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Learn How to Start a Blog

Web Passive Income have recently released two awesome posts where the process of “How to start a new Blog“.

The first being:

How to Start a Blog: Setting up a New WordPress Blog

and the second:

How to Start a Blog: Configuring WordPress

I the fist post :”How to Start a Blog: Setting up a New WordPress Blog” the issue of setting up a hosting company, and how to install WordPress on your server is being discussed.

Setting up your hosting company & Installing WordPress

In this post a detail description of the process of signing up to a Bluehost hosting account is described. It literally is a step by step process which takes the user trough the intricacies’ of managing through the tech jargon, avoiding the sales pitches, and how to login into your new hosting account.

Configuring WordPress

In the second post “How to Start a Blog: Configuring WordPress” the user is taken trough a step by process of how to configure the Newly installed WordPress from scratch up to the point where the user can use it to post their first post.

Best Website Host highly recommend that any person which considers starting a new blog makes use of the these the articles to guide them through the process.

Web Passive Income Blog Review

Having a website is no good if you cannot perform well in the search engines. Best Website Host have spend some time to see if they can find useful resources which can help webmasters configure their websites to perform as well as they can in the search engines search results.

During this process Best Website Host came across the Web Passive Income Blog which is doing just that. The website is still in its “development” phase but already have the characteristic of one of those blogs which will continue to grow into a site which will be noticed.

One of the characteristics which stands out is the open and honest tone of the content presented on the pages. What you see is what you get, no beating around the bush just the facts.

The blog is run by Henry an Engineer by trade (his description) and a blogger by hobby. From the conception of the blog Henry had a focused approach on the development on the blog, starting of with a clearly defined mission statement which states his objections.

Within the content of Web Passive Income Blog detail is given on how the blog was set up to a point where Henry felt that the blog was developed enough to change his focus from reporting on the development phase to focussing on the needs of the blogs followers.

From this point forward a lot of detail has was given on what is good search engine optimization (SEO). Posts on search engine optimization processes is posted on a regular bases with excellent in depth analysis of the subject.

At present the blog’s content with respect to finding products and marketing has not yet developed to the where Henry would like it to be. A short coming which he hopes to address sooner than later.

The strongest feature on the website is the passive income resources page. This page is packed with a list and details of resources all website owners should have to fulfil that the SEO tasks. It is diffidently worthwhile having a read of this page.

All in all the content on the website is very useful and of good quality.

I give the Web Passive Income Blog a firm high-five.

Valuable link to have

I have recently came across the Web Passive Income (webpassiveincom.com) website. Worthwhile reading for people who starts a new website with aim to generate passive income.

Best Website Host Latest Results

Best Website Host has recently done a survey on hosting companies. From the analysis Best Website Host concluded that from the latest survey data HostGator came out tops as a preferred hosting company.

Key features were:

Best value for money
Website transfer assistance
Excellent customer service
User friendly self signup service
Easy website development support features
High server up time
Secure fully managed servers
Customize-able and affordable VPS servers
Affordable flexible dedicated servers

Best Website Host regularly updates hosting companies surveys and provide an updated ranking list of the best performing hosting companies on its HostRanking page.

Selecting a website platform – blogging

Setting up a New Website Part 3

In part 1 and part 2 we dealt with selecting your domain name (website name), selecting your TLD (Top Level Domain) and the selection of a domain host (website host). In part three we cover the selection of suitable platform to launch your website from.

Selecting a website platform

To start this session it is assumed that this is the first website you are setting up and that you are looking for a quick way of setting up your website. It is also assumed that your coding knowledge may be limited or may be none existing. When you are at this level it is recommended that you start with one of the blogging platforms as you only need a limited amount of html coding knowledge (Nothing you cannot get from the internet or from a html book from your library or bookstore).

Blogging

The advantage of using a blogging platform is that:

It is easy to install. Typically an automated process if you have signed-up to one of the larger hosting companies.
You need very little coding knowledge.
In most cases it is free.
Thousands of free customisable (using menus) website templates to choose from.
Blogging platforms can be used as standard static pages.
Thousands of easy to install add-ons to customise your website.

Starting off using a blogging platform will give opportunity to gain get familiar with not only the compilation process of putting a website together but will also help to familiarise you with aspects such a securing your website from outside attacks.

As your html knowledge grows you will be able to edit the templates to fully customise your website to suit your needs. Only once you have mastered the html basics is it recommended that you explore the more complex website coding methods.

How do I Select a Good Website Host

Setting up a New Website Part 2

In the previous session we dealt with the selection of a domain name or website name for your new website (Selecting a Website Name). The next step is to select a good website hosting company to host the website.

Selecting a Good Website Host.

There are a number of things to consider when selecting a website host to host your website. Most of these things boil down to:

price,
how important is it that your website is visible on the web all the time,
how secure do you want your website to be,
and important is it for you to be able to access the server your website is hosted on.

Cost Considerations.

The natural reaction to selecting a website host is to select the cheapest available hosting company. Approaching your hosting needs in this fashion can be a very costly experience. Cheaper is not always cost effective. A general rule when considering cost is to select a website host with a hosting fee which ranges between $4.00 per month and $8.00 per month. Going below the $4.00 per month value the quality and sustainability of the hosting company becomes questionable. The last thing you want is for the hosting company to go bust on you.

Occasionally the larger more sustainable companies will offer special signup offers below the $4.00 per month mark. This is a strategy employed by all the costing companies to lure new customers. Be aware that typically the lower price is only temporary and will revert back at some point to the going rate.

$4.00 to $8.00 per month is not a great deal of money and should not be the major criteria on selecting a suitable host for your website.

Your Websites Visibility

With your website’s visibility I mean the percentage of time the hosting servers will be able to deliver your website to visitors.

This is very much a function of the up time of the servers used by the webhost. As a general rule the larger hosting companies either using their own servers or using large datacentres with complex systems. With these complex systems the hosting company is be able to guarantee up time in excess of 99%. Smaller host may not be able to provide any up time guarantees.

Up time is only important where your website is critical to your business for every minute offline could result in sales being lost. If your business is dependant on the uptime then sticking to one of the larger website hosting companies is recommended.

For websites which deal with social or information topics the server uptime is not that critical and a smaller less expensive host can be used. There are however boundaries to this as a host with significant downtime may cause your website to disappear from the search engine search results or users may get frustrated with the none availability of your website and may choose to find other more reliable sources.

In my experience it does not matter what type of website you run , stick with the larger hosting companies for they are not that more expensive and will ensure that your website is just about all the time up and running.

Security of your website content.

The security of your website content is primarily your responsibility. Always make sure that your data is backed up and that you have installed sufficient firewalls to protect your data.

The selection of a hosting company could have a significant impact on the preservation and your security of your data. Smaller hosting companies may not have all the checks and balances in place which most of the larger hosting companies have. There is a couple questions you should ask yourselves when choosing a hosting company:

Does the hosting company offer a backup service in the event that my primary data goes corrupt or if my website got hacked?
Who has access to my webserver?
Are there protocols in place to prevent the people working in the hosting companies from downloading my personal or my clients details.

Typically you find that the very small hosting companies will not have sufficient policies, procedures, and backup facilities in place to secure your websites data on the server side.

Most larger hosting companies will have an established regime in place to safeguard your website data. A warning, Do not take this for granted. If you will be dealing with sensitive information, like credit card details, then ensure that the selected hosting company have backup facilities in place, limit access to the web servers, and that the servers have sufficient safeguards in place against potential hackers. Your website host will normally boast about their security protocols on their own website if they have the latest safeguards in place.

Again my recommendation is to stick with the larger hosting companies. It is not worth taking the risk.

The location of your website host

For most website owners it does not matter where their websites are hosted (unless they have some devious objective).

As a general rule the larger and more secure datacentres are located either in North America or in the Asia Pacific region. A large number of the large hosting companies will either have their primary hosting facilities in one of the regions and will back up their servers in the other region. The ability for them to do this allows them to provide a reliable service to their customers even in the event of a catastrophic failure in one of their datacentres. Normally they will have systems in place which will allow the backup servers to seamlessly take over the function of the primary server in such a failure without the customers even being aware of the problem.

This ability is only available with at the larger hosting companies. This does not mean that the smaller hosting companies would not be able to provide a similar but less advanced service.

There may be companies out their which may wish to keep control over their website data and would prefer to be able to limit access to the servers which host their website. An example of this would be a company which deals with sensitive research information. For these companies it is doubtful if the global worldwide web is the place to store their data and a local owner managed server may be the best option. For the rest of us the location of the website server does not matter.

How do I select the best website host for my website?

To select your website host stick these following rules:

The cost of the hosting service is a secondary consideration and should not be your primary selection criteria.
Select a website hosting company with a high server uptime.
Ensure that your website hosting company have sufficient backup and security protocols in place.
Unless you have a reason to maintain full control over your website’s data choose the best possible hosting company doesn’t matter where the website hosting company is located.

In the next session we will be dealing with What is the best platform for your website.

Let the BEST WEBSITE HOST guide you through selection and setup of a new website

What do I need for a New Website

Setting up a new Website Part 1

Setting up a new website starts long before the new website domain is registered.

The process starts when the prospective webmaster (you) first formulates the concept of the new website. During the initial stages the webmaster needs to consider who the audience (who will read you website content) of the new website will be. This is important as the success of reaching the audience is a function of how the website is setup from the start., from the selection of the website name (Domain Name) to the selection of an appropriate website host (on who’s server the website will sit), through to the selection of the type of the website [blog (chat or information sharing), e-comers (selling), a static marketing page, website based database, etc.].

Selecting a Website Name

The first step is to select an appropriate website name and to get the new website name (domain name) registered.

A couple of guidelines in selecting a new domain name (website name).

The domain name should represent your business or topic name.
The domain name should be easy to remember.
The business or topic name should be incorporated in the domain name.
(this helps with getting higher page rankings on the search engines)
Keep the name as short as possible.

Selecting the LTD (Top Level Domain)

LTD refers to the bit which hangs of the end of your website name (.com, .biz, .org, tec.)

To determine which LTD is best for you, you as the webmaster needs to determine if you want your new website to be accessible locally (in your country) or globally (worldwide). In theory all of the LTDs could be visible all over the web. The reality is that the search engines will filter search data to firstly place high ranking local content (in your country) in the search results prior to global results.

For global websites the .com LTD is still the most popular. This is slowly changing as overcrowding is causing the website names to become longer and longer. You may find that you may not be able to find a suitable .com website name. Good alternatives are .org .net .info and .biz. A new rising start is the .co TLD.

It may be a lot easier to find a good website name when using a local TLD. These are easy recognisable due to the double dot system e.g. Australia is .com.au, South Africa is .co.za. These LTD names are useful if you only want to sell your goods locally or if your website content is in a language other than English.

Registering a New Website

New website names are registered through approved domain name registrars.

There are two ways to register a new website.

Find a independent domain name registrar
or register your domain name through a website host.

If you are new to website hosting it is recommended the second option is selected as the process of pointing the domain name (like a postal address) to your website content being hosted on a separate server (like the street address) could be complex for inexperience webmasters. When registering your domain name through a reputable website host the host will ensure that the settings on the domain name at the registrar is set correctly.

The Auxiliaries for your New Website Name

When registering your new website name you will be asked for number add-on options (all at an additional cost). Most of these are useful but may not be of benefit to you. The only add-on which is recommended is to activate the private domain setting. This is essential to protect your personal details from being blasted all over the worldwide web.

In the next session we will be dealing with How to Select a Good Website Host.

Let the BEST WEBSITE HOST guide you through selection and setup of a new website

The Web Hosting Conspiracy

You are searching for a suitable webhost to host your new website. You are diligent and try your best to select the best possible host. In front of lies a list of possible webhosts obtained from doing web searches and recommendations from your friends, whom themselves having websites and is quick to tell you about their good and bad experiences.

Over last couple of hours you have compiled a list of the pros and cons of each webhost. Looking at the data in front of you a trend starts to appear. Each webhost you investigated have a different look and feel but at the same time have a sort of similarity. You just cannot put your finger on it.

Questions run through your subconscious. Maybe it is the competitive marked hosting companies find themselves in driving their products to be copies of each other or maybe it is a lack of a wide range of hosting platforms shared by all the hosting companies. Or is it something more sinister?

The answer is actually all of the above.

The Conspiracy

The competitive nature of hosting and the lack of a wide range of hosting platform do limited hosting companies’ ability to differentiate themselves from the competition.

The only real options to the hosting companies are how they put the hosting packages together and how much they are going the charge for the service. The second biggest option to hosting companies is how they approach their marketing which includes the look of their marketing websites.

There is however sinister about the whole deal. Have you noticed how similar some of the admin pages look or even how identical the terms and conditions pages are? Surely they did not just copy it from each other.

There is a good reason for that. Most of the more popular web hosting companies actually belongs to a single parent company. Ever heard of The Endurance International Group? I doubt it.

Endurance International Group, Inc. (EIG), formerly BizLand was formed in 1996 and since them embarked on a program to gobble up established and growing medium sized webhosts. As the larger company they have obviously enforces some of their corporate governance onto the newly acquired smaller webhosts, hence the reason why the conditions pages are just about identical. It also explains why some of the hosts use identical management platforms.

The extent of the agglomeration is bigger than you may think.

Any idea how wide the Endurance International Group arms extend? Here is a list of the currently known hosting companies which falls under the Endurance umbrella:

2slick.com

AccountSupport

ApolloHosting

Berry Information Systems L.L.C.

BizLand

BlueDomino

Bluehost

Dollar2Host

Domain.com

DomainHost

Dot5Hosting

Dotster

easyCGI

eHost

EntryHost

FastDomain

FatCow

FreeYellow

Glob@t

Homestead Technologies

HostCentric

HostClear

HostGator

HostMonster

hostwithmenow.com

HostYourSite.com

HyperMart

IMOutdoors

Intuit Websites

iPage.com

IPOWER/iPowerWeb

JustHost

MyDomain

MyResellerHome

NetFirms

Networks Web Hosting

PowWeb

PureHost

ReadyHosting.com

Saba-Pro

Southeast Web

Spry

StartLogic

SuperGreen Hosting

USANetHosting

VirtualAvenue

VPSLink

WebHost4Life

Webstrike Solutions

Xeran

YourWebHosting

Have you noticed that most of the popular brands are included into the list? Bet you that you can spot your hosting company?

What makes this sinister is that none of the mentioned companies even makes mention that they belong to a parent company. Have a look at the Endurance International Group website, and as expected there is no mention of its affiliation with the listed hosting companies. Make you wonder!

Actually there is a good reason why the affiliations between the hosting companies are not mentioned.

Remember how you felt cheated just now when you realised that all your work to select the company meant nothing – you could have picked anyone of the companies and very likely could have got exactly the same deal. If you knew that chances were that you would have randomly picked from the list or you would have searched for a company which is not included into the list.

Is this a bad thing?

To answer this you have to look at how the Endurance International Group allows its subsidiaries to operate. As far as we know Endurance allows each one of the smaller webhosts to operate as a separate entity. This means that all the individual hosting companies are still compete against each other ensuring that you get the best possible deal.

The fact that Big Brother Endurance is overlooking provides some certainty that your webhost is not going to close their doors tomorrow and that you will continue to receive service even if the host do go bust.

In short as a customer, assuming the status quo remains, you are still receiving a good deal by signing up to one of the companies in the conglomerate.

For more information on the Best Website Host visit the Best Website Host Ratings Page

Bluehost Reduced Website Host Price

Bluehost have always been one of the great value website host companies, providing a no frills hosting product. As a general rule Bluehost offers unlimited hosting offers which include unlimited:

domain hosting
hosting space
file transfers
and E-mail accounts

Under normal conditions Bluehost offers their unlimited web hosting service for $6.95 per month. Bluehost offers this same package now for $4.95 per month which puts it on par with the best website hosts.

If the other benefits Bluehost offers is added to this deal like Bluehost’s: No Hidden Fees, Free Instant Set-up, and Anytime Money Back Guarantee then this deal can be considered as an excellent deal to get your new website going with a top rated website hosting company.

The deal is further sweetened with the Free $100 Google Credit to get your website going.

Bluehost also provide 24/7 Phone, Chat & Email Support to complete the package.

For more on Bluehost see our Best Website Host – Bluehost page.

Go Daddy the World’s Largest Web Hosting Company

Ever wondered how big can a web hosting company get. Well its no secret that Go Daddy is the biggest with its closest rival 8 times smaller.

The question is rather how big is Go Daddy?

The true value became apparent when on April 12, 2006, Marketwatch reported that GoDaddy.com, Inc., had hired Lehman Brothers to manage an initial stock offering. The comapany wished to raise in the order of $100 million. The value of the company at the time was however valued several times that amount. On August 8, 2006 Go Daddy withdrawn the company’s IPO filing.

Then in September 2010, Go Daddy put itself up for auction. The auction was later called off. It was reporteds that bids exceeded the asking price of $1.5 billion.

On July 1, 2011 Go Daddy confirmed that KKR, Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures aquired 65% of the company. The purchase price was not officially announced but it was reported to be $2.25 billion.