My Hosting Tips

Archive for December 24th, 2009

Inexpensive Web Hosting For Small Businesses And Churches

How would a small business or church go about finding inexpensive web hosting? It’s not as easy as you think. Just because a hosting provider advertises affordable and cheap shared web hosting packages you need to really be an informed shopper to determine if they really offer inexpensive web hosting.

Any reseller can offer inexpensive web hosting starting at say 3.95 per month but following “inexpensive web hosting” tips may help you avoid the duds as you look for a place to host your small business realty or church site.

A reputable web hosting site should include the following

Inexpensive web hosting means just that and you shouldn’t have to search far for the bottom line prices. Sometimes so called discount and inexpensive web hosting providers slip in hidden fees for services the average person would have thought were part of the total deal. Therefore make sure you check the site carefully for what is included and what is not. If you have any questions just ask the sales representative.

They should not have to sacrifice quality in terms of things like up time on the servers professional technical assistance storage space email accounts and monthly bandwidth transfer.

The company that is honest will try to keep your business but not hold you hostage if you choose to leave. For example once I wanted to transfer my domain to a different host and the “inexpensive we hosting company would not allow me to point my name servers to the new host. Imagine that! So make sure your host will allow you to do if you outgrow it as in my case or you just choose to leave.

On a personal note I was really impressed with Bluehost.com in this regard because after I wanted to leave their tech staff even helped me switch the DNS name servers on my domain to my new host. Was that great of them or what?

Finally a reputable company will come with a full money back guarantee after 30 days and will also pro rate your money back on the remaining portion of your contract as a sign of good will. Anything less than that is a little bit shady in my book.

Overall this is not an exhaustive list of things to look for in decent inexpensive web hosting. However thinking about these issues before signing a contract may help ensure you get a good host for your business and save you time and money to boot.

About the writer:  David Butler the author of this article is a Christian businessman and has a several web sites Christian Dating Service PLUS! and Affordable Web Hosting 4U

Get Your Emails Through The Filters

SPAM filters are becoming a serious problem for legitimate email marketers. In 2006 40 of all email sent throughout the world was considered spam. As a result filters are stepping up their efforts to block this unwanted mail and many of your commercial emails may be inadvertently filtered as well; there are more emails being bounced today than ever before.

Getting email through to your subscribers is critical especially if email plays a key role in your business. You need to count on reaching your readers.

Avoiding the adverse affects of spam filters is not difficult. It merely involves following some simple guidelines to ensure the maximum results from your email campaigns.

First use a double optin mailing list. This is when you send a confirmation email in order to get the readers permission to add them to your mailing database. This ensures that you do in fact have the subscribers permission which will prevent unjust accusations of sending unsolicited emails.

On the sign up page tell subscribers to whitelist your domain or add it to their address book. You should also include this in the welcome email you send to new subscribers.

Send your email as plain text instead of HTML since the latter tends to get blocked a lot more by the filters.

Avoid using various trigger words or phrases that are flagged by filters as being spam. Its not that you cant use them; its just that you should use them sparingly. The filters will block your email if it contains too many trigger words. You can find a list of typical trigger words to avoid in your emails subject line and body at www.andreaoneill.com/spamtriggers.html.

Before you send your email out to your entire list of readers perform a dry run on some free email accounts such as hotmail yahoo and gmail. You can play around with the filter settings on each account and see if your email makes it through. Another good idea is to run your email through a content checker that will determine if it is at high risk of being flagged as spam. There are a number of free content checkers available on the Internet just do a search on Google.

Finally the most important thing to do is follow the CANSPAM laws regarding commercial email. This includes items such as containing an unsubscribe link in every email and including the mailing address of the company or person sending the email. The CANSPAM act can be found at www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm.

It is difficult to tell how long spam will continue to cause problems for legitimate email marketers. Hopefully one day the problem will subside but until then you will need to follow the items highlighted above to increase the chances of your email being delivered successfully. By following these guidelines you will not need to worry about getting your email through to your readers; you can spend more time on the email campaign itself which is far more important.

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;About the Author:
Sean Kenaston is an Associate Editor at Ratings Hub the first and only ad and affiliate link free site that provides 100 userbased reviews of various Internet marketing products and services. It is absolutely free and its the only place on the Internet offering completely unbiased feedback on products used by every type of marketer from beginner to guru and everyone in between. Please visit http://www.ratingshub.nononsensemarketing.com