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Web Hosting, Web Hosting UK, Dedicated Servers, Managed Hosting, Dedicated Server | CWCS
Web hosting comes in a variety of flavours. Small-scale websites tend to be comfortable with renting space alongside other sites on a shared server.
However, for large scale sites, with database, e-commerce, and multimedia components, as well as high bandwidth requirements, a dedicated server soon becomes the preferred option.
A dedicated server is a single server devoted entirely to hosting a single website – yours.
There are a number of advantages in choosing Linux as the operating system for your dedicated server.
Linux is an open source operating system that has grown in popularity since the early 1990s, especially – combined with Apache web server software – as an operating system for web servers.
“Open source” means that Linux is free to install and run, so choosing Linux helps to keep costs down. Do, however bear in mind that, with any professionally supported web hosting service there will always be associated costs.
Another reason for choosing Linux dedicated servers is their stability. They can have many months of “uptime”, meaning that no restart is required, because the system has not been troubled by crashes or problem software processes.
Linux servers are, furthermore, considered to be highly secure: known for being more resistant to hacking and less susceptible to viruses than other operating systems.
However, even if you choose Linux you will still need installation and support services. Here at CWCS our speedy 24-hour phone and email support is unrivalled, whilst our Linux system administrators know their product inside out.
Once you have found a website hosting company which suits you’re requirements and you’ve launched your site, you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be time to take a breather.
However, you could argue it’s at this point that the real work begins – the maintenance and upkeep of your site, and ensuring it stays fresh and lively.
One key routine task error checking. If new content has been added make sure there are no spelling errors and punctuation is all as it should be. Then there is link checking: make sure that you are linking to any sites or pages that no longer exist.
If you are running advertisements on the site, ensure that the adverts still link to valid sites. There is site maintenance software available which could help you with these tasks.
As well as error checking you need to find ways of keeping your site fresh. If you are running an e-commerce component, check your web stats to find what’s popular and ensure that this product gets the necessary prominence.
It’s also a good idea to have both News and Blog sections, and keep both up to date regularly, with lively, well researched, and factually correct, content. This is particularly the case if your site covers a niche market.
It’s important to have a web hosting company which can keep up with your business needs, and here at CWCS, as your site grows in popularity, we can always advise on the most suitable web hosting package for you or your business.
In these increasingly perilous times, with cyber crime, other types of crime, even the unpredictable effects of climate change, all presenting a range of threats to your data, it’s more important than ever to have a sound backup strategy for your web site.
As well as the inevitable Plan A, you should have a Plan B, even a Plan C.
Plan A should be the backup service provide by your web hosting company, which should be included as part of your package. Make sure that this backup service is provided when negotiating your package.
Plan B is the backup system you set up as part of your own home or business. The first step is to decide what kind of backup you want to run. Let’s take the example of a business with a medium-sized website. You could acquire a brand name external hard drive and make a nightly copy of your web site from your web hosting company’s servers on to the external hard drive attached to your PC or laptop. You would most likely make that copy using an ftp programme.
Furthermore you could go the extra mile and have a Plan C. This could take the form of purchasing an online backup account, and running a nightly backup to the online company, which complements the backup to the external drive.
Here at CWCS we are confident and happy to be your Plan A for backup: we offer secure, regular backups of your site as part of all our web hosting packages.
As Cheap as Chips
We can understand why the markets we’re in can be confusing for our customers, as all our competitors use sleight of hand and subtle pricing claims to make it as difficult for people to understand exactly what they are getting for their money.
An example would be a dedicated server enquiry we had from a customer the other day, where our price was £199 per month and our competitor’s price was £69 per month. Clearly they’re not for the same thing, they can’t possibly be, margins in our business are nowhere near large enough for there to be more than a 300% difference in price for the same service!
So, we went and did some digging to find out about our competitor’s dedicated server offering and here’s what we found:-
- We only use HP hardware; our competitor doesn’t say what they use (wonder why !)
- We include 24/7 telephone support direct to 2nd and 3rd line engineers in our dedicated server service; our competitor only offers email support with no published SLA
- Our sales department answer the phone in less than 10 seconds and can provide accurate and helpful pre-sales advice; our competitor doesn’t have a phone number you can call
- Both of our data centres and all of our people are in the UK and have English as their first language; our competitor’s dedicated servers are hosted in someone else’s data centre, somewhere in Europe and, even if you wanted to call them, you can’t
- We include a backup option in our standard offering; our competitor don’t offer any form of backups on their dedicated servers
- Our pricing doesn’t have any hidden extras, what you see on our website is what we will provide; once we’d specced up our competitor’s dedicated server to as close to our standard specification as possible (noting the aforementioned discrepancies), it was actually more expensive than ours!
Viral marketing is a largely web based or word-of-mouth form of product promotion, in which a marketing message is passed from user to user often exponentially.
There are potential benefits to your website, and your business, in a well-planned and run viral marketing campaign.
Web-based email companies have attracted large volumes of new users, in part, by appending a self-advertising message at the bottom of every email sent. This type of subtle marketing contrasts with more lively one-off set pieces, such as the web video promoting a guitar tuition site, which showed a young man strumming brilliantly in his bedroom, and attracted some 45 million views.
The main advantage of viral marketing is that it can be a low-cost way, effective, global form of promotion. Furthermore, it could the best type of PR you can get for your company.
Some tips: Make sure your message is wrapped up in a catchy, spontaneous package. A fun video, entertainment news story, or catch-phrase, are possibilities. There should also be something inclusive about your project: don’t restrict yourself to niche audiences.
If you use social networking sites, make your presence on them focussed and professional.
Finally, be prepared for a surge in hits on your website should your campaign be a big hit: make sure your web hosting package is up to it. Here at CWCS we might recommend, for instance, that you upgrade to a more high capacity web hosting package before embarking on your viral marketing campaign.
When shopping around for the best web hosting company, your top priority should be server resilience.
Server reliability is crucial because the 24/7 availability of your site depends on it. You really don’t want your site to be going down, as not only will you miss out on traffic but your customers might well see this as a reflection on you, not your website hosting company.
On server performance, the company should offer uptime percentages in the very high 90s, maintenance by qualified system administrators, a physically secure data centre, and a rock-solid backup system.
Reliable technical support is a further high priority. When something goes wrong, you need a polite, helpful, rapid response – ideally on a 24/7 basis.
A further priority should be flexibility. Your website may change and grow over the years, and you will need a web hosting service that is capable of “scaling up” with you. Make sure a full range of packages is on offer, reflecting different scales of website, from small 3-page information sites, to major e-commerce enterprises.
Finally, look for value for money: a web hosting company that charges fair rates and a professional, well-staffed service.
Here at CWCS we are fully confident of being able to meet your needs. We offer a 99.99% operational guarantee on our servers. We provide a full variety of hosting packages (both the Linux server and Windows server are supported), at reasonable rates, and are passionate about technical support, which is 24/7 by phone and email for all packages.
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