Archive for the ‘Managing your website’ Category

What is Google page rank?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Google Page Rank, or simply Google PR, is the importance of any particular page ranked out of 10 by Google. In the general scheme of things, Page Rank is a very rough estimate of how important any page is to Google, but it can give you a good idea of good and bad websites and pages according to Google, and SEO.

A Page Rank of 2/10 or 3/10 is considered fairly normal, these rankings are quite easy to achieve and mean that you site is ranked by Google, is not being penalized and is being accounted for in their index.

Rankings of 5/10 and 6/10 are a little more difficult to achieve. If you’re site gets as high as a 6, then you’re well on your way of SEO terms and it would be wise to think wise before linking to a lower-ranked website, as not to water-down your own!

Rankings of 7, 8, 9 and, ultimately, 10/10 are near impossible to achieve. It can be heart-breaking not achieving those kind of rankings, but ultimately its an estimate of importance, but also considering when you’re talking about ranking 9/10 or 10/10, you are competing with the likes of Google themselves, Microsoft, The BBC and NASA!Â

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Why is SEO important?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and without it, your website could potentially have near to no visitors at all. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Ask have complex algorithms to work out the importance of each page on every single website in the world in relation to the next, in order to order the results correctly when a user searches for something in a search engine.

Some examples of SEO in terms of developing your website are to double check your page title tags, and H1 title tags, to make sure you explain what each page is about to the best of your ability in a short sentence.

Including ALT tags on all images on your website is also important in terms of SEO in order to let the search engines know what each image is about – afterall they can’t see images, they can only read text.

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What is uptime?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Uptime, as described in a number of our other articles, is the measurement of how long a web server is online and functional for.

I’m sure you’ve been there – you’ve gone to visit a website to find some information only to be returned with the infamous 404 error message meaning the page cannot be found? This often means the web server that the page or website is on that you’ve requested has gone offline and is down.

Of course, no one ever wants this to happen to their site – it looses visitors and potential customers, so having a good web hosting company is important, as is having a server with a good uptime report.

A lot of web hosting companies boast they can offer 99.9% uptime, which means that their web servers will be active, functional and online for 99.9% of the time (often on a per-month basis)

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What is Fantastico?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Fantastico is a feature package usually added on to a control panel such as cPanel which includes a number of scripts and online applications for you to get on with your website quicker than ever.

If you web hosting package supports Fantastico, then you can effectively have your website up and running literally within a few clicks.

Fantastico includes a lot of different software for a lot of different types of site, including web content management systems, shopping cart software, blogs, photo sharing sites and Wikis, and more.

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What is a web server?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

A web server is a number of large computers, known as servers, housed in an air-conditioned server house known as a data centre where they are connected to a highly efficient, fault-tolerance high-speed internet connection.

Web servers are able to handle hundreds of thousands of requests a second and can return back this information quickly, providing the visitor of a website with the information they were looking for in no time at all.

It is big business to keep servers online – this is called uptime and it is the measurement of how long as server is online and functional for during the period of a month, or year. A lot of hosting companies boast their servers have 99.9% uptime, which means 99.9% of the time (per month) their servers are online and functional, meaning all websites hosted on their servers will be working.

There are many different types of web server available, such as dedicated servers, load balancing servers, database servers and many more. If you’re just starting out on the web and need the basic type of web server, look out for fully managed shared hosting, which means the hosting company maintains the server you’re on, along with the other people that share it. Its often the cheapest solution if you’re a beginner.

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What is a dedicated server?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

A dedicated server is an entire server dedicated to just your account, or just your website. Servers are large-scale computers and are able to handle a lot of requests while hosting a lot of different websites – this is known as Shared Hosting.

However, if your website is large, busy, complex, or a combination of all three, then dedicated hosting maybe the way forward for you. Although dedicated hosting can be expensive, it can be a very worthwhile investment.

Another important thing to look out for when choosing a dedicated server hosting package is whether the server is managed, semi-managed or non-managed. Managed hosting means that the hosting company will take care of your server for you – for example, if there was a problem with it, then they are there 24/7/365 to sort it out for you no matter what.

On the other end of the scale, non-managed means that after it is setup, it will be your responsibility to maintain its uptime and on-going upgrades. This is for only highly experiences users only, however.

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What is cPanel?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

cPanel is a web-based program or application that is used to control the settings of your website and can be accessed via It is widely used throughout most web hosts and is almost always installed for you as part of your new account signup.

cPanel has an easy to use icon-based interface where you are able to add, edit and remove email accounts (depending on the limitations of your hosting package), setup email forwarders and auto-replies, modify files directly, manage your databases, setup CRONs and much more.

The features on cpPanel are usually limited by the package you have opted for and the limitations of the web host you chose. You will usually find that web hosts will limit the amount of email addresses you are able to have setup, for example, and this number if reflected in the cPanel of your site.

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What is bandwidth?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Bandwidth and Data Transfer is often confused and sometimes called the same thing with a number of web hosting companies, where in fact they are two different things.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can potentially be transferred from one point to another, whereas Data Transfer is the amount of data actually being transferred at any one time.

Because Bandwidth and Data Transfer are often confused, you will sometimes find Bandwidth measured on a data-amount per month basis, such as 10Gb / Month. This means the web hosting company is limiting your account to transferring 10Gb’s of data each month.

There are a multitude of things on a website that can take up Bandwidth or Data Transfer, but the first thing that can be reduced is the amount of images. If there is one large image on your websites homepage which is 500KB and you get 300 different people look at your site in one month, then you will use 1.5GB’s of Data Transfer that month – and this does not include the HTML file which serves the image, along with any other images on the site, perhaps a CSS file, and perhaps other pages or images!

It is important to work out the size of your site and then amount of people you are hoping to get visit it on a per-month basis before deciding on the package you will go for with your new web hosting company.

It is always desired to try and reduce the amount of Bandwidth or Data Transfer a website uses which is sometimes relatively easy to do. It usually involves reducing the amount of images the website uses, or at the very least, optimizing the images to reduce their filesize. Styles embedded directly into the pages on your site can be placed into an external CSS stylesheet to reduce each pages’ filesize even further, and by doing this will also allow easier and quicker updating of styles in the future, as well as quicker page loading times for your visitors.

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What is disk space?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Disk space is the amount of physical space you are allocated when choosing a new web host. Disk space is exactly the same as the space you have available on your home computer – it is measured in the same units (GB & MB) and means the same thing.

Websites themselves often don’t take up much space, but this depends on what the website offers. When choosing a new web host, you will have to take the amount of disk space they offer into consideration and make sure it is enough for your needs.

Bare in mind that the disk space web hosting companies offer often also include the amount of space you are allowed on your email accounts. If you’re planning on having a lot of email accounts set-up for a lot of different people, then this may begin to take up a lot of space depending on the email services that you decide to use.

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How to switch to a new web host?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

If you already have a website hosted with a company, but you are wishing to change hosting companies, switching to a different web host is often relatively easy and painless, with little downtime on your website.

Firstly, you will need to sign up with your new desired web hosting company and chose the package that most suits your needs. If you are hoping to keep the same domain name, then you will need to get in contact with the registrar that you registered the domain name with.

A registrar is a company that holds the domain name for you, this is often combined with a web hosting company, so you may find that you will have to get in contact with your previous web hosts in order to modify the domain name.

Before you start modifying your domain name, you will, of course, have to upload your website and files to the new web host. This process is often very similar with all web hosting companies, using a protocol known as FTP. Once you’ve uploaded your site to your new hosts, you are ready to point the domain name to them as well.

Once you have access to the settings for your domain name, you will have to modify the DNS records in order for the name to point to your new web hosting company. All web hosting companies should provide you with easy to follow instructions in order for you to do this.

You will then have to wait for the DNS records to populate throughout the internet, which can take anywhere between 30 minutes and 48 hours.

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