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How to Choose a Web Host – Part 2

This is Part 2 of How to Choose a Web Host. For Part 1, please click here.

What Is Their Definition of a Short Down Time?

I never would have dreamed of asking this question until I went through a lengthy down time with Midphase. In fact, this is what caused me to finally toss in the towel with Midphase and find a new host. It was early one morning and I was trying to work on my site. I couldn’t get my dashboard to come up and quickly realized the site would not come up either.

When I called Midphase they were not even aware the site was down. In case you’re new to this, that’s what shared, managed hosting is all about. THEY are supposed to manage the server, not you. If your site goes down, they should have it fixed so fast that most of the time you won’t even know it was down.

When a site does go down it’s customary to have it back up quickly. Quickly means between 5 and 30 minutes, or an hour tops. It took Midphase over 24 hours to get my site back up.

If you do the math, this completely blows their 99.9% uptime guarantee out of the water. To be up for 99.9% of the time for a month, you could not be down longer than about 1.44 minutes or 86.4 seconds! So clearly I was a bit concerned.

When I interviewed Hostgator to see if I wanted their hosting, I asked them about this with a deliberately very open ended question. They said what I just told you; a short time is between 5 and 30 minutes. Any longer and they’d be looking at restoring their backup of your site to a different server.

What Features Do They Offer?

Now we come to some of the more objective issues involved in selecting a host. You’ll want to know how many domains they will allow you to host. It’s not that important that their least expensive plan allow multiple domains. Just so long as you can upgrade later.

If you’re planning on using WordPress for your website, you might want to check if they offer the one-button installation. Otherwise you’ll have a bit more work as you’ll need to upload WordPress to your site and install it manually.

One nice extra that Hostgator offers is they will transfer your entire website from somewhere else free of charge. You will have some supervision to do, but they will transfer all the content.

You might want to check into a dedicated IP address for your site. This is becoming a less common offering as we are starting to run a little short of unique IP addresses on a worldwide basis. When I signed up with Midphase years ago, they just gave you one if you wanted it. Now, when I signed up with Hostgator, they would only give me one if I bought a business plan and installed an SSL certificate.

There are a multitude of other features that web hosts offer so be sure and do a detailed comparison of the ones that are important to you.

In the first part of this article, I told you I’d give you an example of why price might not be such an important factor in your decision. Let me give you that example now.

The difference in price between Midphase and Hostgator ended up only being about a dollar a month. Keep in mind that making this comparison was rather involved because each included different things in their plans and charged extra for other things. However, in the end, it was only a dollar difference.

Now think about some of the less objective features I mentioned in the first half. The two that come to mind for me are the definition of down time and the ease of use of each one. For a dollar a month more, I get a host that actually pays attention to when my site goes down and has it back up 23 ½ hours faster than the other.

I also get a host where everything can be done from one place instead of searching everywhere and having to do many things during their “regular” business hours. Transferring my old site free of charge didn’t hurt the decision process any either. There are a few other things that are better too, but these are the main ones.

Negotiating Price

As I said before, price should not be a big factor in your decision process. That being said however, sometimes there’s quite a bit you can do to save some money once you select who you’d like to go with.

Something many people don’t know is that you can significantly reduce your monthly cost by paying for more time in advance. Usually you can pay for up to three years which results in significant savings.

Many hosting companies also have ongoing discounts. These discounts can be quite random and even the employees of the hosting company may not know when the next discount is going to happen. They will usually know what the maximum discount is though so you can check back every few days to see what that day’s discount is. When it reaches the level you want, than purchase your service.

These discounts will normally apply to your first order. If you pay for three years up front, that’s considered your first order. I think I saved over $100 with Hostgater by doing this.

Another thing hosts will do sometimes is price match. At one point I was thinking about leaving Midphase (I wish I would have at that point) and I had gotten a dirt cheap quote from GoDaddy. I told Midphase about it and they matched it. The funny thing is, the price from GoDaddy was negotiated too so the ending price was pretty low.

Another thing to keep in mind is that even if you pay several years up front, you are not usually locked in. Every host I have come across will refund your unused months should you decide to go someplace else. So unless you are just strapped for cash and can’t afford the longer contract, it’s always best to pay as much up front as you can. If you use a host I haven’t mentioned in this article though, be sure to ask about their policy and not just assume their refund policy is the same.

Other Considerations

There is one other little piece of advice I’m going to throw in here for free. This really has little to do with choosing a hosting company but is very important all the same.

While it will be tempting to register your domain name with the same company you host with, this practice should be avoided.

When both are in the same place, one company has control over your entire online operation. This is usually a problem when your hosting company decides you have done something they don’t like or they consider unethical. Even if you were not responsible, they may lock down your site and make it unusable. If your domain is registered with them too, there will be little you can do until they consider the problem resolved.

However, if your domain is registered elsewhere, and you’ve backed up your site, you can quickly move it someplace else and resume operations. This can be a lifesaver if you make a significant amount of your income online.

There are many, many other things people consider in their decision about which hosting company to use. For example, my friend Amity of www.GreenGiftsGuide.com left a comment on the first part of this article. She said that she found a host that used renewable energy to power their operation. I find that totally cool, but I never would have thought of it without her comment.

This article covers the basics that you should look at. I’m sure you’ll be able to think up other consideration based on things that are important to you. Whatever those things are that are special and important to you, be sure and ask your prospective host about them. If it’s important to you, surely it’s important to others too and someone has worked it into their operation. There are enough hosts out there that everyone should be able to find one that works for them.

If you enjoyed this article, please leave a comment. I would love to hear what other considerations you may have in finding just the right host. Also, please click the like button in the “Find us on Facebook” box in the upper left.

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About Robert Seth

Robert Seth is a CPA in the Clark County, Washington area who has been serving individual and small business clients for the last 25 years. His business includes a growing number of remotely serviced customers throughout the United States. He’s also a writer and technology expert. He has a passion for improving the lives of others by helping them simplify the complicated stuff in their lives.

How to Choose a Web Host – Part 1

When selecting a company to host your website, it’s important to get it right the first time. A little extra work in the beginning can prevent tremendous headaches later.

I thought this was a good time to write about this topic as it’s very fresh on my mind. I have gone through two changes of hosting company in the last four months. Both changes were very different from each other and for different reasons.

The first change came about in May when I wanted to transfer my site away from the company that is used for participants in the Ultimate Internet Boot Camp (UIBC). This boot camp is an amazing five day course but leaves you with a site that is rather limited in what you can do with it.

Since they only allow the installation of about 12 plugin, the functionality of the site kind of suffers. The worst part however, is that you cannot install a backup plugin. This not only has the obvious drawback of no backup, but it makes it very difficult to transfer your site to somewhere else should you so desire. Their fees were also very high compared to everyone else.

So I moved the site to a host I’d been using for another site. This host’s name is Midphase and I’ve been with them for around 10 years. What made me choose them was their excellent customer service, low price, and the fact that I’d already been with them so long. I soon learned though, that none of these reasons, by themselves, is a good reason to choose a particular host.

When I transferred my site again four months later, I went to Hostgator. By the time I did this I had lots more experience and had a much better idea of how to make a good selection. Hostgater comes highly recommended and so far I have not been able to find any problems (or even concerns) with them.

If you know me personally, you know that I ask a LOT of questions! People that don’t know me can mistake this for just trying to cause trouble. People that do know me love this, and count on it when they need information about something.

Picking a hosting company was one of those issues that I turned the massive question mark to. I’m sure many a customer service person was tired of talking to me when it was over. However, now you get the benefit of knowing what questions to ask and what kinds of things to look for in a hosting company.

Ok, now I’ll stop blabbing about how this all happened and give you some information you can sink your teeth into.

Cost of Hosting

You may find this next statement kind of odd, but, cost should not be a major factor in your decision process. Most hosting is very competitively priced. As long as the package you’re looking at is within a reasonable range (between $6 and $12 per month) DO NOT compare price until you are absolutely certain all other features are equal. I’ll give you an example in a moment to show you why price is not a good measuring tool for this.

How Many Customers Do They Have?

Web host come in a huge range of sizes. There are local ones with just a couple hundred customers, all the way up to ones with millions of customers. My preference is for one somewhere in the middle.

If you pick a host that’s too small, they have problems related to inadequate revenue. It will be difficult to make upgrades to stay cutting edge. It will also be difficult to keep enough staff on hand to deal with unexpected problems.

While it’s probably better to pick one that’s too large over one that’s too small, large ones have their problems too. They can tend to lose their sense of how important each customer is. They also can make arbitrary rules that are not necessarily in the best interest of the customer. A good size range seems to be between one and five million customers. This allows for adequate operating revenue while still maintaining that sense of customer appreciation.

How Long Have They Been In Business?

You can learn a lot more than you might think with this question. Obviously this answer will tell you if they’ve been around for a long time or if they’re just a startup that might not be there next year.

However, when you combine the answer to this question with that of how many customers they have, you start to get a much more complete story. Let me explain.

Midphase has been around for around 15 years. Yet they only have about 20,000 customers. This fact alone should really bring some serious questions to your mind. Especially when you consider that Hostgator has been in business a much shorter time but has over 1.5 million customers. Bluehost which has been in business a similar amount of time as Hostgator has 5 million customers. And GoDaddy, which has been around less time than any of these, has many millions of customers.

So why would Midphase have so few customers after so much time? This is a difficult question to answer without a lot of research. However, it becomes painfully obvious when you try to move your site.

It turns out they are a hodgepodge of little companies and sites. There is no one place where you can manage everything like with most hosts that have grown quickly. You have to go one place to manage you domains, another to manage your name servers, and still another to manage your site. There is little that’s automatic about them and much that has to go through the “billing department” during regular business hours.

My friend Rose Mis helped me with this transfer and we both felt that we had never seen anything like the complications, loose ends, and unrelated details that had to be dealt with in this transfer.

So when you hear that a host has been in business forever, but only has a few customers, dig deeper and make sure you listen to all those warning bells going off in your head.

What Interface Do They Use?

The interface I’m talking about here is the one between you and the back end of your website. The overwhelming majority of hosts use CPanel. If you don’t already know how to use it, it’s easy to learn. It’s also known by virtually every tech person you’d want to hire to help you.

Some hosts, like GoDaddy, have their own proprietary interface. If you’re used to CPanel, you’ll have a learning curve if you sign up with someone that doesn’t use it. Also, if you plan to use a host that does not use CPanel, make sure anyone you plan to hire to help with your site knows the interface you’re planning on using.

I actually briefly signed on with GoDaddy before I went to Hostgator. I did not transfer my site but I did set up a new one just to see how it would go. Between the constant technical issues and the foreign-feeling interface, I quickly decided this was not the direction I wanted to go.

Other Consideration

There are several other things to be considered when choosing a web host. We’ll look at those in part 2 of this article which you can read by clicking here.

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About Robert Seth

How to Add or Remove Plugins From Your WordPress Website

If you’re new to WordPress, or even if you’re not, knowing about plug-ins is a must. WordPress is an amazingly powerful and simple platform. It can make you a web pro in no time even without installing any extra plugins. But to really shine and get your WordPress site performing at its best, you’ll eventually need to know about plugins.

The basic purpose of a plugin is to extend the capabilities of your site. They can also greatly simplify something that would be very difficult to do otherwise. For example, let’s say you want to add a contact page to your WordPress site. With a plugin, it’s as simple as clicking on install and the job is done. If you had to do that with HTML or PHP programming it would take you much, much longer. That’s assuming of course that you even knew how.

Since most of us don’t know how, plugins are a tremendous help. They make it so we can concentrate on writing great content, or doing whatever we do best, rather than learning to be a programmer.

Since the purpose of this article is not to tell you about all the plugins that are available I won’t go into any detail about that. I will say however, that there are thousands of them to choose from. This is very fortunate for anyone that wants to use WordPress as their blogging or web platform.

Not only are there thousands to choose from, but there are many of each type. This is also of great benefit to us. Sometimes one plugin may not play well with everything else we’ve got going on with our WordPress site. A good example of this is the post editor I use on this site.

I began with a plugin called Dean’s FCKEditor. It is a full-featured and very good editor and many people use it without any problem. On my site however, it behaved very erratically. It even caused me to have two of the same input windows right on top of each other. This was definitely not how the software was supposed to work.

So, since I was familiar with another editor plugin called TinyMCE Advanced, I thought I’d give that a try. It worked perfectly. This is not to say that Dean’s FCK is a bad editor at all. I just tell you this to provide an example of why it’s a good thing that we have so many to choose from. It makes it so you can choose your set of plugins that will make your WordPress site hum along beautifully.

Now that you know what plugins are and why you need them, let’s talk about how to install and delete them. Go to your WordPress dashboard and look at the menu items down the left side. Find the Plugins category and click on Add New as shown in the screen shot below.

(Click on screenshots to enlarge and open in new window for better viewing)

The Install Plugins screen will come up next as shown in the next screen shot.

In this window you have several choices. You can either click on one of the choices circled above or you can do a search. Clicking on Popular brought up the following screen for me. What comes up for you will depend on what’s popular at the time you do this. If you want to search, you can either enter a term, or leave the box blank. Leaving it blank will bring up all plugins. Entering a term will narrow your search considerably.

Notice that the page already knows what’s installed. So for me, since Contact form 7 is already installed, it says so.

In this case, NextGEN Gallery is not installed. If you click on Install Now, it will do just that. It will ask if you’re sure and if you click yes, the installation will be instant.

Clicking on details will give you a chance to read about it and make sure it’s what you want as shown in the screen shot below.

Clicking on Install Now will do the same as on the previous screen.

Once you install, you get the following screen. Click on Activate Plugin to activate it and make it usable. This is a good place to mention something else. You do not need to activate plug-ins that are installed on your site. You can also deactivate (which I’ll show you in a moment) a plug-in that you don’t want to use.

There are many reasons for not activating every plugin. You may want to test several plugins to see which one you like. Maybe one stops working but you think the next WordPress update might fix it. Deactivating makes it so you don’t have to download and install again in the event you want to reactivate. I still have Dean’s FCKEditor installed on mine. I’m hoping someday it will work again with my setup. If I delete the plugin rather than just deactivating, I’d need to download and install it again.

Some plugins require you to adjust settings once activation is complete. There are far too many to discuss in this article. I just want you to be aware that it’s normal to have to do this.

Once your plugin is installed and activated, it will look like this in your plugin list. To edit the settings, click Edit. To deactivate, click Deactivate. Delete will only appear for plugins that are not active because they need to be deactivated before deleting.

To finish up let’s show you what deactivating and deleting looks like. Click on Deactivate and now the plugin looks like this.

You may also see the following screen shot at the top of the screen depending on what other plugins you have installed. If you do see it, be sure to follow the instructions.

If you want to delete, click the Delete button that now shows up. The following screen appears. The system gives you plenty of chances to change your mind or to get additional information. If you want to see what exactly will be deleted, click on the Click to view entire list of files which will be deleted option at the bottom of the screenshot.

Click on Yes, Delete these files and data. The plugin will be deleted and you will see any appropriate messages at the top of the screen. As before, be sure to follow any instructions given there.

So there you have it. That’s the basics of installing and deleting plugins on your WordPress Website.

One other thing I should mention here. Some types of WordPress installations do not allow you to change the plugin or they only allow you to select from a few. My first website was like this. I took a course called the Ultimate Internet Boot Camp. During that course, we actually installed and set up our WordPress websites and did our first blog post.

The course was great, but I soon learned some things that I didn’t think were so great. You only had a choice between a few plugins. Most of the ones that were installed were done in such a way that you couldn’t even see what they were and they could not be removed. One of the worst parts to me was that you could not even install a backup plugin so you could back up your site.

I believe the reason they did this was so you couldn’t back it up and install it someplace else. They did not want to lose their rather inflated hosting fee. To get my site off their servers and onto someplace else was quite a job. It required copying and pasting every piece of information on my site to another site. It was really worth it though. Now I have all the freedom WordPress has to offer without any artificial restrictions.

If you are taking a course like that and you want ultimate control over what you do with your site, I would recommend getting off their servers as fast as possible. The longer you wait the more information you will have to move.

If you enjoyed this article and it was useful to you, please leave a comment below. If you like the site, please consider clicking the “like” button in the “Find us on Facebook” box in the left sidebar.

Thanks for visiting!

About Robert Seth

How to Add Videos, Photos, and Images to Your WordPress Website

Blogging with just written content can be very engaging to your readers and a great way to keep the conversation going. There’s nothing like photos or video, though, to really bring the conversation to a new level. Here’s how you put photos and videos on your WordPress Website.

This article will also be applicable to many other types of websites too. Many website interfaces are very similar and use the same methods, or very similar ones to achieve the same tasks. Hopefully, with some slight modifications, you will be able to apply this information to your non-WordPress website too.

Before you can upload a video or photo to your website, it will need to be in an acceptable format. Although this is really the subject of another article, let me take a moment to explain this. Many video and photo cameras use proprietary formats for their videos and photos. The RAW format that many high-end cameras can shoot in is an example of this.

Before these photos or videos can be used, they must be converted to a standard format that your website will understand and will be able to load quickly. The most commonly supported formats for web photos and images are JPG, PNG, and GIFF. You can tell if your image is in one of these formats by looking at the extension, or last three letters, in the file name.

For example, if I have a file named myphoto in JPEG format, it would look like myphoto.jpg. Most modern digital cameras have shooting modes that will create this type of file in the first place. This prevents having to do any conversions.

The standard formats for web video files are WMV, MOV, FLV, MPEG, and MPEG-4. Again, it is best to get your video into one of these formats before attempting to upload it.

After you have your photo or video in an appropriate format, now it’s time to get it online. There are basically two methods for doing this. Which one you use depends on a couple of different factors.

First, let’s look at photos or images. Since these should be of fairly small size, they’re ok to put on your own website. To do this, open up the dashboard for your WordPress website as shown below.

The image uploader is circled in the screen shot above. Click on this and the Media Library will open as shown below.

Click on Browse, find the file on your computer, and click on the file. It will be added to the box next to browse in this screen shot. Next click on Upload.

This screen shot is just the bottom portion of the screen that appears next. Select the alignment and image size and then click on insert into post. The image will be inserted wherever your cursor is on the post entry screen. The size can also be adjusted by dragging the boundaries of the image once inserted into the post.

For inserting videos, there are two choices. You can either put them on your site or host them on a site like YouTube or Vimeo. It is generally not recommended to host videos on your WordPress site. This is because the bandwidth of your site’s host could easily be exceeded if you have lots of visitors viewing your video at the same time.

If you do choose to host them on your site you will be limited to two megabytes. To upload a video, you would use exactly the same process as for images with one exception.

Refer to the circled portion of the screen shot above. That is the video uploader. Simply click on that and proceed in the same way as you did for images.

For hosting videos on Vimeo or YouTube I will not go into how to get them on those sites in this article. That will be the subject of future articles. For now, you can go to either of those sites for instructions on how to use their sites.

For purposes of this article, we will look at how to get a YouTube video onto your site. Most other video hosting sites will use a similar process.

Once you have your video on YouTube, go to the actual video and click on it as if you were going to view it. The panel below the video, as shown in the screen shot above will appear. Actually, only the part above Link to this video will show up at first. Click on Share, and Embed, and the remaining part of the screen will appear.

If you just want to send your viewer to YouTube from your site, copy and paste the link in the Link to this video box. If you want to embed the video in your site so the viewer stays on your site while viewing, copy and paste the code in the box below the Embed button.

Go back to your WordPress post that you’re working on as shown below.

If you just want to link to the video and send your viewers off to YouTube, Type in some text that you want to use as the link. In this case I have used “Example of a link.” Highlight it and click on the link button as shown above. The hyperlink screen will open and you can then paste in the code that you copied off of YouTube from the Link to the video box. It goes in the circled box as shown in the screen shot below

If you want to embed the video, which is recommended so viewers stay on your WordPress site, do the following.

Click on the HTML tab. This will show you the HTML of your post instead of the visual view. Place your cursor where you want the video to show up. I know the HTML looks a little alien but look carefully and you should be able to tell where you want the video to appear. For simplicity, you might just want to insert it in the post before adding any text and leave it at the top of the post. To insert it, paste the embed code you copied from the YouTube embed box.

Be sure to save anything you do in the HTML editor before going back to the visual editor. On many platforms, if you don’t do this, your changes will be lost when you go back to the visual editor. Even if you’re just adding HTML tags to adjust the positioning, be sure to save first before going back to visual. Do this by clicking Save Draft, Publish, or Update.

When you go back to the visual tab, the video will appear as a blank box. This is how it should look. The video will appear normal when the post is viewed by your visitors.

So there you have it. As you can see, it’s pretty easy to add images, photos, and video to your WordPress website. Your viewers will appreciate having some video and pictures to look at instead of just text.

So now it’s your turn. How did you like this article? Are there other subjects you’d like to read about? If so, leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you! Also, feel free to join us on Facebook by clicking the “like” button in the “Find us on Facebook box” in the left sidebar

Thanks for visiting.

About Robert Seth