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Web Hosting, Web Hosting UK, Dedicated Servers, Managed Hosting, Dedicated Server | CWCS
Running a commercial website can be quite an exacting business, especially if your site is involved in e-commerce. You will doubtless be juggling the competing pressures of online marketing, ensuring you are making a healthy profit, of keeping content fresh and lively, dealing with forum feedback, and engaging with the social network.
Given these competing demands the last thing you will want to be concerned about is hardware logistics: managing your servers, making sure they are running smoothly, getting the latest patches applied, and stored securely, in a suitable air-conditioned environment.
It’s also the case that some business premises are not necessarily best suited to housing IT equipment. It is not unknown for the machine hosting a company website to be tucked away in a broom cupboard in the MD’s office.
However, there is an alternative approach, known as “Colocation”. In a colocation hosting arrangement a company’s servers are physically located to the data centre of your web hosting company. The company’s site owners or IT staff will have full remote access to a server, as well as the opportunity for site visits as required. They will also have full admin rights at root level to any collocated servers.
Here at CWCS, with our excellent technical support, we specialise in taking the hassles out of your hardware, so that you can get on with running your website. You can be sure that your equipment will be housed in a secure data centre, and a climate-controlled environment, which is both fire-resistant and theft proof.
In today’s fast-moving digital world, where information always seems readily available, it is only too easy to get lulled in to a false sense of security. Indeed, it can be hard to imagine this data that has become part of your everyday life suddenly not being there.
Indeed, it cannot be stressed enough, that data loss remains a continuing and very real risk. Natural disasters, extreme weather, power failures, component wear and tear: these can all cause computer disks to fail, and lead to serious data loss. The only way to guard against this ever-present risk is to back up your data regularly, consistently and securely.
Ideally, however, you should have a plan B, and even a plan C to protect your most precious data. Where your website is concerned, your backup “plan A” should, of course, be the responsibility of your web hosting company. Do gain assurances from any prospective web hosting company that they have a sound backup policy. Your plan B could complement your website hosting company’s backup service – through backing up the most recent local copy of your site to a USB external hard drive.
Finally, it’s better to be safe than sorry, so have a plan C in mind. This could consist of an account with one of the increasingly popular internet backup services.
Here at CWCS we take backup seriously, and will ensure that your site is regularly backed up to one of our highly secure, weather-proof, theft-proof, and fire-resistant data centres.
Web hosting is a peculiar combination of art, high-tech and customer relations, and it can be difficult to get right. What’s more, sometimes the customer can come out worst from shoddy deals cobbled together by “here today gone tomorrow” hosting companies.
To help you choose the right web hosting company, here are some quick tips.
First visit and scour a potential company’s website. Check that a variety of services is offered, from starter packages to complex hosting. Such variety can demonstrate awareness that websites have different needs as they become increasingly sophisticated.
Next, ensure the company gives full information up-front about what you will get for your money, from bandwidth offered, hard disk space and pop email boxes.
At this stage put in a call to the sales office. Verify that the packages advertised truly contain all the promoted features.
Next, consider the uptime offered for websites. Treat rash promises of 100% uptime with caution, as any professional company will tell you that this is not feasible, since Linux and Windows servers sometimes need a little downtime for proper maintenance.
Finally, probe the company on its technical support: view with suspicion any companies which only offer email support, as this could mean you are kept at arm’s length.
At CWCS, we offer a truly professional website hosting service, and we’ve been in business for well nigh a decade to prove it. We give a 99.99% operational guarantee, and provide stunning technical support, on a range of competitively priced packages.
There can be few things worse for website owners than that breezy phone call from a friend, saying “just thought I’d let you know: your site’s broken”.
‘Broken’ can of-course mean different things to different people, so take a look for yourself as soon as possible.
Here are some scenarios that can come under the heading “broken”.
A single page could be unavailable whilst the rest of the site remains up. This is known as a ‘404′ error. Start by trying to reproduce the problem on another computer. If you and others also get the missing page then this could indicate file corruption on the dedicated server, or at worse deletion by a rogue process.
Sometimes, part of a page can appear garbled or not display properly. This could be related to browser compatibility, and should be taken up with your web developer as soon as possible. If you yourself are the developer, then you will need to work on debugging the issue methodically, and perhaps consulting with other developers on forums.
The most serious problem is when a whole site becomes unavailable to all users, i.e. when a site ‘goes down’. This is an urgent issue for your web hosting company, and they would need to investigate their hosting server and diagnose the problem.
Here at CWCS Managed Hosting, we have we have a dedicated, expert technical support team, passionate about giving the best possible website hosting service to our clients. Should your site develop technical problems of any kind we should be your first port of call.
The internet can be entertaining, educational, a social hub, and – for many businesses – a lucrative marketplace. However, it can also perilous, with spyware, viruses, phishing scams, identity theft, and other cyber crime posing constant threats.
Whilst no-one can expect 100% protection from security threats, it is possible to achieve the best possible protection. Such optimal protection is best achieved by taking a multi-pronged approach.
The first step is to ensure that high-quality security for your site itself is provided by your web hosting company. Make sure that a robust, industry-standard firewall is protecting the server which hosts your site, as well as current antivirus software. You can find this out with a phone call to customer services or perhaps technical support, if you are already signed up.
Next, configure the email boxes (‘pop 3′ mailboxes) that come with your account to make use of the antivirus and anti-spam services on offer. This ensures that, should you be checking your emails in a client on a home or work PC, there is already one robust protection layer in place.
Next, make sure you regularly and frequently change the password for access to your site Control Panel, in order to minimise hacking risks.
You should also check that any developers or designers working for you have fully up to date security software on their hardware.
We at CWCS, a long-established web hosting company, do our part by providing robust security software on our servers, and regular backups for your site.
Many site owners, once they have found a suitable web hosting company and launched their website, could be forgiven for thinking “job done”.
But the site launch is really only the beginning of a continuing process of development. This is especially the case if your site represents a business, and if you are involved in e-commerce.
One post-launch objective will be to find ways of gauging your site’s success. ‘Success’ means different things to different people. The owner of a website for a 10-member stamp collecting club might be thrilled with 10 unique visitors a month. The same figure might spell disaster for an online retailer.
Given the difficulty of defining “success” here are some suggestions for objective success metrics.
A well promoted, moderate sized business should aim for around 100 unique visitors per day. Large businesses could get around 1,000 unique visits per day. On the other hand a global company with a substantial marketing budget might expect around 100,000 daily unique visits.
If your site has an e-commerce section, another success gauge is your “conversion” rate: the percentage of visits to a site which turn into completed transactions. A realistic conversion rate to aim for, for medium sized businesses, is around 2%.
Here at CWCS managed hosting, we will do our very best to suggest objectively the best web site hosting package for your site. For instance, should the site exceed your success indicators, generating large volumes of traffic, we might recommend the dedicated server option.
When you are running a website, statistics can actually be helpful, so long as you know how to get the best out of them.
Your web site hosting company should provide you with statistics reports for your site via the Control Panel, the software available in a browser to help you configure your site.
The first statistic to look out for is “page impressions” or “page hits”. This is the number of times that pages on your site have been viewed by any user over a given period, and is a simple gauge of user activity.
However, a high number of page impressions could be misleading as you don’t know whether this is made up of a few users browsing the site many times, or many users browsing the site less frequently, or a combination of those activities.
To get a complete view of the site’s performance, also look at the Unique User count: i.e. the number of individual site visitors over a given period. Indeed, in late 2006 “unique users” overtook “page impressions” as the preferred compulsory metric for one influential website auditing company.
Here at CWCS Managed Hosting, as a web hosting company that’s been in business for over a decade, and with stellar 24/7 technical support by phone or email, we are always happy to give guidance on getting the best out of your website statistics.
Having found a website hosting company and launched your site, you might want to consider adding online retail to your site, otherwise known as e-commerce.
There’s no doubting that e-commerce is almost impossible to ignore for any growing business. The figures tell there own story with the UK e-commerce market now valued at around £69 billion.
However, before leaping on the bandwagon there are some practical steps to consider.
First, to trade online beyond comprehensively, you will need what’s called a ‘Merchant Account’. This is a financial contract with a merchant acquiring bank that will let you accept debit and credit card payments. You can acquire one from a third party broker or direct from the banks themselves.
Next you will need to set up your website to handle e-commerce. There are a range of options, from simply using Paypal (which does not require a merchant account), to complex e-commerce software, which would include the vital ’shopping cart’. Many website designers are now geared up to integrating e-commerce in to their projects from the outset, so it is worth considering handing the whole process over to a professional designer.
Finally, a reliable, secure web hosting company, which can guarantee maximum uptime for your site, is essential. Here at CWCS, with our 99.99% operational guarantee, we can look after all your web hosting needs, and will be happy to assist you with any increase in traffic should you decide to branch out in to e-commerce.
Once you have found a suitable web hosting company and launched your website, you will obviously want to ensure that your site is returned as a search result when people search for the site itself or its related content.
Site owners want their site to appear high up in the search results for the major search engines. It’s easier said than done to achieve this, and an industry has sprung up devoted to “Search engine optimisation”.
There are, however, some straightforward measures you can take for yourself.
First, ensure that your site has a distinctive, catchy name that does not resemble other popular sites to much.
Examples are “bebo”, “flickr”, and “reddit”. A unique site name increases the chances of sites like “bebo” appearing at the top of the results list for a search on the word “bebo”.
Next, make sure that each page on your site has a short, uncluttered title that precisely matches the page content. To a search engine the title is one of the most important parts of the page. However, don’t neglect page content – it should be kept up to date, ensuring your site is not “forgotten” by search engines. You should also create a site map to make navigation of your site as easy as possible.
Finally, it would be unfortunate if your site was findable on search engines, but only intermittently available to users. Here at CWCS site “downtime” is not an issue. We guarantee 99.9% operational guarantee with all our web hosting packages, and provide unrivalled technical support.
Once you’ve found a suitable web hosting company and set up your site, you may want to add a discussion forum as one means of maintaining interest in, and activity on, your website.
Forums can bring real benefits to a website, especially a retailing e-commerce site, but there are some risks to bear in mind, and some key tasks required in order to keep the forum running smoothly.
The main advantage of a forum is that usage of your site is likely to be encouraged. Users are more likely to make use of the site if they know there’s an area where they can air their views, and even sound off if necessary. Busy and lively forums can trigger return visits.
A forum is also a signal to your audience that you are customer focused. Furthermore forums are valuable to businesses as a means of getting instant qualitative feedback on new products.
There are, however, some potential disadvantages:
*An underused forum can be off-putting to users. Better to have no forum at all than one that is hardly used.
* You may also get negative comment on a forum, and someone will need to be on point to handle these.
* Also, do ensure that all users sign up to “Terms and Conditions”, and that your forum is politely and regularly moderated. There’s plenty of guidance on “terms and conditions” available on the internet.
Here at CWCS we can advise on the best web hosting package for your forum needs.
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