When looking for a home for your wordpress blog you want to make the right decision the first time. This comes to anyone looking for a cheap web hosting company but one of the complaints I hear the most is about having to move a blog and domain registration from host to host when they realize that the hosting company is not a great fit for them. The top two companies i recommend are ANhosting.com and Mariehosting.com Anhosting.com specializes in small business hosting and their prices have been the lowest in the industry for years. Their admins and even level 1 staff have a wide range of knowledge when it comes to wordpress hosting. the majority of their customers are small business who utilize the servers to sell their business ideas, brand identity and blogs. As small business companies get use to the idea of blogging and realize that this is the best way to get traffic from search engines wordpress becomes a more popular solution. It is easy to install through tools such as fantastico, which is included in most cpanel hosting companies control panel. Anhosting is one such company that utilizes fantastico’s ability to install popular scripts and keep them up to date. This allows the cusotmer a great experience in installing and keeping their wordpress script up-to-date.

Mariehosting.com is a niche market hosting company that has just started out their customers are also mainly only wordpress customers as they are looking to provide additional services for wordpress bloggers besides just hosting. My sources there have told me that they have some great wordpress tools in store for the very near future. Including automatic wordpress backup from the control panel. Currently customers through cpanel have to manually backup their files and databases for the whole cpanel account, or retrieve the backup from hosting companies at a price or convenience. Most hosting companies do not guarantee backups as things do happen and by time a customer needs a backup it may be related to the issue at hand.

You should backup your wordpress template themes, plugins, php customizations and databases at minimum. these things can be done by hand through an FTP program and mysql tools. You may also do these through the control panel but this will backup your entire account, takes longer and can be a big file to download. I recommend you log into ftp and retrieve a backup anytime you make changes to yrou theme and create a mysql backup at least every three months. I ask my customers “How much data are you willing to lose”, “If you made a post today and you lost everything except that one post you wouldn’t be extremely upset,” “But, if you lose three years of data you would be very upset.” Most of my customers are happy to log into their account through cpanel and creating a mysql backup every three months and backing up their theme templates and plugins when they add new features or make changes. Int he worst case scenario you would install a new instance of wordpress, upload your template files and plugins, import your database and could be up and running in the amount of time those tasks take. Don’t forget to reactivate your original theme.

When choosing a cheap web hosting provider it is important to ask them about how often they provide backups, how much it costs to restore a backup, how long it takes to restore a backup. I recommend createing yoru own backups on a regular basis do not depend on someone elses backup and servers as you may lose data, or have to wait a long time to get yrou data restored.

I installed this free wordpress theme for my customer. it looked great but needs a few modifications. I noticed in the footer template there was a long string of text. I knew that was from a php ecryption package and decided to I investigate further. the creator of the template had encoded the footer links. why? to make sure the link to thier website was still in tact. anytime someone installed his template he would automatically get a link back to his website. he took this one step further by including the div and a few other CSS tags into his php encoding. if you remove the full section of code the template no longer functions properly. Great idea!

how can you do the same thing ? first I reconend you make a copy of your project. one of the most popular ways to decrypt the code on the server is through ioncube. this software is usually installed as part of a cpanel and fantastico installation. the package to encode is a little pricey.

why would you want to encode your files? there a couple of great reasons besides the one describe above. if your doing freelance it would make your customers come back to you for modifications. secure your passwords and other sensitive code. while this is not the best practice as it could be reverse engineered it is a better security practice than leaving your information in the open for anyone to use.

value added software.
did you spend hundreds of hours programming against a vendors Api with little to no documentation? did you create a script the accomplished a much needed bussiness process? do you have employees who have acces but not much knowledge about programming?

webhosting guru asks:
what popular software that you pay to license, needs better Api documentation?

wordpress,google adsense,targeted adspace,wordpress tips

Ever wonder why when you put a google ad on your site it shows results that have nothign to do with the content you are writing about ? google adsense takes all the content on your webpage by default to select ads. For example on my site I use the words wordpress hosting alot. Google will show an ad for “hosting” an exchange student from abroad. While this is funny, my audience will not be clicking on these irrelevant ads. There are a few ways to get around this problem.

Key wording density. Search engines love keyword density and so does google adsense. Keyword density alone does not help google adsense select the best ds to show on your site as in my previous example. Grouping keyword densitiy such as always using the words wordpress hosting, or blog hosting; in pairs betters the chances that you will get releavant ads. Google will see that both words have the same keyword density, as in you are using those words the most and at about the same frequency.

Since we are talking about wordpress blogs there is a trick i found will searching, i call this google targeting. This allows you to use the content of your post as a targeted section in which google will use the words from this section to show relevant ads. If you look at my google ad on my pages you will see that they show relevant content related to my posts to do this i used a few pieces of code.

To have google adsense target your post put this at the beginning of your post section:

<!– google_ad_section_start–>
and this at the end:

<!– google_ad_section_end–>

It will take a few days before google will start targeting this section, to test that you put the code in the right place, upload your changes. View the site in a browser and “view source” you can then search for the word google_ad_section and see all the references. You should have a start and finish section for each article you have on the page.

Blog hosting on WordPress.

Blogs have become quite popular within recent 2-3 years. As of September 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 106 million blogs. More and more people nowadays start the blog on a stand alone domain name. Blogs help people to express themselvs, it is a perfect tool to start personal on-line diary or professional blog related to any subject.

Apparently blogs are one of the easiest ways to create a website. With WordPress preinstalled, it literally takes a few moments to have a professional looking site up and running and available for millions of visitors from all round the world.

Creating a blog on WordPress does not demand any technical experience or knowledge from you. A great number of design templates will help you to customize your blog and make it to look attractive and professional.

WordPress allows you to post blog content online, thus there is no need use FTP connection from your web hosting provider.
As well it allows you to update your blog content from any place of the world by just loginging to blog admin area which will look like http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/. All you need is to remember your admin login and password. WordPresss automatically updates the order of the posts, archiving older posts by post date and moves the most recent posts to the top of your blog index page.

When you set up stand alone blog on paid web hosting it has more chances to be well indexed and crawled by search engines, since stand alone blog has individual URL and can obtain Google page rank. It is necessary to choose the right keywords in the post title and body.

When stand alone blog is indexed and crawled the chances of blog monetization are preety good. Having a high page rank you may sell text links, banners that will allow you to make profit and pay for the web hosting services.

WordPress also allows your blog visitors to leave comments and in this way interact with the author of the blog, that is one of the most important parts of the blogging process.

Despite of the fact that there are some excellent services that offer free blog hosting services, more and more bloggers prefer to use paid blog hosting. And certainly there are several reasons for this.

When you sign up for a paid web hosting services to create your stand alone blog on a separate domain name you get reliability and some guarantees, such as uptime guarantee. You get in most cases perfect professional and responsive technical support that will help you to answer questions and resolve technical issues when you need this help. This is of great importance if you are newbie and this is your first time setting up blog on WordPress.

Generally for Blog hosting Linux web hosting services are more preferrable. Since Linux web hosting is cheaper and more reliable. However this is you who decide!

About Author

Do you really need perfect reliable web hosting services for your blog on a stand alone domain name? Then Eskhosting.com is right for you. Eskhosting offers ideal custom web hosting plans, blog hosting on WordPress, 24/7 technical support via live chat, e-mail and toll free number, 100% uptime, instant activation of your web hosting account.

Source: ArticleTrader.com

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.

How to prevent your wordpress installation from overloading your shared server (or how to survive the digg effect on your wordpress blog):

Wordpress blogs can be extremely resource intensive if you happen to experience a surge in traffic. Poorly implemented wordpress setups can place a high load on webservers and lead to interruptions of service or account suspensions for using too many resources (we at midPhase allow up to 10% of CPU resources and up to 50 concurrent mysql connections). Here are some tips that can help you make your wordpress install more stable:

1. Use Wordpress super cache plugin ( http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/ )– The number one thing you can do to improve wordpress performance is install a page cache. Wordpress super cache plugin is an extensive modification of the WP-Cache plugin. The wordpress super cache plugin serializes your posts to a file on disk and later spits them back. It also knows how to update itself when comments are received, etc, so your site is always the most up to date. I can not recommend this plugin enough if you wish to have a stable and responsive wordpress install. Note: to use this plugin you must have Mod_Rewrite enabled. Add the following to your .htaccess file: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On

   Please see http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/ for more information.

2. WP Built-in object cache – The default installation of wordpress can be used to cache database queries. Less database queries = less resources being used and that makes us all happy. Just add the following line to your wp-config.php file: // Enable the WordPress Object Cache: define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);
3. Review your plugins – You should go though the plugins you have installed and see if there is a way to make them faster. Any way in which you can make them stop creating database queries and use flat files, or even better, cache things will help out greatly. If you find that a particular plugin is slowing down your wordpress install you should uninstall the plugin and consult the author. Most plugin developers love to hear feedback and would greatly appreciate your help.
4. If you are doing media-rich applications and serving large files you may want to consider hosting these files on a VPS or dedicated server. You may find our dedicated servers at singlehop.com
5. keep your wordpress install up to date.

Please note that these are only recommendations. A major spike in traffic may still take down a site even if it is cached. If you find your site is going down due to traffic then your site has most likely outgrown shared hosting and it may be time to thing of upgrading to VPS or a dedicated server.

To move your wordpress.com account to a hosted domain name. You only need to do a few simple steps.
1. Sign up for a hosting account and receive your cpanel information.
2. Read the instructions for installing a wordpress blog to your account here.
3. Export your existing wordpress.com data by clicking on, Manage, and export. You will download a file to your desktop.

4. After your domain becomes active and you can log into the wordpress administration on your site which would be located at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin (if you installed wordpress using the default folder) Click on manage then import.

Then click on the option for importing from wordpress.com. The next page will ask you where you have the file located it, you will hit browse and find the file that we downloaded earlier from wordpress.com

This requires a little MySQL trick. It’s one simple edit in the database.

First, make sure that your Word Press installation is complete, and you know what the name of the database is. If Fantastico installed wordpress for you, it’s likely the name of the database is something like:
username_wrdp1
or
username_wrdp2
and so forth.

Next, log into your cPanel. Select the function MySQL Databases. Down at the bottom, there is a link to phpMyAdmin (looks like a sailboat.)

Once here, you need to select your database name from the drop down box on the left. (ie _wrdp1)

This will display the names of the Tables underneath the dropdown box. Click on the one called wp_options.

Now there is a list of tabs at the top of the page to the right of the drop down box. The First one is called Browse. Click there.

Next, the database entries are listed in columns and rows. You want to select the Pencil Icon (for Edit) on the left for the VERY TOP row (option_name is site url)

Once you’ve clicked the Pencil Icon, you will see your domain name listed something like this:
http://ineedtotest.com

You want to change that to something like this:
http://555.123.556.495/~username/wordpress/
This step is crucial you don’t make a mistake. Please take a moment to verify the url you are typing in here is correct, or you won’t see any change.

Once you’ve changed the url, down at the bottom there is a Dropdown Box that says Save. If it does not say Save, change it to Save, then select the Go button. After you hit Go, you’re done. Visit your temporary URL for your blog, and all the images will show up just fine.

***Follow-up
Once you’ve changed your name servers so your domain name resolves to your cpanel account, you don’t have to go back into phpMyAdmin to make the change again. Simply log into your Admin Panel, there is a tab for Options. In there you will see:
WordPress address (URI):
Is set to your temporary url. Change this to your domain name with any folders required, and you’re back to normal.

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.