Prices for companies that offer these kinds of services are very competitive, so it’s pretty easy to get what you need at prices you can afford.  Whether your just a small business that only needs shared hosting, or a full fledged corporation that needs a dedicated server with all the bells and whistles your going to be pleasantly suprised when you find out what’s available.  Your more than likely going to have a hard time narrowing down your list of perspective vendors to a short list.  That however, is a good problem to have.  A word of advice though.  Once you’ve chosen a vendor, be sure to keep that short list close at hand.  You never really know how good a company is until you’ve used them for six months to a year.  There may come a time, when you have to make a change, and it’s good to have that initial research close at hand.

There is a solution to this problem, ant that is employing the use of external  software QA services.  Basically, your outsourcing the testing of your programs.  It’s a good solution for a number of reasons.  First of all, it frees your skilled developers to do what it is they do best.  That is crank out tons and code, and find innovative design solutions for complex business problems.  Secondly, it gives the testing of your software to someone that doesn’t have a personal interest in seeing the programs run perfectly.  They want to break your software, and they need to think more like an end user than a developer to do that.  So, if you can’t afford an in house QA team, that’s probably a good thing, because a better solution would be to have professional third party companies run your software through it’s paces.

The first few things you want to look at is the features a hosting company has for blog owners. The things I look for first are unlimited hosting of domains with one account. Maybe in the future I want to start more blogs. It will be really easy to do that, not to mention saving money, if I choose a host that will allow me to host unlimited websites on one account.

The next thing I look for is great customer service. I will usually contact the company through their chat lines. I ask a lot of silly questions that I already know the answers to just to see how helpful and knowledgeable the people at the company are. If the blog web hosting company doesn’t have live chat customer service, I’ll probably move on!

Believe it or not, some host are still running PHP4. This is simply ridiculous! One company that you would know if I told you about them, spends millions on advertising but is probably one of the worst blog host on the Internet. Maybe if they spent a little more money on their systems and less money on hot race car drivers, they’d have a better reputation as a blog web hosting company!

Finally, I make sure that the host has the dashboard program called cPanel and that they have a program called Fantastico or Simple Scripts. These are two programs that will allow you to install WordPress and other blogging platform without a hitch. Many times it only takes a click or two to get your blog up and running. Sadly, some blog web hosting providers do not provide these easy to use programs. If yours doesn’t, you need to find one that does!

What you do want however, is a host that is reliable.  There’s nothing that bugs me more, then having a website down for unscheduled problems.  Really, considering the maturity and low cost of most hardware and software solutions for web hosting, there’s no reason to accept much down time from a web host.  They only time most hosts run into trouble, is when they oversell their servers.  Meaning, they try to host too many websites on the same machine.  One of the most important things you can do for your websites, is to keep current backups of all your work.  I use WordPress for a lot of my sites, and there are a number of plugins that take frequent backups of both my database and my html files.  The backups are emailed to me every day.  With current backups, it’s pretty simple for me to move my site to a new hosting company in a matter of minutes.

Let’s say you’ve done a fairly good job of SEO and marketing your site, and you are getting a steady flow of targeted traffic.  The next most important factor is a simple, focused design.  Take a look at the most successful sites on the web, Amazon, Google, Ebay.  They all are built with a focus on making it as simple as possible for a visitor to take the desired action.  Too many web design companies get too concerned about looks and features and unnecessarily complicate business websites.  A favorite quote of mine from Albert Einstein is  “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler”.  GOBI, an Atlanta Web Design and Peachtree City Web Design company has this exact philosophy and creates some very successful websites.

Finally, the last factor is speed.  Google has recently announced that load speed is now one of their factors in determining page rankings.  You do not want to lose valuable targeted traffic because the load speed of your site was tool slow.

The following actions should be completed on a scheduled basis (monthly/quarterly) to rejuvenate computer performance:

-    Don’t allow the disk drives to exceed 90% of full capacity. Microsoft recommends leaving at least 10% free for Windows to operate.

-    Close applications not in use. The temptation is to keep browsers/email clients/etc. open while working on another application but doing this reserves CPU and memory for these applications, even in standby.

-    Run a full anti-virus check. Bugs, such as trojan viruses, can utilize a lot of CPU and internet connection bandwidth.

-    Pay particular attention to getting device driver and critical updates from the Windows Update service.

-    Run a disk defragmentation tool every 3 to 6 weeks. These tools speed up disk access times and reduce caching requirements (in memory).

The above should go a fair way to speeding up a slow computer. Additional speed can be gleaned by tuning the registry file (the file storing configuration data for all applications and the operating system). Manually altering the file is a major no-no and is best done using software such as Reimage.

The Reimage review process runs as an online service (i.e. in a browser) to scan the registry for all manner of faults – missing keys, non-optimum settings, virus damage, errors due to overlapping applications. Registry keys are reset based on healthy configuration settings in the Reimage database (containing thousands of configurations).

An additional benefit is that Reimage checks OS, device driver and 3rd party software files on the hard drives for faults (e.g. virus damage, out of date versions, etc.) and downloads newer, working versions.

All computers should be able to sustain a long and useful working life, so long as the hardware holds out. The maintenance tasks listed here are the basic actions needed to keep any computer stable, secure and performing well.

The best website hosting companies generally have the same features.  You will see that they give you a choice of Windows hosting or Linux hosting, or other operating systems.  They also will all offer email, blogs, a certain amount of storage space and bandwidth, and unlimited MySQL databases and POP mail accounts.

Some of the top host companies now also provide credits to advertise with Google AdWords, and other discounts for online advertising.  Another feature of top host is that they offer software applications to help you build a website.  This can be useful if you are just getting started with a website, and you want to get a page up online quickly.

Some hosts also offer domain registration.  If you have to register your domain name at a separate company, you may find it easier to maintain everything with the same company:  your domain registration, your web hosting and so on.  Having to use two separate companies, one for hosting and one for domain registration, can sometimes get confusing.  Often, top web hosts will give you a free domain registration with your initial subscription.

With so much competition on the Web for website hosting deals, and with all the potential additional features each site offers, the buyer is really in the driver’s seat when it comes to getting a great website hosting deal.  Using a quality webhost is critical to your business, and also important for personal websites.  Be sure to compare the host you are considering using before signing up for a long term subscription.