Every website needs a great web host, however when you are looking online for a host you may be overwhelmed with the wide variety available ranging from absolutely free to relatively expensive. How do you know what you need and what is the best choice? The answer to this depends on your business and whether you will have a lot of business or none at all, however you always want to have more space than you think you will need as well as the following options for a great web host.

When choosing a web hosting company you definitely want to make sure that they have 24/7 support. The reason for this is if you have a problem with your website, you need to be able to talk to someone and have them fix it immediately. As long as the host offers this type of support it should not be a problem. If they don’t, you might wait several days with your website down and not be able to contact anyone. Think of the customers you will be missing and all of the lost sales you’ll suffer.

You want to make sure your web host offers a generous amount of bandwidth in order to support your website and ensure it loads as quickly as possible. The more bandwidth means the more information that is carried and the quicker your page opens. So, make sure you have a web host with plenty of bandwidth to support your site.

Regardless of whether you need it now or not you want a web host that offers plenty of storage space in case you do need it. Give yourself some growing room.

When you have a web host as well as URL you will also want to have your own e-mail that ties into your company name. Find a web host that offers this as well. Most do, but some might trick you with fine print so be careful.

You may only have one domain name today, but the future holds all kinds of possibilities. Be sure you can add additional domain names if you need to.

If you have a domain name, but do not have your own name server then you will certainly want a web host that will allow you to store or “park” your domain name on their server for your domain to remain valid for an extended period of time.

While you have found a web host that meets all of your needs, be sure you also have a tool box that will help you manage your site easily and whenever you want. This is really important for you to be able to do, especially if you need to change something like prices, or other important information.

About the Author

Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

Web statistics are one of the surest ways of tracking down a poor webmaster – because under no circumstances will that webmaster let you see them.

He or she will offer you “digests” (Heavily edited needless to say), will regret that your server does not have statistics installed (highly improbable), or will just say “I’m sorry?” and change the subject.

The excuses for sitting on this crucial source of data are many and various because Webstats alias web server statistics are the only cast-iron method of showing how well – or how badly – your website is actually doing.
Used in a positive fashion with a cooperative webmaster, web stats are the ideal fine-tuning tool for improving your websites performance and discovering who your customers are, what they are doing on your site and how you can help them to do it better.

This is going to be a simple journey through the basic terminology, so that when you are confronted by the data in question there will be no mysteries for you.

Generally there are two flavours of statistics programs, although others do exist. Either “Awstats” or “Webstats” should be preinstalled on your server and will only require accessing with the password for your hosting. The task they perform and the terminology they use is virtually the same, I just find the Awstats interface a little clearer.

How it works.

The server where your website lives is cleverer than you might think. It is aware of a number of factors about the people viewing your site. It notes where they are from, what pages they request or download, how long they stay on site and even where they are from.

Every web server does this.
For the paranoid, the server does not know your name and address – but it does know that someone from IP address 195.258-458-102 connected at 22.45 (server time) and requested the page “index.htm” which was successfully downloaded. Each request, its source and the result of the request goes into the log files on the server.

Awstats and the like read this information and present it all as easy to read graphs and tables using the following standard terminology.

What it Means.
Phrases like “monthly totals” you can probably puzzle out without may help! The slightly more complex stuff is as follows:

Hits.
Hits are for impressing the uninitiated. One page with four images on it makes five hits. This measurement is of very limited value and can be safely ignored.
Visiting our five-file page and hitting “refresh” three times will get you fifteen hits.
Fun – but of very limited value.

Files.
A “hit” that actually returned something from the server. (Not all hits return data – files may be cached on individual computers and so not need downloading or files may be missing and so not downloadable. Missing pages – for example – are “hits” but not “files”.)

Pages or Page Views.
Now it begins to get interesting. How many pages are actually being looked at (requested). 100 visitors viewing 200 pages means – on average – two pages per visit.

Unique Visitors.
The biggie. This figure counts the number of unique internet addresses that have been to your site.
Visit our five file page and hit refresh ten times – fifty hits, ten files (the images will not need to download twice), one unique visitor.
Exactly what we need to know, how many people have seen our site.

Visit Duration.
How long each “visit” stayed on site. The implications are obvious if no-one stays more that 30 seconds.

Referrers or Referring Sites.
Who is sending you traffic – this will include other pages within your own site, so no surprises if you appear to be sending traffic to yourself!

Search Terms and Search Strings.
What people who search for you are using to find you.

Browsers, User Agents, and Operating Systems.
This tells you what browser people are using to view your site. If you get a lot of Firefox users, for example, make sure your site is Firefox compatible.

Entry and Exit Pages
Where viewers arrive on-site, and where they leave. If everyone walks away from a specific page, ask yourself why.

What Comes Next.

So – get access to the control panel of your hosting right now.
If for some reason your webmaster cannot give you the password, no problem. Offer to view the stats with him (or her) at their office – their input should be useful anyway – but insist that you want to see them live on the server. (Make sure that its your server you are viewing too!)

It’s a simple exercise of logic to decode what is going on with your site behind the scenes, and it will help turn a website with the most lacklustre performance into the killer marketing tool your company deserves.

And that you already paid for!

Englesos is a Web and Graphic Designer working out of the Famagusta area of Cyprus. See more of his work on http://www.englesos.net or else at http://www.lookerscy.com