You have made up your mind that you will buy a domain name (or several) and take out web hosting from a web hosting provider.

First some considerations about the domain name(s)

Domain names do not have anything to do with web hosting and can be registered independently from the web hosting package. There are advantages if you have domain name and web hosting separate. For example, if the web hosting company you selected fails to provide a good service, all you need to do is find a better web hosting company and change the domain name settings. If you have domain name and web hosting with the same company and the company ceases trading, the last thing they think about is your web hosting or domain name. By having them separate, you are lowering the risk.

Disadvantages of registering the domain name with your web hosting company

Many web hosting companies offer to register domain names on your behalf. You think that your domain name is with your web hosting company, when, in fact, they register it through some third party registrar for you. You then receive an invoice in 2 years time from a company you never heard of, ignore it, and in the worst case lose your domain name.

Furthermore, in many cases, you will not get access to your domain name details nor will you be given a domain name control panel. Why do you need a domain name control panel? You need to be able to update the contact information for your domain name(s). If you move house for example and don’t update you domain name details and for some reason you need to change registrar etc. (or because your web hosting company ceased trading), you are in danger of losing your domain name because you cannot prove any longer that you are the owner of a certain domain name.

Also, a domain name control panel allows you to change email forwarding, web forwarding, and most importantly, the domain name servers, as well as some other settings. Check out www.123-reg.co.uk if you want to find out more about that.

Larger web hosting providers

Have a good look around online and check out different web hosting providers. There are many large web hosting companies out there such as 1and1. The advantage of registering with a large web hosting company is that they have hardly any downtime and their servers will be fast and up-to-date with the latest spam protection etc. Web hosting can be costly though if you reqister with a large web hosting company and if you want any additional services, you will have to pay for them. Support can be an issue too – you usually have to wade through hundreds of “Frequently Asked Questions” before you are allowed to send an email to their support team. You might also have to call a Premium Rate phone number if you need to speak to someone urgently. These rates can rate from £0.50 to £2 per minute (!) or even more. In most cases, you will receive excellent support, but in some cases you might be put through to an unexperienced person who has to speak to their supervisor to double-check things frequently – and all that at a premium rate!

The biggest problem with large web hosting providers is that if you miss the annual payment and do not react to their payment reminders – they will remove your website, your account, without further notice. In some cases, there will not be any chance to recover your website. With a large web hosting company, your website is just a number in a very large pool of websites. Their systems will be automated, if you don’t pay on time, your website is automatically removed!

Web hosting with a smaller web hosting provider

If you find a reliable smaller web hosting provider, chances are that you will receive a personal service, and support questions are answered with a lot more detail and a lot quicker. Most likely, you can call a UK landline or an 0845 or 0870 number which is a lot cheaper than £2 per minute. In some cases, you might be able to receive a reply to your support question – which you sent on a Saturday evening – that same night.

If you miss your payment with a smaller web hosting company, they will most likely call you personally and remind you on your late payment. They are keen to keep you as a customer and will probably not remove your account and your website immediately.

Web Statistics

Ask the web hosting company if they provide extensive website statistics. You want to know how many visitors have accessed your website, what search terms they used to find your website in Google and other search engines, how many visitors you have per day, on a certain day of the week, and so on. Please also ask if you can have access to the website log files. You might think that adding a website hit counter will provide enough information, but that is actually the most inaccurate method of counting your website visitors – and apart from that they look tacky and unprofessional. Your web hosting company should provide statistics that are at least as comprehensive as Webalizer and if statistics are important for you, you need to have access to your log files which can then be analyzed with statistics analysing software (such as www.surfstats.com).

E-Mail issues to watch out for

Before you take out web hosting, ask them if they provide SMTP/POP3 which you need to set up email accounts. If you want one or several e-mail addresses with your website – such as sales@mydomain.com – the web hosting company needs to provide SMTP/POP3 setup. Some web hosting companies only allow you to receive emails sent to sales@mydomain.com, but they will not allow you to use these e-mail addresses to send e-mails from. They will simply argue that you can use your Internet Service Provider E-Mail address – such as joe.smith@btopenworld.com. This does not look professional at all, and you should avoid web hosting companies that do not provide SMTP/POP3 service.

Backups

Check with your web hosting company how often backups are made. Usually, backups are made on a daily basis. If you have a large online store on your website and the server room at the web hosting premises is on fire, you will lose all your work if they do not back up their web server files. So please check if they have a backup routine in place.

Free Webhosting with your internet service provider

Please do not use this! Your internet service provider company provide an internet connection. That is what they specialise in. They sometimes “throw in” free web hosting for up to 100 MB or even more. They normally do not provide SMTP / POP3 setup for the sending / receiving of emails related to your website (such as sales@mydomain.com), nor will they provide databases, server scripting language support and such like. Usually, you can only upload websites developed in pure HTML, and in some cases you will not be able to use FTP software for uploading your files and managing your files on the web server. Your business website will proabably use some sort of server-side scripting language – such as ASP, PHP etc. and maybe use a database such as MySQL. If your website is with your Internet Service Provider, the support for this service can be poor and the account can sometimes not be upgraded to include server-side scripting languages, and/or databases.

Web Hosting Costs

Web Hosting costs can vary greatly. You can take out web hosting for as little as £15 per year, or you can get web hosting, including 5 email addresses, 100 MB web space (which is a lot for a small business presence) for as little as £30 per year (check out Plugsocket). If you buy a web design magazine (such as NET – www.netmag.co.uk), you will see many adverts from bigger web hosting companies. Check out their prices, their policies, and maybe give them a call – you will find out how long it takes until your call is answered.

Do not jump in because it is cheap, and conversely, do not think the service must be great because it is expensive. Check out what is on offer and then make an informed decision.

Still don’t know? We can advise you what would be the right web hosting provider for your business! Give us a call on 01506 66 86 85!

If you have had your business for a number of years, think back to when you started: it probably took about six months to a year to get your business going, for calls to come in regularly, for enquiries to come in, for customers to come back wanting more, or for customers to recommend your services to someone else.

If your website has just gone live and if you have not paid for online advertising such as google adwords or any other form of advertising, it is unlikely for enquiries to flood in.

Your website needs time to establish itself on the web. This does not happen over night or in the space of a week or a month.

You need to imagine your website to be a brand-new island in the big ocean. You have just made the island accessible and added an airport as well. No-one knows, however, that there is a new island, therefore, no-one will fly there. The reason for this is because you have not implemented any flight routes from other islands to fly to you. You need to do a lot of work to speak to the other islands around you – especially the big ones – that there is a new island which is worth “flying to”. You need to establish new routes that go to your island. By “routes” I mean “links” – web links that is. You need to find islands / websites – which provide a similar kind of service or a complementary service to what you have on offer. If, for example, your business is wedding photography, you want to establish links with suppliers of wedding stationery, wedding supplies, wedding cakes and so on. You also want to establish links with photography related websites.

When you buy a photography magazine, usually at the back of the magazine you will find a number of pages full with advertising. These pages are targetted at people with an interest in photography – the very same person who just bought the magazine. The advertisers who sell photography-related equipment (such as backdrops, flash guns, photography training, software) will have a much bigger chance to being noticed by the person who bought the magazine than an advertiser who wants to sell garden hoses, for example. Therefore, the advertiser of garden hoses will not get much business from advertising in a photography magazine.

If you decide to advertise in a photography magazine, you will probably want to advertise in a magazine which is read by many photographers in the country. You will look for the biggest magazine there is in order to maximise impact of your advert.

You need to do the same thing with your website links. You need to find the big “islands” – the big websites – and ask them to place a link on their website which points to your website. You should also offer them a link in return – from your website to their website (this is called reciprocal linking). Sometimes, websites, in particular directories, charge money for a link to be placed on their pages. This fee can be a one-off fee or an annual fee. These fees can vary greatly between £10 and £150 or even more. You need to check out the PageRank and popularity of these websites and evaluate if it is worth paying a fee for your link to be included.

How do I know if a website is worth having a link exchange with?

If you have Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox on your PC, you should download the Google Toolbar and install it in your browser. The toolbar will be displayed at the top of the browser, and apart from having a search box, it will give you much information about how websites are rated in Google (please see image below).

If the toolbar is istalled, for any website you visit, the toolbar will tell you the PageRank of that website. PageRank is Google’s idea of determining the relevance and popularity of certain website. The higher the PageRank, the more relevant and popular a website is regarded by Google. This relevance is calculated with the quality of content on a website and with the number of quality links that point to a website. A quality link is a link from a website with a high PageRank (PR higher than 3 or 4 for example). You can read more about Google PageRank on the Google Website.

Back to our wedding photographer example: you want to have links pointing to your website that come from related websites, ie. websites which offer wedding-related products and/or services. Furthermore, the website that places a link to your website should be highly regarded by Google, it should therefore have a high PR.

How long does it take for my website’s PR to increase?

When your website goes live, it will have a PR of 0 because Google does not know anything about it. Over time, probably during the first 6 months of your website going live, your PR will increase because it has been indexed by Search Engines and the number of links that point to your website is slowly but steadily growing.

Bear in mind, that building link relationships with other websites takes a lot of time. Even though you might have sent away 50 e-mails to potential link exchangers, chances are that only 5-10 will reply and actually place a link which points to your website. Sometimes, you will receive a reply within a short number of days, sometimes you may receive a reply after 3 months.

How do I know how many links point to my website?

This is simple: Go to www.google.com and enter link:www.mydomain.co.uk
Google will then tell you the exact number of links that Google knows about that point to your website. The more links Google knows about the better. If you have 5 links pointing to your site, it’s a start. If you have 50 links pointing to your site, you are getting there. If you have 500 links out there – you can claim to be an expert.

Why do I need links on my own website? I don’t want my visitors to leave my website!

You need to have a links page on your website. If you ask other websites to link to yours, it is only fair to offer a reciprocal link in return. However, you don’t want to place a button in your main navigation that says “Links” or “Useful Links”. You can “hide” the link to your links page on your sitemap or in the footer, for example. The links page is only partly meant for your website visitors, but more for Search Engines. You website will get indexed by Google a lot faster if a link on a high-traffic website points to your website. If you fill in the Google Submit Website form, it can take months for your website to be indexed by Google. So don’t bother…!

If Google or other search engines crawl a high-traffic website and find a link pointing to your website, the search engine will follow this link and discover “there is a new website which is not in my database yet”. The search engine will then index your website’s homepage, which means it will add a small amount of information about your website to their database. This small amount is sufficient enough for your website to be found in the Search Engine. However, your website will only come up in the top results when you enter a very specific search term, such as “Bob Kowalski Wedding Photographer Edinburgh” for example. It is unlikely for your website to come up on page one of the Search Results if you only enter “wedding photographer” or “wedding photographe Edinburgh”.

Over time, the search engine will come back to your website and index your sub pages too. Bear in mind, that indexing has nothing to do with ranking! Indexing means that the search engine is aware of the existence of your website. Even though your website might not come up when you enter “wedding photographer”, it might be displayed when you enter a more specific term, for example “wedding photographer Robert Smith Edinburgh” (if that is your name and if this name and the word “Edinburgh” appear on your homepage on several occasions).

If you want to work on your Search Engine Ranking, you need to optimise your website for the keywords you want your website to be displayed in Search Engines and you need to establish link relationships. The more links that point to your website the more relevant Google and other Search Engines think your website is.

With all the information above you should get an idea of why you cannot have online enquiries or sales within a very short time of going live.

If you don’t want to spend money on online advertising and expect to make thousands within a matter of days, you will be disappointed.

Be first in Google from DAY 1 of going live

In order to be first in Google, you can check out Google Adwords. You can pay Google (and other search engines) to display your advert if someone enters a certain key phrase in the search engine. Your customised advert will then be displayed above the normal results or on the right-hand side of the browser. Some people will never click on sponsored links though. Sponsored links can help you to get noticed online, but they can cost a substantial amount of money. You should work on your normal “organic” listing and try to optimise your website for your most important key phrases (for example “wedding photographer Edinburgh”).

The development of a decent position in Google for your most important key phrases is not something a web developer can “sort out” for you in a matter of days. It’s a time-consuming task which has to be repeated over time. Link building, optimising content, updating your website can all help to improve your ranking, but it won’t happen over night.