Best Value Web Hosting

Creating a professional website can be challenging. E-commerce web design is really a complex animal. To cut development time, many web hosting companies start offering web hosting templates or hosting with templates.

Whether you’re looking for a simple web site or a functional e-commerce website, the chances are that you may be able to find a few web templates from your hosting company. A simple web template may cost under $20 dollars, but a well-designed professional e-commerce website will cost a few hundreds or more if not thousands. The cost of web templates is still cheap comparing to custom-made e-commerce websites when Web designers charge anywhere from $20 to $100 per hour. If you want to check out some templates, go to www.templates box.com

Besides the requirements of standard web hosting plans, Web hosting templates for e-commerce operations needs a shopping cart that supports online catalog and online payment processing (here’s a clue, pick Pay Pal). Web templates for e-commerce often include common pages and navigations for online shopping – searching or browsing products, adding items to shopping carts and making payment. The web templates for e-commerce do not include or connect to any specific shopping cart. It’s up to the webmasters to add shopping cart to the site.

The alternative e-commerce hosting to web templates is e-commerce turnkey solution. EBay Stores, Yahoo! and GoDaddy.com are the most popular turn-key e-commerce solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores easily. Different hosting plans may have different free structures. The cost of each hosting plan often varies on transaction volume.

When comparing functionality, there’re many questions to ask: 1) whether a shopping cart accepts online check or debit card. 2) Whether there’s a limit on the number of products and categories that you can setup; 3) whether it automatically sends out an email notification once an order is placed at your web-site.

When looking at the cost of commerce operation, you’ll need to ask questions about 1) what’s the basic monthly fee for transactions; 2) is there’s a setup fee for a new online store; 3) how about handling taxes?; 4) how much it charges for each transaction.

Talk with your hosting service on e-commerce issues and discuss the best plan to go with.

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

JSP Hosting Basics
JSP Hosting is a Java hosting program that has many similarities to Microsoft ASP. JSP hosting refers to the ability to run and manage Java Server Pages. Even though Java Server Pages (JSP) is quite similar to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) JSP does have slight differences in the hosting environment.

Java Server Pages is a server-side language that uses simple tag-based codes inserted into HTML and XML to produce dynamic and interactive web pages that are platform independent, meaning that by all rights they should appear exactly the same on every computer screen, regardless of the platform. This is the result when your publish yoy JSP-coded website on a JSP-supported Java hosting provider.

JSP allows web designers combine dynamically generated HTML in with their standard, static HTML code. While most CGI programs require you to compose the entire website in that one program, JSP allows you to compose the dynamic aspects and the static aspects of your site separately.

Java Hosting which includes JSP support would be the logical choice of any web designer wishing to eliminate the irritating need to repeat work they’ve already done. Java hosting, and JSP hosting specifically, would also be an efficient choice for those web designers working with a team.

One of the greatest aspects about JSP is that you don’t need to learn Java to use it and it’s practically built into programs like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX.
JSP’s use a variety of simple tags. The following are some of the most basic and common ones:
* Directives: <%@directive%> Instructions processed when the page is compiled
* Hidden Comments: <--comment--> Document the page, not sent to the client
* Declarations: <%!declaration%> Declare methods or variables with scope throughout the page.
* Expressions: <%=expression%> A bit more complicated to explain, expressions produce results which are then inserted into the output stream at the appropriate place
* Scriptlets: <%scriptlet%> A fragment of code that can access a declared variable and execute it at a defined time.
* Actions: An XML-style tag that can perform any of a slew of functions

So if you are running JSP, remember that you need to have a host that provides JSP runtime modules on the host side of your web server so that you can run the appropriate scripts.

Linux/Unix is an alternate type of system that provides hosting for small businesses and companies that run Linux/Unix applications on their personal computers and laptops. The Linux/Unix-based platform is stable platform in the industry.

The Linux operating system was developed by Linus Torvalds as an alternative to other operating systems. Most of its versions are free of costs. The most popular Linux software is Red Hat and Mandrake.

Linux/Unix was only for professionals until a few years ago but the situation has changed. Many ’small businesses have switched to the Linux/Unix platform because of its open source architecture, meaning that users can structure the system to do what they want it to do.

Web host providers are specializing in Linux/Unix servers and the demand for this type of interface has grown by 40% over the last three years. A Unix-based platform is one of the most reliable operating system that you can ever have. It has a better up time than Microsoft Operating Systems and hosting programs in Linux/Unix are more flexible. You actually can get ore from a Linux/Unix based server than other servers on the market.

Linux/Unix supports a wide variety of application languages, more than any other operating system. The most common applications of such kind include C, C++, Shell, Perl, Tcl, Python, Java and PHP. Databases available for Unix are mSQL and mySQL. The one you choose would depend on what you plan to do on the web and the host that you choose to park your web site.

The Linux/Unix based system comes with its won web development module in some versions of Red Hat Linux that make web site creation easy as 1-2-3. FTP modules are built into the operating system to provide you with an alternative way to load the web site to the Linux/Unix host.

Linux/Unix will become a major force in the future as more small to medium businesses turn towards its hosting platform.