Technology Metro

There are not a lot of places where you can get web space for hosting sites for free. There are a few but most of them don’t allow users to use their own domain or they restrict some file types. Some even provide free web hosting with cpanel. Some free web hosting providers allow use of only particular extensions with lots of restrictions and those kind of hosting is almost of no use ( particularly for me). I have used free hosting from many sites and at last decided it was better to pay a small fee than to get web hosting for free. I used free hosting from awardspace (which only allowed use of subdomain eg: test.awardspace.com) . I found one that allowed free hosting of sites which included a cpanel. I used it for quite a while but after some time, they collapsed. It was not the best hosting but was pretty good if you consider the price, FREE.

After that, I decided to purchase a hosting plan but that failed horrendously two times. Now, I found the perfect hosting for my sites. It is pretty cheap and has a damn good server with no downtime till now. Well, if you can’t afford to pay for hosting or you want to just try it out, you can find few good free web hosting providers. I think Hostbot.com might fall into one of them. They don’t have Cpanel but you can have access and manage your site’s file using a pretty good control panel. They also allow free php web hosting, not a lot of sites allow php files on their server ( for free service ). Hostbot also doesn’t want anything in return for the free hosting space and bandwidth. Some of the free web hosting providers force the users with links and ads that are placed automatically at the footer (usually). With Hostbot, there is no forced ads. Their free hosting plan includes:

• 20GB Disk Space
• 10GB Bandwidth
• Full FTP access
• Supports Php5 and SQL (You could host sites that require a database like wordpress)
• They also offer quite a few useful pre-installed scripts which you could use to make a site
• Get access to traffic data with the help of Awstats which is also available for free

Awstats is a very useful tool for analytic traffic and visitor data. I use it all the time and it is the best analytic software available. Awstats even shows when search engine spiders (bots) have accessed your sites. Well if you want more disk space and bandwidth than currently provided by hostbot, you can upgrade your account by paying a small monthly fee. I would have loved to see Cpanel on it. What do you expect, the service is provided for free with no forced ads and also allows SQL database, PHP etc. You can try it, its free and if you don’t like it you don’t loose anything. If you want to operate a business website or anything important, you might want to go for a paid one that offers Cpanel.

One of the most important part of running a website is to make it unique and clearly distinguishable from other similar sites. One of the things that does this is the design of the site and the logo. The recent trend for website has been Web2.0 and it is very popular. These kind of designs are very visual and eye catching. Design of a site is very important, you must know making a good first important is important and the design of a site does that. And “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”. Professional Website Design is one of the things you should consider when starting a website. Then comes the part where you need to build traffic for your site.

In this part, you need to market your site on the web properly. The most important of them all (from me) is search engine optimization. If you have done your work properly, you should be getting a lot of benefits from it. The first thing you need to do is choose which keyword you want to get traffic from (don’t choose just one), then do a lot of search engine optimization work. This certainly won’t show any immediate results as it takes time to build your search engine ranking. One your keyword ranks high in search engine results, you will be getting a lot of free traffic to you site courtesy of search engine and your search engine optimization work. Search engine optimization includes adding meta tags, keywords, descriptions etc to your site. This is just one small part of SEO. Get as much incoming links as possible with your desired keywords. Exchanging links with other same niched sites is one way to go. You should visit this seo blog as it has quite a few tips and new information on search engine optimization.

When you have launched your site, you won’t get any traffic at first. So, to solve this issue, use social media sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reggit, Propellor, Del.icio.us etc. This will get you instant traffic. From my experience, Stumbleupon has been the best instant traffic supplier. Here is a good Social Media firefox plugin you could use to manage multiple social media accounts on different social media sites. You will gain a lot credibility with social media sites and this will help you in the future when you submit new stuffs to them. Nowadays, using social media is a must to promote new websites. If your site is good, you could get a lot of backlinks for free (without doing any work) which is good for search engine ranking. Just focus on these stuffs and your website should be doing good in no time.

For any site to be successful, it needs a lot of traffic and that too traffic that is related to your website’s niche. This kind of traffic is called targeted traffic. Well you could purchase some traffic from PPC sites like Google Adsense but you will need to spend a lot of money. The best way to get targeted traffic is from search engines. Organic traffic are the best and lots of webmasters try to do that by optimizing their site specifically for search engines. This will take some time but the results are awesome and the traffic costs nothing.

Well to find out what you are doing wrong or what you are doing right, you need to find out where your traffic is coming from. To do this you will have to use a web analytics to analyze all the traffic details. You should not just rely on search engine traffic, you need to market you site extensively to see a high result. You need to do a lot of testing to find the best solution for your website and this takes a lot of time and effort. Search Engine marketing is a must for every site if it is to be successful. A single person can’t do all these stuffs and they must hire some professionals to do so. You could hire some person but it can be a double edged sword as you have to trust this person to do your SEO and other marketing work well. The best possible thing to do is to find some well established online marketing company and let them do the work for you. This way, success is almost guaranteed. This should be a good option for an online business company.

Omniture is one of the tried and trusted company for online marketing and anything there is to do with promoting online business. Their web analytic software is great for analyzing the new trends in the online world and you could optimize your online business site accordingly. Instead of a whole IT department these kind of softwares can do the same kind of job. Their software can also provide bid management solutions if you want to do search engine marketing via Google Adsense or any other similar PPC advertising sites. This is a very important thing if you want setup a good and cost effective campaign. This is not it, there are a lot of ways you can benefit by using Omniture. You might want to take a free tour to get a feel of what you are getting into.

I have write a post about iDrive before. Well here it is again, iDrive is a great backup system for backing up your important files. You will need a broadband connection for this online backup system to be usable and effective. iDrive provide a Secure Online Backup service to everyone. For paid customers they provide a bit more disk space but you can get 2GB of free storage if you don’t want to pay for the online backup. It is quite easy to use iDrive’s online backup system, you just have to download a software that is provided by iDrive themselves. Install that software and you are good to go.

This software creates a virtual drive on you computer and whenever you copy any files into the virtual drive, it automatically gets transfered and backed up on a secure iDrive server. Thats it, the files you copied into the virtual drive is now safe and sound on an iDrive server. You can only use 2GB of storage space for free, which is the basic package. For a more advanced package, you will have to pay $5 per month (this price applies to an iDrive Pro package for personal use).

iDrive has been and loved by a lot of people and most recently, their free service even got praise from PC World. Here is an article on PC World on 101 fantastic freebies. You can download the iDrive Software here if you want to try if out, come on, their basic package is for free and there is nothing to loose for us. Even PC World has listed it on their article.

Everyone wants to make their operating system their own and to do this you have to either use a skin which will take up lot of memory as you will have to install some third party software (Wincustomize of some other similar softwares). The easiest and the fastest way to customize your computer is to place a set of icons which doens’t need any special software. Just download the set of icons you like and set them as you might want to. Downloading a free icon is not that hard, there are lots of sites that offer free download of icon packs and also some paid ones. Apart from using these icons in your computer, you can apply it to your own software, websites or anything whatsoever you want to do.

FreeIconsDownload is one of the free icon downloads sites and there will be no legal issues if you want to use it in your software or websites as all of the icon sets found at FreeIconsDowload are royalty free. Free Icons download has very exclusive collection which you can not find on the popular icons website and most of the all the quality of icons are really great. There are more than 15 categories in which icons are divided as well as you can also list icons as most download icons. They have a huge collection free icons on offer. I searched around this site for quite a while and I really liked the Social Bookmark Icons. I think I am going to use these icons on this blog. I am thinking of removing the big one that I have right now and use the Social Bookmark Icons set I found at Free Icons Download.

lol this is a very very cheap deal. $5 for a Ethernet switch is a very low price. Well actually the price is set at $15 on Newegg for SMC105DT Fast Ethernet Switch. You will need to use a $10 off coupon code (EMCADCFCH) to get the SMC105DT 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Switch for $5. There is nothing special on this SMC Ethernet Switch but for $5 its a cheap ethernet switch and will work as advertised. Nothing more to it. I almost forgot, this SMC Network’s Ethernet Switch’s shipping is free so for a total cost of just $5, you will get if right on your doorsteps. The price of this SMC Ethernet Switch elsewhere is:

• CostCentral.com $32.90 + $8.06 shipping
• POWERMAX $34.88 + $7.05 shipping
• PC Connection $35.28 + $9.49 shipping
• TheNerds.net $36.99 + $9.99 shipping
• Super Warehouse $37.99 + $6.99 shipping

So considering the price of the SMC105DT 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Switch on other shops, $5 is a great deal. Well this SMC SMC105DT 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Switch has 5 x RJ45 Ports. It is built on IEEE802.3, IEEE802.3u and IEEE 802.3x standard. It also has a 4K Mac Address table and 1MB of buffer memory. The size of the SMC105DT 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Switch is pretty small ( 4.3″ x 2.8″ x 0.8″ ). Here are some of the features of this SMC Networks’ Fast Ethernet Switch:

• Auto-negotiation of half or full duplex
• Auto-sensing of transmission speed on all ports
• Auto configuration for MDI/MDI-X cable connections
• ANSI/IEEE 802.3u compliant

Since the advancement in the internet world in respect to its speed. People are using the web to do a lot of different things that was virtually impossible to do on a dial-up connection. Watching a video on sites like Youtube or uploading or download huge files on the web was a tedious task when we were using dial-up internet connection. Now dial-up connections are almost obsolete and almost everyone has a broadband connection now. This has really opened up the web for users and website owners alike. They can put huge amounts of data on the web and people on a broadband connection can easily access it in minutes because of the speed of their internet connection. Youtube has grown a lot in recent years and so has the online backup business.

Instead of storing your backup files on a CD or a DVD, you can now backup and sync all the data on your hard drive or from anywhere else directly to your online backup storage space. Lots of sites that offer online backup service are giving limited online backup storage space for free to users. iDrive is one of the company that provide online backup storage space for free as well as for paid customers. Their basic service is offered for free and their paid subscription is pretty cheap as they provide unlimited storage space for paid customers.

iDrive Basic Package:

• 2GB of online storage space
• an option to upgrade to an iDrive Pro account if you require more space

iDrive Pro Package:

• Unlimited storage space
• ability to create and manage multiple online backup accounts
• Costs $4.95 per month or $49.50 per year

To use iDrive’s online backup system, you will need to download a iDrive software. This software will work on almost all Windows Operating Systems apart from Windows 98. To use this software, your computer will need atleast 512MB of RAM and 20MB of hard disk space which is required for local caching. You can download iDrive’s online backup software here. You can download this software free of cost and also use their iDrive Basic package if you don’t need much backup space or want to just try out iDrive’s service before you decide to buy iDrive’s Pro package.

Are you looking for a website hosting provider that allows you to run whatever scripts and features you want and still save some money while doing so? There are a lot of hosting providers out there on the web and knowing about it take quite a bit of research. There are quite a few hosting review sites you can look at to find all the information you need but not all of them are easy to use for novices. WebHostingSearch provides an easy platform to search for all the best hosting deals and companies. You can use the database on WebHostingSearch.com to find a perfect match for your budget as well as the space and bandwidth you need. They have an impressive database with all of the best hosting providers in the world with the list of prices and other configurations they provide. WebHostingSearch reviews and ranks all kind of hosting plans including reseller web hosting and dedicated hosting. Shared Hosting will satisfy beginner but for a bigger site that receives a lot of traffic, dedicated hosting is the way to go. I recently got a one year hosting from a new web hosting company. It was a shared hosting plan and I didn’t have much knowledge about it. Within one month, I started getting a lot of traffic (10-12k per day) and they suspended my account because my sites were using too much CPU power. I got a VPS which till now is working perfectly for me. I think a good VPS can handle about 100k hits per day so I don’t have to worry about it for now.

Well if you are planning to earn some money on the web then you can get a reseller web hosting which you can sell to your friends or create a website and start selling it on the web. It is a neat way to earn some money. Visit WebHostingSearch.com to find out the best hosting of any kind.

Lots of webmasters and business are turning to vps hosting as it the the next best thing after dedicated server hosting. Dedicated Servers are a bit expensive and for a site that gets around 100k traffic per day, a VPS would do the job very well. The price of a virtual server depends on what specification you want. I almost moved to a VPS just a month ago after my shared hosting account got suspended for using too much CPU power and bandwidth. I was just about to move to a VPS and I was doing some research on it because I had never used a VPS before. Then I found a great deal on digital point for shared hosting and they helped me optimized my sites to use less CPU power. There has been no problem since then. Well if the similar problem occurs again, I will have no other choice but to move to a virtual private servers.

Some VPS companies charge a bit high price but this one is pretty cheap compared to some I found when I was looking for a VPS to shift my sites. This business web hosting uk solution provides VPS for a very affordable price. The lowest VPS they offer costs £15 per month. The specs for this VPS server is pretty low but it should satisfy people who don’t need that much dedicated memory and disk space. Well 7GB is enough for almost any sites. They provide three packages to suit all kinds of requirement, a value pack, extra and pro package.

VPS 2008 Value Pack:

• 128MB of dedicated RAM
• 7GB Disk Spave
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Root Access

VPS 2008 Extra Package:

• 512MB of dedicated RAM
• 10GB Disk Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Plesk 8.2 with the option to add 30 domains in total
• You can select these Linux OS: CentOS 5.0, Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, and Ubuntu 6.10 or even Windows but the price is a bit higher

VPS 2008 Pro Package:

• 768MB of dedicated RAM
• 20GB disk space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Gets the most CPU priority than other packages
• Plesk 8.2 with 100 add-on domains (Free)

All the servers on above packages comes with a 2 x Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs and 4 x 146GB SCSI RAID 5. The value packages gets 1 IP address whereas the other two gets 2 IP addresses. One thing I don’t like about their packages is they only offer Plesk control panel. It uses a bit more RAM than other Control panels. Lxadmin is the best control panel for vps or any other option as it takes very little RAM. Cpanel is the most used control panel but it also takes a bit of the dedicated RAM but it is a lot better than Plesk. FYI, all the data-centers are located inside United Kingdom.

Getting a web hosting can be a big confusing if you are a novice. Just a month ago, I got a shared hosting from a company and my account got suspended in just one month. The reason for this was “I was using to much of their server’s CPU”. I absolutely didn’t have any idea on this. I got around 10k traffic the week my account got suspended and they told me that was the cause of the problem. Now I know a lot more about hosting than just a month ago. I did a lot of research on the topic and found out some very useful information.

I was about to get a VPS, as suggested by my previous host but then I found a cheap linux hosting on DigitalPoint forum that I couldn’t pass up. If the traffic starts to increase again, I will have no other choice other than to get a VPS. A regular VPS can withstand about 100k hits at a time so that would be totally sufficient for me. There are some sites that get absolutely huge amount of traffic and to manage that, they usually start their own server (which can be a bit of a hassle as you have to maintain it all the time) or they get a dedicated hosting.

VPS and Dedicated hosting has become a huge market as millions and millions of users start their own sites. There are huge amount of web hosting and server providers and it can sometimes be a bit confusing when it comes time to commit. I have a link to one of the server companies. It is a UK based company so people who reside in the UK or have huge traffic from UK should benefit from it. All four of their data centers are located inside UK. Their price is a bit high for me but small company should be able to easily afford it. They provide managed web hosting uk for its clients. They have four packages available, which should meet the requirement of almost any company. Their dedicated hosting UK solution has three packages (Value, Extra and Pro). These packages are perfect for uk small business web site hosting or even for a large business.

Value Package Server Specs:

• Intel Server System Server Model
• 1 x Core2 Duo 1.6GHz Processor
• 80GB SATA Hard Drive
• 1GB of Dedicated Ram

Extra Package Server Specs:

• HP Proliant 360 G5 Server Model
• 1 x Quad Core Xeon 2.33GHz Processor
• 2 x 146GB SAS Hard Drive
• 2GB of Dedicated Ram

Pro Package Server Specs:

• HP Proliant 360 G5 Server Model
• 2 x Quad Core Xeon 2.33GHz Processor
• 3 x 146GB SAS Hard Drive
• 8GB of Dedicated Ram

All these packages comes with unlimited monthly bandwidth quota. The Pro package includes 4 IP address whereas the other two has two IP address. There server will be up 99.9% of the time which is the standard in the industry. If you choose the Pro package, you will get a free PSP or an iPod Touch (you can can choose either one).