Do iUKHost support WordPress web hosting?

Yes, WordPress is available with any of our web hosting packages. You can quickly install WordPress from the Fantastico section in cPanel. This enables you to install WordPress in a matter of minutes without having to have any technical knowledge. WordPress is one of the most widely used free blog platforms available, it makes management easy with third party plug-ins & ability to upload your own themes. iUKHost provide reliable blog hosting services at an affordable price.

The powerful administration panel allows you to write posts and publish them at the push of a button. You can also manage previous posts, make updates & view comments made by your readers. Here are some further features of WordPress:

• Full standards compliance
• WordPress Pages
• WordPress Links
• WordPress Themes
• Cross-blog communication tools
• Comments
• Spam protection
• Full user registration
• Easy installation and upgrades
• Password Protected Posts

Learn about more of the features here.

If you want to start a web hosting business you will first need have the required resources that will be needed for the day to day running of the business. The resources that you need will depend upon the type of web hosting that you wish to offer your customers and how large you want your business to be. It is important for a web hosting provider to appreciate the importance of good customer service to the clients that you provide web hosting to. You will need to ensure that you have the resources to provide a high level of customer service at all times.

Starting a web hosting business is not an overnight task although many people believe that all you need to do is get a reseller account and proceed from there. The reality is that there are many obstacles along the way that need to be overcome in order to setup and honest professional web hosting company. To ensure that you web hosting business has good online organisation you will need to have a clear website along with third party software packages so that you can keep track of customer information. You will also need to invest in support systems to make it easy for customers to contact you.

Reseller Account or a Server?

If you are decided upon starting a web hosting company then you will have to plan how you are going to proceed with setting up your business. There are a few options to choose from whether you pick a reseller account, VPS server or a dedicated server. To start a web hosting company you will need at least one of these to provide your customer with a web hosting account. Your investment budget will affect your choice so you should plan ahead for the future to ensure that you will be able to cover the recurring costs if you rent your hardware. As a beginner or a small web hosting company it will be more beneficial for you to start off with a reseller account. By choosing a reseller account you can lower your start up costs therefore lowering the risk of losing money. There are other advantages to reseller accounts which are listed below:

• Low Running Costs – The cost of a web hosting reseller account is a lot less than that of a VPS or dedicated web server. In the case of most reseller accounts they include third party applications and a control panel already installed so you do not have to pay extra for these. With a VPS or dedicated web server the cost of the control panel is usually billed at an extra monthly charge.
• Server Management – The management of the server that your reseller account is on is usually taken care of by your web hosting provider. This means that you can start up your web hosting business with limited technical knowledge until your skills grow.
• Free Support – Most reseller hosting accounts come with free support so if there is an issue with one of your customers accounts your web hosting will resolve the issue for you. If you have a VPS or dedicated server you will have root access which means you can make changes and solve issues yourself. There are managed VPS and dedicated packages available so your web host can take care of things as well if you are unsure.

Web Hosting Business Costs

As a new business just starting out you should know it is imperative to keep start up costs as low as possible. Reseller web hosting is therefore the ideal solution to achieve this. If you have customers or want to be able to offer customers a wider variety of options with your web hosting plans then a VPS or dedicated web server is the better choice. Although there is a higher cost incurred with VPS or dedicated servers you are provided with the following advantages:

• Root Access  – With VPS and a dedicated server solution you should be provided with root access to the server which means that you can manage it yourself and enable you to install applications of your choosing. A customer may require a setting changing on the server and this may not be possible with a reseller account.
• Dedicated Resources- With a VPS or dedicated server you will get RAM and CPU resources dedicated to you. This means that you do not need to share these like you would with a reseller account.

Any of the above discussed types of hosting are suitable to start your own web hosting business. A shared web hosting package would be an unsuitable choice for a hosting business because you are not able to create individual accounts. If you are a web designer / developer then you may choose to host your clients websites under your own shared hosting plan however a reseller plan allows you to split them up for better management.

Web Hosting Support

If you are running a web hosting business then you need to be able to communicate effectively with your customers. If you customer has a problem with their hosting package you should be available to help them get the issue resolved. There are a variety of communication methods that you could use to communicate with your customers. Most web hosting companies will use web based contact methods to communicate with customers, an example of this is e-mail. As the owner it is your choice as to which methods you have available to your customers. As a new business you may not need to provide 24/7 support and this may also be an unnecessary cost. You might not want to provide phone support either and just stick to web based contact methods such as:

• Web Based Support Ticket System – Many web hosting providers will use a third party software to provide support to their customers. These packages allow customers to raise a ticket with the problem that they have and then the web host replies to that ticket with the solution.
• E-mail – Stand e-mail can be used to contact your customers about problems that they may be experiencing with their web hosting packages.
• Online Forums – You may wish to install some forum software onto your hosting website so that your customers can register and communicate with each other. Customers may use to forum to ask questions regarding their web hosting packages. It is important to moderate the content on the forum so that no spamming occurs.

You will find that communication is a very important part of web hosting and if you do not get this right customers may move to another web host. As a start up phone support is not imperative however as your business grows it should be considered so that all customers can contact you with a method that they prefer.

Complete Guide to Starting a Web Host

If you want a step by step guide to starting your own web hosting company you may wish to read this eBook. This eBook has great information all about how to start your own web hosting company! Get great inside knowledge from an industry expect along with SEO tips and tricks plus lots more! Learn more here about how to start a web host!

Anonymous FTP is used to allow a user to access files from anywhere on the Internet without the requirement of a user name and password. Using the user name “anonymous” the user will bypass local network security settings and be able to access publicly available files on a remote host. If you are running your own FTP server you can grant access to users to allow them to download files.

Anonymous FTP provides access to any folder that has the permissions set to public whether these are read or write. Users will have access to upload and download files from the server if they have the correct permissions. It is advisable to configure the folders that you want them to access with public permissions. Other folders you do not want to allow anonymousaccess to should be configured to private. It is possible not only to configure directories but individual files too. If there was one file in a directory that you want to stop access to then you can by editing the permissions. Correct setup of permissions will ensure that anonymous FTP users only access data that you want them to.

If you are the owner of several websites or domains then multiple website hosting is the ideal solution. Multiple website hosting allows you to host many different websites under one web hosting account. This can save you a lot of money because you do not need lots of different hosting packages for all the websites that you own.

Multiple website hosting is a great way to manage a large number of websites because you can do so from one control panel. This means that you do not have to login to multiple control panels and have to remember lots of users names and passwords to change settings for all your websites. You should ensure that the web hosting account that you choose has enough resources to handle all of the websites that you want to host. You need to check that there will be enough bandwidth available for all the sites that you are hosting. This may result in you having to purchase a larger shared hosting package to accommodate all the websites you have however in the long term, you do not have to manage lots of smaller hosting accounts.

In cPanel control panel you have add-on additional domains onto your web hosting account. When you want to add-on a domain you need to create a directory for where the site files are going to be located. Once this has been completed you can upload the site files to the directory that you specify and then host multiple websites.

For a video guide on how to achieve this view here: How to create an Addon Domain is cPanel

Fantastico is a great application that can be used with cPanel web hosting to allow you to auto-install scripts. The installation of these scripts can take a matter of seconds and can be performed by anyone with or without indept knowledge. This feature allows you to install web aplications such as forums and blogs without the need to create databases, upload files or change any permissions. All our shared web hosting packages come with fantastico to make setting up your website much easier.

Blogs
     b2evolution 
     Nucleus 
     WordPress  
     
Classifieds
     Noahs Classifieds  

Content Management
     Drupal 
     Geeklog 
     Joomla 1.5 
     Joomla 
     Mambo 
     PHP-Nuke 
     phpWCMS 
     phpWebSite 
     Post-Nuke 
     Siteframe 
     TYPO3 
     Xoops  
     
Customer Relationship
     Crafty Syntax Live Help 
     Help Center Live 
     osTicket 
     PerlDesk 
     PHP Support Tickets 
     Support Logic Helpdesk 
     Support Services Manager  
     
Discussion Boards
     phpBB 
     SMF  
     
E-Commerce
     CubeCart 
     OS Commerce 
     Zen Cart  
      
F.A.Q.
     FAQMasterFlex  
     
Hosting Billing
     AccountLab Plus 
     phpCOIN  
     
Image Galleries
     4Images Gallery 
     Coppermine Photo Gallery 
     Gallery  
     
Mailing Lists
     PHPlist  
     
Polls and Surveys
     Advanced Poll 
     LimeSurvey 
     phpESP  
     
Project Management
     dotProject 
     PHProjekt  
     
Site Builders
     Soholaunch Pro Edition 
     Templates Express  
     
Wiki
     TikiWiki CMS/Groupware 
     PhpWiki  
     
Other Scripts
     Dew-NewPHPLinks 
     Moodle 
     Open-Realty 
     phpAdsNew 
     PHPauction 
     phpFormGenerator 
     WebCalendar

Web traffic that comes to your website either via a web directory or search engine that is free and unpaid is commonly known as organic traffic. You can gain large amounts of organic traffic by listing your website on directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo or by submitting your website to search engines such as Google.

One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to register with major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. In most cases it is not enough just to register with these websites. By registering you are asking the search engine for your website to be included for crawling. This involves the search engine gathering data about your website. Search engine crawling programs are generally called bots, robots or spiders.

The crawl will begin with your websites homepage and then progress through your linked website structure. The crawl will following internal links around your website and gather data about the pages that it finds and then index this information in the search engines database. The search engine will index the web page URL and the web page title and some include more information such as a page description and parts of the pages content.

When a user searches for a phrase the search engine will match this phrase with indexed pages and show them as results. The order in which the results are displayed is usually dependant on the search engines algorithm. It is more common that organic search results are displayed higher are receive more clicks from users. This is why it is important to get your website ranked high on SERPs.

Web crawlers can take a long time to index pages due to the vast number that are on the web. With more and more websites being created everyday the spiders workload continues to grow hence the time it takes for your website to be indexed on a search engine. Using a service like Google Adwords you can decrease the waiting time it takes for your website to become indexed.

Link popularity is based upon the quantity of high quality back links from similar websites. If an incoming link to your website has relevant keywords in the anchor text on the external website, this may well help your web page gain a higher ranking. Link popularity is a very important part of search engine optimization which can really improve your websites ranking in SERPs.

Link building is an Off page SEO technique used to increase the number of websites linking to your web pages. The link popularity of a website is dependent on a few factors. These are listed below:

• The number of websites that are linking to your website
• The Link popularity and the PageRank of the external website linking to you
• The page from which you are getting the link should not have too many outgoing links
• The content and niche of the website link to you should be similar to yours
• The link to your website should be one way which means there is no link back to the external website from your web page (no reciprocal link).
• The external web page should have a higher rank than your website
• The website linking to you should not be blacklisted
• The IP addresses of the website linking to you
• The anchor text in the link to you should contain one of your websites top keywords
• The link coming to you should be a simple link with no scripting

There are other factors too that affect link popularity however the ones listed above should give you a basis on which to gain back links.

If you have a website or an online business then it is very important that you have a secure web hosting service. There are many different types of security threats on the Internet such as hackers. A hacker may try to gain access to secure information that is hosted on your website. Viruses and spyware are another kind of threat to your website so it is important that you have secure web hosting. This is especially the case if you have confidential information hosted on your server such as that of your customers.

If you have chosen shared web hosting then security is very important. As a shared hosting customer you would be sharing a server with many other users which means you need to be protected. It is advisable to check what types of security your web host has in place to ensure your data and account is safe. There are many ways a server could be attacked, so check that your web host has security rules in place that detail the types of scripts and services that can be run on the server.

Different methods of overcoming security measures are constantly being developed by hackers all the time which is why it is important to ensure that you web hosting company update your server regularly with the latest operating system and security patches.

There are steps you can take yourself to ensure that you website is secure. The first thing you can do is use strong passwords that use characters, letters and numbers. You should then use different passwords for different parts of your website to increase security.