“Can I just pay a couple of months now? We can’t afford to do the whole year at once”

Sometimes my hosting business gets requests to extend a hosting account just a month or two.  I’ve always accommodated these requests, as I can understand money can be tight.

However recently I’ve had two instances where people have requested an extension (and they’ve paid their $9 bucks or whatever it is) just to move hosts.  They had planned all along to do so, and just needed a little more time to do so.

Well, no more extensions.  From now on you pay for a year or I terminate the account.

What is that saying, lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part?  Something like that…

I live in a fairly small town, about 20,000 people in the city limits. Suffice to say, most of the small businesses in town don’t have a website. Forget search engine marketing, heck some are still on dialup.

But such is life (not) in the big city. If for some odd reason, a local business actually decides that they need a website, they still have no idea the few purchases (domain, hosting & web designer) that they need to make just to get that site up and running. Web hosting is the most foreign of the three to the average business owner.

So today I’m going to help Mister Joe Average out there who’s running a business selling appliance parts or running a local drywall company.

Web Hosting Defined: A service that allows users to post web pages to the Internet. A web host, which is also called hosting service provider (HSP), is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for websites to be viewed on the web.

Basically, web hosting is the virtual real-estate that you lease which you build your website upon. You rent out a portion of a hard drive on a server that is connected to the Internet.

So how do you go about picking out a web host? There are tons of them out there. Some are professionally driven, and some are run by a 15 year old high-schooler. Here are some quick and easy ways to pick out a good host.

Pre-tips Tip: This may be a personal bias, but if you’re planning on marketing your site, I suggest you stay away from Windows-based hosting. The options with Linux servers are much better, and there are plenty of them out there, don’t be at a disadvantage right from the get-go.

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I had the pleasure of speaking with Monty Loree from the Canadian Money Advisor yesterday about people making money online.

We spoke a bit about my business and how I started out doing web design. As I would build these websites, I would always ‘farm out’ the web hosting to another company. I saw a need for my clients to get hosting, and I discovered that I could offer these things on my own. So that’s where I started making money online. Ten years later, I’m still doing it through SEM.

And the good news is, you can too!

I was recently a guest on SEO101, a show on Webmaster Radio. The show covered topics related to hosting and SEO.

 

 SEO 101 - Hosting [35:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hosting company Lighthouse Technologies has just launched their reseller hosting affiliate program. For anyone wanting to make some nice payouts ($100 bucks per!), sign up here

When putting up a website, there are a few modifications to the .htaccess file that you should consider.

1. Your site usually has two defaults that work:

• http://yoursite.com
• http://www.yoursite.com

Now, that’s cool that you can get to it two ways. Problem is, the search engines see this as two separate websites, both with the exact same content. Problem. You definitely want to avoid the duplicate content penalty. So, to fix that, we need to add a few lines of test to your .htaccess file.

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Web Host Lighthouse Technologies has just posted a new page on their site offering a 40% discount to all Dreamhost customers.

After Dreamhost’s bad luck, this looks quote appealing to web hosts that are wanting to have a secure system with excellent customer service.

The sale only goes through June 20, 2007.

According to Caydel, nearly 3500 ftp passwords have been leaked from web host DreamHost.

I’ll use this bad news as an opportunity to promote my hosting. Why not?