The Web Hosting Guru’s Blog

The easiest wordpress hosting I have seen so far is by hosting companies using cpanel with fantastico. Fantastico has an autoinstaller for wordpress that gets you up and running after you answer a few questions. And if you have troubles with that tech support should know how to do that with no problem. In order to get cpanel and fantastico you need to find a linux web hosting plan.

For a wordpress site you don’t need a lot of filespace or bandwith. You need one mysql database and one domain. If all your going to do is a wordpress than just about any linux web hosting plan with fantastico will do fine. If you want an ecommerce store, want to host any other sites or if you need to install other scripts you would need more than the basic web hosting plan. For ecommerce and other scripts you will need a plan with one database for each script you are going to install. So wordpress and an ecommerce store such as oscommerce would be two databases. Fantastico includes an autoinstaller for oscommerce as well as other programs that would be helpful in running your site.

What are the benifits of using a hosting company to host your wordpress blog instead of using wordpress.org to host your blog?

Here are a few limitations to hosting your blog on wordpress.org:

1. No Advertising - This means if you wish to make money online from your blog using advertising programs like Google Adsense, Kontera, Chitika or Text link ads, it is not allowed. One discreet link to Amazon per blog is okay. Read more about their advertising policy and how they may occassionally show ads. To earn money by displaying advertising, you need to buy VIP hosting.

2. No Sponsored / paid posts - Another popular option for bloggers is to earn money via paid reviews using services like ReviewMe and PayPerPost. Wordpress.com does not allow you to blog paid articles.

3. Limited Theme Customization - You need to select your themes from a preselected number of themes. You cannot hack and edit these themes as per your liking. You can edit and save the CSS as a paid upgrade. Currently you can select from a large number of beautiful themes, but if you want your own unique design, you need to pay.

4. No Plugin Uploads - A major limitation is the inability to upload plugins. Wordpress plugins are amazing tweaks developed by the vibrant Wordpress community that adds improved functionality to Wordpress for free. Plugins can automate lots of stuff and take your blog to a new level. Here are some Wordpress plugins I use.

5. No WP Code hacking - If you like editing PHP files in your wordpress installation to create new functionality for your blog or showcase your PHP skills, then it is not possible at Wordpress.com. You cannot edit the core wordpress files to suit your needs.

6. Paid Upgrades - If your popular blog grows in site traffic and branding beyond the imposed limitations, you need to buy paid upgrades

# Custom CSS - lets you style the blog or use an existing stylesheet, but does not allow direct theme editing.
# Domain Mapping and Domain Registration to get the ‘wordpress’ out of your url.
# Space upgrades - to get more space for all your uploads
# Unlimited Private Users who can see your private blog.

You can also get VIP hosting which will let you use your own domain name, host ads and help survive lots of traffic. Check out some notable Wordpress bloggers hosted on Wordpress.com

7. Violate TOS and Get Deleted - It is essential you read up the terms of service carefully. They will not tolerate copyright infingement, spamming, commercial use, machine generated blog etc. and people can easily report spam blogs and you might wake up to find your blog deleted one fine day!

# the Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);
# the Content is not obscene, libelous or defamatory (more info on what that means), hateful or racially or ethnically objectionable, and does not violate the privacy or publicity rights of any third party;

Wordpress has great features for blogging. You can write your own php and embed the code into your theme or you can install and activate other plugins some developers have written. When customers call me about web design dometimesbi have to point them in the right direction instead of writing just about the same code and reinventing the wheel.

Sometimes as a provider of services it is better to point the customer in the right direction.

When searching for a webhosting company you should see what resources they have. Are they easy to get to? Are they targeted towards your level of expertise? I believe that in order to give tech support you have to be able to gain a customers perspective. For example I know how to set up domains and email accounts in our control panel, but I didnt the first day I started my job three years ago.

Does your tech really understand what your website means to you? Even if your site has a picture of your two dogs, or you only use your email to talk to your sister, your website should be as important as the next persons website. When you have problems does your tech support have empathy or are you just another call? Yes, there could ne downtime for any number of reason, I try to make sure I can point a customer to where we will be posting updates about the situation, or I take down thier ticket number and keep an eye on the situation.

Is there someone who knows how to use this? While there are a lot of open source applications the most used tools should be things your tech support should know about. For example I have a passion for wordpress I am the go to guy when customers have questions about wordpress such as plugins, where to get themes or transferring an account from wordpress.com to a hosting account.

Your offering 24 hour support?

24 hour support Is exactly that. Check the hosting providers website for normal hours of operation such as when you have billing or sales questions. Support is the most important department to you as a customer. Typically a customer will contact support for the first two weeks of thier account and if there are server issues. On average customers only call billing or sales about three times a year.

One of the purposes to starting a wordpress blog instead of a traditional website is its ease of use and ability to get traffic and that it is easy to add new content. Wordpress makes it easy for search engines such as msn, yahoo and google to index your site. These sites and other sites use a combination of the robots.txt file, your site index and link crawling to find out the content you have on your site. This makes it easier for people looking for information using a search engine to get to your site.

The robots.txt file is put into the root folder of your site. You include instructions such as files and directories you do not want indexed. If you do not take the time to upload even a blank robots.txt file when robots or spiders come to your site you may get a few errors in your traffic logs. They are looking for a file that does not exist, but should.

The sitemap is usually an xml file that you use to tell sites such as google about the organization of the pages in your site. Google has a tool to validate your sitemap. I usually make two site maps, one called sitemap.html (or other file extension such as .asp or .php) and one called sitemap.xml for google. Most websites update their content only a few times a year. Using a blog script such as wordpress means you want to update your content on a regular basis. You will want a way to update your sitemap as soon as you create a new blog entry, there are a few wordpress tools that will help you with this function. I create a link to the sitemap.html file I created and put it on the my menu section of all my pages.

Robots and spiders are programs that crawl your site to index content. Some look for news, images, outbound links to other sites, keywords in your text or other media to include in their database. They start on your home page and follow all the links from the pages on your site.

If you have a page with no links to it you may want to include this in your sitemap. The spiders will crawl your sitemap and find all the pages on your site that are listed and follow them to other pages it doesn’t already know about. This makes it faster for the spider to find new content on your site. By including your sitemap, this should reduce the amount of time and resources is needed to index your site.

By creating new content on a regular basis spiders and robots will index your site frequently. Content is king, if you want traffic you should put fresh content that is related to the focus of your website. For example, if your site is about web hosting you should create content about webhosting ;-p The more content you have about your focused topic the more users come to you that use search engines to find topics and content that you write about.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts.

A podcast is a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers. The term, like radio, can refer either to the content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also termed podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.

The term podcast is a portmanteau of the words iPod and broadcast, the Apple iPod being the brand of portable media player for which the first podcasting scripts were developed (see history of podcasting). These scripts allow podcasts to be automatically transferred to a mobile device after they are downloaded.

Though podcasters’ web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their content, a podcast is distinguished from other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.

Blogging is an abbreviation of “web-logging”.
The simplest definition of a blog is that it is an online log that is organized in reverse chronological order. It comprises of comments, declarations, links, or anything else of interest to the blog writer.

There are two basic requirements of starting your own blog. You need a software to run a blog and a place on the Internet to host your blog.

Taking into consideration the above mentioned two factors, there can be four categories of blogs:

1. Free Software + Free Webhosting
2. Free Software + Paid Webhosting
3. Paid Software including Price of Webhosting
4. Paid Software + Paid Webhosting

We have given descriptions of all these four options alongwith their pros and cons.

We have also given recommendations regarding the suitability of these options.

1. Free Software + Free Webhosting

This is a completely free way of blogging. Here you pay neither for the software nor for the virtual hosting.

But there are some drawbacks of this system. It offers very few features as compared to the paid services. You cannot post pictures online or design your preferred look for your site.

The companies that provide free software and free domain hosting frequently place a banner immediately above your site. This detracts the visitors from the look of your site. You also have no discretion over the content of the advertisements.

The key advantage of this system is that it is absolutely free. This option is extremely useful for a newcomer since he/she can try this method to find if they are really interested in blogging.

This option is recommended for those people who would not like to pay anything or for the newcomers.

2. Free Software + Paid Webhosting

This option provides you free software but you will have to pay for the domain hosting.

There is a cost factor involved in this option. Minimum cost of domain hosting would be $5 per month but a realistic budget would be slightly higher, around $7-8. The annual registration fee for domain name would be about $10-30.

This system will let you do certain things that you were unable to do with the free one. Here, you can modify the look of your site and you can also post pictures. But free softwares have fewer features than paid ones.

This option is highly recommended because by just paying the cost of virtual hosting and domain registration, you can avail great features and flexibility.

3. Paid Software including Price of Webhosting

This is a subscription-based option. There are ongoing costs involved in this option.

You have to pay at least $6 per month for basic services and for advanced features the fee would be around $15 per month.

The cumulative cost for a year would reach up to $200. That makes this option a very expensive one.

Apart from customizing the look of your site and posting photographs online, you will be able to use a software that provides more features than a free one.

This option is recommended for people who do not want to be troubled with virtual hosting and software installation issues. This is the easiest possible solution. It offers great features but at a reasonably high price.

4. Paid Software + Paid Webhosting

This option provides you paid software and paid domain hosting.

The cost of the domain hosting ranges from $5 to $10 per month while the cost of the software would be at least $45 (one-time cost).

This option gives you great amount of flexibility. You can select your own domain name and have a feature-rich blogging software.

This option is highly recommended for businesses since the cost is not a major consideration.

Copyright © Active-Venture.com’s domain hosting service. This article may be reprinted freely provided the resource box, Web addresses and copyright information remain intact.

Wordpress Plugins

“Wordpress Plugins allow you to extend the features of a standard Wordpress installation”

Maybe you always wanted a feature that hasn’t been available in the latest release of Wordpress. What you can do is either install a 3rd party plugin or write your own custom code to extend the features of Wordpress.

Wordpress plugins are programming code that enhance the features of a standard installation of Wordpress. A well written plugin will be basically “drag and drop” without modifying the core code of Wordpress. As Wordpress has been designed in a modular way, plugins allow you to customize your site to your specific needs without modifying the core of Wordpress.

Ever since Wordress version 1.2 plugins have been available. Wordpress plugins can be categorized according to the feature it provides. Here a list of various features that you can implement for your web site through Wordpress plugins.

* Administration: Install Wordpress plugins to customize features like Admin Tools, Anti-spam, Comments, Meta, Restriction, Statistics, Syntax Highlighting, Syndication, Tweaking, etc.
* Design, Layout and Styles: Change the look and feel of your blog by implementing plugins that modify Archive, Calendar - Event, Navigation, Randomness, Styles.
* Graphics, Video, and Sound: Add plugins that create Audio - Mood and Images for your blog.
* Posts: Implement plugins for Editing Posts, Formatting Posts, and other Miscellaneous Post related issues.
* Links: Setup Wordpress plugins that change the default behavior of linking.
* Miscellaneous: You can install miscellaneous plugins that shows weather information or other outside information from external websites.

Installing a plugin for Wordpress is not difficult. Here are the list of steps that you need to take to install most plugins. Some plugins may require additional steps.

1. Upload your plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder
2. Go to your Wordpress site using a browser and login
3. Click on the Plugins link from the main menu at top
4. Scroll down the list of available plugins to find the plugin you just uploaded
5. Click “Activate” to make your plugin active

Wordpress Plugin Sites
We found the following sites with a comprehensive list of Wordpress Plugins:

* Wordpress Wiki - Plugins: http://wiki.wordpress.org/?pagename=Plugin
* WordPress Plugin Repository: http://dev.wp-plugins.org/
* WP-Plugins Download Interface: http://redalt.com/external/plugins.php
* Wordpress Plugin Database: http://www.wp-plugins.net/

About the Author
Sanjib Ahmad, Freelance Writer and Product Consultant for Business.Marc8.com (http://business.marc8.com). You are free to use this article in its entirety as long as you leave all links in place, do not modify the content, and include the resource box listed above.