Affordable Web Hosting Is A Must For Any Webmaster

When searching for a web host affordable web hosting is the goal, but it is also important that you choose the plan that best suits your needs. Affordable web hosting is easy to find if you know what you want in web hosting and you compare the prices of a web host and many of their competitors. Affordable web hosting is wonderful, but only if you are getting all of the qualities that you need from your web host. Another important consideration in choosing an affordable web hosting is the customer support services.

When having an online presence is a must, but money isn't flowing quite as well as any webmaster would like, affordable web hosting services can really save the day. As any entrepreneur knows, it is wise to shop for services and if you are building a web site, you are going to be shopping for affordable web hosting. This is of particular importance when we consider affordable web hosting for small business. Your search for a web hosting partner that is affordable should include investigating their equipment, their connection, and their integrity. There could be a cheap affordable web hosting solution that takes care of all these aspects and still gives you good quality service, and this is precisely what you need to be looking at.

Hosting services will also give a variety of bandwidth that is available. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data transferred from your site to your users. Every time someone visits your website, they use your bandwidth. Two of the most important features to any website plan are the amount of disk space allocated to your domain (how much file space your website will take up on the web hosts server) and the amount of bandwidth you are allowed to use each month.

Affordable web hosting is what most people are looking for. Affordable web hosting is the most important element in any web sites plan for development. Having a good reliable and affordable web host is the first step to success. If youre going to spend time on anything, taking the time to find good affordable web hosting is a good investment.

One of the best affordable web hosting compaines offers a coupon for the first months hosting for only one penny, with great monthly rates after that. Get the coupon code here.

Is Trackback Spam Messing Up Your Web Stats? Use Google Analytics To Figure It Out!

I get so tired of looking at my web statistics in Awstats and then going over to Google Analytics to see the actual traffic to my blog. Why is there such a big difference? One of the reasons is trackback spam, and it affects a lot of WordPress sites. This post isn't going to show you how to eliminate trackback spam, but it will show you how to live with it, and how to figure out your actual traffic (or at least eliminate the trackback.php visits).

If you don't know, Awstats is a web statistics program that gets its data from the apache access log. That means that it tracks all of the traffic to your site. This includes trackback spammers, normal visitors, bots, everything. So when looking at my Awstats statistics I see really inflated numbers (ones that I wish were real) that don't account for the actual traffic I have. I want the program to show real people who are engaged in the content, not Joe Trackbackspammer (which is most likely a bot) posting trackbacks about how to find some kind of drug, or good time, or casino, etc, etc.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, is a javascript based web stats tool. It's free from the folks at Google. It only tracks pages that actually have the Analytics javascript on them. In my case, the culprit, trackback.php does not have the code, so Analytics doesn't count it. I can instantly see a better view of actual traffic to my site. Using Analytics in this way would also block out legitimate trackbacks, but I get so few (like .01%) that it doesn't bother me.

One thing that does bother me about both stats programs is that you can't tie who is visiting with what they visited (unless I'm missing something and haven't found it yet). However, this is really easy to do by looking in the raw log file. You'll need to obtain the raw log file from your host and look at it with text editor. I suggest something like VIM since these have a tendency to be huge files (believe me, it kills Dreamweaver to open these kind of files). Just take a look in your Awstats log to see which ip addresses you want to look up in the log file. Look for the ones that have equal numbers of Pages and Hits in high numbers. This usually means that the computer associated with the suspect ip address is hitting a single page over and over again. Once you have an ip address use the find tools in VIM to find that ip address. If there is a whole slew of trackback.php visits from one ip on one or several posts then they are spamming you.

So how do you block them? Well the easiest and most drastic thing to do is to block their ip address from viewing your site. This is how I've gotten rid of some annoying spammers. The problem is that some of them use random ip addresses so you can't block them using this method. Also, you may inadvertently block a lot of users if the computer using this ip address is behind a router or switch that controls a network. If those problems didn't make you flinch then simply add this code to your .htaccess file and say sayonara to those spammers:

#Deny IP adresses

order allow,deny
deny from 000.000.000.000
allow from all

Replace 000.000.000.000 with your suspect ipaddress, of course.

You should also install the Akismet plugin, which comes with WordPress. All you have to do is enable it in the Plugins section of the Admin interface. This will eliminate almost all of your spam, including comment spam, by placing it in a spam folder of sorts. The spam is deleted after a period of time automatically and it has worked like a charm so far for me. The only downside to this method is that the spammers still get to your server and waste resources, whereas the method above completely blocks them.

Did you like this blogging tip? Read more like it at DEVTRENCH: Web Development From the Front Lines

DEVTRENCH is a Web Development Blog written for web designers and programmers who need need up to date tips and tricks on how to create great websites.

Linux Servers: Do You Understand the Difference?

First of all, some people are worried that they will not be able to use Linux hosting because they run Windows on their PCs. However, what operating system you run on your own PC is irrelevant to which web hosting environment you can use, because the latter is run remotely on a web server, where your website files will be uploaded.

Linux and Microsoft Windows are two different operating systems. Windows is a well-known household name and does not require much introduction. Linux is a new version of the Unix operating system. Both these operating systems make excellent environments for web hosting. However, there are some differences between them.

To help you decide whether Linux or Windows hosting is better for you, we look at the following elements:

Cost

Linux is known as an "open source" operating system. i.e. there is no licensing fees to pay. Therefore, compared to Windows, Linux is very cheap. Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft has begun enforcing software activation. This means that a single copy of Windows can only be installed on one computer. With Linux, once you own a copy, you are free to install it as many times as you wish on any number of computers.

Reliability

Linux is reputed to be very stable and reliable. This means that a Linux server is much less likely to crash than a Windows server. Subsequently, a Linux server will mean more 'up time' for your website.

Experience

Linux has many more years of experience than Windows in hosting.

Speed

There is no real difference in speed between Linux and Windows, but Linux is slightly faster in processing basic web pages.

Functionality

Windows support ASP (Active Server Pages), a Microsoft programming/scripting language, which allows you to build dynamically database-driven web pages by connecting to a Microsoft database such as SQL Server or Access. Linux does not support ASP nor Microsoft databases, but uses MySQL database instead.

If you use Microsoft Frontpage to create your website, it doesn't mean that you have to choose Windows hosting. All Linux accounts come free with Frontpage extensions, which allow you to upload your Frontpage website to your web space on a Linux server.

Scripts

There are many CGI programs available on the Internet. The majority of these are Perl scripts and have been developed on Linux / Unix web servers. So they tend to install more smoothly and operate more reliably on a Linux server. Moreover, many Perl scripts are downloadable from the Internet free of charge.

To summarise, most users find that Linux hosting is easier to use, more reliable, provides free, open source software and is much cheaper than Windows hosting. So unless you particularly need to use Windows specific features such as ASP and an Access database, it is probably a better choice to choose Linux over Windows. For more information on Linux hosting, visit www.frontierpowerhosting.com

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