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Choice Hosting FAQ - Web Hosting Frequently Asked Questions FAQ - Basic Hosting QuestionsWeb hosting refers to the process of publishing a web site so that it is available to the internet for all to see. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Domain names are sequences of letters
and numbers which determine the address of your site. AKA:
Website Address. Here is a exmaple of a domain name: "www.choicehosting.co.za."
You need to register a domain name before your web site becomes
accessible at it's address. To register a new domain or website
address, please check availability of your domain name choice by
making use of our Domain
Registration availability tool. Can I keep my domain name when I change a hosting provider? Yes, certainly. When you want to transfer your website from another hosting provider to Choice Hosting, you won't need to do much and is a farely fast process. First think you will be required to do is provide your current hosting provider with notice of cancellation with your current hosting account. The average notice you can epect to give is one month, but do ask them to double check. Next, fill in the hosting order form to provide Choice Hosting with all the details that is required in order to setup your new account and transfer your website. When your notice period is near to expire, Choice Hosting will then contact your current hosting provider and make arrangements to transfer your website. If you know how, this is when you will need to backup your website files and pages ready to upload to the new Choice Hosting account. Not sure how, just ask and Choice Hosting will do everything for you. We will just need your FTP login details to gain access to your current website. Simple as that. Once the transfer has taken place, the public won't see any difference on your website. I don't have any experience in creating a site. Who can help me design my website? There are many web designers out
there to choose from. We know that a lot of web design companies
in South Africa ask exorbident rates. That is why Choice Host has
partnered with Deacon
Designs who offer quality designs at affordable rates. The methods of payment which are
accepted is via bank debit order or credit card debit order. The easiest and best way uploading
files to your website hosting account is by using FTP. When
you sign up with Choice Hosting, you will receive a FTP account
that lets you access web files in your account. There are
many software options out there that supports FTP such as CuteFTP,
AceFTP, CoffeCup, GoFTP or Total Commander, to transfer files from
your computer to your hosting account on Choice Hosting servers.
If you don't make use of a FTP tool, you can quite easily use the
web interface, you can use your hosting account control panel's
File Manager instead. Uptime is the percentage of time
that a web site is working. Choice Hosting gaurentees 99.5%
uptime. The very little downtime (if any) is for scheduled or unscheduled
maintenance on the servers, to make sure everything keeps running
smoothly. Of course we try to keep this to a minimum. We monitor
our servers and customer websites contantly and are notified immediately
in the rare occasion that the server does have a hiccup and work
hard to make sure everything gets up and running very quickly. Scheduled
downtime is also kept to a minimum and only occurs from time to
time and usually done out of work hours. FAQ - Advanced Hosting QuestionsHow much bandwidth will I need? That is a excellent question. The
average small website uses less that 1 gig (1000megabytes) of bandwidth.
You can figure out how much data transfer you will require by estimating
your average page size (including graphics!) and multiplying it
by the number of page views you expect to have in a month.
For example: with an average page size of 50 KB, and around 2000
page views per day, you will transfer an average of 3 Gigs per month.
In this case, it would be best to over compensate by getting a hosting
plan with more than needed, so will be good idea to get a hosting
plan with 4 to 5 Gigs of data transfer limit per month, so you don't
have to worry about going over your account's limit, which may cause
extra bandwidth charges. Fortunately, Choice Hosting hosting plans
over a substantial amount of bandwidth on each hosting
plan. Do I need web stats and how do I view them? It isn't a neccessity.
However, it is a great marketing tool that can help give you feed
back in regards to your marketing efforts. By analyzing anything
from where most of your visitors are finding your website, what
search term they searched for, busiest time of the day, business
month etc. You can view your detailed stats by using AWstate and
Webalizer stats program which can be found in your Control Panel. Do I need a static IP address for my site? Maybe. Majority website won't
need a dedicated IP and will receive a shared IP address. However,
if you are Setting up SSL, you will require a dedicated IP address
and will need to pay a little extra every month for that. How do I get my website on the search engines? There are a few ways to get your website submitted on the search engines like Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, Ananzi.co.za etc. You can manually submit it by going to their submit pages. Take note that it does sometimes take anywhere from 4 weeks to 3 months before your website appears in the search engines. Google Submit page: http://www.google.com/addurl/ Can I reduce the amount of bandwidth my website uses? Yes you can. By optimizing all the graphics like banners, logo's, photos and other images on your site. When you insert your images into your website, the dimesions of that image reflect as small, but find out what the file size and dimensions are for that image. If your website page takes longer than 10 Seconds to loads (on broadband connection), then your visitors will not wait around too long and would will look around for another website that will give them the information they desire faster. Fortunately, there is a solution: you can optimize your graphics for your website. Your graphics should be in either .gif or .jpg formats (.gif works best for logos and navigation buttons, while .jpg works best for photographs.) The idea is to reduce the filesize of your images so that they take less data bytes as possible while retaining acceptable quality. This can be done using free on-line image optimization tools. One of the best ones out there is Gifbot, by Netmechanic. They have a easy to use web-based interface that works like this: you upload your image, they process it, and almost instantaneously they will give you several lighter versions of your image for you to choose. Pick the image that takes the fewest bytes while still retaining and acceptable quality level. It is not uncommon to reduce the weight of a picture by up to 70% with no noticeable decrease in quality (especially if the image is in .jpg format.) Another useful tip is to use thumbnails. Thumbnails are smaller versions of a picture or image that are hyperlinked to its actual size version. The thumbnail will load fast, and by clicking on it your visitors will be able to see the actual size version. A great free tool for this that is very easy to use and can create thumbnails of 100's of photos at once is Easy Thumbnails. Use all these techniques and you will have a website that loads a lot faster for your visitors and keeping them happy, as well as saving more of your hosting space and bandwidth on your web hosting account.
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