podcast about web hosts and web hosting topics
A web site visitor should never be confused by your web site’s navigational layout. Every web page out there should have an easy way to navigate both to new web pages and categories, but also back out of them. Think of it as reaching a fork in an old country road, choosing to go down the left road – and then turning around and finding a pink hippopotamus in a tutu. While that might sound ridiculous – many web sites leave visitors with the pink hippo more often than not.
Do your web pages flow? By flow, I mean can you read through it without asking yourself what is this about again? If you find yourself stopping and starting when reading your own web pages, take this basic writing advice and try it out on your own web site content.
We have gone over the fact before that it is important to keep a backup of your web site, and if you haven’t done so – you should do so sooner rather than later. However, how many backups do you have of your web site? I think with the start of the new year, we might all need to make a backup of our web site backups.
Before you claim that I am just overly suspicious of bad thing happening, let me make my case. What would you do if your web site went down?
How does somebody turn a complaint into a feature? Anybody out there, who runs a web hosting company, can tell you they hear complaints about this, that and the other, every single day. When public opinion becomes SO strong, you might want to take the idea into consideration.
You do not have to drastically change the way you do business though. If you are successful in one area of business, do not toss it aside to do something else that is more popular. I got a question submitted to me the other day from Matt, which touches on this very topic.
Here is what Matt had to say:
I run a free hosting site, and I’ve been at it for 4 years, and we’ve got very high rating, and uptime, and server speed, but I’ve still got this problem where everyone expects our service to be a sort of scam or not very good because of the price. If I start charging for it, I have to say goodbye to a lot of people who I’ve been helping for a long time, and if I don’t, it seems to me there’s always this group of people who wont choose it. I mean, if you want to pay money for your hosting, I’ll gladly take donations, and I have many people who do donate. If you have time, because I know you’re very busy, could you give me your honest opinion of our service and what we need to do to appeal more to small businesses and community organizations?
Large corporate enterprises are not the only ones that need to be careful about security and having the tools in place to recover from a web hosting disaster.
My good buddy Barry, from Layered Tech posed an interesting quandary to me the other day.
As someone who works for a major player in hosting, one of the biggest problems I see on a daily basis is people having their server hacked and used for some nefarious purposes such as spam, DOS attacks, and more. There are many ways to combat this costly threat, what is the most cost-effective way for the small to medium-sized business?
It is important for everybody to have a good offense and a good defense when it comes to all the proverbial “natural disasters” that can happen in the web hosting world. My best advice would be to have a good strategy in place first, so you can prevent the problems from happening in the first place. You have to be proactive, and not reactive.
Could H1N1 (the Swine Flu) take down the Internet? Now, as we all get ready to get out shots, wash our hands and cough into our elbows, once has to wonder if an increase of sick people staying at home and browsing the Internet could possibly threaten the stability of the system?
According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, absenteeism during a pandemic could peak at 50% during a six week period. That would cause an unsteady rise in Internet usage for watching movies, playing games and doing other bandwidth heavy activities that are usually saved for the later hours in the day.
So you want to start working as an independent contractor to a web hosting company, or you just started your first job. Before you switch to working remotely as independent contractor for a web host, here are a few things you should remember:
If you keep these ten tips in mind, I am sure you will be a very successful independent contractor, and any web host around the world would be more than happy to have you.
One thing you have to watch out for when you start working remotely in the web hosting world is how many hours you work. Now some might think you should be working as much as you can, while this is true – you also need to have limits. Any web host who would hire you as a remote worker should get you a set number of hours per week to work.
Don’t do more for less. When looking for a remote position with a web hosting company, many hosts may ask you to do as much as you can. You should do your work assigned to you, however don’t let them get away with not giving you a set number of hours a day to work. Any remote position should have the same benefits of a regular “going to the office” job, meaning you should work X amount of days, get X amount of days off and work a set number of X hours per day.
I can speak from experience, as somebody who will usually go beyond the call of duty, and as somebody who was fooled into this in my first remote web hosting job. At the time, I was inexperienced and thought it might be normal to be on call 24/7 to help out with answering e-mails, or working live chat for a web hosting company. What was the end result? I was so burnt out I didn’t take another remote web hosting job for two years.
Now, I am not saying any web host out there will go out of their way to screw you over, sometimes they need all the help they can get and they might forget about the fact that they are overworking you. If there is one thing I could tell every remote web hosting tech out there, to sum things up, it would be don’t allow yourself to be available 24/7.
So when you sign up to work remotely for a web hosting company, be sure to get it in print in your contract your weekly hours, days off and when or how you get paid if your asked to work overtime. Both the web host an yourself need to be clear on these limits so that they can get the expected work out of you, and you don’t get overworked in the process.
Some people in the hosting industry look at collocation as a dirty word? Why does collocation hosting have such a bad rap? Well, first let us take a look at what collocation hosting is really about.
At its core this means that the provisioning of space, bandwidth and power is controlled by a third-party data center. They do not control it all though. Most of the time, the web host who is using the third-party’s data center services will need to provide the management for the hardware or servers they are running from there.
To try to make sense of this, lets say I want to start a store. I go rent a building downtown that has all the shelves, cash registers, and shopping carts – however I have to stock the store myself and, of course, figure out a way to bring the customers in the door. Instead of spending money on buying the store and some of the basic necessities, I get to rent them – in turn bringing my overall costs down.
So, with it explained like that – where is the evil in it?
Well, many web hosting elite look down upon this practice because it is a money saving practice. It lowers the proverbial bar on the point of entry somebody has to become a web host too.
Since building a data center from the ground up is a very expensive and time consuming act, I see no problem in getting your hosting through collocation.
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Mitch Keeler is nothing more than your average Joe trying to leave his mark on the world though both his professional work and his online projects, articles, podcasts and more.
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