In Search Of The Best Shopping Cart

If you do any online shopping, and many of us do, when you are ready to pay you will see a little shopping cart symbol that tells you it is time to start the payment process. But although the symbol makes it easy for us to know what's happening, the shopping cart icon hides a sophisticated process that you will need to understand if you are going to put online shopping facilities on your website. Here's what you need to know about shopping carts and a round up of some of the major players.

What Is A Shopping Cart And How Does It Work?

The shopping cart that you see is really a piece of software that runs a series of scripts to allow people to pay for goods and services. The shopping cart is only the start of the process, allowing people to add items and get a total, but when they are ready to buy, the shopping cart will pass them on to a secure payment gateway, which is where the money is actually collected.

In a speedy online process, the payment gateway takes the card details that you have entered, communicates with your card issuer or bank to verify that it's ok to take the funds, processes the payment and then returns you to the point specified by the retailer. So your shopping cart is both a front end and a back end for the payment process. This seamless experience is what you need to recreate for visitors to your site, but it's not as easy as it seems. There are hundreds of shopping cart packages out there and it can be difficult to decide which one is right for you.

Shopping Cart Compatibility

Shopping cart software comes in free and paid versions. Some shopping cart software has to be hosted on your own domain, while other programs are hosted by the providers. If you host the software on your own domain you have total control, but having the software hosted by a provider can help you test the waters if you're creating your first online store. However, you will have to pay a monthly fee which can be upwards of $80 and you may have to pay a set up fee as well.. Be warned, though, shopping cart providers can go out of business so be sure to make regular backups of all your customer and sales data. And there may be less opportunity to customize your shop than if you host it yourself.

Most web hosts offer a couple of free shopping cart programs, and you can be sure that those will be compatible with your hosting package. However, if you plan to purchase shopping cart software, then you need to be more careful. Shopping cart scripting can be in Perl, ASP, CGI, PHP, Javascript and other scripting languages so make sure the program you plan to buy is compatible with your web host. (PHP open source; ASP Microsoft integration)

How To Start Your Own Web Hosting Company

Everyone knows somebody who has a website (or has his own) these days and they all need to be hosted. That's the reason that so many people think providing web hosting is a sound business idea. It may be, but you will need to know what you're doing before jumping in. After all, there are a lot of people doing exactly the same thing. Here is how you can start your own web hosting company. The only requirement is that you have your own domain name and website.

Before you even think about web hosting options, think about your new web hosting company as a business. Like any new business you will need a business plan. Even if you intend to fund the business yourself a business plan will help you develop your business in the right way and will help to keep you on track. It will help you to think about all the areas that are important for your web hosting business and will provide a road map for the development of your web hosting company.

Research Your Target Market

You will need to start with some market research. As part of your market research find out what products and services other web hosting companies are offering and how they are marketing themselves. Discover what market segment you should target and what your costs are likely to be. This will give you some ideas for how you can make your company different. Sign up for web hosting forums and seeing what people are most concerned about and what other web hosts are discussing. This will give you advance warning of future opportunities and may help you to decide where to position your web hosting business.

In thinking about starting your own web hosting company, there is one major decision that you have to make. Are you going to do it yourself or become a web hosting reseller? There are advantages and disadvantages to each option.

Do It Yourself Web Hosting

The DIY approach has the highest initial outlay, but all the profit is your own. If you are going to run all aspects of the hosting company yourself you will need a server on which to host others' websites. Your options for getting a server are to buy one or to lease one. Buying a server may seem like a good idea, especially since computers are no longer that expensive, but a good, reliable server is not cheap and don't forget you will need the latest technology and software for Windows or Linux hosting.

You will need to be realistic about how many websites you can actually host on your server. Overestimate this and you could be heading for a tech support nightmare - which you may have to handle all by yourself. You will also need to think about bandwidth, which means you need to get a company to provide that to you so that you can resell it to your customers.

An alternative to buying your own server is to lease a server (from a company such as Dell or Gateway) or dedicated server (from a company such as Rackspace.com or Cyberworldservers.com) and then resell the bandwidth to your customers. This saves you the up front cost of buying your own server, but it means you are not in control if there is a crash. When choosing a company to provide a server, look for one that has good customer support and as little downtime as possible. Servers do crash sometimes and you will need to be back up quickly so you don't lose customers.

Other costs that you will have to take into account are the costs of getting a control panel for managing the websites and the cost of technical support. All of these can add up if you are running a one person operation - and you will be working all day and all night, too, because most people expect 24 hour support from their web hosting company. So this is an important decision to make.

If you don't think you can be available all day every day you may need to consider taking on an employee or employees. This will make it easier for you to manage your own time but will make the cost of doing business add up. The employee will have to be paid even if you have had a slow month. However, it may be worth it so you don't have to do all the technical support yourself. Unless you employ a couple of people, you will still be working long days.

There are a couple more options for providing technical support. One is to include help desk software to manage support tickets or to set up a forum where your customers can help each other. A forum requires a low outlay and may run itself after awhile. You could also offer live chat to support your customers, though that may take time. Finally, you could outsource your technical support to a company which specializes in this area. It will add to your monthly costs, but could save you a fortune if your customers are kept happy.

Reseller Web Hosting

Another option for starting your own web hosting company is to act as a reseller for another host. This has several advantages, most of them to do with the time you save. Acting as a reseller requires a relatively low investment, with only the monthly reseller fee to pay. If you already have a couple of sites yourself, switching them to your reseller package could be cost effective. You do not have to worry about technical support, server size or bandwidth. All you have to do is promote and sell the web hosting package. Of course, this has its own challenges.

Some reseller accounts are anonymous, which means that you can brand your web hosting business as you like. Others require you to use the branding of the main host. With some reseller accounts everything is taken care of, which means that billing and any follow up are all the responsibility of the main web host. However, other resellers may require you to do your own billing so if you choose one of these you will need to think about how to handle that. This is the backend of your web hosting company and it is just as important as the front end.

Billing For Your Hosting Company

Most web hosting companies offer a choice of monthly or annual billing, and may offer a discount or incentive for the annual package. You need to think about options for taking money. Your choices are an online payments processor such as Paypal or setting up a merchant account so you can accept credit card payments directly. You may also accept money through the mail but this could be unnecessarily complicated, so it may be best to avoid this. An online payments processor is flexible and allows you to accept a variety of payment forms. In addition, it can handle automatic billing. If you are accepting payments online you will also need an SSL certificate so that your customers' sensitive information can be encrypted during online transactions.

Speed Up Your Web Pages

There could be a few reasons why your web pages load up slowly. When it happens look for some of these signs and look for ways to fix them quickly and easily.

One major reason that a web page loads slowly is the design. In most countries, users are still using the 56k modem for their internet use. Go easy on the graphics, ads, pop-ups, music, and video. All of these slow down loading. If you are using graphics use either GIF or JPG. These load much faster than any other type of graphic. Try not to use animation or other gimmicky effects unless you absolutely need to.

Do not use frames as each frame is considered a page. Proper HTML coding can speed things up. Also, avoid using excessive use of tables, applets, special effects, and overuse of java script. In addition, remove any unnecessary coding and empty spaces as these also slow down loading a web page.

Layout your site using CSS. CSS loads faster because tables need to be read twice before loading. Once to determine layout and the second time to determine content. Also, tables appear in one go - users will not see the table until it is fully loaded on to the screen. In addition, tables need spacer images for positioning. CSS requires less code than tables, which can be cumbersome. CSS coding can be set into a separate document which is called up only once and cached on the users computer while a table must be loaded up each time the web page is accessed. With CSS, you control what is downloaded first, so you can have the content loaded first and the slower images and graphics loaded after. This will make for happier clients and customers.

Unfortunately, your host's speed can also affect how fast your web pages load. Check their speed prior to hosting to avoid this possibility. If your web page is still loading slow and you have it so that it is supposed to load fast, you can always change host providers.

The speed of your local internet connection is a major factor. As mentioned before, some people are still using 56k modems. Are you? If you are, it might be time to upgrade to a high speed modem. Your computer itself might be the culprit. If your computer is loading slowly, there are several things you can do to speed it up. Once you speed up your computer, you will speed up the loading of not only your web pages, but others as well. Defrag your computer, scan for viruses and spyware, check the registry of your software, remove any unnecessary programs, delete your cookies, dump your cache, and anything else that will speed up your computer should be completed. Spyware is also a huge problem when it comes to slowing down web pages. Scan your computer often for these annoying things and remove them.

There could be a small glitch in your script that you need to find and repair. Often times, that could be the problem when you are testing or adding components to your site. A broken URL can even be caused by a simple error. A broken URL can cause hang ups and frustrate users.

Do not use graphics or images to display text. There is generally no need for it. Simple CSS coding can make a button appear pushed down when a mouse scrolls over it. CSS coding can even make a decorative image appear faster. Any user who has CSS disabled will not see any CSS imbedded images. Using contextual selectors will also speed up the loading of your web pages.

Use shorthand CSS scripting. Minimize the white space, comment tags, and line returns. Every single letter or space takes up a byte. May not seem like much at first, but the smaller the number of bytes to download, the faster the page loads. By eliminating these things, you can shave off up to 10% of loading time.

Use relative call ups whenever necessary. Absolute call ups take more time to load. Remove any META tags and content. They are unnecessary and achieve little. The most important tags are the keywords for SEO and description tags. If you do need to use META tags, try to keep it to under 200 characters as anything more will increase the size of your web pages. Lengthy META tags are not good as they dilute your SEO keyword phrases.

Basic Website Statistics

Basic website statistics are something you need to pay attention to. These are broken down into six easy categories that can make your website owning experience confusing and frustrating. Web stats refer to the use of the data collected to determine which pages are generating the most traffic and sales.

Hits

What are hits? A hit is a person visiting your website. Hits are counted using a hit counter that you can have either visible or invisible on your site. These counters come in all shapes, sizes, colours, fonts, and designs.There are drawbacks to hit counters - they tell you how many people have visited your site up to that point. A single web page has many discrete files and each one is considered a hit while the page downloads for the viewer. The number of hits is really an arbitrary number that is grossly misleading and exaggerated. While you could do a little bit of math and determine an average per day and per week of how many hits you get, an accurate count is sometimes a great thing. The total number of visitors or page views is a more accurate count of hits.

Page Views

This is a better tracking unit than the hit counter. Every time a page is viewed by a user, it leaves an impression. This impression is what a page view counter tracks. If a returning user views that page again, it leaves another impression. A banner or other advertisement is also considered an impression.Again, there are drawbacks. It is not an accurate count of how many visitors there are to your site as a person can go back and review another page here and there while still on your site. Each time this leaves an impression on the page, and it is counted. So if your visitor is looking for something in particular, each page they visit more than once receives more than one impression, and those impressions are counted.

Visits

This is the best tracking system. This tells you how many visits to your site you have had in one day. Generally, a visit is considered one person, and it is assumed that the one person will visit more than one page, and thus creating more impressions or page views is expected. It is broken down into thirty minute intervals as well as how many page requests they made. This is a great way to determine how many visitors you get, how long they stay, and how often they return. This is a great tool to determine how wide your audience is.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors are determined by IP address, domain name, or cookie. Many say that this is the number that counts. A unique visitor may visit more than once, but because it is that same person, it is only counted once. The mandatory metric for ABCe audits is solely the unique visitor.

Referrals

These are the number of people who are referred by another website or search engine. This number can tell you what advertising you have out is working and what is not. Referrals can be repeat visitors or new visitors. Often times, they are both.Keep in mind that often a referral can also be someone who goes directly to your site from the start. They may have heard about your site from a television ad, friend, newspaper ad, or other reference.

Search Strings

Pay attention to search strings. This is the phrase that visitors use to find your site in a search engine. You can use these to focus your ads and other marketing methods to generate hits to your site. They are also useful in what does not appear there. If the keywords you have been targeting do not show up in your statistics, that should raise a red flag and cause an investigation to determine the reason.

Search strings, or keywords as they are also known, are important. They are the words that rate your site in search engines. The higher your site sits in the rankings of search engines, the higher the chances that someone will click on your site and visit it. This is because the majority of people do not scroll down to see the sites that are lower in the list because they are not as relevant in their search as the ones higher up.

Often times people complain about a website leaving cookies on their computer. There is a privacy concern with cookies that leave many users cold. A cookie is many things. It identifies users who have been to a website before. Cookies are supposed to help load the page faster and identify unique visitors. When people delete their stash of cookies, it throws off the statistics. However, due to the privacy concerns, people have been blocking or deleting cookies, first or third party.

Power Considerations for Your Server Hardware

One of the most important decisions you will have to make in regard to colocation is the server hardware you want to move. This could either be an easy of difficult task depending on a number of variables. You will need to consider various features including processing power, RAM, hard drive capacity and hard drive redundancy among others. While all are essential, perhaps the most vital feature you must consider for your server is the power requirements. To help ensure a smooth transition, this article will provide tips on some factors you want to keep in mind.

Energy-Efficient Hardware

Before purchasing any hardware, you should know that not all servers are created equal. For example, some are equipped with standardized components designed to be compatible with virtually any type of motherboard. Power supply can be very cheap in this instance and cost as little as $10. Purchasing one with a voltage that specifically matches the motherboard in your server will cost a little more, but will be far more energy efficient and help you save hundreds of dollars on power consumption. This is one of the most important considerations for choosing a server because the hardware you collocate should be as energy efficient as possible. Power consumption tends to vary greatly as most hardware is not designed to be conserve power. However, this is change rapidly as top tier manufacturers such as Dell and IBM have recently introduced more energy efficient hardware to the market.

Power at the Facility Costs

The average person believes that when investing in colocation, all they have to pay for is rack space and internet connectivity with the power being free with the service. Unfortunately, it is these type of assumptions that leads some people to make an attempt to cram all of their servers in one small area and save money on their monthly fees. What most do not realize is that the premium power and AC cooling needed to keep the hardware thriving generally costs considerably more than rack space. It is very easy for many to conclude that space comes for a fee while power is free, causing them to think if they can stuff 20 servers in a small space, they would then be able to save money on buying a full cabinet. These faulty assumptions result in companies shelling out thousands of dollars on blade servers only to learn that their power requirements call for substantially more than typical sized servers would have cost to store.

The misconception that power is free is on the colocation market is merely that, a misconception. The truth is that the tremendous amount of power a server requires can often cost a price that is equivalent to leasing three full racks of space in the facility. Simply knowing this can be vital when it comes to purchasing server hardware and planning to collocate your network. You can save yourself a lot of grief and money by knowing your exact requirements before entering an agreement with a service provider.

Why Reliable Web Hosting?

In today's competitive world reliable web hosting is very critical especially for the success of online businesses. Your message or information won't be conveyed on time unless you send it over high-speed network connections backed up by reliable web servers. You need to seek a web hosting company that can provide you with these components and much more.

People usually wonder “why reliable web hosting?” Critical components as listed below are some of the reasons why:

- Server monitoring and 24x7 security to safeguard your site
- Spam filtering
- Firewall protection to protect the site from unwanted trespass
- Daily site backups
- 99.9% uptime guarantee

Reliable web servers with multiple fast connections are critical in ensuring that your web site runs smoothly. Only behind the hosting company's firewall and additional security on their web servers can you seek to keep your website safe from unwelcome intruders. Spam and virus filtering is another essential feature which should be taken into account with all email facilities. This is again possible with only reliable web hosting.

Apart from the above, there are many other useful reasons. Certain components responsible for reliable web hosting not only decrease your stress but also increase productivity. Reliable web hosting is known to provide dependable uptime so that you can make changes on your website and upload it for customers to view in minimal time.

Reliable web hosting is vital for serious business clients who need their web sites to be fully-functional and their domains accessible at all times. These businesses could be any online industry, be it bank, financial institutes, railway and flight online booking sites or even ecommerce sites. Only with help of reliable web hosting can you maintain the highest level of security for discreet user transaction on any website. All ecommerce websites are integrated with payment gateways and if your web hosting is not secure or reliable then anyone can hack your site and you can lose essential online cash flows.

If your site is integrated with a dependable Content Management System (CMS) through which you seek to update your site on daily basis then reliable web hosting becomes all the same critical. To stay ahead in today's online competition you need a secure and flexible website and this is only possible with help of reliable web hosting. Copyright notice: This original article is the property of Web Hosting Geeks (http://webhostinggeeks.com). Web Hosting Geeks provides independent customer and webmaster reviews of top 10 web hosting providers. Top web hosting reviews, best web hosting awards, web host rating, web hosting articles and more.Requirement: You must also post the above author information if you would like to republish this article!

Technical Support

Why do we need technical support for our websites? If something goes wrong, and you do not know what the problem is, technical support can help you find what is wrong and help you fix it.

Technical support staff is people who have worked on websites and networks, have gone to school to become certified in this type of work. They know their hardware, software, wires, connections, and coding. If you can explain the problem clearly, answer all their questions to the best of your ability, they can pinpoint your problem and tell you, in terms you will understand, how to fix it.

Good technical support is not hard to find. Assess what you already know. If you already know how to build a website and make it look more than just presentable, but just do not know how to put that audio on to it, tech support can help you. Choose a hosting company that offers technical support at any time, not just business hours, because catching and fixing an error sooner rather than later can mean a sale or a client.

Another consideration would be whether your hosting company's technical support responds to service requests quickly or puts you in a queue to get to when they can. Your website is your business… and it is theirs. You pay them to be there when you need them, and if you need technical support now, that support should be there right when you need it. This comes right back to having the support at any time and not just during business hours.

Your host company should also offer proactive notification of maintenance. They should let you know when they will be doing maintenance on the server so that should have a chat room or other interactive item, you can let your users know that you will be down for a period of time for site maintenance. Most people are understanding and appreciative of being told that the site will be unavailable between certain times so that you can enhance your site for their benefit.

Providing documentation on new features of their hosting and their technical support is a nice feature your hosting company should have. Whether you use it or not is entirely up to you, but if you are technology challenged, it is a nice thing to have so that you can reference it at any time. The documentation should also be very easy to find on the website. The information is important to you, and locating it is essential to your business. Knowing how to use a feature you have never used before is an asset to your website - even if you never do use it.

If you ask your hosting company for training, your request should be answered promptly. The host company should be happy to provide you with any training you want or need to maintain your site. If you want to put an audio feature on your website, they should be the ones to train you how to put it on, how to maintain it, how to change it, and anything else that pertains to the audio features.

You should be able to access technical support any way you choose. Email, live chat, or telephone should be available. Live chat or telephone is generally the best way to access the help you require. Using the telephone or live chat, you can locate the items they tell you to find, make the small changes, and answer your questions as you go along. They will be patient with you as you search, fix, and edit your website.

Tech support is a great way to learn how to do things yourself. After you have been helped once, you know how to do it should your problem arise again. However, if you forget, they will be happy to assist you again. They will log your assistance and when they see that they have helped you with the same problem before, they will be happy to refresh your memory by going through it all over again with you. After all, that is what tech support is there for.