Category Archives: web hosting

Save Money on Your Web Host with HostMate

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The cost of common shared hosting starts at 3$-10$ per month. While this is a cost many can afford, there are many out there that find it hard to spend 120$/year. Well, in the past 4 years I have used the idea of hostMates very successfully, saving money and learning from my mates.

Please note: HostMate is an idea, best practice if you want. It is not a product or a service, although someone might want to provide this service.

The simple idea of HostMate

Share the same host account with other people (preferably friends) in the same manner we use to have a roommate in the university.
Most hosting accounts support multiple domain names, MySQLs, email addresses and FTP accounts.
Why not share the cost and enjoy this multitenancy with a few ‘virtual roommates’?

A very similar set of rules should apply both for roommates and for hostMates:

  1. Respect the other mates privacy
  2. Keep the file system/ living room clean
  3. Don’t do anything that will bring the police
  4. Do not abuse common resources
  5. If you bring a date back to the room hang a ‘do not disturb sign’ on the door knob – I guess this is more relevant for roommates than for hostMates

At some stage, very similar to roommates, you will outgrow your hostMate arrangement and move out of this deal into a new, posh hosting all by yourself.

Good luck.
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How much should a web site really cost?

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Lately I have been asked by many people how much should they pay for a personal or small business website. It seems that these are good times to get some extra cash from a web initiative.

The problem is that, for most people, building and hosting a website is somewhat of a mystery. And when people treat something as a mystery they tend to over complicate it and over pay for it. Some people I talked to spent 20-100$ on simple basic hosting alone! That is, in most cases, more than what they need to pay.
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Shared Hosting or Dedicated Hosting? Now it is easier to choose.

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When you want to host your website with a hosting proivder, one of the first choices you’ll need to make is whether to go with a dedicated server or shared hosting.

This is the key decision that this choozza helped me make. Choozza takes a different approach to this question; I defined my priorities and got the decision which was fine tuned for me.

You will make the decision based on these criteria:

1) Big Websites Fit – Does this hosting option fit a big website, with a large volume of traffic?

2) Control – How much control do you have over the server?

3) Cost – How expensive is each of the options?

4) IP Address Issues – Will your website have its own IP address?

5) Performance Implications – What type of performance can you expect to get from the hosting? What can affect this performance?

6) Security – What are the security implications of going this way or the other?

7) Small Websites Fit – Does this hosting option fit a small, low-to-average traffic website with no special needs (e.g. a blog).

I filled this choozza for one of my small web sites and the answer was Shared Hosting. The details provided really justified my decision.

How to: Adding wildcard pages to robots.txt

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Sometimes we want to exclude a page from search engines. For example, repetitive pages that might lead to page rank penalties.

If you want to exclude pages with a specific name from several locations in your site – for example you might have a comments.php or a help.php in multiple parts of your site, and you want to hide it from search engines, you need to modify robots.txt.

Here is how you do it:
1) Create or edit robots.txt in the root of your site
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