However, if you have asked for a specific server specification, or a non-managed dedicated server, then your setup times may be slightly longer. You might be faced with some additional setup fees in order to physically build your server if your requirements are specialist.

• Make sure they provide you with enough bandwidth, data transfer and disk space. If they are offering more than most, then find out why – its an obvious thing to suggest, but check the small print.
• Double check that the features they are offering are right for you – Do they support PHP? cPanel? Email forwarders? Databases? and more.
• What kind of guarantees do they offer? If they’re offering 99.9% guaranteed uptime, then you can be fairly confident that their servers really will be functional and online 99.9% of the time, otherwise you can ask for your money back and they won’t make their money!
• Make sure you’re choosing the right hosting plan, whether its shared hosting, reseller hosting, a dedicated server or simply free hosting.
• Finally, don’t be pressurized into getting something you don’t need. If they’re offering a bigger, better server for more money ask yourself – do you really need this?

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

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.

If, for example, you developed a 10 page site in HTML code without an external CSS file, then decided to change your navigation slightly to a different colour or position, then you’d have to change every page on your site which could take a long time.

CSS avoids this since all the styles of the site are held in one single external file.

If you are planning on designing and developing your site yourself, then it is almost certain that you will need at least some HTML knowledge, if not learn it.

Even if your page is PHP based, for example, HTML code will almost certainly still exist in that page since PHP itself does not output anything for a browser to read.

If this is possible, then designing, developing and constructing the site will be much faster since you will not have to upload the files that make your site each time you make a change.

If you are hoping to do this, then you should look into installing Apache on your home computer if you are using Unix-based web hosting.

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)

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.

The easiest way is to get in contact with a secure payment provider, follow their website integration guides and tutorials, then re-direct your customers via their website so that your customers have the security of another company and you don’t have the overhead costs of a secure payment server of your own, or a secure certificate.

A well known payment provider which has free setup is Paypal. Paypal is easy to use and many people have heard of it before, via eBay, so it is trusted by many people around the world. Paypal may be free in terms of their setup fees, but they do charge on a per-transaction bases which can become expensive as your website becomes more popular.

There are a number of other companies offering free transaction-based fees, but with a setup fee such as Worldpay, Protx, and many others.