Category: Web Hosting

Are you looking to get a website, but don't know what steps to take to get it done.

Web hosting can be one of the most important decisions you can make. You need to choose your web hosting provider carefully as it may be harder to move once you have everything built and in place.

So, what should you look for in a web hosting provider?

1. Well, for starters you should look for reliability. Find out what the web hosting companies "up-time" is. That is the amount of time that the website will be available online. An uptime of 99.9% is obviously good, but believe it or not, 97% or 98% is not that great. 98% uptime means your website was offline for over 3 hours that week. That's three hours that a customer can't get to what you want to sell them. Think about this; have you ever tried to go to a website and had it not come up? Did you go back to that site later, or did you find what you were looking for somewhere else.

2. The next thing I look for is ease of use. How difficult is it going to be to host a website with that provider? How are you going to manage your website? Do they have a good control panel? This also would depend on your level of experience with working with your web site so you might want to assess your skill level and then ask the host or research if they will be a good fit for you.

3. What kind of support does this reliable web hosting provider offer? Do they have 24/7 support? Is that support over the phone, or chat? Or do you have to e-mail them or put in a "support ticket" and they'll get back to you? I don't know about you, but I prefer phone support or online chat. Email can take forever and in some instances just tells me that the host isn't willing to make time for me to assist me with any issues that I may have.

4. And then there is price. We all know the "host your site for $1.00 per month and get 500 billion gigabytes of disk space and 1 Trillion gigabytes of bandwidth or transfer. Who really uses all that "promised" amount of resources any way? Most sites do not. Make your decision on the quality of the hosting provider and not the amount of disk space they give you. A friend once told me that cheap servers aren't always cheap and you may very well experience this if you make your decision based on price.

The main point is to determine what your needs are and then match them with a suitable web hosting provider. Don't be afraid to call your potential host and feel them out. Look around and read up on focus group sites to find the best host for you.

Argon Hosting offers solid web hosting plans at affordable prices.

Category: Web Design and Tips

Just about everyone has a website today. Certainly, if you're in business one way or another, you have a website. And people have different objectives behind their sites. Some are content-driven. Others provide an online service and have sophisticated user interfaces. Others still are designed to entertain and amuse their visitors. But regardless what your website is designed to do, there are a few primary objectives you should keep in mind before you start building.

This first website objective is FOCUS. Your site needs to have a narrow and specific focus. Why is this? Because there are literally millions of websites out there and the visitors you're lucky enough to attract will only take a few seconds to decide whether they'll stick around or whether they'll simply click the back button and continue browsing elsewhere. Within those few seconds, your site needs to communicate exactly what it's designed to do so the visitor can decide if it meets his or her needs or not.




One of the best exercises to enhance the focus of your site is to establish a 15 to 25-word positioning statement that guides all your development activity going forward. Think about it like a mission statement. It should articulate exactly what your website does in just 15 to 25 words.

Another way to look at it is to do a Google search for a keyword in your field and see what comes up in the results page. Under each listing, there's a short description of what that site is all about. As it turns out, the search engines get that description from the meta tags on those websites but it's exactly the same thing. What do you want YOUR description to say?

Once you've established a positioning statement, you should display it prominently on your homepage. It should be one of the first things visitors see when they land on your website. And as I mentioned above, the same statement should be included in your meta tags as your site description. That way, the search engines know exactly what your site is about at the same time. And if your site shows up in a search results page, that description will show up as part of your listing.

The second objective is DEPTH. Again, this objective serves your visitors as well as the search engines. Build a massive amount of content all about your narrow business focus. That way, if a visitor lands on your website and decides in the first few seconds that they need what you're providing, they'll go on to find a ton of resources all about that topic, satisfying their need and establishing trust along the way.

Depth of content helps your website with the search engines as well. Google uses complicated algorithms to assess value to different websites and one of the biggest things they look for is content. If your website has a narrow focus and lots of content about that focus, it will get ranked higher within your area of expertise. Google will consider your site a good resource for people searching for your narrow focus.

The third objective is to make your site STICKY. This is a relatively new term that describes a website's ability to keep a visitor on the site. A lot of sites do a fairly good job of attracting visitors but many of those visitors take one look at the site and leave within a second or two. As I mentioned earlier, the positioning statement can do a lot to help someone understand what your site is designed to do. But you need more than that to keep them browsing.

The visitor needs to see immediate value when they visit your site. They need to see something that will benefit them right away. They need to see something they can use to make their own lives better. This is the foundation behind today's value-first marketing moniker. People have been over-marketed and have become skeptical in clever marketing slogans. They want to see the value. They want proof that you can deliver. They want to sample your product or service before they buy anything.

You should spend some time and think about what you can offer your website visitors as soon as they land on your site. It could be information. It could be a tool or calculator of some kind. It could be a free subscription. It could be an entertaining video or an interactive game they can play. Whatever it is, you need to capture your visitor within seconds and guide them to something that will benefit them.

Once they've received one piece of value, give them a second and then a third. Guide them through a maze of value, encouraging them to continue browsing and discovering even more. This is the key to a sticky website and you can get a good idea of your progress by measuring your average time on the site through your analytics platform.

There are a million different websites out there and they're all designed to achieve different objectives. But each one of those websites can be a bit better by incorporating more focus, depth and stickiness. All three improve your website' effectiveness and all three offer benefits with the search engines as well.

Category: Hosting Tips & Tricks

More and more we are seeing hackers out there exploit email addresses and webmail logins using dictionary style attacks. A dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by searching a large number of possibilities. In contrast with a brute force attack, where all possibilities are searched through exhaustively, a dictionary attack only tries possibilities which are most likely to succeed, typically derived from a list of words in a dictionary. Generally, dictionary attacks succeed because many people have a tendency to choose passwords which are short (7 characters or less), single words in a dictionary, or are simple variations that are easy to predict, such as appending a single digit to a word.

Use
Dictionary attacks may be applied in two main situations:

1. in cryptanalysis, in trying to determine the decryption key for a given piece of ciphertext;
2. in computer security, in trying to circumvent an authentication mechanism for accessing a computer system by guessing passwords.

Spammers often use a form of dictionary attack, sometimes known as a Directory Harvest Attack, for e-mail address harvesting. For example, a spammer may try sending messages to adam@example.com, barbara@example.com, carl@example.com, etc. Any addresses to which messages are delivered, as opposed to being bounced back, can be added to the spammer's list of known-valid addresses.

Having a Strong password can divert these attempts and keep your data safe. A strong password is sufficiently long, random, or otherwise producible only by the user who chose it, such that successfully guessing it will require more time than the password cracker is willing to use guessing it. The length of time deemed to be too long will vary with the attacker, the attacker's resources, the ease with which a password can be tried, and the value of the password to the attacker. A student's password might not be worth more than a few seconds of computer time, while a password controlling access to a large bank's electronic money transfer system might be worth many weeks of computer time.

Examples of stronger passwords include:

t3wahSetyeT4 -- case-sensitive and alphanumerics
4pRte!ai@3 -- case-sensitive, alphanumerical, punctuation and one "special" character
MoOoOfIn245679 -- case-sensitive, alphanumerical
1382465304H -- a string of numerals ending with a letter
Tpftcits4Utg! -- A mixture of varying-case letters, one numeral, and punctuation. It is memorable as an initialism of "The password for this computer is too strong for you to guess!"

If you are in doubt that your passwords are safe enough, you can ask us or simply use the above as a guideline to creating your passwords. There are also many password generators on the market that will help you create Strong passwords to keep you safe.

Category: Web Hosting

Link Building is a search engine optimization method where a web site owner tries to build relevant, quality inbound links to their website, for purpose of increasing the importance and value of their web site, and this in turn increases search engine rankings.

Inbound links are one of the most indispensable factors for getting your keyword high ranking, and most of search engines are ranking their search results on the link popularity from your web site. Search Engine Company believes that it is not number of quantity links that matters, but the quality of those links is important. They cab help you in making your link building and website promotion easier and faster. Link building is not the number of links you attracts, but about how much it assists your web site search engine performance. A good link building campaign would surely bring you real customers - and they always remain valuable.

Building links through reciprocal link exchanges is an easy yet very powerful website promotional tool. If done appropriately, increasing your linkage will:

* Increase your site traffic. * Improve your appearance in the search engines. * Provide an added source to your website. * Save money. * Save time.

Types of Link Building

* Reciprocal link building * Directory Submission * Buying Text Advertisements * Buying Site wide Text Links * Buying Site wide links across web journals / web logs / blogs * Buying Links from Related sites * Article Reproduction * Press Releases * Page rank Optimization / Page rank Increase

There is no alternate for high quality content. It is content that people look for, content that gets you up the search engine rankings and content, which motivates others web sites to link to yours. But don't put out content just for the sake of having something for search engines to index. Every piece of good content on your site needs to be there for a purpose - it must support your sales proposition and take your customers a modest further along the sales cycle. So for getting quality links you first need to concentrate on content.