If you are taking the step into heading onto the World Wide Web for the first time, hosting a website for a business or perhaps you wish to impart your knowledge with the world, there are many things to be aware of. The World Wide Web has seen a huge surge in demand in recent years and it is impossible to contemplate running a business without having an online presence. There are so many things that a firm must have in place when they try to develop a new business and they include the infrastructure, sales and promotional and marketing activities. It is quite common for a new firm to have an extremely tight budget and this forces a firm to create and hot their own websites that provide value for money and great efficiency.
There is no doubt that a website plays a very active role in creating the opinion a consumer has of a company. It is their gateway to the world, it can increase the rate of traffic a company receives and it can help them create their own little niche on the internet. Needless to say, if you are an internet based company, the website has to be a pressing priority.
For a startup firm, there are a huge amount of companies that offer web hosting facilities. These services have been created with the startup firm in mind and will be adapted to suit their needs specifically. The web hosting firms will usually offer the advice of the SEO experts to ensure that customers are armed with good techniques to drive more custom to their store.
Processes that startup firms need to follow for web hosting:
It can be a little tricky to host a website for the first time. Following some of the basic steps that are listed here will enable any new user to make the best decision about what web hosting company is best for them and their needs:
* The first task should always be to search the internet and obtain as many price quotes as possible firm companies who offer web hosting services for new firms.
* Choose the one that best meets your budget and your requirements. Undertake a full search of what they offer, what their background is and if there are any other features. Compare this to some of the other sites you have seen.
* Having chosen your firm, sign up online. Go through the join up process and offer up the details that they request, which may include name, address ad credit card details.
After applying, wait for the approval which may take a day or two.
* With the application approved and a hosting account generated, start hosting your very own website.
What does a Web Hosting startup package consist of?
For firms who are looking to enter the internet for the first time, there is a great deal of companies to choose from who offer tailored web hosting startup packages. There are many reasons to start a website and it can include blogging or sharing information and knowledge with other people. It is quite common for new firms to have low needs and casual demands for their site and this is matched by having a limited budget. These are the constraints that web host providers will work round to offer special packages to new companies.
Features in a Web Hosting Startup package:
There are a number of common occurrences which a web host may offer in a package designed for a new startup company although the actual offer may differ between different sites.
* Web Management system - This will include a base amount of between 20MB and 50MB disk storage space. It should also include a minimum of 10GB each month for data transfers, the ability to have complete FTP and anonymous FTP access. In addition to these services, there should also be the provision of Static IP Address and Secure Server (SSL) Transaction Encryption.
* Email Features - Every startup site needs to have these facilities. The standard benefits of these packages include having about 10 email accounts (configured to POP/Web), the ability to have email aliases and provide forwarding facilities. Other email features can include PGP Encryption, Personal SMTP Mail Server and the ability to use Email Auto Responders.
* E-Commerce - If you are looking to provide a shopping facility on your site, the following features will be vital. Having Password Protected Directories and Service Side Includes (SSI) can make your life much easier. As can having access to PHP4 Server-side Scripting and SSH-Secure Shell.
* Technical Support - Most new customers require the facility of 24 hour support, which can be offered through ticket support and it is common for firms to state they guarantee 99.9% uptime each year.
* Website Monitoring - Some of these packages include Wusage 7.0 Graphical Statistics, Raw Access Logs which can be downloaded and DailyData Backups.
* Additional Software - Some users may find their package also contains other software such as Web Based Control Panel or an increased level of support for FrontPage Extensions..
Hardware & Network - Many of the startup packages include Dual- 1 Ghz Pentium IV Servers, Custom Red Hat Server OS, Apache Server Software, 10-T1, 5-DS3, and 1-OC3 Network Connectivity and Uninterruptible Power
* Advanced Features - In order to get more customers, the web host providers are offering up additional features to customers. These can include products like CGI Bin or Custom MIME Types. They could include UnixShells, bash, csh, tsh, Perl, C or C++. There may also be the provision of Java JDK, Python and TCL Compilers, Emacs 20.4, Pine,vi, Joe and Pico & Cron Tab. And if that wasn't enough, there is also .htaccess and Custom Error Documents and if none of these are enough to get custom on board, many also offer a 30 day money back guarantee.
Vital information that Startups need to know:
New website owners, whether it is business or pleasure need to have clear goals about what they want for their site. They need to know what they want to store and archive on the site. Knowing this in advance is vital before making decisions about what they want to do on the World Wide Web. The following tips should help any new user.
The attention span of a user is very short and hence the website for start-ups should look attractive and must be able to grab the attention of the readers. Ask self targeted questions like what will bring people to the website?
* The benefits that search engine factors and taking advantage of usual SEO guidelines will work well with the existing website content to make the site more popular, so it is important to use SEO.
How do you want your company or the products to be marketed in the web?
* Being attractive to search engines is good but a firm needs to provide engaging content to keep customers coming back to the site.
* Think of how many other sites are starting up just now. You need to ensure your firm stands out from the rest of them.
Do not go for shared web hosting services as it has no performance guarantees.
* Fast connections are important to your site so make sure that the web host company is able to provide them.
* Ask if there is any back-up system in store in case your web host provider loses power.
* Contact the customer support service and ask questions of them.
* There are other issues that you should ask your web host provider if they offer before deciding to go with them. These can include do they provide access to a secure server in order to enable order processing and if they do is it free? Do they have an online Web Site Manager and do they have an online support manual.
While starting a new website, there are various pitfalls that one needs to avoid. A well structured and search engine optimized website can bring the right traffic and growth for the company. It is recommended to seek the help from the professional Web hosts who can tactfully recognize the requirements of the startups and provide the most efficient services.
I immediately started looking for alternatives and decided on Go Daddy dedicated hosting. The price was right and for just over $100 a month I got a nice server with 2 GB of memory, 500GB of monthly bandwidth, a speedy CPU all to my self, to abuse as I see fit.
Fast forward to UFC 77. You see I run a web site which does UFC predictions and UFC results. On fight night, the site can get pretty busy, my previous high was 18,000 visitors in the 3 or so hours that the fights take place. My shared hosting account never had a problem with this load, at least not as far as I could tell. However, with UFC 77 on my new dedicated hosting account my server hit a brick wall. The CPU was at 100% and there were 200 apache processes all vying for the available CPU and memory. Immediately I started looking for reasons and more importantly solutions. Three days later I think I have most of my answers.
It's important to know that Go Daddy was not at fault, I asked for a box with certain specs and that's exactly what they gave me, complete with all the software they said. MySQL, PHOP 4.3.9 and Apache 2.0.52. So I started looking (when the server calmed down) at what was happening when a user requested a page. The first thing that I noticed was that the current apache process would take about 5% CPU, I did not pay attention to how long it ran. The next thing I noted was that mysql would also take significant CPU, if only for a short period of time. It's important to know that during UFC 77 MySQL was taking approx 50% CPU for the whole busy period. Time to search for some optimizations.
For my site, where there are 20,000 visitors in 3 hours and maybe 10 updates during that time, caching would obviously be helpful. I noticed searching the web that apache has some caching and even better some min caching, however it is not considered production ready in the 2.0.52 build that I have, so I discarded that idea rather quickly. I did however notice some things when I looked at MySQL optimizations.
The most important MySQL optimization that I found is the query_cache_size option. You see, MySQL has this concept of query caching, here's a simple explanation. If I do a simple query, say
SELECT customer_name from customer where customer_id > 10 (I know, a silly query)
Generally the database goes through all of it's magic and returns back the result set of all customers names who's id's are greater than 10. For this query it wouldn't take very long, but the more complex the query the longer it would take. However, with MySQL query caching, the result of that query would be kept in memory, along with the query itself, meaning that the next time the same query was run the database would just check that no tables in the query have been changed and then look up the result in memory and give it back. This is much faster. MySQL has query caching turned on by default, but the query_cache_size variable is set to 0, essentially disabling the feature. To turn it on you must do:
query_cache_size=64M in my.cnf
Note: I also increased my query_cache_limit to 4M and my thread_cache_size to 384. There are many other MySQL options which you can set to enhance performance, look for a good MySQL book or maybe I'll post some of them on my open source depot blog at www.open-source-depot.com/blog.
After setting those options in my.cnf you'll need to restart MySQL, being that I'm kind of impatient and I don't like restarting processes I went to the MySQL command line and set the global options. For some reason the 64M didn't work for me there, so I used the expanded (bytes) version
i.e mysql> SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 60000000;
to see what's set, do a:
mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'have_query_cache';
Note: You need to tell MySQL to "go" with a g on the next line.
Now I tried hitting my blog a bit and found that the CPU for MySQL never went over 1 or 2 (except for the first hit), very very cool. I must make a note that I have found some references on the net where query caching on MySQL actually degrades performance for certain circumstances. I would guess that in a heavy update environment (a shopping cart for instance) that the overhead of the cache might outweight it's usefullness, but for sites like mine where it's 99.9% reading and only .1% writing query caching is awesome. There are other MySQL optimizations that I want to look at like table caching and maybe even persistent connections, but one step at a time. I want to see what kind of difference this one change will make. I'm hoping for good things. My next step is PHP caching, but I'll save that for another article.
Both Matt Hedges & Jon Murray 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.
Matt Hedges has sinced written about articles on various topics from About Web Hosting, About Web Hosting and The Internet. About the Author: Matt Hedges. Hedges, a 12 year veteran of the web hosting industry, helps small business owners find the on the Interne. Matt Hedges's top article generates over 40500 views. to your Favourites.