Since the mid nineties, I’ve owned a web hosting company. Although I rarely promote it, it is a terrific complement to my SEO business.
One of the great things about having my own servers is that I can control many of the things that a typical hosting company won’t let you do. One of those is IP addresses. Click to continue »
Recently I picked up an SEO client which has a pretty good web presence, a nice domain name and a great product. But when you searched for their brand, they were no where to be found.
After doing a little research, I discovered that they were using a hosting company that was based out of Canada, giving them a Canadian IP address for their domain. Ouch.
Click to continue »
I’m surprised how many time this question gets asked on various forums and answer websites. I’ve seen some pretty crazy answers out there, and I think I’ll add mine to the list.
My process is simple: Get hosting. Buy your domain. Develop your website. Launch.
Since my business started doing web hosting way back in the 90′s, I’m a bit partial to hosting with my own company. For less than 11 bucks a month you can have everything you’ll need to get just about any website a place to live.
There are tons of hosting companies out there, just do a search and you’ll find plenty. For SEO purposes, I’d recommend staying away from Windows servers, though.
Now, you don’t have to have hosting when you go to buy your domain, but it is highly recommended. We’ll discuss that below.
There are literally thousands of domain names being researched and registered every day. Heck, every hour! If you find a good domain name, you should register it immediately. This is without question the most important step.
Let’s say you’re building a new website for your company. You know your name is available, but you want to get the site up first. You don’t want to have one of those ‘under construction’ banners on your website, and I can’t say I blame you.
Finally you get your site ready, and then you go to get the domain name and sure enough, someone has registered it. What could have cost you $20 bucks or less now may cost you hundreds, thousands, or even worse, the person doesn’t want to give it up. Now you’ve got to come up with something else. That bites.
During the time after you buy the domain and before you launch the website, you can do a few different things.
Under Construction – Back in the early to mid 90′s this was the norm. People would buy a domain name and put up a crazy (or boring) message saying something to the affect of “This site is under construction. Check back later”. Like someone is really going to check back. My recommendation: don’t do it.
Block the Spiders – If you’d prefer, you can simply block all spiders from crawling your page. This will allow you to build your website right on your domain (if you so choose) or you can put up the God-awful ‘under construction’ banner, but it won’t get indexed. I’d only use this method if you are in no big hurry to get indexed. Need to know how?
Park the Domain – Another one I’d probably not recommend. Most domain registrars, when you purchase, will offer you the option to park the domain for free on their server. They’ll put up a splash page with ads and basically make money off any type-ins that may occur.
Probably the biggest reason that parking occurs is because you have purchased a domain name, but haven’t got around to getting the web hosting yet. This is something you need to have prior to getting your domain because they’ll ask you for information (such as name server addresses) when you purchase the domain name.
Splash Page – If you want to at least let the search engines know you exist, and briefly what you do, you can put up a simple page of content (text, not graphics) that explains what your website will be about. This will give your visitors a reason to check back (if they like what you’ve written) and will also be a small bit of fodder for the spiders.
From a marketing standpoint, this is probably your best option. While you won’t have much info out there, at least it’s something. And you can start doing some low-end link building too, which may help you when you finally launch your site.
If you come across a good domain, or if you have a business and want to register your name before someone else does, do it. Don’t wait.
If you don’t know anything about registering domains, or need ideas for good marketable domains, just contact me or visit my business website. If you need hosting, I’ll throw the domain in free for the first year. What could be easier?
“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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
