It’s been said that Dreamweaver has a way to do this, but no one has been able to tell me what that way is.  Frankly, I’m a developer so I don’t really care about what Dreamweaver has or doesn’t have, I just want it to work.  Turns out, there’s a really easy script that you can add to your site (or your client’s) that will allow visitors to fill out a form and then have that data e-mailed to the appropriate recipient.

First, you’ll need to setup a form on a page called userinfo.html.  This should be fairly easy to do whether you’re creating the site freehand or with web editing software.  When you name each element, that’s how our script will label them in the e-mail, so be sure to label them clearly.  Dreamweaver seems to like to label things a37_infrared, so let’s just make sure they’re human readable names.  For example, to create a field to receive the users first name, it should look something like:

<input name="firstname" type="text" />

In the e-mail, this will output something like “Firstname: Joe”.  That should be close enough for our purposes.  Once you’ve finished the form, just set the action to the PHP script we’re about to create.  That makes our form tag (in userinfo.html) look something like this:

<form name="userform" action="processform.php" method="POST">

Now, for the part you’ve been waiting for.  Make processform.php (this is a new page and separate from userinfo.html) a nice HTML page that let’s the user know that you have received their information.  Again, do this in any way that is easy for you to create your HTML pages.

For this to work, it does require that the server can run PHP.  The server also needs the ability to send e-mail, but most servers do both of these just fine.  It shouldn’t be a problem for most people, but it seemed worth mentioning.

Now, at the very top of the processform.php add the following lines:

<?php
$body = “”;
$subject = “You received a new request from example.com”;
foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) $body .= ucwords($key) . “: $value\n”;
mail (‘myname@example.com‘, $subject, $body);
?>

You can now replace the text after “$subject” with the subject line of the e-mail you would like to receive.  Then replace “myname@example.com” with your e-mail address (or obviously that of your client’s).  Now every time they fill out your form it will send you e-mail with their details.

Not bad for 4 lines of PHP, eh?

Use a thumbnail image for attractive links

It’s time for a beginner post. Mostly because my brother has been asking about how to post thumbnails, but also just because it seemed like other people probably had the same questions. There are a lot of things that can be done with links online. In this article, we’re just going to touch on the basics and we can fill in the gaps in a later post.
Links are just a way of referencing material online. In order to do that, you need 2 things: 1) The address of the material you are referencing. 2) The content which will send the user to that material. By content, we refer to either text or a graphic. When you click that text or graphic, you then go to the referring webpage.

So first, let’s look at a simple link:

<a href="http://www.internetstarting.com">Helpful Website</a>

This link starts with a tag, which opens <a.  We must end the tag with a greater than (>), but not until we specify the address to which we link.  That is specified in the href parameter of the a-tag (<a>).  In this case, our address is http://www.internetstarting.com.  Always be sure to enclose the address in quotes.  Then we end the a-tag (which is short for Anchor, BTW).    So far we’ve covered:

<a href="http://www.internetstarting.com">

Next, we have “Helpful Website”.  This is the content of our link, or the anchor text.  In our case it is just text, but we’ll add images later.  This anchor text is what is going to actually be displayed to our user.  Finally, the <a> tag we opened must be closed.  HTML tags are closed with a forward-slash in front of the tag.  Our closing anchor tag would then look like this: </a>.  Now, when shown online, our link will look like the following:
Helpful Website

Now, let’s go about adding an image in there.  To do that, we’ll need to use the image tag, which is simply, <img>.  Similar to the link, we need to supply a parameter to the image tag and that is the location of our image.  This is usually on our site, but it could be anywhere on the web.  In the image tag, that address will be put into the “src” attribute.  So, we’re going to have something that looks like this:

<img src="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg"

Again, notice that we have to put the parameter to “src” in quotation marks.  Finaly, we’ll close the image tag.  This is a little different than closing the anchor tag because we’re going to use some HTML shorthand.  Because the img doesn’t have any content (only the src attribute here), we can close it immediately.  So, we’re just going to add “/>” instead of our nomal “>” followed by “</img>”.  Our entire image tag now looks like this:

<img src="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg" />

Now, let’s make that a link.  All we’re going to do, is take our anchor text (which was Helpful Website) and replace it with our image tag.  Now we have:

<a href="http://www.internetstarting.com"> <img src="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg" /> </a>

or

<a href=”http://www.internetstarting.com”>

<img src=”http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg” />

</a>

Now, we have an image used as the content for our link.  When you click the image, it will still take you to the homepage for InternetStarting.com.  One last thing before we show you the image and link.  It would be a little big to add to this post again, so let’s shrink our image.  We could use photo editing software to shrink the image, or for images that are reasonably small we can just cheat a bit.  We’re going to add two more parameters to the image tag.  They are “height” and “width” and you can probably imagine what they do.  Let’s make our new thumbnail image 80×47 (1/4 the size of the original).  The code would now look like this:

<a href="http://www.internetstarting.com"> <img src="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~geisel/car/3kgt-md.jpg" width="80" height="47" /> </a>

There, now you can see what the thumbnail will look like at 1/4 of its size.  This is not recommended for very large images however as it will slow down your site.  We’re actually using a big image and displaying it as a small image.  For example, if you were to take an image directly from your camera and “cheat” the image tag, it might take 15 or 30 seconds to load this tiny image on your site.  That’s not very efficient and why it would then be better to use some photo editing software to actually save the picture in a smaller format and just use that instead.

One last thing on links for the beginner.  Sometimes you will see a very, very long link.  These especially show up at affiliate sites like Amazon.com.  In fact, you might even see a full web address inside the web address which is in the href.  Don’t let this confuse you!  We’re only concerned with what’s between the quotation marks.  So, <a href=”someReallyReallyLongStringIsOK”> — even if it’s several lines long.  Just look for the closing quotation mark and you will be fine.

For anyone still having trouble with links or who has other questions, use the comment link below.  Let us know what trouble you’re having with links and we’ll see if I, or someone in the community here, can help you out.

Does PageRankSubmit Measure Up?

There are so many sites out there advertising how they will provide you with great SEO, it’s hard to wade through the muck.  Every site has big promises, and more often than not they end up disappointing on those promises.  For better or for worse, I’ll do my best to keep you updated on my experiences so you can avoid the disasters and flock to the successes.  It’s nice to sit in my blogging lair today and bang out an article on the latter, a website that successfully delivered on (at least some of) the hype.

You probably found this site in a search for a review of PageRankReview.com, so I’ll do my best to cut to the chase.  If my reviews are honest and thorough, you’ll hopefully come back to check out my other reviews.  I was happy with PageRankReview and I’m in the process of using them for all of the sites I manage (see the Blogroll on right).  In my opinion I got $100 to $200 of SEO for $29.  It didn’t save the world, but it did get my site to show up in the first few pages of Google.

The claim from PageRankSubmit.com is that they will submit you to 100 Internet directory sites for $29 (price as of this post).  They say the sites all have a PageRank of PR4 or higher.  When you are finished, they will send you an Excel spreadsheet containing a list of the sites to which you were submitted and their PageRank.  All entries are manually submitted by their team, so you don’t have to worry about CAPTCHA issues blocking non-human entries.

In reality, I found they were pretty close to their promise.  They actually submitted my site to 101 directory sites.  I did a PageRank lookup and not all of the sites were still at their advertised PageRank, but remarkably most of them were.  My biggest concern was that some of the directories would be in Google so-called “bad neighborhoods” and that I would be penalized for it.  As far as I can tell, none of the directories had bad reputations with Google.

PageRankSubmit.com doesn’t guarantee that you will actually get listed in the directories, however, I again found that most of the sites did add me to their listings.  There are a few that didn’t, or that say they’re entirely too busy to get around to your post for the next ump-teen months.  Whatever.  There are always a few bad apples, but I prefer not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

A note to those who still have nascent SEO skills: be sure to pick a good title.  For example, Internet Starting would work, but it wouldn’t get me the Google exposure I’m looking for.  Find your top keywords (preferably from your Google Analytics account) and try to work them into your title.  For example, I used InternetStarting – Internet Business Starting.  Because PageRankSubmit is actually handled by real people, they tend to adjust the title according to the directories rules.  If this were run by a bot (an automated submission robot), for example, they might try to submit anchor text that was too long and got my submission disqualified.  Another example is for DVDCorral.com, I used DVDCorral – Personal DVD Library.  After submitting this, Google started to show DVDCorral in search results for “Personal DVD Library” — In fact, after just checking I found DVDCorral ranked #2 in Google for “Personal DVD Library”.  Looks like it worked very well!  Be sure to create a title that includes a few good keywords for your own site as well as the actual name of your site.

What happens next?  Well, prepare to get about 100 e-mails from these directory sites confirming your submissions.  I find that it usually takes 15 minutes in 3 or 4 different increments to finalize all of the submissions.  Usually it’s just clicking a link to complete the process.  A word to the wise, setup an e-mail account specifically for this submission if at all possible.  For example, I typically use first.last@mywebsite.com whenever I do a new submission.  That way if any of the sites decides to sell your e-mail you don’t have to get it in your general mailbox.  Setting up a similar account should be pretty simple to do with your web provider.

For the first couple of weeks you’ll see confirmations continue to roll in.  Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines will continue to find these sites over time and adjust your rank accordingly.  It will take about a month for everything to eventually settle out.  In fact, I just received a notification recently for a site I submitted a few months ago.  That’s just a little more link love Google will be sending my way.

In all, I felt PageRankSubmit offers a pretty good service for a very fair price.  In fact, I felt it was good enough to go join their affiliate program.  Disclaimer: While I do participate in their affiliate program, that is because I feel they have a good product at a good price.  I have had other affiliate sites that I gave a negative review to and those sites won’t appear under our “Recommended Sponsors” section.  This is my honest review and if you liked it, hopefully you’ll follow this link and:

Boost Your Page Rank!

Start your own Blog

Thanks to hardworking people at several major internet sites, it’s now easier than ever to start your own blog.  In a recent article in Inc. Magazine, Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) said, “My mom started a blog a couple of weeks ago.  Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my mom to use.”  He’s absolutely right.

Blogging has finally come to a point where it depends more on your ability as a writer than it does your technical skills.  Between sites that will allow you to freely host your blog and software to run the blog, you’re pretty much left with the writing — Oh, and the setup, but we can help you with that.

First, let’s briefly understand what a blog is and is not.  The term comes from the initial use of the term Web-log.  A lot of internet users (especially students) were starting to keep journals online, and now we’ve got tools that allow for much more.  Now blogs are often used as a primary source of news on the internet, but they can just as easily be used for posting information online.  Blogs should not be confused with forums where many users participate in a conversation.  If it’s a topic you’re interested in and ready to talk about, blogs are a great way to get your information out.

The blog will need to be hosted somewhere (see Starting a Website for more information) and there are several sites online that will host your blog for free.  The two easiest are probably WordPress.org and Blogger.com and both are free.  I do have a small blog that I setup on blogger.com and it only took a few minutes to do so.  I haven’t set one up with WordPress.org, but given how well-written their software is, I can’t image their hosting is any different.

For basic blogs, you should just be able to setup an account with one of those sites and get started.  However, if you’re planning on doing some serious blogging (i.e. considering part or full-time work) you may want to have it hosted somewhere you have more control.  When you host a site with a webhosting company, you have more control about the speed of your blog and where you store images.  For anyone just starting, the free-hosted solution is probably just fine and you can always transfer your blog later.  It’s always good to have a solution you can revise later.

From what I can tell, you can’t install custom themes on WordPress.com or Blogger.com’s free hosting.  In order to install custom themes (explained later), you will need to use a webhost solution.  Finally, if you host with WordPress or Blogger your blog will be myblog.blogger.com or newblogname.wordpress.org.  Again, if you’re just testing the waters, this is perfect.  For a more formalized approach, you can register a domain name and attach it to your hosted blog.  Both WordPress and Blogger allow this, though I believe WordPress charges a small fee ($10-20 dollars a year).

To add a blog to an existing site, or if you decide to get your own webspace right from the beginning then you will need to get blogging software.  There is plenty of free software available for blogging, but I prefer WordPress (and run 3 different blogs on it).  Feel free to start with any blog software you like, but I’ll cover a basic WordPress install here.  First, download WordPress.  You will need to uncompress it and upload it to your webhost (again, this is only for those who have chosen to install a blog on a webhost, and not on one of the free hosting services).  Then, follow the step-by-step instructions from WordPress.  Note, you will need to edit some of the files on your webserver, so you’ll need to know how to do this before continuing.  You will also need a webhost that provides MySQL support (most — but not all — do provide it with basic packages).

Now, you’ve got your blog installed — either by using one of the free hosting options, or by installing it onto a webserver.  At this point, you’ll just need to customize your blog and start writing.  For those who use Blogger.com, you’ll be using their own software.  If you downloaded WordPress or are using the free hosting on WordPress.com, then you’ll obviously be using the WordPress software.  Most of these steps are similar for all blogs, but I’ll specifically be taking you through WordPress customization for the sake of brevity.

You can start blogging right away, using the default theme from WordPress.  However, you will probably want to customize the blog to make it your own.  The first step to customizing your blog is to find and install a theme.  The great thing about WordPress themes is that they’re easy to find and even easier to install.  The downside is, not all themes measure up.

A quick Google search of WordPress themes will bring up more sites than you can shake a stick at (even a virtual stick!).  In my experience, paid themes aren’t necessarily written better than free themes.  So, you should find the theme that you like and go with it.  There are plenty of free themes out there, but you may find a paid theme that you like.  Generally, paid themes run from $15 – $50 and that will be for a non-exclusive license (someone else might be blogging with the same theme).  Until you have really customized a theme, it’s not a big deal as you can always replace it relatively easily.

Find a theme and get started, but there are a few rules that may make the process less painful.  If these are confusing, don’t worry too much about it, you can always change it up later when you run into issues.  The main problem I have found is poor CSS.  Usually, sites will allow you to view a live blog using the theme they’re advertising.  Make sure you resize your browser window and that the blog looks reasonable as you’re resizing it.  You don’t want to make your screen get really wide and have the blog design (template) go nuts.  Also, be certain that the blog doesn’t use hard-coded text in graphics that you will need to change.  A good example of this would be the name of the blog.  If you’re a graphic artist, you don’t care.  For everyone else, we don’t want a theme with a hard-coded name in a graphic somewhere.

Install your theme by uploading it into the themes directory on your website.  This will be located in /wp-content/themes.  If the theme comes in a .zip or .tgz file, make sure you uncompress it first and upload all of the files and folders it was storing.  Now, you’re going to return to your WordPress console and click “Appearance” on the left side  (if your lost at this stage, remember that you logged in when you were following the WordPress installation instructions).  From there you should see the themes displayed and you can now select your newly installed theme (first click on the theme, then click “Activate” from the theme preview window).

Once installed, you may use the Appearance menu to manually edit the HTML or CSS for your blog.  This is where you can edit some of the things like where your login menu appears or where the logo for RSS shows up.  Most themes will have at least an “About” page, which you can fill in with information about yourself or your company.  Check through some of these pages and familiarize yourself with them.  Also, make sure you fill out the information so none of your pages say “This is an example of a WordPress Blog”.

At this point, you should be ready to blog away.  In the top left is a menu labeled “Posts” and this is where you can go to edit, create, or delete posts.  Start writing posts and get on your way to having a great internet blog.  Once you’ve spent between a couple of weeks to a couple of months of posting content (depending on how studious you are with it), it will be time to advertise your blog.  We’ll cover that in another post, but for now you should have a blog up and running.

If you started a blog with this post — leave a comment to let us know.  Or, if you have problems, post your questions and I’ll do my best to answer them and maybe update this post if it’s a relevant question for everyone.

Oh, and Matt, my mom’s starting a blog too!

Setup Google Analytics

Besides being such a great search engine, Google has some phenomenal tools.  Before you do anything else, it’s important to be able to track what’s happening on your website.  You can’t grow your website without knowing where it is right now.  To understand where your website is, who is coming to it and other useful marketing information, we’re going to use Google Analytics.

Analytics is not only completely free, it probaby is the best tracking tool on the internet for your site.  With Google Analytics, we’ll be able to understand who is coming to our website, where they are coming from and what they do when they are there.  You will be absolutely amazed at the amount of data you can gather about your visitors and how we can use that information to make our website better.  Without further adieu, let’s get started and you’ll pick up more features along the way.

Create a Google Account

For whatever reason, when I hear “Create a Google Account”, I automatically think of a Gmail account.  While Gmail is also a great tool, you don’t need to have a Gmail account to get started.  You do need a google account.  So, start by heading to analytics.google.com to get started.  Click on “Sign Up Now”.  For those of you who do have a google account already (be it Gmail or otherwise), you can use that account here.  Just type in your Gmail address on the right side and your Gmail password and you’re in.  For those who don’t have a Gmail account, just click on “Sign Up Now” (yes, again) to create your google account.  You’ll just enter your current e-mail address and give google a password and that will become your google account for Analytics.

Now you have a google account; click “Click Here to Continue” at the bottom of the page (bet you didn’t see that one coming!).  Before you use the account, you’ll need to check your e-mail (of the address you used to sign up for a google account).  Find the google e-mail and click the link inside to activate your google account.  Now go back to the previous Analytics window and let’s continue.

Next, you’ll be taken to a page where you click “Sign Up Now”.  See, this isn’t so bad, just keep clicking the cookie-crumb-trail of links that Google lays out.  Now, we’ll be taken to a screen where you need to enter your internet site information.  Go ahead and fill that out (if you have more than one site, just pick one for now you can fill the others in later).  When you fill out the account name, use whatever you want.  For www.internetstarting.com I’m actually just using www.internetstarting.com as the account name.  This is only for you and it’s so you can associate this account with a website (useful if you have several).

Continue through the Google steps, providing answers as needed.  Stop once you come to the page called “Analytics: Tracking Instructions”.  You’re going to need this code later, so copy and paste it somewhere useful (maybe make a new Word or Notepad document on your desktop somewhere).  You can get it again later, but it’s easier if you don’t loose it in the first place.

Click “Continue” and whala!  You are brought to the Google analytics screen.  You’re almost finished.  By the way, you will notice a small yellow alert next to your account.  Don’t panic, it’s supposed to be there.  It just means Google doesn’t know about any visitors to your website yet.  It will go away once we finish and you start getting visitors.

Now, what do we do with all that code we cut/pasted earlier.  Well, now you’ll need to add it to your website.  How you do that will depend on how you created your website, but we’ll try to give you a couple of tips here.

1. If you had someone design your website, just ask them to add the code before the </body> tag on all of your pages.  They’ll know what that means.
2. For WordPress users, go to “Appearance” and “Edit”.  Now find your “footer.php” and place it in that file.  Again, look for a line that says </body> — you want to put it right before that line (but make sure </body>) is the first thing on the next line.
3. If you used a website builder of some kind, they may have a Google Analytics Plugin (there’s probably one for WordPress also).  Otherwise, find out how to edit your HTML and do the same thing the WordPress users did in #2.
4. If you created your own website, you already know how to do this.  Just make sure it’s at the end of the body because you don’t want your whole website to have to wait for analytics to load.

Bam!  That’s it, you’ve successfully installed Analytics now.  If you figured out how to install it on a particular webhost or website builder program, please leave a comment for our other users.  If you’re stuck, check the comments and see if someone else has solved this for the webhost you’re using.  It’s like “Take a Penny.  Leave a Penny.”  Except without the penny.

We’ll write a 201 article soon on what you can do inside Analytics and how you can block your own IP (so you aren’t analyzing yourself connecting to your own website!).  In the meanwhile, just play around with the settings and menus in Analytics… and don’t worry!  It’s a read only tool, you can’t break anything on your website by playing around in Analytics.  So take some time and get to know the system.

Alright, now I have to go paste the code into www.internetstarting.com.  I’ve done this on other websites plenty of times, but seriously with internetstarting.com, I’m walking through the steps right with you.  Good luck!

• How much webspace do I need?
• Can I just choose based on price, or is there a significant difference between internet providers?
• My friend said I should go with XYZ internet provider, which package do I need?
• If I make the wrong choice now, how long do I get stuck with it?

Alright, so there are probably a hundred other questions I can think of, but let’s just start with these.  Below, we’ll link to additional posts that describe more details like how do process credit cards, getting your site marketed, and more advanced questions.  For now, let’s get you a website!

Everyone wants to know

First, let’s answer the questions that are going to be the same for everyone.  Then, we’ll move on to answers that will vary depending on the type of site your planning to setup.

Certainly different webhosting companies can offer different services, and some are better than others.  There are some basic principles that hold true in nearly all cases.  One is that larger companies regularly have better systems and support.  That doesn’t mean the smaller companies don’t, but if you know anything about economies of scale, then you already understand why this is.  If I hosted one machine and paid $20,000 / month for a full diesel generator, I probably wouldn’t make very much money.  On the other hand, companies who are hosting thousands of websites have the abilities to do such things.

Generally, this is why you’ll find companies like 1and1, Yahoo, or GoDaddy have very inexpensive plans, sometimes costing less than $5/month.  There isn’t anything wrong with these hosting plans, it’s just that you’re sharing resources with (likely) hundreds of other customers.  “Is that bad?”, you ask.  Not necessarily, but we’ll get to that later.  In general though, I’ve found that the larger companies have better support and a better ability to fix problems when they occur.

It’s unfortunate, but you will often find that companies don’t have time to help you setup your website.  This happens to be especially true of larger companies, but smaller companies aren’t always better.  Thankfully, you have internetstarting.com to help you with that part!  Just make sure that the webhost provider you choose does solve problems when there are actual technical issues with your website.  I’ll give you some details on a few of them later, but just search google for reviews on websites to get a better idea of who is good at what.

Caveat Emptor!

Beware when reading reviews!  Most sites collect a commisssion on sites when you purchase your webhosting after visiting their site (called a click-through).  Some companies pay a higher commission, so these “review” sites have an incentive to promote a particular company as their #1 recommendation.  As I write this article, we haven’t signed up any sponsors yet.  Once we do, I will publish a list of rank in terms of our commission in an effort to provide full disclosure.  I refuse to promote anyone that I feel would hurt your business though, irrespective of how much commission I might make off of such a recommendation.  It’s just not good business.

Linux or Windows?

You may be used to using Windows on your home PC and now you have to decide if you want to use Linux or Windows for your webserver.  (You could also be running Linux, in which case you have already answered this question.  I suppose you could also be using a Mac, but Mac users are already used to being ignored.)  It really has nothing to do with what you’re used to using.  Unless you’re running a major application on the web (in which case you’ve already hired a team of engineers to do this work for you), you won’t have any interaction with the Operating System on the webhost at all.

That being said, I will recommend that you choose Linux in most cases.  Windows just happens to be a bit slower and more prone to crashes.  This usually won’t affect you, but because your webhosting provider has to deal with it, they may actually charge you more for a Windows plan.  You’re actually paying more for the system to be serviced more often because it will be down more.  That’s not what you need.

If you were going to interact with the system, I might recommend you stick with what you know.  In the case of a webserver, it just isn’t the case.  Unless you have a really good reason to go with Windows (i.e., you need ASP or VB Scripts on your webserver), I recommend you stick with the Linux option.

Do I need a Terabyte? … what’s a Terabyte?

Alright, now let’s dig into the nitty-gritty of what you’ll actually need on your site.  This is going to be an experiment you’ll have to play with in order to find the right fit, but there are some simple principles that you should know and will help you along the way.  Now, read down and pick the site that best describes you.

Standing Page – Personal or Business

This describes your page if you just want to make sure you have some kind of internet presence.  You’d like to make sure your customers or clients can find you online and can find your hours of operation or perhaps your resume.

Relative to the major sites on the internet, this kind of a site is going to get a small amount of traffic.  If all of your pages are static (that means they don’t automatically change every couple of minutes or hours), then you don’t even need to worry about things like PHP or MySQL support.

Good news, you’re going to be fine with the minimum hosting requirements of most of the major services.  You can probably find the package you need for around or under $5 / month.  This will allow you to change your content as needed, but you don’t have to worry about a lot of traffic or storage space (i.e. you aren’t storing hundreds of videos here).  Check out some of our sponsors on the side and pick the one that feels right to you.  You can always upgrade your site later.

In terms of storage space, you probably don’t need more than 10-20 MB and most of these hosting accounts come with 50-300 GB (1GB = 1024MB).  Some hosts have a very cheap account that only allows for 10 or 20MB.  This is plenty if you only have 1 or 2 pages with very little graphics.  If you’re going to do much more it won’t hurt to bump up to that $5 (or so) plan.

Creating a Blog or Unique Source of Information

For those who are starting a blog or want to use the internet to get unique information out to the world, you may have slightly larger requirements.  The good news is, this still isn’t going to be very expensive.  However, you will have to dig a little deeper to make sure they provide you with everything you need in terms of technology.

For most applications (incuding blog software), you’ll just need a hosting provider that runs PHP and MySQL.  In the case that you’re using WordPress (the blog software we use here), some hosting companies even support a one-click wordpress option.

I still wouldn’t recommend going with a VPS (Virtual Private Server).  For most applications you won’t need it.  Most webhosting companies will give you 100MB per MySQL database and that will certainly be plenty when you’re starting off.

As for storage space, you still won’t need much here — especially if you’re running a blog.  Almost all of your blog data will be stored in a database, so the storage space of the account is insignificant.  If you’re running a site that will be pretty active or has a significant amount of images, flash, etc. then maybe you need a bit more.  It will depend on your application, but usually 50GB is more than enough (when large pictures can sometimes consume less than half a MB!).

Internet Application Companies / Mid-size Companies

For those of you with a Mid-size company (say, larger than 100 employees) or who are making an internet application, you may want a dedicated server or a VPS.  Even as a Mid-size company, you may only need this because it’s hard to explain how a $100 Million company can get away with paying $20 / month for web space.  If you need a bigger number, a) think about a VPS, because they’re less expensive and will still probably meet your needs and b) Please, make sure you click our affiliate link so we can share in the excess profit you’re bleeding!

In all seriousness, you may eventually need to go to a VPS or dedicated server in this case.  Be careful though, very often shared hosting solutions are actually under-utilized and you will lose resources by upgrading.  The key to VPS and dedicated server offerings is two-fold.  1) You don’t have to worry about some one else’s traffic spiking right when you need the bandwidth (this is slightly less applicable to VPS) and 2) You need more processing power or specialized requirements like large MySQL databases, etc.

To give you an example, I run a DVD Catalog and Organizing site. It ran for a year and a half on a shared hosting solution, and only after our database grew from 100,000 movies to over 200,000 did we need to shift to a VPS. Obviously every application is different, but hopefully that will give you a little bit of perspective.

VPS vs. Dedicated Server

A Dedicated Server means that your webhost actually sets up a physical machine dedicated to serving only your website.  You may use the machine for anything you want, as long as it complies with your webhost’s terms and conditions (usually just things like spam and illegal activites are not permitted).  This is a good solution if you really need the processing power, and most webhosts will allow you some level of configuration of the machine.

Because it is a dedicated server, you essentially are paying the lease on the hardware as well as the webhosting fees.  These packages generally start at around $99/month, but you can sometimes find specials for less.  Be careful, I have seen dedicated plans costing as little as $29 / month, but they actually come with no support.  If the machine shuts down, you’re on your own bub!

VPS stands for “Vitual Private Server” and operates similarly to a dedicated server.  In the case of a VPS, there is only one physical server which hosts several VPS accounts.  Usually these are pretty beefy machines with quad processors or even 8-way processors, but they are also usually serving between 16 and 64 VPS accounts.  This puts you half-way between a dedicated server account and a shared hosting plan.  Prices usually float somewhere between as well.

If you just don’t quite need the processing power of a dedicated machine, VPS systems are a nice way to go.  They will get a bit sluggish if another member is crunching away on a task, but usually some amount of RAM and processing power is always reserved for each machine so you should never get resource starved.

The VPS is also a nice way to go if you need to do something besides just a webhost.  For example, if you need to run software that hosts an online multiplayer game you likely couldn’t do that on a shared hosting account.  VPS setups are still cheap enough that it may fit your budget, but because it acts like an independent machine you should also be able to run whatever other types of server you may need (proxy, STUN, game host to name a few).

For VPS or a dedicated server, you’ll have to decide how much RAM and/or processing power you need.  There’s no real way to gauge this, it’s just going to depend on your application.  256MB of RAM isn’t a lot, but if you are hosting an application that isn’t very busy or that has a small database footprint, then maybe it’s enough (I’m speaking in terms of a Linux VPS here, Windows VPS accounts — you’re on your own).  The best thing I can recommend is to make sure your web host allows a simple upgrade path.  Then if the allocation isn’t enough or your requirements grow it will be easy to migrate to a larger account.

It All Comes Down to This

Remember, it’s not a big deal to upgrade.  I wouldn’t recommend doing it every week, but it won’t kill you to upgrade once or twice in this process.  So, while I might make less commission off of it, I recommend starting small and moving up as required.

As for which host to go with, I can tell you that I host 3 sites on 1and1 at this point.  They’ve done a pretty good job of it so far and their technical support has always been responsive (I usually get through in 1 to 3 minutes).  I also checked throughput (how fast they download) and 1and1 wasn’t the absolute fastest out there, but they’re almost always near the top.  That was one of the big factors for me — if it loads slowly, people will move on.

When reading through internet archives I’ve probably read more bad about Dreamhost than good, but I don’t have any personal experience, so you’ll have to make your own judgement there.  GoDaddy seems to have similar plans and features to 1and1, but they’re usually just a tad more expensive.

Finally, if you are going with a dedicated server, you may want to check out ThePlanet.  They do dedicated servers almost exclusively and they seem to do it very well.  When I look at who is running what, the big sites seem to frequent ThePlanet.  Again, if you’re looking for shared hosting (the smaller plans), this isn’t the company for you.  Check out one of the previously mentioned companies.

Also, check out our advertiser list.  I don’t blindly signup advertisers, so if they’re in our list there’s a good chance they know what they’re doing.  If I ever hear otherwise (from reliable sources), I’ll be sure to remove the offending companies from our list.  We believe you’ll come back if we’re honest and upfront with you, so you can trust our advertisers!

Tools and Resources

I need to add a whois database lookup to this blog, so if you are reading this and it’s not on the right — shoot me a reminder.  We’ll try to add useful tools to this section as we find them.

Thanks for reading and thanks for making InternetStarting.com your place for online business information!

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