The Top 10 Important Factors to Consider While Choosing A Web Host

Like most things, making a decision on which web hosting company to choose can be tough. With all the companies out there each promising to have 99% uptime, unlimited resources, and knowledgeable support, there has to be a way to cut through the jargon and make an informed decision. Right?

This guide will help you make that decision by showing you how to compare apples to apples. By understanding what hosting companies mean by what they say, you’ll be able to decide which hosting company and package best suits your needs.

1. Price

This is the aspect most of us will look at first when choosing a hosting provider; however, it shouldn’t be the deciding factor. When you see price differences it’s helpful to remember the old maxim that we get what we pay for. Jumping on the cheapest offer you see isn’t necessarily the best idea, especially if you rely on your site to make money. Things like non-outsourced support and quality hardware cost money, and a hosting company that charges $1.99 per month likely won’t offer these features. Take a closer look at the features that each host provides, and THEN compare prices.

2. Area of Focus / Specialties

It’s a fact that not all web hosts are right for all different kinds of customers. Some offer great shared plans but don’t have solutions that are good for growing businesses, while others have great enterprise solutions but aren’t the right fit for someone with a small recipe blog. Look into a company’s specialty or area of expertise before you buy, and go with one that understands your particular needs as a customer. You can find reviews and recommendations on the Web, and many of these will talk about a particular company’s strengths and weaknesses.

3. Tech Specs / Limitations

Take a good, honest look at your site and figure out what you want it to do. If you’re hoping to host a blog, an e-commerce site, rich content, and videos, then you shouldn’t go with the cheapest hosting package you can find. A cheap hosting plan probably won’t have the RAM, processing power, and disk space to serve all these needs, and you’ll spend more time dealing with downtime or load issues than you would like. Look to see what you are getting with the cheap host and what features are included in the cost. Do they charge for additional domains, support, backups, etc.. Call them. Ask questions. Tell them what you envision your site’s needs to be. Just don’t take it for granted that they take your site as seriously as you do.

4. Tech Support

In most people’s opinions, this is the big one. When my site, for some unknown reason, goes down, can I call up and get a real, live person on the phone? And, more than that, can they find out what’s wrong and fix it, or at least tell me what I need to do to get my site back online? Before going with a host looks into their reputation for customer support. See what kinds of different ways you can contact them when you need support – email, toll-free phone, chat, and so on. Are they staffed 24/7? Do they outsource support?

You’ll find that, like in price and technical specifications, all hosts are not equal. Some hang their hat on their support crew, and some view customer support as an afterthought. Steer clear of the latter.

5. Features / Add-Ons

This area of consideration comes down to the following question – What makes this hosting company special? What extra incentive do they provide to make hosting your site with them just a touch more attractive? Whether it’s multiple data centers, energy-saving practices, or additional features such as regular data backups or free domain privacy, hosting companies often offer more than just servers. If you see one that offers something you need or find important, that can be a good indicator that you should look into using that company.

6. Hardware

You might have to do a bit of reading (or question-asking) to get to the bottom of this one. What kind of machines does your hosting company use? Are they top-of-the-line, out-of-the-box new machines, or are they cobbled together from what might be spare parts and chicken wire? If the hosting company doesn’t say what kind of servers they use, you’ll want to ask, since hardware can affect the performance of both their servers and your site.

7. Customer Reviews / Satisfaction / Reputation

This is one of those factors that you’ll have to get a little creative to get the real story on. Do a Google Blog search for a particular hosting company, or look them up on Twitter – whatever you have to do to see what their current (or former) customers are saying about them. Are they easy to contact for support? What’s the average time it takes to respond to a ticket? When they find a problem with a site, what’s their course of action? This is one of the great things about social media – ask a question about a company, and you’re more likely than not to get a few answers.

8. Email Features

This is one of those areas where you might not have considered asking your host for help. If you have a spam problem, then it may be because your hosting company doesn’t provide an adequate solution to stop it. Look into or ask about your provider’s spam solutions and general email practices. No matter what they say, email isn’t dead quite yet.

9. Control Panel / User Interface

Even if you’re the least tech-savvy person in the world, there are some things – installing WordPress, setting up email, setting up FTP accounts – you should be able to do without calling your hosting company’s support line. Does your provider use cPanel or Plesk to make updates and modifications easier, or do they use some clunky interface that no one can figure out? You’ll most likely be the one working with it, so if you can’t figure it out, then that’s going to be a problem.

10. Scalability / Room to Grow

Finally, an important thing to consider about your hosting provider (and the plan you choose) is whether or not they fit into your plans for the future. In other words, what you consider adequate hosting now might not meet your needs two years from now, once you start selling your wares online and getting some good traffic to your site.

Any web-based enterprise should have its eye on growth, so if a hosting company might have difficulty accommodating that growth it could pose an issue. Does the host have VPS or Dedicated Server solutions? Will they be able to easily upgrade your account? Transferring from one host to another takes valuable time and effort which could be avoided if the company can scale their solutions for growth.

As with all these factors, does some research, get some opinions, and make an informed decision.

10 Important Traits of a Great Blog Design

Your blog’s design can be the distinguishing factor that separates you from the vast sea of other weblogs out there. First impressions count and making sure that you have all the elements of a great blog design can ensure that readers will enjoy the content that you present.

1. Good readability

One of the most important elements of a blog design is readability. Make sure that the background and foreground colors that you choose have sufficient contrast to make your text easy to read (look into some tools to test your design’s colors). Provide sufficient line-spacing for paragraphs to make longer blocks of text easier to read. Take a peek at the Viget Inspire‘s content layout, they’ve made it so that their text content is pleasant to read.

Though readers can easily change their font size settings via the web browser, make sure that the font size of your text – especially for paragraph elements – is sufficiently large (between 12-14px for web-safe fonts is a good and comfortable size).

2. A strong focus on the content

Ensuring that readers do not get distracted by the site design and focusing on your posts’ content can make the decision of subscribing to your blog and coming back to read more of your content an uncomplicated choice. Some great advice to boost your blog content can include making sure that your header section isn’t too tall so that readers with smaller screen sizes can easily see the post title without having to scroll down. Another way to center the blog design onto the content is by making sure that there are no distracting items in the background. The content is the meat of a weblog – make sure that you give its design the attention it deserves.

3. High findability

Designing a weblog in such a way that it’s easy to find other content/posts is a sure sign of a solid weblog design. A lot of this has to do with a strong navigation design that entices users to click on other sections of the site. Using tiered/hierarchical navigation schemes can help users quickly find what they’re looking for; for this, you can employ JavaScript-based navigation menus to help you effortlessly build a multi-level navigation menu design.

Utilizing the sidebar (auxiliary/secondary content) of your web pages to display recent posts and popular posts can lead to more page views: present what you’ve got to the reader, make related content easily accessible to them as they read your posts. The figure below shows you an effectual way of displaying other site content (onWebdesigner depot‘s side bar).

Having a search feature integrated into your blog application is always a good thing: if you’re looking for a free search widget – explore the Google AJAX Search API.

Remember that the more interesting content you display to the reader, the higher the likelihood that he or she will consider subscribing to your RSS feed.

4. A great comment section design

The comments section is where all the action happens. It is in this section that readers get the opportunity to give you feedback on the topic you’ve written about and to share their own knowledge and opinions on the subject. Having detailed debates and conversations about your posts can invite people to share their views and in turn really get the website going. Having a good comment section design tells your readers that you care about what they have to say and have given them a great place to share them in.

To supercharge your comment section and to encourage discussion, check out an application called IntenseDebate that opens up features to help you design an engaging comment section.

5. Tight integration with social networking/media sites

Make it trouble-free for your readers to share your content within their networks. Many people like sharing the content that they have been reading on places like Twitter, Digg, and Facebook. For easy social media integration and sharing of content, consider using an application called ShareThis!.

6. A memorable header

When a person visits your blog, one of the first things that they will be guaranteed to notice is the design you have at the top of the web page. This is your chance to create a memorable first impression as well as to imprint your brand into their memory. To get creatively inspired on your next blog header design, check out this showcase on beautiful header designs and learn about the five types of effective headers.

7. The use of effective visuals in the content

The failing of many blogs is that images within the posts aren’t design well. Consider using figure captions to make images more attractive and to make them more meaningful to readers (you can use the ImageCaption MooTools plugin for a JavaScript-based solution).

Additionally, when your topic is such that you require the sharing of numerical data, try to make them more interesting by using effective data visualization techniques such as graphs and charts; this not only renders otherwise boring information into more attractive visuals, but it can also help readers more readily comprehend the data you are discussing.

A medley of distorted images, watermarked images, and images with a variety of alignments and sizes can result in a look that give users the impression that little care is taken into content creation.

8. A semantic HTML structure

Having a nice design for your blog is all fine and good – but you should also make sure that your HTML markup is designed and written properly and keeps semantics in mind. This not only makes it easier for you to maintain your blog, but also promotes better search engine results, which in turn can lead to more exposure to your web property.

9. Logically and coherently organized content

If your blog is a big operation and you post about a variety of content in a wide range of categories, your navigation should be up to scratch so that users can find their subjects of interest. Organization is the key to success and investing the appropriate amount of time in planning and designing your site’s navigation will pay dividends when users try to seek for more stuff on your site.

10. A good headline/post title design

When reading a weblog, it is always the headlines that draw the readers into a post. It isn’t only how the headline is worded that is important to entice the reader in, but also how it looks and grabs their attention that can lead them to read the rest of the content. Use distinguished font styles that are bold and large so that readers don’t miss your post titles.

Consider providing meta information such as the author’s name, the date of publication, and sharing features near your post titles to give greater context to what they’re about to read.

Is it time to replace your computer?

Windows 8 is the new baby out of Microsoft’s works. In fact as expected all PC manufacturers are now releasing their hardware with Windows 8. I had a chance to install the consumer preview version on my now aging three-year-old Vaio Laptop and indeed it was a breeze to use. 
It felt like a lease of new life to the machine with everything moving along quite swiftly.
Consequently, I begun contemplating that maybe, just maybe, I need a new machine. But then again I struggled to reconcile, in my mind, that if my current laptop could do well with Windows 8, maybe I just need a fresh install.

See, many do not need the latest hardware or software to be able to accomplish most of the tasks in a typical work environment or even at home. Nevertheless, there comes a time when you simply have to replace that computer regardless. With technology changing all the time it is easy to be left behind by hanging on to that old desktop or laptop for too long. Many people are not sure when it is time to buy a new computer.

While the decision can be affected by several different factors, including but not limited to, the financial investment. You need to consider; the computer’s speed and whether it has slowed; how much memory you have and if you have room to increase it; whether or not it has the correct ports for external devices you want to use; and if it has the processing power that you need. Most importantly, is if you can efficiently accomplish your tasks.

Signs you have to replace your computer 
A brand new computer will spring to life when you press the power button. A computer on the way out will let you have a cup of tea between the time when you hit the button and when it is ready to go. It takes several minutes to do simple tasks.

A drop in speed could have a number of causes, but the most likely, and serious, could be that your computer’s running low on memory and is struggling to handle “your” requests.
Buying more Random Access Memory (RAM) is an option. But if the programmes you are running require a lot of RAM, it may be time for a new computer.

Cleaning things up will usually speed things up. The software to perform these routine maintenance operations is built into most computers. You can find them under “Accessories” or “System Tools” in your programme menu. Having many programmes loaded and running especially ones you don’t use any more will also slow things down and can be remedied by simply removing them. It is worthwhile to occasionally check on installed programmes and remove any that you no longer use. This saves hard drive space, can sometimes remove programmes that are staying in memory, and will remove unneeded registry entries that slow down your computer.

If your computer cannot support new software, it is a sign you might need a new one. While one might argue that upgrading the operating system shall do the trick, the hardware itself may not be up to the task and you shall be back at square one.

If you computer is running Windows 98 or Windows XP, then you either need that particular windows version for a laser-specific reason or your machine is just too old. Please, just replace it because chances are you are always fighting viruses, blue screens of death, computer needing several restarts a day etc.

Sometimes you have extremely discernible and obvious signs of the end times. If your computer cannot display pictures as well as it used to, or if there are mysterious lines or dots running across the screen. Some keys on the keyboard no longer respond, the CD drive scratches CDs instead of reading them. It is pretty much obvious.

Finally
All good things come to an end, even the high-end expensive computer you bought just a few years ago. Despite the promises and smiles of the salesman, your toy has been slowing down, acting funny, making strange noises, and all your friends have better, newer models. 
There are things you can, and should do, that will make your machine last as long as possible, but a smart user will know when to recognise the signs that it is time to buy a new computer.

You are all welcome to this page. I have created this page as an IT home for our daily IT problem solutions. A home that we can share collectively all the IT problems.
You are all aware no is an Island in IT. As we advance in the IT world, we keep on learning and for this we need to share what we have learnt.

Putting up this page does not mean i know it all, but it will also help me learn from you.

Thanks for being my friend on this page.