Apr 24, 2008 - Website Hosting Tips To generate more Traffic (Article)

Website Hosting Tips To generate more Traffic

Web hosting services facilitate to put a website (domain name) on the internet. After registering a website and picking a domain name, the next step is to find a perfect web hosting service. For successful business campaign a website must be always up and running, only a quality website hosting provider can do this.

Bad Hosting May Cause Problems

There are a ton of unreliable hosts on the web offering either free or discounted web hosting. Hosting is one thing one should spend good money on. If your site is down most of the times you may lose potential customers and spiders may not be able to spider your site. Your online reputation may be destroyed completely. System lag and overloading of the server let the website down. Overloading is generated when hundreds or thousands of domains are placed on a single IP address on a single server. This is called "Bad Hosting".

Common Hosting Problems

- Bad hosting prevents customers from finding you and may prevent your site from getting and staying fully indexed in the search engines.
- Some hosts will not let you change some of your files or configurations that you need to change when running your site
- Some hosts configure incorrectly with the wrong clock time or sending DNS errors that prevent your site from being indexed. A server header checker can be used to ensure your clock time is not way off and your home page provides a 200 code and non existent pages provide a 404 error.
- One can also use Web Bug or the Firefox Live HTTP Headers extension to check HTTP headers.

Dedicated Vs Shared Hosting:
Dedicated hosting is typically far more expensive when compared to share hosting. Shared hosting places many domain names on the same IP address and same server, whereas dedicated servers allow you to place just your stuff on a server. If you are going to be making major investments into the web then it may be worth it to buy a reliable dedicated server. As in shared hosting you have no security for your web site. In shared hosting there are chances of invading your web site by other Spammers hosted on that same server but in the dedicated servers your web site is more secured as you have total access over the server.

Host in Your Country
Getting regional focus in the search results can also be a better idea. Many major search engines give sites a relevancy boost if it is hosted in the same location as the local search market. If you are promoting a site primarily geared toward Japan, you should not host that site in India.