Web Hosting Services

As you know from my last post, the choice of a web hosting company is extremely important. Some of the best known and highly popular are GoDaddy, 1and1.com, Yahoo small business, Fast Host, and Hostigator.

One of the high quality but lesser known and highly affordable hosting company is My Power Host. It has a lot of excellent features, like Cpanel , Fantastico and support for MySQL and PHP scripts.

GoDaddy has a wide variety of hosting choices, and great tech support, but do you really want to pay them to be an affiliate? But I guess sponsoring Danca Patrick and a NASCAR and Super Bowl commercials aren't cheap.

Yahoo small business has a wide variety of hosting packages as well, but more limited than GoDaddy. Decent tech support, but not overly helpful for newbies.

Perhaps one of the best hosting companies for newbies is 1and1.com. They offer a free manual that you can print out from James Martell, which is extremely good for educating you about internet marketing and websites.

In the next post, we will look more specifically at the individual features and plans of some of these companies.

WEB HOSTING SERVICES PART ONE

One of the most important decisions you have to make is choosing a web hosting company. You need a reliable company, with 24/7 tech support and who guarantees to be up at least 99.9 % of the time. If your website is not up, then it doesn't matter how good your site is, because no one will see it.

For purposes of this discussion we will presume that you do not have a business that is so big that you need a dedicated server. Hopefully one day you will !

There are several questions to ask yourself before choosing your web hosting company. Personally, I use several different ones, each has it's own pros & cons.

First ask yourself do you want to build your site with your own tools or do you want a site that provides a large variety of tools for you.

Second what are the various hosting plans and how easily will the company let you change plans and services if you want or need to.

Third, do they provide live 24/7 tech support?

Fourth, do they offer a user friendly interface? Is it easy to figure out? What kind of guides to they provide for their services? Can they be printed out?

Fifth, if you do not already have a domain, do they have a "package" that gives the domain for free or at a discount.

Sixth, how many years will they let you register the domain for? This is a lot more important then you may realize for two reasons. First of all the search engines like your web site a lot better if you show you are there for the long haul. If you can register it for 10 years, that is your best bet. I am not aware of any web hosting companies that will allow you to register for more than 10 years. Second the longer your domain is registered for, the longer you are protected against price hikes. I read in an issue of CPU magazine (which is generally of very reputable source) that top level domains (ie .com, .net, .us, etc.) were going to be dramatically increased in price, and that you will be able do get an extension ( the portion of your domain name to the right of the "." .

Seventh, how safe and secure are they? Do they offer SSL encryption or VeriSign, or some other equivalent?

Eight, do you have to pay them to be an affiliate? Sounds outrageous? Several of the big name web hosting companies actually charge you to be an affiliate? Do you really what to pay someone to promote their company? Surprisingly a lot of people do, but that is really a waste.

Nineth, do they offer a reseller program, and how much do they charge? Do they provide you with the tools to promote your reseller services?

Tenth, how much advertising of their company do they do? Both on and off line.

Next we will discuss specific companies, several of whom I personally use and others which I do not. We will discuss the pros and cons of each. I use 5 of the companies, which enables me to test different things for my sites and see who is performing best for me for the particular needs of each site.

OPT-IN PRODUCTS

As you read in my last post, having people "opt-in" gives you permission to contact them and protects you from violating anti-spam laws. All that is extremely important, but of more immediate importance to you is when some one "opts-in" you know that they are interested enough in what you are offering to provide you with their name and e-mail address. 

Originally I was going to review a few products, but after extensive research, I have narrowed it down to just 2 products, and I will explain why later.

The first product is low cost, and sometimes free and it is called Optin Buzz. What I really like about this program is that it works with many of the major autoresponder programs, it allows your subscribers to instantly receive their product or service from you, while staying on the same page. Giving your prospects instant gratification will also help you increase the number of prospects who "opt-in". It also has a "wizard" that enables you to set it up with a minimal amount of time and effort. 

You can also add images, videos, audios or anything else that can be possibly be placed on a website as a thank you message after they "opt-in".  

As an extra bonus, they will allow you to purchase rebranding rights to the software, and you receive a free rebranding tool, which will enable you to use it for "viral marketing"(We will discuss viral marketing in another post) and you can make money by both selling the software to your prospects either with or without rebranding rights. 

All these features make it an excellent choice and it has a user friendly interface and is very powerful. 

The second product is Graphical Optin Box Collection. This is even more powerful, but it is for a user with more technical savvy. There are numerous templates that you can customize for your product or service. 

You can also purchase and sell master resell rights to this product. But check with your autoresponder to see if this program will defintely work with it, and you should also want to check with your web hosting service just to be on the safe side. 

In our next post we will cover  WEB HOSTING SERVICES, THE GOOD,THE BAD AND THE UGLY.  The well known ones as well as not to well known ones.

I have been working hard to get the companion website to this blog live, which is called  MAKEYOURINTERNETMONEY.COM. It is finally live, but still in the early stages of construction, so please be patient, this is very time intensive. Be sure to check it out and watch as it developes.