Web Hosting Info

WordPress 2.7 makes it incredibly easy to install plugins. Gone are the days where you would have to download a file from wordpress.org, unzip it and then upload the files. Now in the administration panel you can just install within a few clicks. Plugins > Add New > Search

Top WordPress Plugins

Akismet This is the tool for comment spam, its free, has a fantastic success rate and is so good it comes as standard.

WordPress Related Posts this plugin automatically shows a list of posts that are similar to the one currently being viewed. Great way for users to get around your site and spread your PR value.

Broken Link Checker for WordPress – this handy little tool can automatically check your entire wordpress blog for broken links and will alert them too you. You can also apply CSS to the broken link.

All in one SEO pack Does all the SEO work for you. Good tool to create custom titles

1. Check the company has a toll free (free phone) 24/7 number. You should be able to contact your host at all times. Make sure someone acutally picks up the phone!
2. Check how many sites are hosted per server. If there are hundreds of sites on the same server it may get very slow.
3. Find a website that is hosted by the company and see how fast theirs is.
4. Pay Monthly to avoid loss of payments if the company goes out of business

Hopefully we will add more to this page over time.

When designing your website, you need to remember that there are still lots of people on slow internet connections. Over 65% of users connect at speeds between 28K and 1Meg bits/second.

It is therefore important that you keep your website simple. The simpler the better. If your website takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, people will just leave. Try keep your web page size small, less than 15k if you can. Look at Google and how simple works for them. So when designing a site, follow the KISS principle: Keep it simple stupid.

If light of the recent announcement that DreamHost accidently let let a 3rd party access a list of client’s FTP passwords (link), we thought we’d give you some pointers to keeping your website secure.

Most of the ways to keep your website secure are the responsibility of your host. They should have a firewall. On shared and reseller packages, your host will patch the operating system to reduce the threat of exploits or viruses.

You should use strong passwords, long in length and containg alpha-numeric characters. Try avoid words or anything related to you, i.e don’t use date of births/names etc. You should always change your default password.

If you use any software on your website such as a forum you should keep up-to-date with any security patches. Subsribe to the mailing list or RSS feed of the software. Although free software is great, exploits can be found often. The same goes for paid software too – keep up to date.

Simple File Upload

Your host may have a control panel from which you can perform various functions on your site. Once you have logged into your site’s control panel, look for an item labelled “File Manager” or similar. From there you will be given a list of folders and documents, similar to what you would see on your home computer.

It is important that you find the correct folder to upload to, some folders are not accessable to the general public. On most web hosting services you should upload to the folder called public_html or www. You must also name your home page index.html or default.html. Obviously some hosting providors are different so if these don’t work for you, contact them. From the public_html folder you will be able to make other folders for instance a folder in the public_html folder named images would be accessed by yoursite.com/images

FTP Transfer
Some WYSIWYG editors include a file transfer manager within them so you will need to configure your WYSIWYG client with your login information. This FTP login details may be the same as your control panel account, however if it isn’t make a FTP account within your site’s control panel.
After logging into your site’s FTP server, you need to browse to the same location as you would do in simple file upload, public_html. From there you can drag and drop your files and upload your site’s content.

When signing up to a hosting service, you will have to agree to the hosting provider’s terms of service. These include things such as no illegal content etc. You should be cautious of the fact that many say that they can change the terms at any time.
With shared hosting you are sharing the server with potentially hundreds of other people. Your host may reserve the right to terminate you suspend your account if you use too many resources. Using too many resources could be because of a large amount of visitors or running scripts that require a lot of memory or processing power.
You should also be careful when sending mass emails. Your host does not want to be accused of spamming. Make sure that you have permission to send emails to large amounts of people.
If you have been guaranteed uptime, you may find in the TOS that not everything is classed as downtime. Server upgrades are not classed as downtime to many hosts. They may also class downtime as an outage lasting more than X amount minutes.

 Copyright laws can be confusing however below are some facts that debunk some myths about using other people’s work.

Do not copy and paste content from other websites

Even if a website does not have a copyright logo or notice, you still do not have the right to copy. Since 1989 copyright notices are optional.

Copying small amounts of text is not compyright infringement as long as it is not a substantial part of the work copied. Unfortunately it is not black and white to what is a large part and what isn’t.

Giving credit to the original author does not give you the right to copy.