Hosting FAQ

What size hosting do I need for a 15 page website?

• You did not give much information there. Generally speaking if your building the website yourself, after your finished completing it just point your cursor at the file it's saved in. This should show the file size. If not right click the file and go down to properties and click it to see the size. Now, decide how many e-mail addresses you'll need for the website and multiply it by 5 Mgs. Add both together and that the minimum size you need. It's always best to get a little more than what you figure you'll need for growth.

What's transfer rate?

• Simply how much of your website is viewed by visitors. Let's say you have a 2 Meg website. And one visitor views every page. You just had 2 Megs of transfer. So if you expect 250 visitors to your website every month and their going to visit every page on your website (which doesn't happen often) you'd need 500 Megs of transfer rate per month.

I'd like to see the control panel and features your talking about?

• You can get a good idea of what's offered and what the control panel looks like at our Support Page.

How do I read the information about who visits my website? And what do I do with it?

• Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don’t know which direction they are coming from or who they are.
  Without analyzing your web site traffic, it’s difficult to improve your web site marketing.
  You should be aware of the different terms used to describe web site traffic, so as not to be confused about your web site visitors.
  Here are the main terms used:
  
  Visit - these are all requests made by a specific user to the site during a set period of time. The visit is ended if a set period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or hostnames/Ip addresses
  
  Hit - this is a request to the server for a file not a page. Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic files, audio files or CSS and JavaScript files, resulting in a number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a hit.
  
  Counting hits is not the same as tracking page views. It takes multiple hits to view a page. 
  
  Page view/Impression this is the number of times a page is accessed as a whole.
  
  Unique Visitor - Visit by a unique person within a 24 hour period who has never been to your website.
  
  Referrer - A page that links to your site. By looking at your referrers will tell you who's linked to your site. This can be particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine traffic is coming from. 
  
  User Agent - This refers to the software used to access your site. Sometimes known as a "browser" or "client", the term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when the search engines last crawled your pages. 
  
  Analyzing log data can give you a good idea of where your site visitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how long they stay, and which browsers they are using. Before signing on with a hosting company, make sure they offer access to raw log files. Even if you don't need them immediately, sooner or later you'll be glad to have them. 
  
  There are also different types of log files - access, referrer, error, and agent are the primary ones.
  
  Analyzing the access log will give you information about who visited your site, which pages they visited, and how long they stayed on the site. This is useful information in determining whether or not your site is working as you intend.
  
  The record below shows the visitor's IP number or hostname, date and time of the request, the command received from the client, the status code returned, the size of the document transferred, and the browser and operating system the visitor was using.
  
  nas-112-52.slc.navinet.net - - [29/Jan/2000:17:17:12 -0500] "GET
  page.html HTTP/1.1" 200 23443
  "http://www.mydomain.com/page.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;
  MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)" 
  
  The referrer log contains referral information - the source that referred the visitor to your site. If the referrer was a search engine, you will also find the keywords that were entered to find your site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record below shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.com to the index page of the site.
  
  http://www.somedomain.com/page.htm
  
  This record shows that the visitor came to my site from a search engine link. Notice the keyword data is included in the record.
  
  http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=design+tips
  
  The Agent log provides information on which browser and operating system was used to access your site. Such as:
  
  Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)
  
  The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated  by the server and sent back to the client. The record below shows the type of server, date and time of the error, client identification, explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to the file that caused the error.
  
  apache: [Sun Jan 30 10:09:57 2000][error] [client 195.238.2.162]
  File does not exist:/u/web/mydomain/favicon.ico 
  
  As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about how your visitors are using your site.
  
  Web traffic statistics provide very valuable information about your web site. You can make better marketing decisions through them telling you:
  Which Web pages are most popular and which are least used.
  Who is visiting your Web site.
  Which Web browsers to optimize your Web pages for.
  Which Web search engines are most useful to you, and which are the least useful. 
  Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages.