Four Things to Look for in a Web Host, and Why You Should Care
Here are some suggestions on what to look for in a web host, plus a recommendation on a company that satisfies all of these needs.
Choose Your Web Host Wisely
Who you choose to host your website could have a profound effect upon whether your business efforts online succeed or fail. Consider the benefits your web host delivers:
- Gives search engines and information-hungry people a place to find you
- Delivers your content to your world-wide audience
- Represents you around the clock, day after day
- Connects you to your market, and them to you
In this day and age, your website going down is a huge problem! It’s at least as bad as a phone or power outage, and perhaps worse in some cases, because you are alienating people who might otherwise want your product or service.
We call them “Customers.”
Your Silent Partner
Consider your web host as a silent partner in business. You depend upon continued, reliable service, because downtime costs you customers and revenue.
So while web hosting is not as sexy or trendy as Facebook or Twitter, you must pause and carefully choose who you partner with.
Here are some examples of how I learned this lesson.
- A company serving small businesses caused a bottleneck when I needed to administer my websites, because they provided weak, incomplete administration tools.
- A domain-name registrar slash hosting company that was more concerned with selling domain names than answering my frantic emails.
- The company that hosted the websites for the US Army and other major clients was great until they “upgraded” their back end. When each one of my websites started flaking out, they must have been focused on getting the military’s site back up and running, because I couldn’t get them to reply for over two weeks!
The Holy Grail of Web Hosting
I was starting to think that the entire web hosting industry just sucked, and that I shouldn’t expect any better service. I was completely fed up, so I came up with some criteria for an ideal web hosting partner.
- They have to provide straightforward tools to manage your websites
- Must be at least as reliable as the power company
- Gotta be available when things go wrong or when you need guidance
- Actually help you solve your problems and deliver on promises they make
I had faith that I would find such a company, and with some diligent research, I finally did find what I like to call the “Holy Grail of Web Hosting.”
Here’s is why I love them:
- Since I’ve been using them, not one of my websites have experienced any downtime
- I never have to wait on hold for their Live Chat feature (compared to interminable hold times on the phone AND chat with previous two companies)
- They provide user-friendly site set-up and management through cPanel web-based software
- 1-click install and upgrade of WordPress, the free publishing software beloved by bloggers and small business owners everywhere
- When I dug a big hole for myself migrating a website to one of their servers, they went way beyond the expected level of service and rescued me! They took my problem out of my hands solved it, then sent me on my way. At no additional cost.
When you combine such a track record of uptime, amazing customer service, easy-to-use tools, and real help available via chat, you have a real gem of a partner!
If you want a web hosting partner that will just keep rendering fantastic, invisible service for years to come, do yourself a favor, and migrate on over to Bluehost.
Tags: hosting company, reliable service, small business owners, home office worker5 Ways to Leverage StumbleUpon for Small Business Owners
If you run a small business, chances are you are too busy managing loose ends to have time to test all the newest social networking sites that have sprung up in the wake of MySpace and YouTube.
Here’s one for you that will help you sift through the barrage of gar-bage websites out there: StumbleUpon.
From the website:
StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests. Whether it’s a web page, photo or video, our personalized recommendation engine learns what you like, and brings you more.
After you register, complete your profile by telling StumbleUpon your interests. Install the StumbleUpon toolbar in either Firefox or (blech) Internet Explorer, and hit the “Stumble!” button. The service will deliver a page in its system that someone with similar interests as you has blessed as good.
The Benefits
In order of increasing value, here are 5 ways you, the small business owner, can leverage this powerful social networking tool to help your business.
- Discover interesting websites, photos, videos, etc as inspiration for blogging or writing topics. As you Stumble! and rate sites, StumbleUpon will learn about your preferences over time and send you more and more relevant content.
- Bookmark your Stumbling history for later perusal. StumbleUpon will keep track of what you like and don’t like, and allow you to drill deeper into topics that interest you. Use this for future reference when writing blog posts.
- Network with resourceful people online. Being that it is a social network, StumbleUpon is great for finding other people who share your passions and can provide solutions to your problems. You can find and follow people whose opinions you have grown to trust.
- Create a resource of useful websites and tools for your clients, patients, or customers. You can provide your constituents value by getting them to become a fan of yours on StumbleUpon and regularly sending them content you think will interest them. Great way to keep yourself relevant to them.
- Promote your own blog or website, increasing your online exposure. You can add your own content to the StumbleUpon database to benefit from some of that social networking mojo. As long as you push your own stuff in proportion to your other Stumbling activity, you can see develop consistent traffic from the service.
More Strategies and Tactics
I’ve been taking a course put together by Caroline Middlebrooke called StumbleRush. It’s a free, multi-part e-course that I recommend you take a look at, because it details several strategies for using StumbleUpon to promote your blog and website online.
In fact, it was Caroline’s gentle guidance that inspired me to experiment with StumbleUpon and sold me on its value to my online marketing efforts.
Take a look at the course, start Stumbling, and let me know how you make out in the comments.
Tags: StumbleUpon, small business owners, Caroline Middlebrooke, social networking sitesSeries: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar
This post is the 2nd in an ongoing series about how web-savvy home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time using Google Apps. Topics I’ll discuss in the series include:
- Read Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail
- Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments
- Staying current with Google Reader
- Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
- Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office
Google Calendar is the single most useful tool for any home business owner, and gives specific advantages to husband and wife teams. Here is how I arrived at that opinion.
My wife and I were running 3 separate businesses between us. I also held a part-time job with a wildly varying schedule, which I wrote down on tiny slips of paper and brought home. We were also busy parenting a toddler and a baby.
Needless to say, scheduling our life was just ridiculous!
I used my little slips of paper, she used her Palm Pilot and sometimes iCal on her Mac. Pretty primitive setup, I’ll admit, and it did not allow us to manage our lives in any meaningful way.
We needed a solution that would:
- Show different colors for each individual (and grouping) in the family
- Allow both of us to view and edit the schedule without a bunch of B.S.
- Send reminders when and where we can best use them
- Display the most current version of the ever-changing family/office schedule
Google Calendar Delivers the Goods!
After way too much research into desktop software packages that would satisfy these goals, I decided to give Google Calendar a whirl. And boy, am I glad I did!
Google Calendar has a simple interface that displays all your events with colors assigned to each person or group. Adding an appointment is as easy as clicking any open space on the calendar or using the “Quick Add” feature.
Check.
Sharing a calender with a coworker or partner is simple yet sophisticated. As you create a new calendar, edit the calendar settings and type in the email address of the person with whom you want to share. Make sure you enable “Make changes AND manage sharing” if you trust the other parties. If not, either fire them or set a more appropriate access level from the four options. Your choice.
Share your calendars and set your permissions correctly, and it will be like your personal calendar software is installed on every computer in the world. Access and edit anywhere. I love this!
Double-check.
Of course, what good would your calendar be if you had to constantly remember to look at it? Google Calendar’s killer feature is SMS text reminders so you can relax your mind and focus on taking action in your business.
You can also do this by email, but SMS is the most convenient and useful because it delivers me the reminder wherever I am on a device that I always have on me: my phone.
Triple-check.
And the fourth requirement in the list above—always having the most up-to-date schedule information—is handled readily by the fact that all of this calendar mumbo-jumbo resides on the Internet.
Check. Check. Check. Check. All requirements met!
Google Calender is a robust, convenient solution for any business you run out of your home, and liberates the home office family from a nightmare of schedule management.
So, step two in your journey to liberate yourself from your home office may be to migrate to Google Calendar. You can start here by creating a Google Account. Also take a look at Google’s Getting Started Guide.
Let’s dig deeper!
What is your favorite Google Calendar feature? Let me know in the comments below.
Tags: virtual home office, home business owners, google, liberate
Series: Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail
This post is the first in an ongoing series about how web-savvy home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time using Google Apps. Topics I’ll discuss in the series include:
- Using Gmail as the first step towards getting my home office out of my home and accessible anywhere.
- Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments.
- Staying current with Google Reader
- Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
- Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office.
So let’s start with Gmail. For years, I held onto my beloved desktop email software: Mail.app on Mac OS X. The usual Apple polish combined with incomparable integration with the computer operating system itself was enough for me to overlook some of the limitations not shared by other programs.
So I kept using Mail.app until I began to be continually frustrated because I couldn’t get to my mail while out of the office. Since my iMac resides comfortably within the confines of my home office, I had to physically be in front of the machine to access my email, and frustration ensued whenever I was out and about.
I did a little dance with Yahoo! Mail several years prior and got burned in a mystical lost-password-lost-email-account situation. It was an endless loop on which I wasted many hours, trying in vain to recover data locked up within Yahoo’s merciless servers.
Enter Gmail.
When Yahoo! trashed my email account, I was just using it as a throwaway email address to sign up for webisites that required such things. I thought Gmail would serve the same purpose, but as I began to use it, several features stood out as quite useable:
- Emails are stored in a conversation-like display by default, meaning I could easily follow ongoing email discussions and refer back to them effortlessly.
- Tons of storage: almost 7 gigabytes of email storage available, growing all the time.
- Integrated instant messaging lets me talk to my friends with Google accounts from within Gmail.
- Amazing spam filtering: I NEVER get spam in my Gmail inbox. Never.
- Google Search built-in: this allows me to search through both emails and archived chats with lightning speed.
So Gmail began to grow on me–very quickly, in fact–so I decided to make the jump to an all-web-based-email. Gmail is my killer web app because it works, simply and elegantly, consistently, and from whatever computer I can put my hands on.
Of course there are some limitations and less-than-desirable interface elements. As a Mac aficionado, I prefer the elegant, aesthetically pleasing interaction with technology that Apple delivers. So the circa-1998, flat, HTML-ish look and feel of Gmail was a little off-putting at first, and seemed out of place in my glass+aluminum polished Apple world.
But what Gmail lacks in elegance and polish, it makes up for with usability. The web app gets out of my way and let’s me do what I need to do. I don’t have to roam around, wondering where in my folder structure I placed that all-important registration email with all the passwords. Now, I can find it faster by searching for it.
A few other things to be aware of:
- As is Google’s usual modus operandi, Adsense ads are served along the right side of the screen, relevant to whatever information is contained within the email. They’re unobtrusive, but they’re there. If this bothers you, a desktop app may be your best bet. I don’t have a problem with it, and some of the ads are actually useful.
- I have some misgivings knowing that Google has indexed my “private” email, but I’m willing to trade that off for the usefulness of Gmail. This is one of those leaps of faith that we all have to take from time to time, and Google’s history of trustworthiness allays my fears to the extent that I can use their fantastic service without any difficulty.
So, step one in your journey to liberate yourself from your home office may be to migrate to Gmail. You can start here by creating a Google Account. Also take a look at Google’s Getting Started Guide, then print out the cheat sheet of Gmail shortcuts.
These actions will take you one step closer to freedom from your home office shackles. Please let me know in the comments how you use Gmail in your day-to-day operations.
Tags: google, home office worker, liberate, freedomEmbrace the Digital Home Office
I founded Home Office Web Tools for one purpose: to teach home office workers, small business owners, and entrepreneurs how to transmogrify their businesses using Web 2.0 and social media technology.
In my search for ways to manage my various past businesses 100% digitally, the wealth of resources available simply confused my preoccupied mind. I had enough to do without experimenting with yet another untried, untested online service.
Mustering the time and focus necessary to discover reliable, authoritative forums and reviews proved too challenging to balance with family responsibilities, a day job, etc. and it occurred to me that other home business owners probably had similar problems.
Which is why we are here. I plan to share with you my discoveries and techniques for both managing and marketing a small home business online. Along the way, we will explore such topics as:
- Outsourcing—the single most powerful tool available to the Bartholomew Cubbins-like home office worker. Learn the value of sharing all those hats with capable virtual assistants.
- Business Automation—let he who wants to continually waste time doing repetitive work avoid this section. Anything that can be automated, should be automated.
- Podcasting—how to get inside the ears and minds of the people who can most benefit from your services, expertise, and message.
- Social Networking Sites and the relationship marketing model. Crowdsource your way to better products and services by working with your audience!
- Web-based applications that enable your virtual home office to exist anywhere within range of a hi-speed internet connection
- The iPhone—the essential piece of technology for your journey of liberation from your business.
Look for regular blog updates and an upcoming weekly podcast, where we will discuss these online tools and how to best use them to accomplish our personal and professional goals.
Looking forward to serving you…
Devin Best
Tags: home office worker, virtual home office, small business owners, virtual assistantsPolls
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