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[D124]Dedicated Server Hosting Company

by Alex Gwen Thomson, Ale

There are literally thousands to choose from, and each touts themselves to be the best. Some will entice with incredibly low prices for the most basic of hosting plans and assurances it's all you really need for your company right now. Others will dangle the simplicity of a template collection for site building, saving you thousands since you wouldn't need a designer messing with your business image.

Almost every site will push the claim of having the best uptime, often with cautions that 'the other hosts' don't maintain their equipment as well, so your site may be regularly offline and inaccessible if you go elsewhere.

Let's cut straight to how you better make sure you've protected yourself, and the company, by making the right choice - without spending months on research.

ELIMINATE 98% OF CHOICES IN MINUTES

Promises of great service are easy to fulfill when no problems are encountered, but the true test of Great Service happens when a glitch in the flow actually happens.

No matter how hard we try, every business owner knows bumps in the road happen in the real world. Whether it's a delivery late for pickup, a customer changing their order at the last minute, or even the office or production equipment needing some unexpected and sudden quick maintenance or repair: your client doesn't care about the details, they just want their order now!

It's all part of daily business, but how we handle these hazards will determine how solidly we maintain our client's respect and continued business. You can use that same strategy to help determine the strength and support of your Hosting candidates.

Though it's only common sense that any Hosting company with a poorly done website should be immediately dropped from consideration, it should be the first item used to weed out poor choices. Forget the hype or promises: if the Hosting company is amateurish in their presentation online, they aren't likely to be savvy in delivering the quality or support when you need it.

Now that the obvious is out of the way, we'll focus on your best revealing tool. Look at what methods of communication the Hosting service provides: phone, email, troubleshooting ticket support, and the most powerful (though least often used exposing source) - the forum.

PHONE SUPPORT:

Hosting services deal with clients across borders and time zones. Though they may display regular office hours, the first question you should ask is how you can get support outside of their regular hours. Most solid Hosting companies have tech support staff on duty at all time. If equipment should happen to fail during the night, you need to know somebody will be working on getting everything back to full speed right away, not whenever the empty office shows up the next morning.

EMAIL SUPPORT:

Likewise with email support: if nobody is there to respond when a problem should arise, you will be left without support until workers begin their day - which means your clients will also be left waiting.

If you email the Host during business hours, even with a general inquiry, how long are you waiting for a response. Test a company by emailing a simple question such as "How long would it take before I can use my account after I set it up?"

The answer itself is straightforward, but what you're checking for is response time. If you don't get a reply for more than a day (if at all), then you know you aren't likely to get help for more critical matters.

TICKET SUPPORT:

This is your direct fast-track for specific account tech support. A Ticket support is given priority, and you should receive at least the first response from an actual tech staff member very shortly. Smart businesses may even register for the most basic short term account just to test the response time: it's a good investment if a Hosting company is on a deciding shortlist.

GEAK SPEAK vs. NOVICE REPLIES

How well can your Hosting service communicate? Good tech service understands that most people need to be walked through online questions without a swarm of confusing technical settings and terms to follow. At the same time, if you or your staff are tech savvy, you'll want to make sure the support staff can give you the specific technical settings without the slower hand holding explanations.

FORUMS: Your Best Behind-The-Scenes Spy

A Hosting company should have an active (and interactive) forum in their own site. This will give you immediate insight as to their professionalism.

-Organizational Strength: Look for organized topics, covering a good range of subjects such as Pre-Sales Questions, Server Status Information, Online Help Desk (with specific helpful sub-categories), Beginner and Advanced 'How-To' references, and even Site Programming and Code discussions.

-Pre-Sales Questions: The forum should (hopefully) have a section for questions by people and companies considering the host. This is not only a great way to get answers to the most common questions asked, but also a wealth of questions you should also be asking from your potential Host.

Pay particular attention to 'Who' is answering, and how fast they respond. Maintaining a good forum is time consuming, so you absolutely want to see a lot of swift activity by staff members. That's a sign support and helpfulness is full priority within the Host.

Best yet, see if current clients respond to queries. When you see the Host's own customers taking time out to respond, you know they're satisfied and anxious to share their feedback and support.

-Negative Feedback: The most telling sign of all - a good Host should openly allow negative feedback and concerns about their services. That shows they aren't trying to hide anything. Pay attention to how they handle the negatives: are they defensive, or are they calm and professional.

Beware of Hosts which show negative posts, and suddenly those posts are all deleted quickly. It's questionable when a site only allows positive responses about themselves.

Wouldn't you for a minute love to be able to follow your online visitors and see where on your website they visit and which page they leave? Just imagine being able to sit down on a chair by them and just WATCH where they go on their computer or better yet, find how they came across your site. Did they find your ad in local newspaper you placed, searched google, yahoo or msn, or was it a link from another website. I don't know about you, but I think that would be real important information. In fact it is such important information that you could even tweak your own site to be responsive to where your online visitors are going.

What Can You Learn From Statistics

Up until a few years ago when I designed a website, I did just that. I just designed the website then basically tossed it on the Internet. The only way I knew if visitors were coming was either by the emails I received or a silly counter I had installed.

My hosting company then didn't offer any statistics features so I eventually packed my bags and all 20 of my sites and switched hosting companies. It wasn't easy but after I got settled in with a good hosting company that offered statistics, it became the best move I ever made!

My current web hosting company offers many statistics online programs but the one that I found was the best and not over whelming was Webalizer. Once you enable Webalizer to run, it watches your website for multiple criteria's such as how many visits and hits you receive each day. If your not sure about the difference between “visits” and “hits”, visits is measured in how many unique visitors determined by the visitors IP address visits your website. So you could say if you have 1000 “visits” in a month, then you have had 1000 different people visit your site. Hits on the other hand are how many times your site was visited or “hit”. If a single person repeatedly visits your site then it's considered a hit.

When you first go to Webalizer you will see a graph comparing how my “Pages”, “Files”, and “Hits” you received each month since you started Webalizer. You can see if your site is gaining or loosing traffic per monthly basis. You are also given a “Summary By Month” showing total Hits and Visits and a daily averages. There are also other monthly figures but I won't get into those as to me they are not as important and this article would be a book long.

Here is where it gets real interesting. When you click on the month, you uncover detailed information about your website including hourly and daily website usage, top URLs within your site, top enter pages, top exit pages, top referrals and so on.

Converting The Information Into Money

Now this is what you're all wondering about. You might have guessed by now but if you haven't then let me explain how you can profit from that statistics that now are in front of you. For the sake of this article I will only be focusing on what I believe are the most important pieces of information you can learn from Webalizer. They are Top URLs, Top Entry Pages, Top Exit Pages, and last but certainly not least Top Referrals.

Top URLs

Top URLs is the top pages within your website that people visit. Let's say you have a Cat and Dog site. Your cat page is cat.html and your dog page is dog.html. Now you login into Webalizer, click the month you want to view, scroll down to Top URLs and you see that there was more “hits” for cat.html than dog.html. You now know that more people are looking up cats than dogs. How can you benefit and make more money with knowing which pages are getting the most traffic? Focus your ad campaigns such as affiliate banners, programs or links, Google Adsense and so on to the popular traffic pages. If you want people to visit the less traffic pages, then you can simply market the less traffic pages with banners, links or a catchy paragraph on the high traffic pages.

Top Entry Pages

Top entry pages are the initial pages people go to when they visit your site. Say we use the same Cat and Dog example and you see that cat.html gets more entry traffic then dog.html. What does this mean? It can mean that there is a direct link to that page from another website. It can also mean a search engine has that page indexed and its being display as search results when someone could be searching for lets say cats. A lot like Top URLs you can benefit from this by focusing your ad campaigns to the top entry pages, thus leading to more sales.

Top Exit Pages

Top exit pages are the last pages a person is on your site before they leave to go somewhere else. Why is this important? Knowing which page ranks highest as an exit page can help you tweak that page to keep a visitor from leaving. You could put a link and a catchy paragraph at the bottom of the page promoting one of your Top URL pages. The main thing is you want to keep the visitor at your site as much as possible and knowing where you can tweak your page to keep that visitor from leaving will lead to more sales.

Top Referrals

Top referrals are where the visitors are coming from. You can see if your visitors are coming from direct request (typing in your domain name), coming from a search engine, and find what other websites have links to yours. This feature can be more a money saver than anything. Lets say you have a monthly paying banner ad at mybestcats.com. Using Top referrals you can see how many people are clicking on that ad and entering your site by looking down the Top referral list and finding that website. If after a few months you see that only a handful of visitors came from mybestcats.com then you can make a more valuable decision to keep the banner or not on their site.

Conclusion

I hope my article has helped you understand the benefits of web statistics and how this information can help you tailor a better website and make you more money. I believe that have the best hosting plan is crucial to website success. If you would like to see what hosting I use that offers Webalizer at no cost for your website and many more important features, please visit http://www.besthostingplanever.com

Article Source : Pg. 136

About Author

Both Alex Gwen Thomson & Alex Coulstring are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Alex Gwen Thomson has sinced written about articles on various topics from Home Management, Income Tax Return and Wrinkles. About The AuthorAmy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality from their US-based hosting facility. They offe. Alex Gwen Thomson's top article generates over 673000 views. to your Favourites.

Alex Coulstring has sinced written about articles on various topics from Web Development, Computers and The Internet and Beauty Tips. . Alex Coulstring's top article generates over 720 views. to your Favourites.