If you have a nice website with many scripts running and you often feel sluggishness in loading of pages or worst the whole website does down from time to time, it’s not always a sign of bad webhost. Work with clients I have received complaints about website going down and when digging into the matter it was found that number of process were a lot more than what were allotted by the hosting to that particular account. To avoid misuse and proper distribution of resources amongst its customers, shared hosting providers sometimes allot a fix number of allowed simultaneous process than can run in one account. Now when number of process exceed the maximum allowed, your website will go down and resume again itself when process decrease. To understand this, let’s assume these processes to be similar to the process running in your windows based home PC.  You should have noticed that when number of process increase in your taskmanager, your computer responds slower. Web servers are computer too, so when your website start running lots of processes it gives substantial load on the system making your website responds slower. In normal conditions chances of increasing process count is very less likely but when your website have several scripts that have several loop holes, it can result in increase in number of process. One of the most common culprit is the newsletter system, it require many mails to be sent and if it is abused by spammers then you know you are in trouble.

1. Firstly you should be aware of what types and how many scripts are included in every pages of your website.  Use good quality scripts and avoid alphas and betas.
2. Remove any unnecessary script that many be included on many pages of your website, like script for embedding flash content and page may not have any flash content at all. Keep watch on those heavy frameworks scripts too!
3. If you use mailing script for sending mass emails to your users, make sure you have some delay while sending mails. Sending 1000 emails at once is a big no but sending 1000 emails with gap of 30 seconds after every 10 emails is ok.

Google updated its page rank database today giving out many sites some rank that they deserved. Every single gain in page rank is like a noble prize for the owner of that site. Search engine results are influenced by this page rank, a site with better page rank will come up higher in search results. Coming up higher in search result means it’s more likely that your website will be visited frequently than others and you get more traffic. This traffic is always quality traffic. Even if I don’t know these facts, I just like the Google Page rank green bar longer in my toolbar!

When you are doing a dynamic website project, it may need you to make forms to collect user information. Almost every website has contact us form which mostly consist of name, email, comment and phone number etc. These forms are easy to make and data can be sent to an email id or stored somewhere. If all you want is send data to an email id, then all you have to do is write few lines of code and use mail() function but if you need to store the data, story is different! Storing data means use of database and since you cannot read data directly from logging in database panel and reading tables, you will need to make an interface from where stored data can be read. This is where admin panel is needed. Making form and then connecting it to database, setting up admin panel to view stored data requires lot of coding. If you know coding well even then it takes some time to do this, otherwise you hire a programmer to do it for you.

Form tools make things easy for you. This free open source script is not only highly customizable but also works with variety of forms. All you have to do is make the form and then connect it to form tool (installed on your server) and that’s it! Form tool will collect data from the form, store in database and present you in clean tabular and printable format. Connect your form to Form tool is very easy and anyone without knowledge of coding can do it. I think Form tool is one of the best tool for every web developer. Download it free from formtools.org

Website uptime depends on your host. While most of the web host these days claim to have 99.9% uptime, but it’s really unfortunate to know that it’s not always true. It’s like whenever a web host setup his own website, the web designer gifts him a 99.9% uptime icon without even knowing whether the host will be really that good or not. Thumbs rule is to choose a host which is well known in industry and have been in business since long. Few names which come in mind are: HostGator, 1and1, godaddy, bluehost etc. Going with one of these means a good service and rare downtimes. Good uptime will make sure that your site is available for your visitors whenever they visit your site which is very important. If site shows unavailable then it gives a bad impression and one can notice a drop in hits and page views. I recommend WebCEO for monitoring your website uptime. They are really good in providing timely reports right into your inbox (no spam whatsoever, only reports) which is really useful as you can show it as a proof to your host if he is providing a bad uptime.

There are a number of options to consider some particular web host for your website but in my opinion, its best if this decision is taken by the person who actually built the site. Not only because he is more knowledgeable in these techy things but also because he only knows what are the exact requirements of the website and which host can serve well for the site. Let’s take example of Ruby on rails. Ruby on Rails, more commonly referred to as Rails, is a framework for web applications scripted in the Ruby programming language. In this sense, the framework is simply a collection of building blocks that compose a type of support structure for a web-based application. If website needs it and webhost does not provide it, then it may be a problem as most of the time web host is not willing to install new stuff just for single site. Unfortunately many web hosts provide almost all the commonly used features so it becomes hard to take a decision. Here web hosting rating on web host directory is very helpful in judging the best host. You also want a hosting company who offers assurance. You need to be assured of receiving the best possible service for your personal, professional or business needs. Most providers advertise an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, a percentage that has become standard in the industry. If you’re hosting a website in a shared server environment, the uptime may be questionable. Uptime is something which you can’t compromise because it’s just like having no website at all if your website is down most of the time. I suggest reading web hosting tutorials which describe every small bits and even hidden facts about web hosting industry. I feel that everyone must know about things like overselling space and other service, uptimes, security, hosting control panels etc. There are few web hosting companies who have received web hosting awards and they are definitely worth considering when you are looking for web host, these may not always be very highly priced. This is again a true fact that all good web host are not highly priced, even if they haven’t received any awards yet, they may get in future.

There are people who consider blog as a blog and some think it as a website with categories, achieves listed on side. But just like you cannot use a bike engine to run a car (well it may be but it will be a bad idea), similarly a blog is a blog. What I mean to say that if you need a company website for official use, make it a proper website with the html, PHP or whatever language you want to use in it and not simply install wordpress and use a free template to save time. You will say, why not do that when it’s simpler, look nice and saves money. You never know how many people are going to get a bad image about your company. There are two kinds of people, one who know what a blog is and others who are completely unaware. So people who know blog will at once sat, “oh this guy is so lazy and cheap that he installed blog and showing it as a website” and other who don’t know must have seen many blogs and they must have an image that this is something easy (maybe they know its free) as everyone is having it. So overall, it’s better to have a true website when there is a need of website and not a blog. At this point you will say that you can find some template or customize it to look just like any other website! But if you are doing so much, what’s wrong is making a normal CSS design? You will have better control over its layout and it will be lighter on system too. it doesn’t take long to XHTML a template psd. Having a /blog with a proper website is a plus point and I always favor that. Its good SEO wise too.