i7o Media

A Few Notes

After reading everything you need to know about web hosting, be sure to check out the four web hosting providers we recommend.

This guide will evolve. Some subjects just require too many details, and are therefore better suited as individual posts – which will be linked to from here after we get around to writing about them.

8 Web Hosting Facts

1. Why pay full price? There are almost always web hosting coupons available. You should be able to find them easily with a quick Google search. If you’re looking for a virtual private server, or a dedicated server, it’s a good idea to check out the deals announced on popular web hosting forums.

2. Most web hosting reviews and recommendations are bogus. They’re simply trying to make an affiliate sale. Some might even feel obligated to hype up their own web hosting provider . A lot of sites are sponsored, and receive free web hosting. Make sure you’re reading real reviews from real people. My favorite happens to be HostJury.

3. The term “unlimited” is deceiving. Many shared hosting packages offer unlimited bandwidth. The truth is, you’re never going to see that bandwidth, because providers place caps on the amount of server resources your site can use at any given time.

4. Shared hosting is just that… shared. You have to remember that your site is on a server with many other sites that belong to other people. Therefore, if your site is using up too many resources, you’re going to slow down every other site on that server. Web hosting providers need to protect every client on that server. Host Gator for example, allows you to use up to 25% of server resources for 90 seconds. If you go over this cap, your account will be frozen until you’re able to work things out.

5. Don’t assume that a VPS is better than shared hosting. Just because a VPS costs more, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to see better performance. Again, lets use Host Gator as an example. Their shared packages start at only $4.95 a month. Looking at the server specs on their shared servers, and taking into account what I’ve mentioned above (25% cap), you’ll be able to calculate that you’re allowed to use the following resources (in bursts):

• 2.0 GHz CPU
• 2 GB of ram

Now lets say you’re in the market for a VPS, because your site has received a ton of traffic lately. Maybe you just got featured on the front page of Digg, and got the boot from your shared server. Obviously, you’re going to want at least the same amount of resources you had on the shared server (2.0 GHz CPU, 2 GB of ram). A fully managed VPS with those specs will run you around $100 a month. So, if you were to move from your $5 shared server, to a $30 VPS, you’re actually downgrading in many ways.

As you can see, the shared server was allowing your site to expand with bursts of traffic when needed, but once you’re forced to move to your own server, you have to purchase ALL of those resources, regardless of whether or not your site is using them at all times.

6. Don’t assume a dedicated server is better than a VPS. There are plenty of VPS servers that can out-perform lower-end dedicated servers, even though the dedicated might actually cost a lot more. One of the biggest disadvantages of a VPS however, is disk i/o, since it can’t be isolated.

7. All hard drives are not created equal. Typically, SSD > SAS > SCSI > SATA. You’ll also want to check the raid setup.

8. Your database or media files can be served from another location. Amazon for example, offers a variety of CDN and cloud services, and there are even wordpress plugins to help with integration. Depending on your needs, this could be a cost-effective solution.

11 Questions To Ask The Web Hosting Provider

1. Are the servers fully managed?

2. Is there a network uptime guarantee?

3. Is there a hardware replacement SLA (question doesn’t apply to shared hosting)?

4. Is there an initial response guarantee (for support)?

5. What type of access do I have to support? Phone? Email? Live chat online? Available 24/7?

6. How scalable is the server? Easy to upgrade? Do files need to be transferred or is an upgrade automatic? Will my site experience any downtime?

7. Is there a setup fee? Are there any discounts available for paying an initial setup fee?

8. Is there a contract?

9. Is there a money back guarantee?

10. What control panel and/or features does the server have?

11. Does the data center (where my server resides) have the following safety precautions: Fire suppression systems in place? Authorized access in a secure area? Temperature controlled environment? Back-up power supply?

Note: Many of the answers to these questions can be found on the sales page itself.

8 Server Specs To Look For Before Making A Decision On A VPS Or Dedicated Server

1. Processor: Check out this article on server load.

2. Memory

3. Hard drive

4. Operating system: Plan on using Windows or Linux?

5. Control panel

6. Bandwidth

7. Port speed

8. Dedicated IP addresses available

Best Web Hosting

Liquid Web

The Good: Superior reliability, excellent support, and options…many options! They offer shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers.

Want to add 1GB of ram without upgrading to the next (tier) package? Maybe you want to upgrade the processor, or add a gigabit uplink port? No problem. Liquid Web offers the best scalability.

The VPS, dedicated servers, and upgrades are competitively priced.

The Bad: Their shared hosting packages are expensive and don’t offer as much as you’d expect at those price points.

The Ugly: Hell, we can’t think of anything. Liquid Web has a solid reputation.

Host Gator

The Good: Host Gator is by far the absolute best in the shared hosting industry. Fully managed servers, fast, reliable, great prices, and the best support we’ve seen. Call, or use the online live-chat feature and get a response within a few minutes.

Host Gator is very fair, and unlike other shared hosting providers, will not bother you over minor issues such as wordpress plugins that command too many queries.

The Bad: Although we’re a fan of their shared hosting, they don’t offer any virtual private servers. They do have dedicated servers available, but the options and scalability are severely limited.

The Ugly: Again, they are the best as far as shared hosting goes, but that doesn’t mean shared hosting doesn’t come with its trade-offs.

Since you’re sharing a server with others, if you go over the resource limit, you’re going to effect everyone on that server. Therefore, they reserve the right to take your site offline and even ban you if you’re causing other sites to slow down.

Host Gator is pretty lenient; allowing you to use up to 25% of server resources for 90 second bursts. Some claim to have had sites with near 100,000 uniques per month running on a Host Gator shared package.

However, large traffic spikes are what you need to worry about. If you’re constantly hitting the front page of Digg, you’re going to want more than shared hosting.

Media Temple

The Good: Awesome control panel, and the ability to do just about everything through the iphone enabled panel. Media Temple offers something that no other provider can at the moment. The ability to handle traffic spikes from sites like Digg, for only $20 a month on their grid service.

The Bad: Going from their $150 a month DV server, the next tier available is the Nitro package, at $750 a month. That’s quite a big jump. Sure they offer ala carte upgrades in between those two packages, but you’ll pay way more than you should for them.

The Ugly: Their grid service experienced a very significant amount of downtime earlier this tear. Many sites were down, and email unavailable for hours (some report days). Everything seems to be under control now, after they upgraded the system.

Known Host

The Good: Great prices, very reliable, good customer support, and sky-high approval ratings. They offer many packages including hybrid servers, which are a lot cheaper, and even outperform some dedicated servers. Click a button and upgrade your packages instantly.

The Bad: Some upgrade options are limited, but not a big deal for 99.9% of webmasters.

The Ugly: We say “good” support and not “great” because they don’t offer a phone number on their website. All support is handled via email.

Functionality

Gravity Forms: Makes form management easier than ever. Especially useful for sites that publish user-generated content.

Duplicate Post Checker: Will check for similar posts that already exist. Great for sites that publish jokes, quotes, poems, etc.

Viper’s Video Quicktags: If you embed videos into your posts, you’ll definitely want this plugin. Once the plugin is installed, you can configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, alignment, etc.). Then all you need to do is paste the url (that the video is located at), and it will show up in your post.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Uses an advanced algorithm to show related articles (from your blog) for each post. The plugin also caches the related posts that are shown, which significantly improves performance over other related posts plugins.

WP-Polls: Allows you to place a poll on your site. Easily customized via templates and css styles.

Feedburner Feedsmith: Detects all the ways to access your feed, and redirects them to your Feedburner feed (allowing you to track all of your subscribers).

WPtouch iPhone Theme: Transforms your blog into an iPhone application-style theme when viewed from popular smartphones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, etc.).

Monetizing

OiOPublisher: Allows you to sell your own advertising through a fully automated system. Also makes it easy to sell digital products.

Amazon Auto Affiliate Linker: Automatically adds your Amazon affiliate id to every link pointing to Amazon from your blog.

Performance

WP Super Cache: This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic blog; dramatically reducing server load during high traffic spikes.

Security

WP Security Scan: Scans your Wordpress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.

Limit Login Attempts: Limits the number of login attempts from an IP address, making a brute-force attack difficult. The plugin will also log the activity, and notify you via email if you choose.

Akismet: Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to prevent spam from getting published. Also allows you to review the spam it catches.

RSS Footer: Makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feed. This is great for adding a link back to your site (to counter scraper sites that are stealing your content).

SEO

All-in-One SEO Pack: A must have plugin for SEO. Here are just a few actions that are easily performed using this plugin:

• Setup canonical urls
• Rewrite titles
• Set meta description and keywords
• Optimize title format
• Enable noindex on specific pages, to avoid duplicate content penalties

SEO Friendly Images: Automatically updates images with ALT and TITLE attributes.

SEO Smart Links: Allows you to interlink posts on your site, or link to affiliate sites through keywords that you specify. When these words appear in your posts, they will automatically link to the url you set.

Google XML Sitemaps: Generates a XML-Sitemap of your site. Supported by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask – this will help search engines crawl your site.

More Useful WordPress Plugins

Come on, you didn’t expect us to stop there did you? That would only leave you wanting more. Which is exactly why we’ve added 10 more plugins to the list.

Why didn’t these make the top list? To maintain performance, we believe you should aim to keep plugins to a minimum. Additional plugins mean longer load times, stress on the server, the possibility of complicated upgrades, and maybe even trouble with your web host (depending on the provider).

We also took into consideration how useful the plugins are, and how easy they would be to replace by simple theme revisions, or manual actions. In other words, if the plugins only added a minor convenience, we preferred to avoid the unnecessary bloat.

Even so, many bloggers will find these plugins useful, so we’ve added them to cater to everyone.

WP-DBManager: Allows you to optimize, repair, and backup your database.

Why it didn’t make the top list: We prefer doing a manual backup of the entire site (not just the database).

W3 Total Cache: The ultimate plugin to improve server performance; this plugin has it all. Seriously the author thought of everything.

Why it didn’t make the top list: Unless you’re advanced in dealing with the backend of your site, you won’t be able to take advantage of many of the features offered in this plugin. You’d be better off using the WP Super Cache plugin mentioned above.

Robots Meta: Easily add meta robot tags to Wordpress pages.

Why it didn’t make the top list: All-in-One SEO Pack already gives you the ability to noindex the important stuff. This plugin just goes overboard in our opinion.

Breadcrumb NavXT: Generates locational breadcrumb trails for your blog.

Why it didn’t make the top list: Breadcrumb navigation is situational. In fact, some studies show that breadcrumb navigation can actually confuse the user. Even so, breadcrumb nvaigation is easy enough to implement without a plugin if needed.

SEO Slugs: Removes common words (the, in, a, what, you, can) from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

Why it didn’t make the top list: We’re not convinced that this is going to make a big difference in your rankings.

We’ll be adding more plugins to the list soon. Be sure to bookmark this page!