Ecommerce Web Hosting

Quote blog.Sitepronews.com:

I’ve had a couple of discussions with clients this week about what makes a good blog post on their business blogs. No matter your subject matter, your blog posts should be of good quality and not written hastily. You want to post once a day if possible, or perhaps only every business day. Posting more often is ok if you have time, but sometimes with frequent posting, the quality is difficult to maintain.

Each blog post I make on my sites takes me between 30 and 90 minutes as I craft it pretty carefully. There is nothing wrong with adding a post about something that is on your mind or an article that you found, but you should try to write so that each post:

–> is of real interest to your site visitors
–> has no spelling/grammar errors
–> follows SEO principles e.g. contains lots of (relevant) keywords and uses anchor text links
–> is well-written and easy to read
–> cross-links to a relevant product or info page on your site
–> uses one or more relevant labels

One client suggested to me that SEO should be the main focus of their blog, but I disagreed. Yes, blogging can provide a huge boost to your SEO efforts, BUT first and foremost, you should be providing your site visitors and potential customers with good content and a useful service. You want to build up your subscriber base and you can’t do that if your posts are written primarily for the search engines.

Always post content that is timely, relevant and helpful to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, post articles about exotic destinations. If you provide an online car auction site, post links to consumer surveys comparing the safety features of various vehicle makes and models. To get more ideas for blog posts, consider your customer phone and email inquiries. What topics do they need more information about before purchasing? Look at your site stats too. What pages are people visiting the most or viewing the longest? That should tell you what content people are finding most useful on your site. Consider asking your visitors and staff for blog post suggestions. I bet your customer service staff could give you loads of ideas for new content.

Make good use of post labelling too. Blog labels are primarily to enable blog readers to navigate your blog more easily and find specific content they are looking for. Your blog should have a label for each of the main topics you write about. Each label creates a new page on your site that is about a specific topic and collates all your blog posts about this topic in one place. Not only is this good for usability, but the search engines consider your site a more relevant match for the topic because generally the URL and page content are very keyword-focused.

Happy blogging!

Quote blog.Sitepronews.com

Great news! According to ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, Google has just introduced a way for webmasters to inform them what country their site should be associated with.

This is an important new feature and can influence the way Google ranks your site, as Vanessa states:

“Country association is used both in overall ranking (for instance, searchers in Canada will see a greater number of Canadian sites than searchers in the United States will) and in country-restricted searches (for instance, searchers on google.co.uk can choose to see only “pages from the UK”).”

To use this tool, simply follow these instructions:

1) Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account
2) Click on the Tools tab and then choose “set geographic target”
3) Choose your country/region from the drop-down list

Please note: you can only change your domain location association if you aren’t using a country specific TLD. For example, if your site is mysite.com.au, the country Google automatically associates it with is Australia and you cannot change that.

Although you can’t specify multiple countries for a site, you can specify a different country for each sub-domain or folder.

To do this, simply add each sub-domain or sub-folder to your Webmaster Tools account and specify the location for each one.

This is a great addition to Webmaster Tools and should solve a LOT of the webmaster questions I’ve seen about how to tell Google about a site’s geographic market. It should also have a big impact on the way webmasters structure their sites from now on.

In my last tutorial i described how to use PHP for SE friendly URLs. This time its inverse. Here you will get to know how to use Apache’s mod_rewrite for SE friendly URLs. Here we go:

First on a *NIX machine, you would have to compile the module with appropriate options. This module is usually shipped with apache; but in case you want to upgrade, etc, etc.

After compiling it, to add it to the list of modules so that apache (httpd) will load it during startup use these:

apache/httpd 1.3.x :

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

AddModule mod_rewrite.c

apache/httpd 2.2.x :

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

——————-

Now, for example there is a URL with you like ” something.com/abcd/pqrs/tpop/index.php ”

you could simply make it something.com/file.html by using this in httpd.conf OR .htaccess :

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^file.html /abcd/pqrs/tpop/index.php

—–

You can specify unlimited no. of RewriteRules.

The syntax is:

RewriteRule <^false URL/Alias required> <Original URL>

Notice the space between the two URLs!! Don’t mix up them else it won’t work!!

Here’s the solution for this:

consider a url like this: something.com/index.php?do=viewarticle&id=123

and you want a URL like something.com/articles/123

Now, in .htaccess OR httpd.conf use these lines:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^articles/[0-9]+ /index.php?do=viewarticle&id=$1

——-

Here [0-9]+ means there can be any number between 0 and 9 and their repetition.

You can use also a combination of other Regex expressions to achieve your goal. What i tell you here is the tail of an elephant ; the whole elephant is still remaining !!

Well, the syntax for this type is:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule <^Fake URL+ Regex> <Original URL and $1 for first regex then $2, & $n for nth regex>

That’s all for now!

This tutorial shows how to setup SEO friendly URLs without using apache’s mod_rewrite.

Sometimes on large sites, mod_rewrite turns to be slow; hence overloads the server. So, here’s a tutorial to use SEO without mod_rewrite:

In the file which shows the content from the database, will have this code or a code similar to this.

Considering a URL: something.com/something.php?id=335

something.php will have this:

$article_id = $_GET[’id’];

$article=mysql_query(”SELECT article FROM articles WHERE ID=$article_id”);

print $article;

That’s just a simple code not for a use.

We want the URL something like this:

something.php/id/335

So for it, we modify the code in something.php to this:

$rq_dat=explode(”/”,$_SERVER[’PATH_INFO’);

now, the URL something.php/id/335

is broke in the script to

$rq_dat[’0′]=id

and

$rq_dat[’1′]=article id (335)

Now, we put this in the mysql_query()

mysql_query(”SELECT article FROM articles where ID=$rq_dat[’1′]”);

Isn’t it simple ?

The next problem is that we have the .php extension in something.php/id/335

To remove it, you have to setup a in the .htaccess file.

ForceType application/x-httpd-php

OR

ForceType application/x-php

OR

ForceType application/php5-script (php5 only)

Now rename something.php to something

It should work.

Note: This tutorial is published without any warranty. For any damage incurred, ecommercewebhosting.org OR any of its affiliates/authors will NOT be responsible. Use at your own risk

Each minute of each day, there are literally thousands upon thousands of spam email messages flooding inboxes the world over. Some of that email even goes out from what appears to be your very own email address! Where on earth do spammers get your email address? There are various ways - some are legitimate, and most are not.
Typically, spammers will “harvest” email addresses from legitimate web sites, such as USENET groups, chat rooms, message boards, AOL profile pages and special interest group postings. These are sites you have visited and requested more information from, or corporate sites where you may have placed an order.

The spammers collect these addresses using automated programs called spambots. Spambots are designed to harvest the email addresses from these web sites. They scan every page on the site, collecting any text containing the symbol “@” they find. The email addresses they collect are compiled into a database, loaded into a bulk-emailing program and out goes the spam. Often, these harvested email addresses are also sold to other spammers ; once you email address makes it to a spammer’s mailing list, it will make it onto their fellow spammer’s lists.

Some websites require you to register before you can place an order or access certain parts of the site. Not all these websites will be as protective of your email address as you may wish. Newsgroups are particularly notorious for exposing their users’ email addresses to the spam gatherers. Most newsgroups do not take a great deal of care to hide the email of their users, and each and every email member email address is exposed and up for grabs by spammers. Some of the wbsites that aask you to register may also sell to spammers.

Another method commonly used by the spammers is to target a domain. They simply guess or make up every possible variation of email address based on the domain name, for example @yourDomain.com . They create a mailing list of these addresses and then spam them. Corporate emails are especially vulnerable, as their emails have a distinct format such as @BusinessName.com.

While most of the spam will bounce, it really does not bother the spammers because they can and do send out millions of this type of junk mail a day. A small proportion of the emails will actually be legitimate and will receive the spam - that is good enough for the spammer. This method of gathering email addresses is called a brute force spam attack.

One way to defend against this is to make it more difficult for the spider to harvest your email. When you place your email address on a web site, remove the @ symbol and replace it with the word “at.” This makes it far more difficult for the spam harvester to gather your address, because it cannot be gathered mechanically; it can only by read by a human who is actually reading the site. Alternatively, you should display your email address as an image rather than as text.

Technorati Tags: Spammer, Spam, email address

How do you choose a hosting provider when there are thousands of hosting companies available online? It’s like going through the yellow pages trying to find burger restaurants. There are lots of them. Hopefully these tips will steer you in the right direction.Important factors in selecting a web hosting company include the percentage of server uptime. 98 to 99% uptime is the dream standard for server uptime, 65% is unacceptable. The higher the downtime of a server, the lower the potential for traffic at your web site. Another consideration is how much space is provided for the files that will make up your web site. How much bandwidth is in your package? Monthly bandwidth is the amount of data transfer allowed for visitors to view and use your web site.

With today’s changing trends in web hosting services, it is important to get as much server space and bandwidth as you can. This will allow for necessary updates and increased traffic to your site as it becomes more popular.

It is equally important when purchasing business web hosting that CGI access is provided; along with features such as MySQL, Real Audio, Real Video, and Cold Fusion (which some companies sell as an add on component). A crucial feature necessary for doing ecommerce is SSL, or Secure Socket Layer. This encrypts all order and credit card information until it reaches you. An SSL certificate can be purchased from most web hosting providers. Displaying it on your ecommerce web site verifies that your site transactions are safe and secure.

We’ve talked about this before in other articles. You will need a domain name that reflects the nature of your business. For instance, a sports business might have a URL that is www.coloradosports.com . To get your own unique domain name, you must first check the availability of the name with a domain name search, offered by domain registrars such as Network Solutions.

There are many service providers to choose from. If you do your homework, you’ll find some good deals that will fit your budget.

Technorati Tags: Hosting Provider, Hosting, Web hosting

Bandwidth is the amount of data transfer over an internet connection. If you are looking for web hosting plans you need to know how much bandwidth you require.

Don’t fell in trap of unlimited bandwidth or monthly transfer. Anyone claiming “Unlimited Bandwidth” is simply lying. Because There’s no such thing as “Unlimited Bandwidth”.

Since there is not any broadband company offering an internet connection as “Unlimited Megabytes per Second.” So, how could a web hosting company, which normally doesn’t even own its own access lines, claims to customers that it will give them “Unlimited Bandwidth”?

Many time high bandwidth sites on these “Unlimited” plans will be disconnected, and no refund given. Normally, the web hosting company will say that the site violated its Acceptable Use Policy or Terms of Service.

Whenever you visit a site promoting “Unlimited Bandwidth” as one of the account features, be sure to visit the Acceptable Use Policy, or the Terms of Service. Read the fine text about the so-called “Unlimited” disclaimer.

When you first look for web hosting services (those who state clearly bandwidth offered), you have to make your best estimation and watch your usage carefully in the first few months. Take these factors into consideration while estimating.

**How many visitor will access your web site?

**How many pages are there to be access?

**How big are the graphic and HTML files?

Large file downloads, audio/video files require more bandwidth. Flash web sites also use hight bandwidth. Virtual Reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all.

Though it is not accurate, but still gives you something to work with until your site has been online for a while and actual traffic statistics have been generated.

Don’t fall for the unlimited bandwidth trap that some companies throw at you.

One of the site which give good amount of bandwidth at very competitive rate are eWebGuru.

Technorati Tags: Bandwidth, download, unlimited bandwidth, web hosting

There are different types of hosting services that you can choose from depending on what type of web development and web site that you want to host.

Dial-Up Access Hosting – This is the most basic access/hosting service and these providers also provides a web page for hosting your site. Dial-up access hosting was the first hosting available and is still around. Most ISP’s specialize in just internet access and it’s rare that you will see an ISP do both. These companies make their money off of providing access to the Internet.

Development Hosting - Web site developers are buying their own servers and offering independent hosting services for their clients. This is called development hosting in which they provide web development services along with a host server located at their place of business. The consumer gets charged for the development and the maintenance of the web-site.

Web-Hosting ISP’s. – These are companies that specialize in hosting business web sites. There is no dial up access needed and site owners access their pages via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This is what the majority of small businesses use to put their site information on the internet. Other services are also included in the Web Hosting ISP package depending on their service plans.

These types of hosting plans are usually for corporations that need a lot of bandwidth to run their web applications. These companies run T1 access lines for big packets of internet data and have multiple connections to an internet backbone. They have fully staffed data processing facilities and the prices are substantial for using these types of services.

Corporate/Industrial Hosting - Companies like Hewlett Packard, Dell, eWebGuru or IBM, run the server infrastructure for most of these host companies.

The SOHO business owner will usually need the Web-Hosting ISP services. It is the middle ground between the basic and advanced services.

Try Hosting by eWebGuru

Technorati Tags: Windows Hosting, ASP Hosting, Hosting

To start with, an IP address is a 32-bit numeric address written as four numbers separated by periods. Each of the four numbers can be from 0 to 255, an example would be 192.168.0.5 . The IP address identifies a sender or receiver of information across the Internet. When you request an HTML page or send e-mail the Internet Protocol part of TCP/IP includes your IP address in the message (actually, in each of the packets if more than one is required) and sends it to the IP address of the server to which you wish to communicate. The recipient can see the IP address of the Web page requestor or the e-mail sender and can respond by sending another message using the IP address it received. Each machine on the Internet is assigned a unique IP Address for the purposes of communication.

One term that is familiar to anyone who has their own website, is the phrase “IP Address”. But what is an IP address, and how does it affect your website? And what is the difference between a static and a shared IP Address?

Based on this definition, we can establish that an IP Address is analogous to one’s home address. If someone is to send you mail, they put your address on the front of the envelope, and the mailman delivers it right to your door. IP Addresses work precisely the same way.

There are typically two types of IP Address that can be used in web hosting, Shared or Static. While there is no difference in the IP Address itself, there are some configuration changes on the servers they rest on.

Back to our home address analogy, you might consider a static IP Address to be a stand-alone home. There is only one house who gets mail at that address. You might then consider a shared IP Address to be an apartment building. Many different households get their mail at the same location, and in turn it is distributed to the correct location.

How does this affect you? In most cases, it wont. A static IP Address may be required if you need to have some sort of special access to your website, like SSL or Anonymous FTP. If you have no special requirements, then a shared IP will work under most conditions.

A static IP Address is when a website has their very own IP Address. This means that whether you type in your URL or the IP address of your website, both will bring you to the same page.

A shared IP Address is when multiple websites all share the same IP Address. In this case, the web server does a little bit of extra work when it receives your web request, and passes you to the correct website. Typing in the IP Address will not bring you to your desired website, under most conditions. Why do we need this? I’m sure you noticed that, based on the above definition of an IP Address, that there is a finite number of IP Addresses available before we run out completely. If every single website on the internet had it’s own IP Address, there would be no room for any new ones.

Technorati Tags: IP, IP Address, Static, Shared

Webhost Panel

Bankoi WebHost Panel is a multi-server management and control system for Windows 2000 and 2003 based web hosts.
Bankoi WebHost Panel is a multi-server management and control system for Windows 2000 and 2003 based web hosts. The system is designed for any size web hosting companies, datacenters and ISPs, which require a solid platform that automates all of the day-to-day tasks that would otherwise require highly skilled man power, and large work forces

VHCS Virtual Hosting Control System

VHCS delivers a complete hosting automation appliance by offering significant security, total-cost-of-ownership, and performance advantages over competing commercial solutions.

With VHCS Pro you can configure your server and applications, create user with domains with a few point-and-click operations that take less than a minute. There is no limit to the number of resellers, users and domains that can be created.At the core of VHCS Pro are 3 easy-to-use, Web-based control panels. VHCS provides graphic user interfaces for the administrators, resellers and users.
VHCS is…
Free: VHCS is Free Software and dedicated to giving users, administrators and developers the ultimate level of control over their linux web servers, and their data.
Usable: VHCS understands that usability is about creating software that is easy for everyone to use, not about piling on features.
Supported: Beyond the worldwide VHCS Community, VHCS is supported by the leading companies in Linux and Unix.
Accessible: Free Software is about enabling software freedom for everyone, including users, administrators and developers with disabilities. VHCS Accessibility framework is the result of several years of effort, and makes VHCS the most accessible control panel for any Linux platform.
International: VHCS is used, developed and supported in dozens of languages, and we strive to ensure that every piece of VHCS software can be translated into all languages

Hosting Controller Windows control panel/hosting automation software

Hosting Controller is a complete array of Web hosting automation tools for the Windows Server family platform. It is the only multilingual software package you need to put your Web hosting business on autopilot.

The HC has its own complete billing solution which is tightly integrated within Control Panel & does all the invoicing & billing.

AlternC Opensource Hosting control panel

AlternC is a set of user-friendly mass hosting management software. It is easy to install and based on open-source software only. AlternC is GPL Licensed.
AlternC includes an automatic installation and configuration system, and a web-based control panel to manage users’ accounts and web services (e.g. domains, emails, ftp accounts, statistics…)
AlternC is based on the Debian GNU/Linux system (’Sarge’ version), and it requires other softwares such as Apache, Postfix, Mailman …
It also contains a documented API, so you can customize your web panel quickly and easily.
AlternC was initially written in French. However, the debian package includes an English version. The translation in any language is possible. Volunteers are welcome ! (See the internationalization page). The documentation is only available in French (so far).

AlternC has been created by the system administrators of Lautre Net, members of Lautre Net and is currently developped by some organizations such as Eitic, Koumbit and Metaconsult.

Web-cp

web-cp is a full-featured, open source web hosting control panel written in PHP and released under the GPL. It consists of 4 control panels: personal, domain, reseller, and server. The personal control panel allows users to update their personal information, change their password and set their spam control settings. The domain control panel allows domain owners to add new users, aliases, subdomains, domain pointers and databases. The resellers control panel allows resellers to add or modify their domain accounts. The server control panel allows the server administrator to add or modify resellers, edit VirtualHost and DNS templates, restart services and monitor server usage. Scripting, shell access, SSI, databases, mail, domains, etc are all controlled from a top-down approach. Web-CP.net is a continuation of the development of web://cp with it’s ultimate goal being a 1.0 release. web-cp runs on almost every version of Unix/Linux/BSD and only Apache, MySQL and PHP are required.

HostFlow

HOSTFLOW BUSINESS SUITE is intended for growing hosting providers, ISPs and telecommunications providers. HostFlow is ideal to consolidate multiple customer bases onto a unified platform post-acquisition, significantly reducing service management overheads and operating costs.

Directadmin

Ease of use. DirectAdmin is the easiest to use control panel, period.
Speed. DirectAdmin is programmed to be the fastest running control panel available.
Stability. DirectAdmin avoids downtime by automatically recovering from crashes.
Support. We offer lightning-fast support by phone, e-mail, forum, and live online chat.

Ravencore RavenCore Hosting Control Panel

The RavenCore Project is an Open Source Hosting Control Panel aimed toward making the most robust, secure, and reliable hosting software available.
Mission statement: “To provide the world with a free, comparable alternative to expensive hosting software.”

Easy to use - Even the installation of RavenCore is a no-brainer. The control interface is simple to use, easy to understand, and only gives options for the components you want installed so you are not looking at things you will never use.
Portable - RavenCore is designed to run on any Linux system without any configuration changes, as it detects what distribution you are using, and automatically configures everything for you. It also is designed to be ran with any web browser, even text browsers such as lynx.
Secure - Designed completely around security, RavenCore employs several fail safe mechanisms and hack-attempt detection features to make sure your server stays safe.
Free - Licensed under the GPL and distributed freely to all. Although you do not have to pay a dime to use RavenCore, we would gladly accept donations.

Technorati Tags: web hosting panels, control panels