Buying Web Hosting Space From Your Web Designer? Watch Out

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We all love to shirk responsibility and hand over some of our problems for people who are willing to handle them. Buying the right type of web hosting maybe quite an overwhelming process for a not so tech savvy business owner. The task of how muck disk space, how much bandwidth and all the technical jargon involved can get quite taxing to understand. This is a primary reason why web designers are more than happy to bundle a web hosting account along with their designing fees. But there are many ways in which such relationships can get sour if the terms of the bundling are not made clear initially. This article explains what could go wrong if you buy web hosting space from your web designer rather than buying it independently.

Buying Web Hosting Space From Your Web Designer? Watch Out

Buying Web Hosting Space From Your Web Designer? Watch Out

Price

Although you may feel that you’ve got a great package deal on your web hosting along with design fees, you should be aware that web hosting fees are recurring fees and usually payable monthly or annually. Don’t get carried away with the waiver of fees for the first year. Some website owners are in for a rude shock when the next year on the renewal anniversary, they receive a huge invoice for renewal of the web hosting account. Design firms are almost always resellers or affiliates of web hosting companies and never a web host themselves. This can be a positive thing as well as a negative thing. Sometimes they may be able to offer you a highly competitive pricing, while some of them may just exploit your ignorance or inability.

Lock In

Taking a package from your website developers may lock you in to their web hosting package as well as their design. More than a physical barrier, it creates a sort of psychological block which prevents you from switching services or choosing a different design for your website. This is precisely the reason why low cost packages are offered and customers are lured to them. Website owners fear that if they shift the design services, then the developers may not be too cooperative and not give them control of the hosting account. Similarly, even if the hosting account has limited features or provides bad service, you may be willing to stick to it if it is bundled with your development package. You should always have control of your hosting account and also have your design source code with you.

Support

If your web designer is knowledgeable, well equipped and efficient, you may get good technical support. Issues related to your website’s hosting will be solved quickly. But if your designers are new to the hosting world, they may not be of much help. Sometimes it maybe helpful to buy the hosting and design from the same company, so that all your services are under one roof. This way there can be no blame game as to which service is deficient, in case of a failure. However, this can also be a disadvantage if you have hired a nascent design firm. They maybe too raw to know the intricacies of hosting and may not be able to keep up with changing technologies or may not be competent to provide the right security or optimization measures. This should not be expected from them either, as designing is their primary business and all other things are side businesses.

Control

If you are taking a package deal, make things clear at the beginning. What happens if you decide to hire the services of another designer? Who keeps the control of the website? On whose name is the domain name and hosting registered? How do you login to control your website files? These are some of the basic questions that you should ask when you are offered such a deal. You don’t want to end up having a disagreement with your web designer, who turns off your website and takes control of your domain name, leaving you high and dry.

Web Hosting And Net Neutrality In A Nutshell

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Web Hosting And Net Neutrality In A Nutshell

Web Hosting And Net Neutrality In A Nutshell

Net Neutrality is a phrase which is being sprayed all over the internet without providing a simple and clear explanation to the layman. Web Hosts are as affected by Net Neutrality decisions just like any ordinary internet user. Many people are quick to point out that Web Hosts also practice data discrimination and should be placed on the same guillotine as ISPs. However, this is not the case as there is a huge difference in providing Bandwidth and in providing a web hosting service. This article points out a couple of reasons why the Web Hosting industry also embraces Net Neutrality with open arms and why a comparison maybe equal to apples and oranges.

Low Entry Barriers

Unlike Internet Services in any country, it is pretty simple for a person to start a web hosting business. To become an ISP, there are several legal and business hurdles that one must cross. It’s not an easy task and needs deep pockets and great influence to start the business. It is on par with a Telephone Company or Electricity Supplier. On the other hand, starting a web hosting business can be done with little or no investment. Web hosting resellers don’t even need to own a server or commit any sales to start their business. A small or medium host can spend a couple of dollars every month and lease a hosting server. This means that to enter into this industry the cost is very low and regulation is negligible. There is no Government control or paper work that needs to be done to sell hosting space. This automatically increases the number of players in the industry.

Intense Competition

The low entry barriers cause such intense competition, that the ultimate beneficiary is the end user. If one web host starts acting restrictive, people can easily switch to another one without much ado. Due to customer-facing side of the business being virtual and online, there is easy accessibility and no physical hindrances to switching. However in most places around the world, the number of ISPs are miniscule and in rural areas there may not even be more than one or two. This kills the competitiveness of the business and gives a dominant position to the ISP, which can be misused to exploit subscribers. Often, when there are only a couple of ISPs operating, it leads to a sort of cartel and price fixing which cannot be questioned. Anti-competition laws around the world prohibit such behavior and try to break up this dependence.

Cut-throat Pricing

Besides striving to offer the best service in terms of speed and resources, every web host aims to offer the best price too. The price-war is so aggressive that even customers find it hard to make a decision as they are spoilt for choice. This is exactly what ISPs don’t want. ISPs want to create restrictions among different website services or online facilities by throttling the popular ones and charging a premium for them.They may either recover the premium from the customers or may ask the web services to cough up that money. If a web host throttles traffic for a certain type of domain name and prioritizes traffic for one that he is selling Eg: .co domain names, then he will soon be out of business because all his clients will switch. As we have learnt from free online services, the consumer doesn’t like to be restricted. The more restrictions you place, the more they will shun your service.

Security and Convenience

Web Hosts do restrict certain type of traffic and also do some filtering, but this is not to create unfair competition or to get a dominant position advantage, but to ensure security and stability of their services. Eg: A host may limit simultaneous FTP connections from a single IP address to a maximum of 50. This is to prevent abuse of their FTP server and to ensure that other users on the same shared server are able to enjoy the service too. ISPs want to filter traffic to commercially exploit the end user, as they know that the end user has limited options for accessing the internet.

Google Hates These Things You Do…

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There are a couple of things that Search Engines look at when ranking your website in search results, for various keywords. These include original content, number of links pointing from other website’s to yours, your overall online presence, the quantity of relevant content on your pages. People have tried long and hard to manipulate Google’s search algorithm by trial and error of various methods. The bottom line being that you just can’t fool Google. Although there maybe more than 2000 factors which determine how your site is ranked, there is a sure-shot list

Google Hates These Things You Do...

Google Hates These Things You Do…

of points which Google hates and will punish you if you do those things. This article aims to highlight some key points which you should definitely avoid if you want to be in Google’s good books.

Plagiarized Content

Google hates copy cats. The whole purpose of Google is defeated if it is not able to serve up fresh, genuine and relevant content for a user’s search query. When a person look for something using Google, he is dependent on Google to provide the most accurate websites which will provide the information sought. If Google does not catch the attention of the searcher, he will look for the information elsewhere and Google would have lost out on potential ad revenue in the process. Google says:

“Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site; it may also constitute copyright infringement in some cases. It’s worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide more useful results for users searching on Google.”

Dummy Websites

To get back links from external websites, webmasters buy many domain names and put up rudimentary content with a link back to the parent website which they want to boost in search results. Google calls these doorway pages and penalizes doorway sites themselves and also websites using doorway pages. Since these websites or pages are “typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase” they offer no value added benefit to Google users.

“Google frowns on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the one they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practices, including removing these sites from Google’s index.”

People also use such dummy websites to automatically redirect visitors to the real website and mislead the user about where they are being taken. The dummy website will show up on Google Search Results, but the user is ultimately taken to the real website which has nothing to do with the search results.

Paid Links

Paid Links are basically links which are not earned due to quality, but are instead bought from websites which are willing to make a quick buck. This dilutes the quality of content for the search results and leads to irrelevant or misleading information. Google classifies buying or selling links that pass PageRank, excessive link exchanges, large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links and even using automated programs or services to create links to your site as Paid Links. These are all liable for being penalized and even removed from Google’s Search system.

Comment Spamming

Google’s Webmaster Support says that “If you’ve ever received a comment that looked like an advertisement or a random link to an unrelated site, then you’ve encountered comment spam.” Comment Spam is visible on many blogs, which have popular content. Spammers post a comment or remark about the article and surreptitiously insert a link with their own brand or promotion in it. Comments are usually in the form of random praise about the article or some obscure sentence related to the article content and sometimes is outright junk text. All these qualify for the penalty by Google.

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

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Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Can You Pay To Become Popular On The Internet?

Every new website owner wants to know how he can rank high in Google so that his website sale’s take off and he can make a quick buck through his online portal. The truth is that you need to invest pots of time and money to make your website successful. You need to spend a lot of resources in understanding what your clients want and how you can cater to their needs. There is no shortcut to becoming famous or popular, although there are many companies which claim to be able to boost your online reputation. The unethical means that they use are often caught and your site maybe heavily penalized for adopting such means. This article explains why paying to become popular online is a myth and has no long term positive effect.

You Can’t Fool Google

We all want to come up in Google’s ranking for the keywords that represent our products and services. We are all willing to put in a large amount of time and money in coming up in the top 10 in Google. There are also a lot of websites which claim to do Search Engine Optimization and can guarantee tons of traffic to your website. These are all short-lived services, which will be detected by search engines and will be blocked. Google uses an unknown number of factors in determining where and why your website should be ranked in the search results. Some people estimate over 2000 factors which affect your search engine ranking for a particular keyword. Google’s algorithm to rank pages is a secret and is not publicly known. While many people claim to know it, they don’t seem to be very successful at manipulating it.

Penalty For Paid Links

All Search Engines penalize site’s with inbound paid links which try to show legitimate traffic. Google’s website says:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site…Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

As far as the penalty is concerned, Google clarifies that:

“The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results. If you receive a warning for selling links that pass PageRank in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you’ll see a notification message to look for “possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.” That’s an indication that your site has lost trust in Google’s index.”

Click Farms Can Spoil Your Reputation

Apart from the penalties that your site will be subject to by the Search Engines, Click Farms which bring in paid clicks or “likes” or “followers” to your website or social media pages can be harmful to your reputation. The fake profile pictures, abusive comments and suspicious activity can be quite a repelling force for your genuine clients and prospects. Click farms pay people to just keep clicking on links, pages and ads without application of mind. A YouTube Channel - Veritasium has also highlighted how these Click Farms can show false statistics of popularity and mislead webmasters.

Quick Fame Can Be Dangerous

Getting legitimate traffic to your website by employing unethical means may get you listed higher in search rankings in the short term, but it can also lead to your site coming up on the radar of the wrong elements. When SEO firms post your website URL on click farms and shady blogs, it can attract a lot of negative attention and cause malicious attacks to be targeted to your website.

Working hard and working the right way is the only way to get your website to rank higher. Tricks and manipulations may work temporarily but not in the long term.

Will Webmail Be The Future Of Email Storage?

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Will Webmail Be The Future Of Email Storage?

Will Webmail Be The Future Of Email Storage?

With email being a primary mode of formal and official communication around the world, an important question that should be asked is that how and where will users store their data. As data storage evolved and modes of storage cross conventional limitations, innovations in Information technology has taken thing to the next level. People have stopped using their desktops for storing their email and prefer to have webmail storage which allows them to access their mail from any location at any time without dependence on any hardware. This article discusses the factors which may influence a users decision in using webmail for storing email.

Mobile Devices

Mobile devices have a lesser capacity to store as compared to our desktops and laptops. Mobile devices are used more for storing entertainment material like movies, games and music rather than emails and office work. Hence, people using mobile devices are more likely to keep their emails on their mail server rather than downloading them

Cheap Disk Space

As hardware prices reduce, so does the price of disk space. Both physical hard disk drives and even virtual storage space costs lesser and lesser day by day. Due to economies of scale, online storage space works out far cheaper (per GB) as compared to a hard disk. This encourages email users to outsource their email storage to an online solution rather than to have the headache of managing and storing the emails on their local computer.

Cloud Storage

A major reason why people will not download mails on their phones or computers is because of lack of accessibility. We all want a single location for managing our mail and documents. Earlier people would use multiple devices to download their mail and were virtually locked in to that device to manage their emailing. This meant that any hardware failure would lead to work disruption. Similarly backups were also tougher to make on a specific device. Your entire online life depended on that one device. If you bought a new device or upgraded it, you would need to carefully migrate your data. Today’s world is platform independent. You are not locked in to one type of device or one specific device. With web mail and online storage you can access your mails from any device. Your mail client only becomes a viewing tool and not a storage tool. It doesnt matter how you access your mail when it is online. You can use a laptop, desktop, mobile phone or even a browser enabled device to see your mails.

Profile Personalization

Another important feature after storage is singularity of your customization and profile. Many of us have our email signature stored with our email clients. If we use our mobile phone, we have to reset our email signature. If we use a separate webmail client, we need to reconfigure our entire signature and email preferences all over again. With webmail, any device you are on will have the same settings as other devices which access your mail. You don’t need to bother about the consistency of your email preferences or personal customization to your profile or email interface as it is always consistent.

What Should You Have Before You Buy Web Hosting Space?

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Buying web hosting is a matter of a few clicks. But what planning should be done before you buy it? Not everyone knows what to do once they buy the hosting space and many months are wasted planning what to do after you have bought the space. A good plan of action helps you to save money and utilize your purchased space better. How much disk space you need, how much bandwidth you will consume all depends on your goals. This article helps you plan the use and usefulness before you purchase a web hosting plan.

Domain Name

One step before a hosting account, comes your domain name. You need to book or register a domain name which will point to your hosting space. The domain name will represent the name of your brand online. Domain names like bookbinder.com and tablerepair.net are self-explanatory and can bring the right visitors to your website. You can usually purchase a domain name starting from $5 to $100 depending on the name and its novelty. Hosting providers also sell domain names and sometimes may offer them free or at a discounted price along with their hosting packages. Availing of these offer bundles can help you save big bucks.

Website Design

Are you going to have a website for your domain name? Or are you going to use it only for email? If you are planning to have a website, it is essential that you do a bit of homework and know what it takes to make it successful. The purchase of web space and setting up the website design should go hand in hand so that neither the money spent on the designing or resources spent on the hosting account go waste. As soon as your design has completed the pilot testing stage and is ready to be put into production, it is ideal to purchase the web space.

Budget

If you don’t have a big budget, it’s very important that you draw out a plan for your website. Many companies jump into expensive software or online products, without knowing how to implement them or how to get their employees to start using them. A website or web app is no different. You can get a lot of off-the-shelf software which you can start using immediately, but do you really need it? How long will training and adaptation take? Will you be able to easily migrate your systems from old to new? All these are questions you need to ask yourself before you jump into buying it. If you haven’t planned properly, your purchase of web space and a domain name will go waste.

Email Accounts

What Should You Have Before You Buy Web Hosting Space?

What Should You Have Before You Buy Web Hosting Space?

If you are going to have email accounts for this domain name, it is best to plan out the email account details and the space that you plan to allocate to each account. This can be estimated from existing email traffic or you can simply choose the minimum limits and keep upgrading as your requirement increases regularly. Individual email accounts must be created with a password and quota setting. You can also plan out if you are planning to forward emails to another email address or domain name. Similarly, any internal email policies should be planned out before you jump in to purchasing web space.

Resource Usage

How much space you need is one of the most important questions that you should be prepared for when visiting the website of your favorite web host. Do you need additional features or resources from the beginning? Or can you upgrade your account later? It’s always a good idea to start off with a plan with the bare minimum resources that you need and then later upgrade in advance, incase you anticipate a higher requirement. Start with how much space your website actually takes up at the moment, almost all hosts will allow you to upgrade your plan on a pro rata basis and adjust the amount you have already paid, towards the upgraded plan.

How Should You Report Spam Mail For Quick Action?

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How Should You Report Spam Mail For Quick Action?

How Should You Report Spam Mail For Quick Action?

We are all affected by the scourge of spam mail. Many of us receive thousands of emails which are fortunately filtered out by our email services or email software. The main issue that everyone has with spam is that it prevents us from noticing genuine mail, which may get lost in the noise of continuous junk. Spam delays or prevents us from getting to our legitimate or important mails. There are various agencies around the world, in many countries dedicated to fighting spam mail and protecting the interests of email users across service providers. There are various agencies which you can complain to about spam. This article explains how you can complain about spam mail and get some effective remedy.

SpamCop

SpamCop.net is a spam reporting service which complains about spam on your behalf, to the service provider of your spammer. When you report a spam mail to spamcop, it forwards your complaint to the correct authority in charge of the IP Address or network of the origin of the spam mail. It picks out the Abuse Complaint details of the network provider and sends a pre-drafted email filled in with the details applicable to your complaint. The best part about spamcop is the enforce ability of the complaint. SpamCop provides spam activity information and statistics to various anti-spam filter services which use these details to block mail even before they reach a mail server. If you are blacklisted due to a spamcop complaint, your IP Address will no longer be able to send out emails to people who are using those blacklists and filters. If that happens, mails from your server will be delayed or will bounce. If your are providing an email service, your service will be disrupted till the spam doesnt stop.

The Abuse Email Address of the IP Address Owner

The email address of the network owner maybe a bit hard to find out, but it should surely yield some results. Most Network Operation Centers, Data Centers and Hosting Providers take abuse complaints very seriously. Action on abuse complaints includes disconnection of services or even temporary suspension of the offender’s service. The abuse contact is supposed to be a one-point communication address by which anyone aggrieved by the behaviour of a certain subscriber or network can report the issues to that person. You can find out the abuse email address of a domain name by visiting abuse.net or simply sending a mail to the default abuse address i.e. abuse@domain_name.com or postmaster@domain_name.com where domain_name is the actual domain name which appears to be sending out spam.

Government Spam Reporting Systems

Various countries around the world have passed anti-spam laws to help tackle the scourge of spam mail. Federal Trade Commission in the USA, Canada Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) Reporting Center in the Canada host an email spam reporting service, which in turn forwards your complaint to the appropriate network operator. The limitation of these bodies is that they may not be able to do much for email or hosting services which are located beyond its territorial jurisdiction.

Mail Client or Webmail Plugin

Nowadays there are many tools available to email users for reporting spam or sending complaints about email service abuse. Webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail have a “Report Spam” button or a “This look like spam” which not only places a complaint but also filters out similar messages in future, by educating the spam control system. Mail client’s like Outlook also have various add-ins to report and delete spam. Some Anti-virus and Firewall software offer integrated email scanning which automatically reports suspicious bulk emails to a central command system.