to your credit card. Don’t count on it though.

22 January 2008 | Hosting 101 | 1 Comment

Dedicated IP

Many times when you sign up for web hosting you don’t know what features you need until it’s too late. For instance, I was helping my Aunt build a website to sell her homemade aprons and handicrafts. She had purchased web hosting before talking to me and later discovered that her host did not offer dedicated ips. Many shared hosting companies make you share one ip address with hundreds of other customers.

My Aunt wanted to build an ecommerce website where she could sell her aprons online. One of the key components to an ecommerce website is an SSL certificate which allows you to securely accept credit card payments. But, in order to have an SSL certificate you must first have a dedicated ip address. There are many other benefits to having your website on a dedicated ip address but for ecommerce websites a dedicated ip is a must have.

I found out the hard way that in a shared hosting environment other customers sharing your server/ip can affect your web site in a negative way. One day I couldn’t figure out why my site was suddenly having email problems. After weeks of trouble tickets and bounced email I found out that a spammer was sharing my ip address and had gotten the ip banned or blacklisted. You can see if your ip has been blacklisted here, many people don’t even realize it has happened.

A blacklisted IP can also cause problems with your website’s search engine rankings. I have friends that could never get their site indexed by Google and later found that their ip address had been blacklisted for years. Many times the blacklist happens long before you come along with your new web site. On the flip-side, a dedicated ip that is clean can have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

Dedicated servers often come with multiple dedicated ips. Some webmasters like to have each website they own on a dedicated ip address. Many shared hosting companies can offer you a dedicated ip for a small fee. Another way to get a dedicated ip is through a VDS web hosting account like Jumpline offers. VDS hosting is a little more expensive than shared hosting but gives you quite a bit more freedom and features. Either way, a dedicated ip address is always a good idea in my opinion.

17 January 2008 | Personal Experiences | No Comments

PLESK Control Panel Software

Every web hosting service comes with some type of control panel software to make managing the account easier. Some hosting companies have chosen to build their own control panel software from scratch like iPowerweb and the vDeck panel. But, most hosting companies use one of the big 3 control panel software solutions PLESK, cPanel or Helm. I have used all of them and really don’t have a favorite. That’s right, they are all very good at what they do. It really comes down to personal preference or simply going with what you know. Learning a new control panel does take time as there is a bit of a learning curve.

Lately I have been using PLESK on my new dedicated server. The more I dig in and discover features I didn’t even know were there, the more I like it. One of the latest discoveries is the custom firewall settings on the server level. PLESK makes it easy to keep port-scanners and hackers from poking around. I can even block pings from unrecognized IP addresses. Security becomes more important as your site grows in popularity.

PLESK is really set up nicely for reseller hosting. You can get a 100 user license for pretty cheap and I can see it working well for the smaller resellers like web designers and virtually anyone with less than 100 clients to support. You can create clients on the server as well as managing everything at the domain name level. I setup a client for my Father who runs a few sites for his art gallery business. That way I can keep his domains seperate from mine and still give him the server access that he needs. I’m not a hosting reseller but I still find the tools useful for managing lots of domains and websites.

cPanel is probably a bit more widely used than PLESK, especially in regards to shared hosting, but for now I am very pleased with PLESK 8.3 on my dedicated server.

16 January 2008 | Which Control Panel? | No Comments

Netfirms Free Host Review

Yesterday I got a phone call from a little old lady that had a website for her clogging group in the midwest. She had designed the one page website using iDesign on her iMac computer. The website looked professional and was very well thought out. She wanted me to recommend a different hosting company because she was ready to graduate from free web hosting with Netfirms. Her main concern was that she was building several other simple websites but wanted to be able to host multiple domains on one account. I was able to point her in the right direction and gave her several good hosting options.

While I was looking at her other websites I was impressed by the un-intrusive Google Adsense ads placed tastefully at the top of her Netfirms hosted pages. Click here to see what I mean. As far as free web hosting goes, Netfirms has the least offensive forced advertising of any I have found. Most free hosts primary source of revenue are these forced ads, usually sold to the highest bidder. This usually means pop-ups, pop-unders, bottom, top and side banners along with anything else the can ram down your throat.

Kudos to Netfirms for not getting greedy with the advertising. I can imagine that they convert more customers to their paid hosting services because of their good business practices. For only $10/year you can get a top-level domain added to your Netfirms free hosted website.

15 January 2008 | Free Web Hosting | No Comments

Lunarpages Support Review

I’ve got a lot of hosting accounts. Some of them are test accounts and some are true paid accounts that I use to test customer service and tech support. One of my test accounts expired yesterday with Lunarpages and I decided that I would like to keep the domain name for future use. One frustrating thing from the get-go was the lack of a forgot password tool at the Lunarpages website. I have no idea why, but they do now have an easy way for your to recover your web hosting password.

Note: Make sure your email address is updated as this is the only way most hosting companies will send renewal notices. I have lost a few domain names to expiration because I changed my email address and forgot to update my info at my hosting company. It is really annoying to visit one of your websites to find it covered in banners and ads with a domain expired notice at the top. Learn from my mistakes, and always make sure your whois email address is accurate as well as your contact information with you web hosting service provider.

I replied to the billing renewal notice that I would like to transfer the domain name and cancel my hosting service. I then requested the transfer through my domain registrar. This the response from Lunarpages support.

“Hello,

We have received a transfer authorization request for your domain, best100deals.com. This request will transfer your domain’s registration away from Lunarpages, to the requesting registrar.

If you would like us to authorize this transfer, please reply with your cpanel username along with the last 4 digits of the credit card on file for you account.

This request is for verification purposes only.

If you have any questions or if you did not initiate this transfer request, please let us know.

Thank you!

–
Feel free to contact us if you require further assistance or have any questions, or consult our forums at http://lunarforums.com
—
Kind Regards,
Debbie Cloven
Customer Service Representative
support@lunarpages.com“

No big deal, so they need to confirm my identity. I replied with the requested information and then received another response asking for yet more information to verify the transfer. This response came from a new tech support person, squashing my hopes of dealing with one person throughout the sometimes confusing domain transfer process. The response time was good at just under 2 hours but still with no resolution.

“Hello,

To complete account verification for security purposes to confirm you are the account holder, please provide the following:

Your full postal mailing address:
Telephone number:

Thank you.

–
Best Regards,

Onika Lewis
support@lunarpages.com“

Now, I don’t know about you but I couldn’t remember if I used my cell phone or home phone, my business address or home address? So I took a wild guess and replied. Nearly 24 hours later I am still waiting and my domain and website has gone into suspended status with the following message.

“Visitors, we are sorry, however, this site is experiencing difficulties at this time. Please return later.

Webmaster, please contact us by email at support@lunarpages.com or via Lunarpages Helpdesk at http://support.lunarpages.com. Thank you for choosing Lunarpages (http://www.lunarpages.com). “

15 January 2008 | Tech Support Test | No Comments

Wordpress - King of Blogs

The face of web hosting has changed over the past decade. Blogs are the new vehicle for people to share their thoughts and pictures on the web. When I ask people I meet if they have a website, most reply “Nope, but I have a blog”. Many people don’t realize that a blog is a website. Not only is a blog a website, but blogs are quickly becoming the most popular form of website. Among the many blog hosting sites out there Wordpress.com has emerged as a fast favorite.

Why Wordpress? First, Wordpress is very simple to use and it is extremely easy to get your first blog started. One of the reasons I have chosen Wordpress for several blogs is the thousands of free wordpress themes available. Wordpress themes are templates or web page layouts that you can download and install to make your blog unique. Many Wordpress themes allow you to change basic things like text color and header images with ease. Another reason I like the Wordpress blog software is the search engine friendliness. At a recent webmaster conference an industry expert proclaimed Wordpress to be the “King of Blogs” when it comes to being Google friendly.

Why would you want your blog to be Google friendly? Because almost every web surfing session starts with a Google search. And if your blog is not search engine friendly, nobody will find it on the web. Although, some people choose to share their blog with only family and close friends. Most people blog because they have something to say and want to be heard. Here is my wordpress blog about fishing and my other various hobbies.

12 January 2008 | Blogs and Blog Hosting | No Comments

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