Everyone has different needs when looking for shared web hosting. You will need a certain amount of space and bandwidth for your website. You may also need databases, add-on domains, sub-domains and e-mail accounts. You should check with the host that the package will meet your needs.

Over Selling Resources

A small website will not need many resources; however people are caught in the headlights by large numbers. A large majority of web hosts on the Internet oversell their services. You may have come across plans that include 500GB Space and 2TB of bandwidth, this is overselling. If you were to actually use all these resources I’m sure the host would soon close your account on the grounds of “high CPU usage”. There is no need to get lots of space and bandwidth, simply get what you need at a moderate price.

Resource Limits

Most shared hosting will have resource limitations such as CPU etc. This means that you can only use X% resources for your site for X amount of time. If you are running scripts, check that they can run in the time limits set by the host. You should also check database size limits, and outgoing e-mail limits that may be in place.

You may only be able to have a database up to so many MB. If you have a forum then this is likely to grow and you may need to upgrade so you might want to plan ahead and see how easy upgrades are going to be. E-mail limits may be set hourly which means you can only send for example 200 e-mails an hour.

Reseller Hosts

Reseller hosting makes it easy for anyone to setup a web host. This means you need to check to see how reliable the host is. The last thing you want is a weeks hosting before the person running it ditches their hosting site leaving you with no money and no hosting. To avoid this look for a host that has good reviews from others and is well established. If you are insistent on going for a certain host check how long they have been operating for, if they are a registered business and you may also check there PayPal transaction rating if this is available.

More on Reviews

There are many review sites that you can take a look at, however it is likely that the host themselves have added their website to allow reviews. This also implies that they have the ability to edit and remove reviews that have been left. The best place to get reviews is from existing customers – how obvious was that? You can do this by running reverse IP on the hosts IP address. This will allow you to get some of the web addresses on that hosts server.

Hopefully you will not get other sites run by the host so check the WHOIS info to different details and send an e-mail to the site owner asking about the service. You may also want to Google terms such as “hosts name reviews” or “hosts name scam” to see what comes up. Forums are another good place to ask, however if someone simply keeps saying the host is great, check the website URL that they have hosted with the host to ensure they are not just self promoting.

Up time

Up time is very important in hosting and now many hosts have a service level agreement that ensure you receive X% of up time. You may want to use external monitors to see what the up time for a web host is like. The only real way to find the truth is to ask previous customers due to some monitoring sites allowing hosts to remove outages from statistics.

Support

This is one of the most important things in hosting. Check what types of support are available. Do they have Phone, E-mail, Instant Messenger, REAL Live Chat or Ticket Support? If there is a problem with your website you want it sorted asap so ensure that the facilities are there for you to receive help when you need it. Ensure their after sales support is as good as their before sales.

Summary

Always go with a host that has a good reputation for up time, pricing and customer service. New hosts with great deals might to be around for too long due to lack of experience. It only takes one thing to go wrong with a small host that removes their budget for servers so ensure that your host is there to stay.

Those are a few basic things to look out for; more advanced users may wish to check that the server IP is not black listed and that they have a good server infrastructure etc.

Robots.txt file is used to tell search engines what they are allowed to access on your website. The purpose of this is to stop search engines listing private and sensitive data such as admin login areas.

If you are happy to let search engines visit all files and folders that exist with your website then you do not need to use a robots.txt file. If you do not need to block any content then do not have a robots.txt file on your website.

If the file is incorrectly coded then you run the risk of blocking important content that you may want search engines to list.

If you want a robots.txt file to allow all the content and you really want to have one on your website then create a txt file called robots.txt and enter the following:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

For more information about robots.txt see here!

1. Categories – If you have a blog then use blog categories with meaningful names that use keywords so that these show up in the websites URL and on SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages)

2. Permalink – Check to see if this features is enabled. If its not then enable it and have the post title in the URL.

3. Holidays – These are great for marketing so ensure that you are ready. Start making posts and site content about Christmas / Easter or whatever about a month before the event. This gives search engines chance to list your posts. Then when people search for Christmas XXXXXX your site will be there. – Maybe decorate your site to suit the holiday theme.

4. Interviews – Interview other sites and post the interview on your website. Alternatively get interviewed by other sites yourself.

5. Selling your site?– Pretend to sell your website. I sold a site recently and the traffic shot up. If you can list your site free then you have nothing to lose apart from responding to offers. However the chances of any of the traffic you received returning is slim. You may benefit from padding out your MyBlogLog section.

6. Surveys – Have a survey or poll on your website, not large, just a small one in the sidebar somewhere that allows visitors to vote on a controversial question or something that will change on your website depending on a vote.

7. Blog Networks – Create a blog network where you can link all your blogs together. This will take up a lot of your time, however if you have it spare the more the better providing the content is unique and remains at a high standard.

8. Create a Site Template or Blog Theme – As the title states, create a theme and have a link back to your website in the footer.

9. Plugins / scripts – If you have the know how, create a plug-in or script for a website and have a link back to your website.

10. Comedy Writing – If you can write funny content, this will attract lots of readers. I know I have returned to a blog in the past due to its humour.

11. Social Networking Site– Use social networking websites such as MySpace, gain lots of friends and then post a bulletin about your website.

12. Reviewing – If you are honest and able to post great reviews then review sites and products and post about them on your website. If this is successful then other sites will want to be reviewed by you.

13. Get Reviews – Go to other sites and ask them to review your website. No one like’s criticism so be prepared to take some. It is likely to benefit your site in the future though.

14. Post News – Try and be first to post breaking news in your niche. Get listed on news websites such as Google News which will increase your traffic.

15. Awards Program – Create an awards brand. Get webmasters to submit their site and you offer prizes or just a graphic that states they won or passed your tests for a great website. Use your imagination.

16. Resources – Write posts that link to resources that may be useful to your type of reader. A webmaster blog may link to free stock photo sites as a post and list them in order of best first.

17. Treat others as you wish to be treated – This speaks for itself. If a reader of yours needs a hand then take the time out to help them. They will appreciate you for it.

18. Edit Posts – Go back over old content on your website and update it if it needs updating. Insert relevant links into old pages that go to content that is similar.

19. Yahoo Answers – Get an account at Yahoo Answers and post your blog URL in answers where appropriate. Only do this when you have a good reputation and the content is relevant and will actually help the user.

iUKHost servers are located in world-class Blue Square Data center based in Maidenhead which is 20 Miles West of London, UK.

Data center Network Connectivity

We have a total of 20,000mbits of network connectivity for all our servers. We have 2 x 10 Gbps links for our data center. Each dedicated server in our data center is setup on 100 Mbps, fully-switched port on an edge switch. Each edge switch is then in turn plugged into two separate aggregation switches at 1gbit, with failover redundancy allowing either 1gbit link to fail.

Brand of Chassis/servers

We use only branded chassis from Dell and we use latest state of the art Intel CPU’s for our servers.

ISPs used for network connectivity of data center / Servers. Our network transit connections are currently to Level 3, Tiscali, and Deutsche Telekom. We also peer with approximately 150 ISPs at the peering points LINX, XChangePoint, and LoNAP.

Network Uptime

iUKHost network is normally up 100% of the time but we guarantee that the network will be available at least 99.95% of the time in a calendar month, including scheduled maintenance.

High Security

The data centre was constructed with security in mind. Data center is located inside its own secure compound, with 2.4 and 3 meter fencing and electric gate entry equipped & monitored by CCTV at all times. Access is restricted by proximity reader access that records all access to the data centre, & monitored round the clock with closed circuits.

Hardware Guarantee

The servers deployed at the data center include hardware replacement guarantee. iUKHost guarantees the functioning of all rented hardware components and will replace any failed component at no cost to the customer. Hardware replacement process is usually completed within 24 hours of problem identification.

24/7 Onsite Staffing

Experienced technicians remain onsite for 24/7 monitoring our network and servers.

What is a Blog?

Blogs have become increasingly popular and now most websites have a blog alongside the standard content. Blog is short for Weblog and is used to report on day to day events witht he aid of images, video and text content. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

What is Blog Hosting?

Blog hosting allows you to host your own blog on your own domain name. You have full control over the blog including its content and its theme. WordPress is a popular blogging solution and this can be installed just by clicking links. This is possible using a feature that is free with our hosting plans called fantastico.

WordPress is very popular and therefore has many themes and plugins that you can implement on your blog to make it unique.

Blog Hosting Features

cPanel Advantages and Blog Hosting

cPanel is great for blog hosting because it gives the end user a graphical user interface (GUI) to control their blog. The blog owner can check visitor statistics, bandwidth usage and disk usage. It is very user friendly and makes taking database backups of your weblog very easy.

Simple Machines Forum, SMF, is a freeware Internet forum script. The script is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.

SMF is professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.

Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI – or Server Side Includes – function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.

SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database. It is designed to provide you with all the features you need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server. SMF is the next generation of forum software – and best of all it is and will always remain completely free!

Look at our SMF Hosting plans if you want to setup your own SMF forum. With our hosting plans you get Fantastico free which allows you to simply click links to install the software. This means that no manual installation is required.

This is the official SMF Site.

phpBB is a popular Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name “phpBB” is an abbreviation of PHP Bulletin Board. phpBB is free software so anyone can create a forum.

Millions of people use phpBB on a daily basis, making it the most widely used open source bulletin board system in the world. Whether you want to stay in touch with a small group of friends or are looking to set up a large multi-category board for a corporate website, phpBB has the features you need built in.

phpBB has an extensive administration panel, which allows the customization of even the most intricate features without having to edit code directly, while advanced users will value the ease with which phpBB can be integrated into existing systems.

Look at our phpBB Hosting plans if you want to setup your own phpBB forum. With our hosting plans you get Fantastico free which allows you to simply click links to install the software. This means that no manual installation is required.

This is the phpBB website where you can download the software.

There are many free online games arcades on the Internet. If you have one and are looking for affordable and reliable arcade hosting then look at these web hosting packages.

iUKHost recommend looking at the LSH3 and the LSH4. You are going to need large amounts of space to host the flash game files on the server. You are also going to need considerable bandwidth allowance so that the games can be loaded multiple times for different end users.

Arcade Uptime

As a games arcade owner you need to consider a couple of things when ordering hosting. You will want to have good uptime for your arcade so that your users are not disappointed and are able to access your site 24/7.

Arcade Speed

Reliable servers will be needed with fast data speeds to ensure that your visitors are not left waiting for games to load.

Database Features

Most games arcade scripts run alongside a database. With all iUKHost Packages there are unlimited MySQL Databases. You will need to check that your script is compatible with PHP5.