The age old saying of "You get what you pay for" always stands true, especially when it comes to hosting company and design costs. There is no such thing as "FREE HOSTING"! you will pay for it in the end, and I will explain why!

Website hosting is a multi-million rand industry, and giving away hosting is not lucrative to any company. The only reasons that a hosting, or website design company would give you free hosting would be under the following conditions:

1. The hosting company company has inflated it's prices to lure you in by giving you free hosting.
2. The hosting company company gives you free hosting, but you will need to add banners to your website.
3. The hosting company will offer x amount of months for free, if you sign a long term contract, or if you pay up front for 1 or 2 years.

The reason these companies give away free hosting, or charge very low costs for hosting your website, is solely because the advertising that goes on your website is where they turn a profit, and also the servers that your website will be hosted on will be highly overpopulated!

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The purpose of analyzing your web site statistics is to look for trends and to research the success level of your marketing campaigns. The numbers themselves can be misleading, as statistical packages count “hits” in different ways. If someone visits a page on your site doesn’t mean that they read it completely.

The idea with web site statistics, then, is to look for trends. Instead of looking at the numbers a concrete items, look at them over time to see if they’re increasing or decreasing. For example, if you do an internet marketing campaign, then look at your web site statistics to see if the campaign increased the number of hits to your site.

With that said, here are some numbers you should look at:

Visitor Information

There are three areas that are important to review each month and during each marketing campaign. The number of unique visitors will help you to determine whether your site is receiving more or less visitors each month.

The location tells you what country, and sometimes what State, the visitors are coming from. This is important if you’re concerned about your global reach to other countries, or if you’ve done a marketing campaign in other States. Note that this is the State of the ISP where they connected to the Internet. Because AOL is in Virginia, you will have an inordinate amount of Virginia visitors, even though these people are actually all over the USA.

An important distinction is the concept of “visitors” versus “hits”. Each person who visits your site is considered a “visitor”. Each time a visitor looks at a page, that page and its contents are accessed, including the graphics on the page. As example, say that your home page has two graphics on it, plus some text. That is considered THREE elements on the page. When a visitor visits that page once, your statistics will show ONE visitor and THREE hits.

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So you have decided that you want to start a website, or even an e-commerce site. You have managed the site design, and have even purchased a domain name, but now what? You will never get any visitors to your site if it isn’t accessible via the web.

The only way to do that is by using a server. The server will maintain a permanent connection with the web and on the server will be stored all the information about your website. In effect, users will come onto the server access your website and then when they decide to move to another website they will access information from another server. So, the real question is, what type of server do you need?

For all individual users and most small e-commerce users, virtual web hosting is the way to go. The other option, having a dedicated server, means that you will actually go out and purchase a big and very expensive piece of hardware that will be used for your website alone. Virtual web hosting is, essentially, renting a small piece of someone else’s server. Virtual web hosting which is also called shared hosting, because it usually means many different sites are all located on a single server, and is vastly more economical than owning and maintaining your own server. But beyond just economics, there are a great number of reasons to use virtual web hosting rather than dedicated hosting.

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So you have decided that you want to start a website, or even an e-commerce site. You have managed the site design, and have even purchased a domain name, but now what? You will never get any visitors to your site if it isn’t accessible via the web.

The only way to do that is by using a server. The server will maintain a permanent connection with the web and on the server will be stored all the information about your website. In effect, users will come onto the server access your website and then when they decide to move to another website they will access information from another server. So, the real question is, what type of server do you need?

For all individual users and most small e-commerce users, virtual web hosting is the way to go. The other option, having a dedicated server, means that you will actually go out and purchase a big and very expensive piece of hardware that will be used for your website alone. Virtual web hosting is, essentially, renting a small piece of someone else’s server. Virtual web hosting which is also called shared hosting, because it usually means many different sites are all located on a single server, and is vastly more economical than owning and maintaining your own server. But beyond just economics, there are a great number of reasons to use virtual web hosting rather than dedicated hosting.

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ASP hosting is a server-side scripting environment that uses the Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. It is designed for dynamic web pages and applications, offering a vast array of functionalities for web developers. ASP hosting is normally hosted on a Windows server, typically an NT server, and can be fully integrated into an Internet Information Server (IIS) or PWS. The concept of ASP is the same as scripts such as Java Server Pages (JSP) and CGI that enables web pages to work with databases and programs in the web server. An ASP web page is easily identifiable with the .asp extension on the URL.

ASP hosting works in similar way as other server-side scripting technologies. When your web browser sends its request to the web server, the web server will call ASP which would process the requested file. It would run any script commands and in turn sends the requested web page back to the web browser. Hence, it is the server who runs all the requests and sends the requested HTML pages back to the browser.

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Cheap websites are bountiful these days and there are many web design companies and web hosting companies offering sitebuilders that allow you to build a website in a relatively short amount of time. Sitebuilders are normally extremely user-friendly advanced website builders that let nearly anyone create and handle a successful website quickly, and like I said, extremely affordable.

Sitebuilders are just what they are, a package. There are sitebuilders that allow you to change almost every aspect of your site and there are sitebuilders that will limit you to only a few modifcations. Pricing ranges from $1.99 (of course you have to buy something else) to $49+ per month. Some have upfront setup fees while others will allow you to jump right in and start building without any setup fees. Most good sitebuilder offerings will allow you to try the sitebuilder out for free, build your website and when you are ready to pay, you sign up and then publish your site to your destination.

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ColdFusion hosting is a server-side scripting language which is similar to PHP or ASP. A product of Macromedia, it is considered as a complete web application server for not only basic hosting, but extends to developing and delivering scaleable e-commerce applications especially for business websites. Mostly, ColdFusion is utilized in small and large businesses, and also for some advanced personal uses. It is due to the fact that in a short space of time, users will be able to create robust Web applications coupled with advanced data integration.

Since it is a server-side technology, ColdFusion hosting works by having a web server to process and deliver web applications, rather than just plain web pages. The language used is called ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) which includes tags for querying databases, outputting text and interacting with different web services. The language uses tags and attributes, similar to XHTML, for the codes that interact with the website and its back-end functions. CFML is relatively much simpler than languages like C++. However, a strong understanding in HTML coding and relational database design is still very important.

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Cpanel is an easy to use interface for web maintenance. cPanel is the leading web hosting control panel available today. Even a user completely new to web hosting can easily manage his/her own website. With the Cpanel hosting interface, you'll have complete control over your website. When looking for a hosting package, CPanel is also a good indicator of the reliability of the hosting provider. The most well known and reliable web hosts would normally provide web hosting plans that are powered by cPanel control panel. cPanel hosting plans that are on the market predominantly support PHP and MySQL, FrontPage, Fantastico and RVSkins.

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Dedicated hosting is a hosting environment where one or more servers are dedicated for a single client. The client effectively leases the server from the hosting provider. The hosting provider provides the server machine, the connectivity and the required software and operating system to run the server. Dedicated hosting can also be split into two categories – managed and unmanaged dedicated hosting. For managed dedicated hosting, the hosting provider will provide the services of running and maintaining the server within their own datacenter. This is a good choice if you don’t have the personnel, money or time to operate a server in-house. This is the choice for web developers who do not want to be bogged down by server management activities. While for unmanaged dedicated hosting, there will be a lot of support and maintenance features that are not provided by the hosting provider and will be done by the customers themselves. This is normally the hosting choice for system administrators who want to manage their servers themselves.

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E-commerce hosting is a hosting package designed for customers who require a complete online business solution for their websites. E-commerce hosting providers provide the infrastructure, systems and applications needed for a website to perform online transactions. Hence, it has become a very important requirement of online businesses since it enables the customers to transact over the internet easily and more importantly in a secure environment. Thus, it is of no surprise that e-commerce hosting has become one of the fastest growing hosting services, looking at the rate in which people are doing business through the internet.

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