Tutorials & Guidance of web hosting services. We seriously test all items from top companies then provide a quick manual for users to start with their service easily.

Tips to Improve Website User Experience

improve website user experience

What's user experience? It's the concept of website design. The purpose is to offer visitor with the info what they expected and guide them to read further on your website. For ecommerce website, it means increasing of potential orders. Also, from the google latest website optimization guidelines, user experience will be considered the most important factor.

How to improve website user experience?

A good website always comes with nice user experience. For example the news report websites and ebay, we always spend lots of time once we opened up them. How they managed to do so? It's easy to exam the successful sites and get the basic ideas on how to do with our own site. Generally, the website user experience is composed by the following

  • Branding
  • Usability
  • Functionality
  • Content

What does that mean? Means regardless what kind of information we can provide on website, we must make sure the site is functional properly and usable first! For example if our website always gives out server errors or timed out for any reason, it'll never be considered as successful site. So make sure to get a quality web hosting service for your website and consult to a professional web designer to optimize the website structure properly.

Also, keep in mind user experience on website is continuing work. We need to adjust based on stats analysis and find out what to improve. The google webmaster tool is great for such purpose, so make sure to sign up with and add your website for examination.

Another important rule is user interaction. We might have tried out best to make the website user friendly but don't know how visitors think about. setup a poll and get suggestions from website visitor is always good idea. Today I went to ipage and fatcow website for the Feb promotions, when I tried to switch to another site they prompt up a survey window and ask me why to leave and how they can assist me better. Screenshot as below

fatcow survey

How do you think about? Personally I think their team is pretty smart to keep visitors for potential purchase. It's quite important for ecommerce website. When you're not sure where to start, asking for suggestions from your website visitor will help with the improvement directly. Because the end user's opinion is what we actually needed.

User experience vs SEO

I mentioned Google optimization from the first paragraph. So what's the relationship between SEO and website user experience? Are they conflict each other? Absolutely not. The website user experience is actually considered the most important factor from latest google policy. Means a website with good user experience will rank higher comparing to those pure traditional seo based websites. It's clear to see user experience will perform more in SEO industry and will change the working mode for SEO workers. The traditional factors like link building, article submiting etc are not so important anymore. It's good news for those webmasters who are trying to offer us useful information.


Domain Selection Tips and Tools

domain selection tips and tools

Selecting the correct domain name for your website is most important while pretty stressful in doing the work. Indeed, we always spend a lot of time doing domain name research but still not sure which is the most suitable one. In this article I would like to share my personal experience about how to choose the proper domain and related tools for domain name research. Feel free to share your ideas.

Best Domain name selection tips

There're different standards depends your website topic and personal thoughts. Here are several of the essential rules we should follow up

Keywords in your domain. Keywords will express your website ideas pretty straight, especially for ecommerce website purpose, you will get visitors' eye-balls more easily and ranked quick on search engine.

Be as short as possible. Based on the first rule, don't keep all your keywords in a single domain because no one will like to remember it for future visits. Always try to keep your domain names as short as possible. Take a look at some famous websites such as google, twitter, facebook etc, we can tell them out without any problem. If they designed with a long phrase, obviously less popular there will be.

Do not use punctuation and numbers. Based on the second rule, we should try to avoid such parameter in domain name in order to keep it short. Why? just think from website visitors' end, why should they look somewhere else on keyboard to enter your website? Be able to type out your domain name in quick time is basic requirement for a good website.

Do not use trademarked names. Always remember to avoid such stuff because you will be in high risk of being sued by some groups. The trademarked names are property of the existing brand owners.

If we can follow the above rules in mind, we can start the journey in selecting our domain names in correct way. Of course, there're many other rules in everybody's mind but obviously the above rules are quite important ones.

Best domain suggestion tools

Yes, absolutely. A good suggestion tool will reduce our time in selecting our best domain names. Here I would like to share the most popular tools that I have used on my website.

The first and the best would be the domain registrar website such as godaddy, networksolutions etc. By searching your wished domain name via their tools they will give a list of available domain names with similar phrases. If you can't get the most wanted domain, their website suggestions are good to think about.

Another tool I would like to introduce is Domaintools

domain suggestion tool

Domaintools is most featured for domain analysis, it will tell you exact information about a domain including whois, domain health, number of hosted domains on same hosting server etc… The best of the best is it will list out the availability of different extension and similar domains. http://domaintools.com

The last one I recommend is Stuckdomains

domain suggestion tool

Stuckdomains is a website for expired domains collection. As long as the domain expired completely, it will be added to Stuckdomains database. When you search some related terms, it will be listed from search result. Their database is updated every few periods. http://stuckdomains.com/

Tips On How to Improve Website ROI

How to improve website ROI

ROI would be the most interesting topic to most people. As long as you're doing business in the world you will need to calculate and actually improve the ROI. What does ROI exactly mean? How can I improve it? This is what I would like to discuss about here.

What's ROI?

ROI is short of Return On Investment, ROI is one way of considering profits in relation to capital invested. For people who're involved to any kind business, they should always consider how to reduce the investment and increase profits. So as we see, high rate ROI is the goal for every live business.

How to improve ROI?

There're different understandings according to different business. I would like to focus on internet business which is based on website. Website is revolution to traditional business since it destroyed geographical boundaries and connected everybody together, it makes it possible for people to make money online without having to open the actual store. Here I would like to share my personal points and other popular methods to improve ROI.

SEO practice

SEO is a MUST if you would like to promote something from website. Unlike the website early times, the competition is now very hot on internet. You can putup a website in minutes, but you may spend more than a year to get ranked on search engine and wait more time in order to get orders. SEO is your best friend to help you website rank high in relatively short term. Several website seo tips as below

Keywords research — Use google adwords and locate the most suitable keywords for your website. As the beginning of your website, you don't have to compete with the leading websites, you should pay attention to other keywords with less competition and digg long tail keywords as more as possible.

SEO website software — Always use some website management software that you're familiar with because you can customize it easily when it's needed.

Linkbuilding — Build backlinks to your website keywords and never stop doing so!

ROI 3 points theory

If you have budget to advertise, it's important to choose the correct methods in order to maximize the profits. Here're the 3 points theory you should follow up, "Relevance, Originality, Impact"

Relevance means you should make sure your advertisement is accurate based on your products, you should explain correctly and show out your advantages

Originality requires you to make new ideas in advertisement to attract visitors' eye-ball and encouraging them to purchase. You should learn such skills according to your own understanding and experience.

Impact would be more hard, you need to learn about the consumers' social culture and history. The advertisement is actually expression of their culture. Of course you have to experience much in order to archive this.

You have more ideas about how to improve ROI? Feel free to share your thoughts!

Unlimited Space Hosting Secret Revealed

unlimited disk space debate

Looking for unlimited disk space hosting solution? Are you aware almost every shared hosting providers are offering unlimited disk space on the web? Indeed, this is almost a MUST feature to attract people's eyeballs. But is it true service? I would like to discuss it more in this article posting and find out who's really offering this service.

How is unlimited space hosting offered?

As we know, the disk space amount is always limited no matter how you configure it. "Unlimited" stuff never exists in logic. So why "unlimited space" is always advertised by various service companies? I have to say, the first company who announced to offer such service is absolutely smart enough because they firstly attracted most people's eyeball. They understand customers' mind perfectly and offer more than what they really expected. So guess what? Unlimited stuff is just business trick to get more orders! Unless you idealy think they could offer what they described on website, you should ignore such points and focus on other features you needed.

Especially for shared hosting server, the disk space usage is actually limited strictly and monitored by system level configurations. Normally, if you go over 10GBs you will get warning from hoster and they will ask you to upgrade or delete files. Most web hosting providers advertise unlimited in plan features but hide the actual limitation in TOS. So please be sure to read TOS before sending out your money.

Is Unlimited Possible?

Based the modern technologies, unlimited space is possible. It's available at cloud computing service where you can add as many hardwares as you like. Especially for those big cloud computing providers like amazon, they have a huge network to work with and each network node can be very scalable to support a big data system. However, the cost is pretty high for cloud hosting, thus its only good solution for enterprise choice.

cloud computing diagram

Do you really need unlimited disk space?

Since unlimited space doesn't exist but just a business trick, you won't get such service anywhere. You should evaluate how much disk space your website might consum on hosting server. It's actually impossible to get lots of space under a shared hosting plan (Just think about the price and other services you get from it). A regular site will rarely use 1GB disk space. Unless you're operating a photo gallery or vedio uploading application, you won't use up the allocated space.

If you really need a lot of space you probably need a vps/dedicated server to deal with. For large size and heavy traffic website, cloud hosting would be the best choice.

Which Hosting offers limited disk space?

In today's hosting industry, it's really hard to find a service provider who offers exact amount officially. By research and webmaster experience. Hawkhost is the best who can offer service in real diagrams. If you don't trust the "unlimited" service from any company, they're worth to check out.

Screenshots as below

hawkhost account space

Why hawkhost provides limited disk space usage? Except for the disk space, you might find some crucial hosting features are limited as well because they treat their hosting servers seriously and just offer the usable part to avoid overloading. Just think about the cheap hosting plan, how could they offer you unlimited service? I have to say, the two companies are some part more honest in doing business on internet because they have kept the limit since from the begining.

What if I need lot of disk space for shared hosting? If you really wish big disk storage for shared hosting environment, dreamhost is probably your best choice. They advertised to offer unlimited space, but from real user experience, their actual limitation is set up to 300GBs which is absolutely leading in hosting industry.

Check out dreamhost for hosting plans http://www.dreamhost.com

SEO Hosting Secret Revealed

SEO Web Hosting

SEO is being considered by most webmasters and it's a hot topic on various web forums. As long as your website is set online you will think about how to rank your website high in order to get clients because more and more people are rely on search engines. So what does seo exactly mean? Does SEO Hosting really exist? This is what I would like to discuss in this article. feel free to share your ideas and thoughts.

SEO Hosting Overview

SEO stands for search engine optimization. The term is created at the end of 20th Century when various search engine companies being setup. There're many other word terms related to SEO such as SEM(search engine marketing), SERP(search engine result page) etc. It's necessary to understand their means if you would like to work with SEO.

SEO hosting generally means the hosting server is search engine friendly or not penalized by major search engine providers such as google, yahoo or Bing. To most people, dedicated ip offer is the focus in understanding the term.

What're the factors to affect SEO?

When we talk about SEO, mostly we're referring to google because almost every seo standards are made by this company such as PR(page rank). So what's being measured by google to rank your website? It's actually a complex system to calculate but generally speaking the following aspects are mostly concerned: Proper HTML tags, Easy to crawl website structure, Regualer website update and backlink growth, Fast website loading. Onsite website optimization is most important as you see, you should always consider the basic aspects when your build a website.

Does SEO hosting really exist?

When you search the keyword "seo hosting", the www.seohosting.com website is the first one in your sight because the domain is completely composed with the keywords. You may also notice many other web hosts who announced to offer mutiple free dedicated IPs for seo hosting advertisement. So does dedicated IP really works for seo? If you check from google's seo documentation you should notice that there's no reference to dedicated ip stuff among hundreds of seo measures.

What does that mean? That means google actually treat shared and dedicated server the same! No matter if you pay several bucks or several hundreds per month, google has no discrimination to your websites, you can safely host your website under shared hosting.

Does that mean dedicated ip is worthless? Absolutely not. When some website got penalized on same hosting server, a dedicated ip will keep your site unaffected because you do not share the same IP address with the bad site. For this case, dedicated IP add extra security protection to your website.

Now you should have learnt the seo hosting is not rely on dedicated ips which is advertised by many hosting companies. To make the hosting search engine friendly, the server must be stable and reliable with less down time to serve your website. A problematic hosting server is never friendly to search engine no matter how many static ips are assigned to.

How to choose the right seo hosting plan?

Since the server uptime is most important for seo, a stable hosting server is what you need when looking for seo hosting plan. When you search for such service, never be misguided by some "end soon" terms or some unbelievable low price. You should always remember you will get what you have paid for. Although the hosting service is more and more cheap comparing to early times, a good rated hosting is always safe choice if you're new to the industry.

Best SEO hosting provider?

Since dedicated ip is not considered for seo anymore and you don't really need it unless you need to apply SSL certificate, a good seo hosting won't advertise such if they know what seo is. From our various web hosting reviews. Arvixe and Inmotionhosting services are highly recommended because of their outstanding hosting features and customer service. The two hosting brands are actually the standards of many other services in the business. Some outstanding hosting features good for seo as following

  • World class datacenters and network backbone
  • 24 x 7 tech support and server monitoring technologies
  • Search engine free credits and tools
  • Discussion forums for SEO problems
  • and more!

Visit http://www.Arvixe.com to check SEO hosting plans!
Visit http://www.InmotionHosting.com for fast hosting service

Website Firewall & Security Setup

website firewall protection

Website security is always concerned as long as your site is online. You never expect your website offline when an important transaction being made there or you when you like to show products to clients from live store. Indeed, a website failure could lose a big business sometimes so it's necessary for every webmaster to learn some basic knowledges to secure your site and keep it in healthy state.

There's a lot of work to do for website securing, for example the server site security configuration, network firewall, unhealthy traffic filtering etc. In this article I will mainly focus on website coding level about how to save the limited bandwidth and avoid malicious injection. The two parts security would be mostly discussed on various community web forums.

How to secure your website code to deal with attack?

Website code is the basis of your website and it's the first thing you need pay attention to for website security. You should always follow the two tips below for code level protecting

Optimize your website codes as simple as possible. We should always try to strip out the unnecessary codes in programming and keep our codes as standard as possible. It's not only good for security but also good for website loading and speed. A good website structure is always friendly to both search engine and visitors.

Encrypt your important codes. If your website contains some important commercial info you should try to encrypt it using up to date technologies. Nowadays most websites are database driven, database connection strings should be protected mostly since it stores all your website sensitive information. The best way is to encrypt each of your connection strings and put your sql queries in stored procedures to reduce any potential security hole.

Of course, there're many more to be considered to protect your website data, you should always keep updated to industry news and improve your skills.

How to save website bandwidth from hotlinking?

One popular website hacking is called dDos which is to exhaust your website bandwidth and cause entire server down. Although we may not have access to configure the hardware level protecting, we can also do something in coding to reduce extra bandwidth consumption. Here I would like to show how to avoid image hotlinking from other websites. hotlinking would seriously eat your website bandwidth especially when there're many pictures on your website. Take wordpress for example, we can implemen the following codes to htaccess and upload it to your website root.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bing.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yahoo.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|png|jpg)$ http://yourwebsite.com/no.png [R,NC,L]

Make sure to replace yourwebsite.com to your actual domain and make sure your hosting server support htaccess. Once you configured it properly, any hotlinked picture from your website will be replaced by the file no.png, you can put anything on this picture and notify visitor it's linking from your website.

Firewall for WordPress Site

Wordpress is definitely one of the most famous website software nowadays. Here I would like to introduce a firewall that's designed specially for wordpress. It's approved to be working as the best. For how to setup the firewall, please visit this official site for details http://perishablepress.com/5g-firewall-beta/

There're many plugins/codes for wordpress security configuration. However, no matter how you security the site, please keep in mind you should always backup your data regularly in case of any hacking or damage.

Any other tips to secure your website?

Of course, no matter what kind of effort you have made to security your website you will finally find a hosting to put your site online. That means the rest works completely rely on your hosting provider, thus a quality web hosting provider is quite important to put your website in safe hand. When you consider a hosting provider, never be misguided by their cheap service, you should pay attention to the service feedbacks. You always get what you paid for, each penny will return the same value service.

Best Secure web hosting suggestion

If you're looking for secure web hosting service with leading features and affordable price, I highly recommend you check out Arvixe. No matter if you need windows or linux web hosting plan, arvixe got it setup with industry standard features plus outstanding security implementations. Host your website on arvixe server is to put your business in safe hand!

The Arvixe multiple SAS 70 Type II certified data centers located in Dallas and Houston, they deliver complete redundancy in supplying data center power to servers and heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

If any data center received a power disruption for any reason, you're covered. That's because arvixe has a complete power management system, including backup generators, in the unlikely event that normal power supplies fail.

Visit http://www.Arvixe.com for secure web hosting plans