Don’t Forget About Email Requirements When Choosing A Web Host

One of the factors that many people forget about when they are looking for a web host is email. The types of accounts offered along with sizes and limitations are as varied as the web hosting companies are themselves.

Every web host should provide you with the ability to have several email accounts, most will offer up to 10 with a basic low end account. Another feature to look for is a company that offers an account that will accept and hold any email sent to your domain that does not match an email address. This is due to the fact that many people misspell names and such and therefore emails get lost.

You basically have three different email services available to you. The first is probably the one that most are familiar with, the POP or post office protocol works like a normal inbox such as your Outlook Express. You will be given a certain amount of storage space you are allowed but generally can only access from one computer.

The second choice called IMAP or internet message access protocol will allow you to use your email account on many different computers so that you can access it at work and home.

The third choice you have is a web based email which is of course the most flexible, allowing you to access your email from anywhere on the planet with a computer and an internet connection though a web browser. I like having all the options.

The next consideration that you have is on the size limit of storage you have. Nearly every web hosting company will have some sort of restriction on the size of account you can have as well as on the size of messages that can be sent. This is especially crucial if you are using your email to send pictures or documents. One key thing you want to do if you are using outlook or outlook express is to select the notify option for when your email is opened so that you know it was received. Many times if a file is too large you will have no other way of knowing. If you don’t get the notification then you know they didn’t receive your message.

Now, back to actual storage space, you should pick a web host company that offers a reasonable balance between the bandwidth limits and the size of the mailbox storage. For example if you have an account that offers 500MB of bandwidth but only a 3 MB data storage for email accounts.

Another important issue to look for is outgoing email limits. If you are using your account for business you may need to send emails out to a large number of people several times a day, if the system automatically flags that as spam you will not be able to send them. Check the limitations on outgoing mail and be sure it suits your needs.

Don’t Let Bad E-Commerce Web Hosting Cost You Business

A reliable web hosting company is crucial especially if you operate a business on the internet offering products for sale the require you to have e-commerce web hosting with shopping carts. Unless you have some mega store it is unlikely that you will need your own servers which could cost you several hundred dollars a month, but you do need e-commerce that is reliable and trustworthy that has a good reputation for uptime. When you are running an online business servers being down is the equivalent of having the doors locked in a brick and mortar business.

One of the great things about web hosting is that you have a myriad of choices ranging from low end shared hosting for less than $10 per month to having high end dedicated servers than run well over $300 per month. Whichever one you choose I still recommend you have someone else do the management of the servers for you unless you are a techno geek.

There are many web hosting companies that offer services with specific e-commerce hosting packages built just for small businesses. Knowing what company to choose is a more difficult decision than trying to find one, not just because of the number of choices of web hosting companies available but because the particular e-commerce web hosting needs vary between different companies. As I mentioned before, it is imperative that you take this aspect of putting your business online very seriously as it can make the difference in success or failure.

One of the key issues that you need to be concerned with when you are looking at e-commerce web hosting packages for your business is how much bandwidth you are allowed. Not having enough bandwidth can hurt your business tremendously especially if you get a good deal of traffic or you sell items that have large downloads as well. The bandwidth is shared by all who are on your server and all the visitors who are on it at any given time so don’t cut yourself short..

Another key issue to look for in e-commerce web hosting is a web hosting company with the fewest “hops” from the internet backbone, hops are basically each server or router that are between the user and the internet backbone, the best of course would be a hosting company that feeds directly from the internet backbone. You should also try to choose a company that has the latest state of the art web server hardware with the most up to date multiple processor servers to avoid any problems.

As mentioned previously reliability is a must as well as redundancy which means they should have more than one backbone provider in case something goes wrong. If you plan on having an online store or large catalogue disk space will definitely be an issue that you will want to address as well. The e-commerce web hosting company you choose should also provide the best security for the online transactions that you will be accepting which at this time is called SSL.

These are the basic e-commerce web hosting features you should have, you may require upgrades such as back end data integration or recurring payment options but those are things you can discuss with the host you choose.

Why Beautiful Women Don’t Mix With Free Web Hosting

So you’re thinking about using a free web host instead of a paid hosting service are you? Well before you dive right in, you might want to consider a few things first.

But rather than give you the cold hard facts, I’ll illustrate my reasoning’s with my colorful, yet insightful little story that includes a free web host and a lot of beautiful women.

It all started one afternoon when I was surfing around the web when I suddenly got an idea. I said to myself: “Mike, let’s see how much traffic you can generate to a website that you built in one day.”

That seemed like a simple, yet interesting challenge. But what would I make the site about? What topic could possibly drive tons of visitors to a website that was built in just one day?

I thought about this for awhile and then it hit me. If I really wanted a site to attract lots of visitors quickly, I should make it about beautiful women. Not a porn website or anything like that. Just a simple picture page site featuring scantily clad females.

So off I went, scouring the web for pictures, downloading them, organizing them, and finally making thumbnails. I created 5 pages of 20 thumbnails each and linked all the pages together.

Then I registered my site at the first free web host I could find, and set up my 1-day site challenge.

Once it was done, I honestly had no clue if I would attract any type of traffic at all. But I figured it was worth a shot so I decided to leave my site alone and check back within a month.

Well, a month came and went, and once I checked my stats, I nearly fell off my chair.

With absolutely no advertising of any kind I had received over 3,000 unique visitors.

How did that happen? To this day I still don’t know, but needless to say, after seeing that number 3,000 on my stats page, two things happened to me.

First, I was completely shocked. I had never expected to receive that kind of traffic from a site I built in just one day, especially where I didn’t advertise it at all.

The second thing that happened was that it gave me a sense of motivation like I’ve never felt before.

While this was the most basic of websites, it still attracted visitors. Granted, having the pictures of beautiful women didn’t hurt, but still, it was something that I created and it received attention.

This did a number on my self esteem (basically sky rocketed it), and from that day on, I vowed to make my site one of the best on the web.

I added tons of images. I changed the layout several times. I went out and traded links (all done manually) with other webmasters, and my traffic sky rocketed even more!

I reached a point where I was getting 400 unique visitors a day! That’s 12,000 people coming to my site every month!

I spent months planning on how to make my site better and get even more traffic! It was like an addiction. I couldn’t stop. I wanted more visitors! More traffic!

Everything was about my site and how to make it better. Heck even my homepage button on my web browser was set to it.

But then, one day I woke up, turned on my computer, clicked my homepage button and guess what? My site was gone.

After cursing in 4 languages, and eating 2 boxes of cookies I finally calmed down. What in the world happened to my site?

Well, since my site was hosted on a free web host, I was allowed very little monthly bandwidth. I had received so much traffic that I far exceeded my bandwidth limit by a factor of twenty.

My free hosting provider never bothered to warn me or contact me. They offered no alternate solution to my bandwidth hogging website. They just deleted it.

All of my hard work was gone in just one day. It’s ironic since it was gone in the same amount of time that it was first built. Now you understand why free web hosting doesn’t mix with beautiful women.