There are a few important facts that one needs to realize before they opt for a dot net address. Quite often when people need to commit the address of a website to memory, they will not remember the dot net and the first place they will check is the given address with a dot com ending. Many times when they do not find it there, they will hardly ever think of using dot net to repeat the search. That is a lost visitor and maybe even potential client.

What is even more worrying is that there is increasing evidence to suggest that an increasing number of people end up at a website after hearing about it either from a friend or acquaintance, or by seeing an advertisement on Television or hearing about it on radio or reading something about the site. When committing the website address to memory very few will distinctly remember the dot net address if that is the domain name that you have chosen.

Having said that, let us also appreciate the fact it is becoming increasingly difficult for anybody to land a decent dot com address. After years of use, there is hardly any short catchy name that you can think of that will not have been already taken up. Do not even mention search-engine key word friendly domain names which will be virtually impossible to get. This is the reason why folks often settle for a dot net address. Others do not even bother to start their search with dot com domains. This is a big mistake despite the unavailability of good dot com domains, which we have already acknowledged.

You will require no or little knowledge of HTML as you can purchase a whole package from a web hosting company which should include some form of website developing software and your domain name plus the hosting of your website. Give some thought to your domain name. It should be easy for people to type in and remember. Not too long, succinct and preferably no hyphens. So you have chosen your domain name and your hosting service now you must develop your site. Again give some thought to this. How many pages you are likely to produce, how many links you will need. What sort of information is going on each page. If you are completely new to this then I would suggest that using your site editor software you produce a first draft and publish it. You can always modify everything later as you go along. This will give you your first website which you can then submit to the search engines albeit not exactly what you want or one that is going to attract visitors.

Now you need to do quite a lot of research on the internet as to how to make your site visitor friendly and search engine friendly. Here you will discover the importance of good content, changing content, appropriate keywords, backward links, article writing and good copy on the website. Taking this information on board will enable you to restructure and rewrite your site over a period of time, probably many times. However all the time this learning process is going on your site is actually published on the Web so is likely to start being trawled by search engines and getting indexed even if it doesn’t sky rocket through the rankings. The most important thing to do from the outset is to write good content that will be of interest to your visitors. If it holds the attention of your visitors and gets them to contact you then it will likely be of equal interest to the search engines. Do not produce a site that is written with the search engines in mind. It is your visitors who are important and by following a few simple rules that are published all over the Web your site can become very attractive to visitors and to search engines also. Keep the site textually based, there is no point in having very flashy graphics as these are not noticed by the search engines and often annoy visitors who want to get at the information they are after as quickly as possible and not have to wait for some animated introduction to finish before they can enter the actual site.

Yes, Information! Infoproducts: eBooks, eZines, Newsletters, etc, etc. “How to write a best selling eBook.” “Create your own Newsletter.” “Sell your own eBook off your website.” “People crave information.” Fantastic!

What no one ever explains is how you set up your Infoproduct as a download. As far as I am aware, you will probably struggle to find out how to do this anywhere on the web too.

The following information assumes you have a website up and running. If you are selling off your site you will need a “Merchant Account” which will take instantaneous payment, which of course, is necessary before your customer is allowed to download your product.

You will need to coordinate access from your website (the place where the customer decides and takes action to buy your download) to the download link you have created.

This is where your “Merchant Account” will help. For example; PayPal has excellent tools for setting up your pricing and shipping costs and creating “Buy Now” buttons, which buyers click on to take them to the Credit Card/PayPal account holders payment page.

You will be able to set up a link through PayPal’s “Merchant Tools” which brings the buyer to your download link once payment has been approved.

Creating a Download

One of the most efficient and cost effective ways to deliver your Infoproduct is by “Download.” The process is not complicated. All you are doing when you set up a download is directing the purchaser (after they have paid by electronic means) back to your web page with a download link on it.

They click this “Download Now” link and they are invited to save or open the download on their own computer. Your download product is stored in a predetermined file/folder on your own computer.

The best way to do this is to zip up the file to keep it from taking up as much room and then save the zipped file to your web server (your website on the internet).

You can use WinZip (you may already have it) to accomplish this. First you need to download (if you haven’t already) a copy of the free (evaluation) version of WinZip. www.winzip.com There are other zip programs but WinZip is probably the most popular.

Before you install, the program will ask you if you want the program to start with WinZip Wizard or WinZip Classic. Choose Classic.

After the programme has been successfully installed, follow these steps:

1. Start WinZip

2. From the menu, choose “File” and then select “New Archive”.

3. A window of your hard drive, showing all the contents of your computer, will appear, and you are asked to give the zip file a name. Before you give it a name make sure you pay attention to where (what folder) you are getting ready to save this file in. You’ll need to locate it later. I would use “Desktop,” but it could be anywhere on your hard drive. Just remember where.

This is the zipped file you are getting ready to create will contain all the files you want people to be able to download. So it will be the file that is saved to your web server(uploaded to the internet via your site).

So; now navigate to the folder (the place on your hard drive, for example; desktop) where you want the zip file to be saved and name it whatever you want.

Lets say, for example purposes, you have written an eBook so we can call the file ebook. WinZip will attach .zip into the filename automatically, so it will be called ebook.zip Click OK.

4. Next, the window of your hard drive will appear again. At this point you want to locate the file or files you want to zip up and be placed inside the file you just named in step 3.

This is where you choose the file/s you want people to download. Let’s say you have saved your eBook on your “Desktop” (but it could be anywhere on your hard drive). Once you find it, select it and click “Add”. If you have more than one file to select, hold down the control key and select all the files and then click Add.

5. You will now be taken back to WinZip’s home window and you should see the file/s you want to zip up in the window.

6. Select the file/s. If you have more than one, just hold down control and click all the files, or, go to “File” and click “Select All.”

7. Once the file/s are selected, go to “Actions” and on the drop down menu click “Make .EXE file”.

8. A pop-up menu will come up thanking you and reminding you to register. Just ignore registration request and click OK (you don’t have to register).

9. Another pop-up window will appear and ask; “Create a self-extracting zip file from” You will see the name of the zip file that you created in Step 3.

10. Right below that you will see a blank that says “Default ‘Unzip To’ Folder”. This is the name of the folder that the files will automatically extract (unzip) to when people download the files from your site. If that folder does not exist on the person’s PC, WinZip will create it for them. Don’t leave it blank, or it will automatically go in their TEMP folder.

It is suggested that you list something here. Try to give it a name similar to the filename so the person will recognize it when they look for the folder on their PC at some stage in the future.

In the example we use here of eBook you could call it “eBook ; followed by whatever you are writing about. ”So if your book is about growing roses, you could call it “eBook Complete Rose Grower.” Click OK.

11. Now the program will ask you if you want to test the file which has just been zipped up. Click “Yes” and WinZip will run through the unzipping process. This is the same process the user that has just downloaded your file/s will see.

12. Next the pop-up box will tell you where the file is unzipping from. This will be the same location you selected in step 3.

13. Select “Unzip” and the program will say; “1 file unzipped successfully” or if you had more than one file it will tell you how many were successfully unzipped.

On your hard drive, there should have been a folder created called “Complete Rose Grower” (or whatever name you chose in Step 10) and the files should be sitting there unzipped.

14. Now you’re ready to take the zipped file and upload it to your server so people can download.

15. Go to Windows Explorer and locate the zip file that you created in step 3. So if you named it ebook, you should see a file called ebook.zip. This is the file that contains all of your files inside that people will download. If you want to test it again, just double click on the zip file and WinZip should extract the files to the folder you specified in step 10.

16. Now you need to upload this zip file to the internet. Assuming you have a website from which to sell your eBook, you need to find an FTP program (File Transfer Protocol) to do this.

There are many to choose from. Just do an Internet search for “FTP Program.” When installed the program will help you upload the file/s in effect, onto your site and therefore, the internet.

17. For the purposes of these examples let’s call your domain www.betterebooks.com (Please Note: This is not a real URL; at least it wasn’t at the time of writing!). After you’ve uploaded the file, you’re ready to point people to the link so they can download the zip file.

18. As an example, you uploaded ebook.zip to a folder called “ebooks” and your domain name is “www.betterebooks.com” then the link you will use to point to the download will be something like;
“http://www.betterebooks.com/ebooks/ebook.zip” The WinZip program creates this link automatically.

When buyers click on this link it will immediately start the download process.

19. After they download it the unzipping program will unzip the file to the folder that you specified in step 11 on their hard drive.

When looking for a web hosting company, it doesn’t matter if this is just for the inception of a web or the move of an established site; you need to consider a large selection of criteria to determine which company to go with:

Customer support

Website hosting service isn’t just storage or bandwidth. Based on personal experience and that of others, even a top-notch service is worthless without customer support. If you own a business website, your hosting provider needs to be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem; otherwise, you may end up losing customers and money.

Downtime guarantee and service monitoring

Having a personal website go down is a minor inconvenience; having a business website go down is a serious matter. What amount of profit would you lose if your site had been down for a week? Long downtime may be very harmful to today’s companies which spend large amounts of money on advertising their websites. Essentially, there are two rules regarding reliability that one should look at:

1. You should check if there is an uptime guarantee offered. A truly service-oriented provider will also give a money-back guarantee, offering a discount or free service as compensation for downtime. Any company which avoids taking responsibility won’t put much effort into the service.

2. I definitely wouldn’t go with a company claiming 100% uptime, as there is no such thing as a server with 100% uptime. If anyone ever claims their server has a 100% uptime they are either lying or they don’t perform the necessary upgrades that prevent a machine from being compromised.

Reputable web hosts will post statistics on their site: What is the frequency of interruption? How about the average percentage of downtime? If these aren’t posted, ask; if the answer isn’t forthcoming, that should be a warning sign. If you still go with a host which doesn’t monitor servers, you’ll have to do the monitoring yourself. I recommend http://www.siteuptime.com, as it’s one of the best monitoring services available for free in the market today.

Backups

There is no host which is safe against different types of technical and programical failures, so make sure that the company runs scheduled backups. The other advice would be always having a backup of your website yourself, as you never know what might happen. cPanel, which is the most popular web hosting management software at this time, has a very comfortable backup-making tool. It allows you to backup files and databases quickly and easily, so backups are no longer a problem.

Acceptable use policy

Web hosts may have 200-300 or more clients per server; there is no exact number, as companies have different hardware and each hosted website has different resource usage. There always is a possibility that a few of those customers host illegal content. There are web hosts who have had their servers unplugged, resulting in their clients’ websites going down. I’m sure you don’t want to put your business at risk and have your website hosted on the same server together with illegal pornography and software sites, so check host’s acceptable use policy to find out, if the host takes care of what’s hosted on their servers.

Hosting your site on an uncared-for server will also result in a low speed. If somebody on the same server sends spam, the server’s IP address will be blacklisted and you’ll have serious problems as recipients stop receiving your emails. Use the “Spam database lookup” feature on www.DNSstuff.com to check if a web hosting company is blacklisted. Spam is being sent almost everywhere, so having one or two red records isn’t that bad; but, if there are more, it may become a problem later on.

Unlimited bandwidth and web space

In web hosting industry, the adage “you get what you pay for” is almost universally applicable. Do not fall for hosts offering unlimited allowances, as there is no unlimited bandwidth, nor unlimited web space. Host’s pay for each GB of bandwidth themselves. Hard drives also aren’t free, so how can they say it’s unlimited? They simply are performing false advertising in order to attract customers. The average website doesn’t use more than 1GB of bandwidth per month; the customer is happy as he bought something “unlimited” and the host gets a new customer, which won’t cost them any more than $1-2 USD per month. But imagine what would happen if I had a website, burning much more bandwidth than an average site does, and I signed up with a hosting company offering unlimited traffic? The host would simply suspend my account and tell me, that it was using too much bandwidth. There even are companies which offer unlimited bandwidth and have a statement on their terms of service, explaining that unlimited bandwidth means 40GB, for example.

Will you really own your domain name?

When you buy a domain name together with a website hosting package, make sure the host will register the domain name under your name. It usually should be written in their FAQ, but, if there is no such information, simply contact them. This will also give you an opportunity to check how fast their customer support team replies to inquiries. If the hosting company registers domains under someone else’s name, you may have problems switching hosting providers later. If you were in such situation, you would have to file for a Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which costs much more than both domain name and web hosting service together.

Control Panel

For ease of maintenance, a feature called a Control Panel is a necessity; this tool will normally allow for regular maintenance, be it email mailbox additions/deletions, password resets, web additions, web count reports, statistics and so on. If the site is for any sort of business, this is an absolute must. The most popular web hosting management software currently available is cPanel. It’s a next-generation web hosting control panel system that allows you to manage your domain through a web interface. The idea is to transfer as much of the control of managing your web site to you; you have the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.

Value-added services

Hosting companies offer different value-added services in order to set themselves apart from the competition. Of course, these are an advantage, but a common mistake customers make is choosing a host just because it offers many value-added services which won’t be used anyway. Some of the really useful features are:

1. Auto-installer script – Auto-installers will save you time if you are going to install a forum, image gallery, content management system, etc. Installation procedures on an auto-installer script take seconds and can be performed by novices without the need of doing difficult tasks usually associated with installations.

2. Online website builder - It lets you design a website in a few minutes without having any creation software and knowledge. One very powerful website builder on the market is Site Studio; this editor allows for ease of use, full control of color schemes and themes, one-click publishing, and an array of templates to use.

The last tip

In this article, I’ve mentioned only a few warning signs which are worth considering. You should know yourself that price and allocations aren’t as important as the quality of service; if the budget is absolutely limited, then the price can be a valid criterion, but otherwise it shouldn’t receive much credence.