Not to be confused with a website that is simply popular and receiving high traffic but some websites have questionable content or can be setup in a way to serve a particular purpose that would most likely cause all other websites on that shared server to regularly suffer downtime and for too long.

A responsible web host will take into account the fact that all shared web hosting customers on their servers need to receive an acceptable amount of uptime and that no individual customer is allowed to hammer the resources on that server.

If they allow a customer on their servers to spam or to have some other type of setup that can be too heavy on the server and cause problems then they will quickly lose business as customers begin to move away to other web hosting companies.

Usually within the terms the web host will list some of the types of sites and services that they will not allow to be hosted on their servers, including IRC Bots, Pirated Software, File Dumps, Autosurf Sites, Hacking Related, Spam Scripts and many others, but also adult content can be disallowed at many hosts too.

Some web hosting companies will not allow anything questionable on their servers and that includes on VPS hosting that they may offer and dedicated hosting too, but especially on shared hosting where resources are more limited and not only is it illegal to host some of the above sites and services in most countries but they often bring strain on a server because of the purpose that they serve.

When a web hosting company disallows certain types of websites (and most do) they are doing it for good reason, to avoid breaking the law in their country and the country that their servers are located and also to operate as a responsible web host where shared resources are available as they should be and keeping downtime to a minimum.

Fortunately many web hosts work very hard to try and keep downtime for their customers to an absolute minimum but even some of the best hosts out there have a troublesome day where they are dealing with server problems or going through a major upgrade accross their servers.

I personally see downtime of a couple if minutes no big deal at all, 10 mins dowtime is not anything to start panicking about, and up to 30 mins downtime, as long as its not a daily and weekly occurrence is still probably seen by many as one of those things, especially on a shared server.

But if downtime experienced becomes hours then this really is too long for a website to be down when it is not through overuse of the server on your part.

I should point out that im referring to downtime caused by problems at the host and not downtime through your own doing or a traffic spike.

If a server is down for a few hours and it hasn't happend to you before at the host that you use or its very rare, and the hosting company keep the affected customers well informed then i feel this is acceptable, its very important for the affected customers to know what has happened if it is relevant for the host to give an explanation and for the customers to have a rough idea of when they should be able to expect normal operation again of their hosted websites.

If you do find your web host has more downtime than you feel acceptable, regardless of the plan you are paying for being cheap or not you should really consider moving to a different web host that doesn't have so much downtime and as a result does not potentially affect the success and possibly even sales generated through your website.

At wordpress.com you can signup and have a blog setup and hosted by wordpress, but when you may want to take the blog a bit further you can be faced with a few problems.

One of the problems is not being able to place ads on your blog, for example adsense and so choosing to self host your wordpress blog can give you the freedom to place ads on the pages of your blog and any other restriction that you could face from using a blog at wordpress.com will no longer be a worry.

Once you begin using your own web hosting account you will enjoy the freedom of being able to login to your account, upload pages and plugins easily and with most shared hosting accounts you get the benefits of stats software included and anything else that you may find useful and usually at a very affordable price.

There are absolutely loads of free picture hosts around where you can upload one image or literally hundreds and then link to the images from your website.

With using a free image hosting service there is the fact that you dont have so much control over where the images are as you would if you had a web hosting account, and theres always the chance that the images could be deleted from the free host, especially if the images are not acceptable for some reason, this could leave you with broken image links on your website, but the plus side of using a free picture host is that theres usually no limits on space and your not having to pay for the hosting.

Most of the free picture hosting services will provide you with a variety of links after the upload has completed with options of direct links, thumbnail links and forum ready links.

If you can prepare yourself enough so that you know what type of server you will need, for example Linux or Windows, and know whether you need database use and and specific programming languages that may be used you can then give a better idea to the web hosting companies if you have questions to ask them.

You dont need to be an expert or to know everything inside out about your website and some of the hosting packages, but by knowing what you are looking for you can find a hosting plan most suitable to you, it will give you more confidence when dealing with the hosting companies and can prevent you from being lead to believe that you need a much larger or feature bloated web hosting plan than neccessary.

If the website is already established and they know that they are actually receiving this amount of traffic then thats fine, as they know what they need from a web host if they are possibly looking at transferring the website to a different web host.

But if they are launching a brand new website and have not used newspaper, magazine or tv exposure as a part of their marketing plan then its often unlikely that the website will explode with popularity as marketing efforts on the internet take a while to start showing as actual use of your website.

We all hope for plenty of visitors and heavy use of a new website and its natural to be excited about your latest project but often a website will not hit its 5,000 or 10,000 visitors a day expectation, at least not in the early days.

This is where you can benefit from saving at your webhost and taking a package from them that you can grow and upgrade as you need it.

Ive started up new websites myself, taken a smaller package, looked at it and worried for a moment that i may run out of space quickly but more often than not i wont face that problem.

If you work on multiple websites then your time is spread throughout your various projects, even if you have people working for you or are part of a partnership.

It can take a while to build up a new website, adding content and promoting it, so you will often get by just fine with a smaller amount of available disk space than you first thought.

Keep this in mind when beginning new websites, as long as you can upgrade when you need extra space and maybe extra available bandwidth, databases etc, you will be fine and find yourself only paying for what you need.

I experienced this myself recently and was not sure why i was receiving this alert of a virus, it turned out that the virus is attached to an email, usually a spam email and unless you open the email there should be no problem.

But to make sure that you are downloading a clean and virus free backup of your home directory to your computer you can go though your email accounts that you have in place on your account and delete any spam emails with attachments, making sure that they are deleted from the trash folder too, then when you are ready to download a home directory backup to your computer you should find that you dont receive any alerts from your antivirus software and the backup is clean.

If you use an FTP client software to transfer the script files from your computer to the web hosting account then its quite an easy process and usually only takes a few seconds to do.

Depending on the FTP software that you use, after you have uploaded the files to the host, if you right click on a folder you will see an option called (CHMOD) or something similar, by selecting this it will present you with a small box where you can manually select what you would like to make writable or you can type in a specific 3 digit number, often stated in the installation instructions included with the script that you are installing.

And thats it, quick and easy and now you have made the specified folders and files within those folders writable.

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