When setting up your web hosting account you may only want to setup one website but if you have plans of setting up a few websites at the same hosting account then you will want to choose a service that allows for multiple domain hosting.

What this will allow you to do is to have addon domains, the domains will still be able to be used individually, but they are added onto your web hosting in a way that easily allows for the setup of a number of websites all from the one account.

Some companies will have for example 5 or 10 multiple domains allowed and others will allow for up to 1000 to be added to one account.

So if you thought that you would have to setup a brand new web hosting account for each website that you want to create then this is not a worry, all you have to do is check any limit that the company may have for multiple domains and you are fine to use the web hosting account for more than one website.

If your hosting account has Cpanel then its easy for you to go into the Addon Domain section and add one of your domains so that it then creates a directory for you that is specifically for that domain and the website that you will setup for that domain.

Filed under: General Web Hosting Info by admin
No Comments » Published May 31, 2008

Quite often while searching around for new web hosting you may come across companies offering unlimited parts of the service that they are offering, for example they may advertise as being able to provide you unlimited bandwidth monthly or even unlimited space and often this will be suggested at quite a low monthly fee too.

This does not mean that the webhost is trying to trick you into thinking that they can offer an unlimited package for a tiny fee, because if you read the terms of service at the company website it will likely tell you that in so many words they cant actually provide you with unlimited bandwidth as common sense tells us that someone has to pay for that bandwidth, and if they are only charging you a small fee then its obvious that the service cannot be unlimited.

What it does do is it gets your attention, and to an individual who may have never using a web hosting service before this will naturally look very appealing and theres a chance that a new user may not read through the available small print that most of us sometimes neglect to read properly.

I have chosen not to suggest that the web hosting companies are trying to trick you or lie to you because the web hosting business is a rather competitive market and in order to try and stand out from the other competitors they are going to want to grab your attention and they know that the word "unlimited" is definately going to get your attention and that it may lead to a new customer for them.

What you need to make a habit of doing when you are searching for a new hosting service is to read the TOS ( terms of service ) and look for all of the realistic expectations and limits that you would expect from a service where they are only chaging you a small fee, and then ask yourself if any web hosting company could really offer you an unlimited service.

A web hosting company knows that a percentage of its customers would not come even close to being heavy users of their resources and will most likely use just a small amount of space and not a lot of bandwidth but then there are always users that do have very busy websites and that are resource heavy and its quite unlikely that a web hosting company could allow a customer to hammer their services and the service being truely unlimited.

So basically its a bit of common sense to weigh up what you could realistically expect from the service you are paying for and that at some point there has to be a limit set on all services offered.

Filed under: General Web Hosting Info by admin
No Comments » Published May 30, 2008

After having setup your website at a web host and enjoying the experience of working on your site adding content and promoting it in the search engines it is all too easy to become distracted with the tasks that you have to do that you may forget a few other and important things that you need to do in order to make sure that you are prepared for anything going wrong, and one of those very important jobs in backups.

Backing up your website and if you are running any databases, backing up those too is something that can often be forgotten about, after all you are busy building your website up and have enough to think about already, and thats a fair enough statement, but if the worst happens, and say your web host lost your work and they didn't have backups or for some reason couldn't provide backups, then this could leave you in a very awkward situation indeed, it would result in a potential loss of all of your work, or a partial loss, not to mention the headache of dealing with this type of situation, and maybe even a large financial loss depending on the type of website and information lost.

Most decent web hosting companies will have backups and often have their own plans in place as an extra safety net, but sometimes customers can depend on this too much and get a false sense of security from this where the customer ( yourself ) may forget about taking their own backups and keeping them safe.

And there is always that feeling of it wont happen to me, well even if you are with a well known and reputable web hosting service and they assure you that your websites are backed up, i would say that as an extra precaution that you should make sure that you take daily backups of your websites. As a bare minimum you should backup your databases daily, it is something that i make a habit of and my work routine means that within the last hour of myself being online that i go into Cpanel in my hosting account and i backup all of my MySQL databases to my computer and take a home directory backup too. If you are running a large website or a number of websites from one hosting account and the home directory backup is quite large, then i guess once every few days or once weekly would be acceptable, at least if the worst happend and your web host couldn't provide a recent backup for you then at least your loss would be a maximum of a weeks work, but if you can avoid any loss at all then of course this is the ideal situation.

Dependant on your web hosting account and what may be included it should be a one click process for each backup download in most cases, from within Cpanel it is easy, or you can backup a MySQL database for example by going into phpmyadmin and exporting the SQL file.

Every now and then make sure that you then transfer all of your recent backup files from your desktop or laptop onto CD's or DVD's so that if you have a computer hardware failure then you can fall back on the disks knowing that your work is safe. It may sound extreme but it is worth doing.

If you are a little more experienced you can often setup backups to be automatic so that they are emailed to you or downloaded to a specific location, this way you can carry on with the comfort of knowing that you are prepared but without having to deal with it manually.

Backup your files today, you may just need them when you least expect it.

Filed under: Database Advice by admin
No Comments » Published May 29, 2008