It's the event every website owner fears... your host's server goes *poof* in a fantastic crash and burn... and takes your website down with it. Don't panic yet, there's hope!

Let's begin with what you can do to minimize your risk of a crash and maximize your ability to quickly and fully recover, then I'll give you some tips and tricks to use if a crash caught you unprepared.

Servers crash, and hardware fails. Anyone who works regularly with computers knows that it's not a question of "if" a server or hard drive will fail, it's a question of "when" it will happen. Aside from server crashes, websites can also be accidentally deleted with one click of the wrong button by the host, or accidentally when editing or updating them yourself.

Two Steps to Crash-Readiness

1) Choose your website host very carefully

There are many low cost hosts out there. Don't choose a website host based on the low price, the fancy website, the claim of unlimited bandwidth or the slick advertising campaign. Choose your host based on the quality of their equipment and service. Three important things to look for are:

DAILY BACKUPS: You want a host who makes daily backups. Find out if those backups are stored on the same server or off-site. Off-site backups are safer because even in the event that the whole datacenter burns down (which is extremely unlikely) there will be a safely stored copy of your entire website on another server in a second datacenter.

Another good reason to look for a host with daily backups is that if you accidentally delete your entire website yourself, they can restore it within minutes. Don't laugh. You'd be surprised how often this happens!

SERVERS WITH RAID: RAID stands for "redundant array of independent disks." In a RAID 10 configuration, all files on the server are mirrored. This means there's a real-time second copy of everything. So if one drive crashes, no data is lost and it takes only minutes to get back online.

ABILITY TO MAKE YOUR OWN BACKUP: Don't rely blindly on the backups of your hosting company. Backup files occasionally get corrupted or aren't complete, so you need to have your own as well. Look for a host who gives you the ability to make your own complete backups. If you host on a cPanel server, this is easy to do with a few clicks within your cPanel and if you save the backup file to your computer you can easily restore your website not only with your current host but at most other cPanel hosts. Be sure you download and save the backup file to your computer and don't save it on your hosting account because if the server crashes and your backup file was stored on the server, your backup copy will be gone too.

2) Be sure to regularly back up your own website

I advise clients to backup their website monthly and anytime they make major changes. You may also want to backup your databases separately. And always save a copy of any files you upload. In a worst case scenario, if you have a database backup from your store or blog, you can recreate it using the database backup.

Keep in mind that if you use webmail, your mail is being stored on the server and if it crashes your mail will disappear with it.

What to do when your website is gone and you don't have a backup

Stay calm. You'll need to deal with it one step at a time.

First, find out if your host has a backup copy. They should. If they don't, they were not adequately prepared and you need to seriously consider a new website hosting company immediately. If they did have backups stored off site that failed restores, it might be worth giving them a second chance. But otherwise, look for a more prepared company.

If they don't have a backup copy, and you don't have a backup copy, then you'll need to begin reconstructing your website from scratch.

If you're facing a complete server crash and everything is gone your first steps should be to get your email addresses set back up and put up a temporary page to assure your clients that you will be back online soon. Deal with this before you do anything else. You want to be sure that your email is up and running and that clients are notified that you aren't out of business.

Next you need to start reconstructing your website. Here are methods for reconstructing your site from various site-building methods.

Created by You

Did you create your own site? If you coded it on your computer, the files should be there somewhere that you can upload back to your web space.

If you publish your site with a program like Dreamweaver or Front Page you may have a copy of your website on your computer that you can upload again from within the program and be all set.

Created by a Website Design Firm

If you had a website designer create your pages for you the chances are very good that your designer has saved a copy of the original files. There may be a fee for their time to get the files reinstalled, but it can save you from having to start from scratch.

HTML Website Recovery

If your site was plain HTML pages (no database) then you may be able to reconstruct it using Google's handy cache feature. Just put the full URL of the page you need into Google and you'll see a result come up like this:

The Small Business Muse

Are you a small business owner who wants tips and ideas on how to balance, manage and market your business with an inspirational twist? ...

www.thesmallbusinessmuse.com/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages

See the little link that says "Cached"? Click it. You'll see the most recent version of your page that Google has saved. Do a "View Source" of the page's code, and you've got your page back! Images will likely be missing but you should be able to find them saved somewhere, and the image names will be in the code so you can search for them on your computer.

Go through one page at a time and if your pages were plain HTML and if Google visited and indexed your site recently, you'll be able to recover a good portion of your website this way.

Database Driven Site Recovery

If your site was database driven like an ecommerce shop or blog, it's tougher to reconstruct.

The first thing to do is reinstall whatever your website was powered by (Wordpress, osCommerce, Zen Cart, etc).

Next you need to get your template back. Again the original designer may be helpful so contact them and see if they have a copy of it saved. You may be able to find it in Google's cache as described above, but it will be a little trickier to get your template code so if you aren't very familiar with php, HTML, and the way your website worked, ask your virtual assistant or website designer/programmer to help you with this step.

Then you'll be ready to add your products back in. If you regularly submit to a shopping site like Google Base, see if you have a recent txt file export stored that you could use as a basis to reimport your products. If not, you'll need to just restock one item at a time.

And next time...

Sometimes lightening does strike the same place twice. So be sure that you are prepared! Not only will you save yourself frustration and work by having a back up copy of your website you can use to easily restore it, you'll also be able to sleep peacefully at night knowing that you are prepared for the worst case scenario.

Please go backup your website now. Really. Right now. *smiles* You'll be glad you did, even if you never need to use that backup.

About the Author

Find Michelle Shaeffer online at The Small Business Muse where she shares weekly tips and strategies for small businesses in The Muses Brainstorm. Stop by The Muses Guide for inspirational guides to help your small business grow.

So, what do you need in a server?

Do you need a gigabyte of storage space?

What IS a gigabyte, anyway?

Do you need add-on domains?

A shopping cart?

Multiple email addresses?

Don't base your decision on price or features alone. Reliability and support are important, too. So many things to consider!

You need to know what you need and what to look for before you start shopping. The information that follows will help you become an informed shopper!

* Server Uptime

A cheap host won't be worth the price if your website goes down frequently. Look for a host who is willing to publicly post their uptime statistics. If their statistics are good, they'll want to show them off. Independent monitoring companies like Alertra or Website Pulse Monitoring are reliable sources to prove server uptime. Don't hesitate to contact a potential hosting company to request their uptime stats.

* Server Speed

Overloaded servers or servers without adequate connections to the internet will be s-l-o-w. This means your site will not load quickly and you will lose visitors (and sales). How can you check a host's server speed? First, don't judge a company by it's own website because many hosts have their main site hosted on a different server for good reason (if their own servers go down, their website will still be available so their clients can contact them for support and updates). Instead, you need to check their client sites. Most hosts will be happy to provide references if they aren't listed on their website aleady.

* Price and Payment Options

A good, reliable host can be found for a reasonable price. It will vary depending on your exact needs, but expect anywhere from $5 to $25/month.

What options are available for payments? Consider looking for a host who offers multiple payment methods and has a true merchant account to accept credit cards, instead of just PayPal, 2Checkout, Worldpay, or other third party payment methods. These are great additional payment methods to provide but the process of approval for a merchant account to accept Visa, Mastercard or other credit cards directly requires a company to provide a substantial amount of documentation and verification and thus provides you with an extra level of security in the company's legitimacy. It's not scam-proof, but it helps. If you choose to pay with a credit card you can also do a charge-back in the event the company doesn't provide the service they agreed to.

Look for a company who offers 24/7 access to billing online. This will make your life easier in case you want to pay your bill at 3 am or need to update your information on the weekend.

* Storage Space

How much storage space do you really need? The majority of small business websites take less than 100 MB of storage space. If you have your website already designed, you can add up the file sizes of the files to see how much space it will take. Remember to consider that you need additional space for email storage and more files as your site grows.

* Bandwidth

Bandwidth is how much data transfer or traffic hits your website. You can get a rough idea of how much you'll need like this:

- Average page size of 5 kb plus 10 kb of graphics. - You expect 100 visitors per day. - Each visitor views 4 pages of your website.

15 kb total per page (5 kb + 10 kb) * 100 visitors * 4 pages * 30 days in a month = 180 MB of bandwidth per month

Find out what the procedure is if you go over your storage space limit or bandwidth limit. There should be an easy way to add more of either to your account for an additional fee.

* Basic Features

Here are some of the basic features to look for in a website host:

- An Online Control Panel (CPanel is a very popular control panel with extensive support documentation available, and includes Fantastico) so you can manage your site and email

- FTP Access to Upload Your Files

- Email Accounts and Email Forwarding Features

- Web based email system and POP mail available

- A Reliable Backup System (more on this below)

* Advanced Features

Depending on your needs, you might also look for the following features:

- Multiple Domain Names: Many hosts are setup to allow you to host multiple domains under one hosting package. You can either point additional domains to your main website, or you can set up additional websites at additional domain names. If you plan to purchase more than one domain name this feature can save you money since you won't have to purchase additional hosting packages for each domain.

- Secure Server: If you will be accepting payments online, you'll likely need a secured server (the exception being if you use a payment processor like PayPal). Most hosts offer what's called a "shared SSL certificate" at no additional charge. This works well for businesses just getting started. But be sure to also check if you can later upgrade to your own unique IP address with your own SSL certficate, and what the charges are for it. Expect to pay a few dollars more a month for a unique IP, and anywhere from $30 to $300 or more for an SSL certificate.

- MySQL Databases with phpMyAdmin access: If you plan to run an e-commerce shopping cart, newsletter, or forum on your site, you'll most likely need a host who supports these features.

- Mailing List Support: Are you able to run a mailing list from the hosting account? Is there a pre-installed or easy to install mailing list program available? What are the limits on outgoing email messages?

There are many other advanced features available than I can cover here. So just be sure that if you're planning to use some specific shopping cart or editing software (such as Front Page) that you verify it will work with the host you are considering.

* Backup Procedures

Industry standard is to make nightly backups. This way if a server or hard drive fails, or if you accidentally delete your entire website, your host can restore a recent copy. Do NOT host somewhere without nightly backups.

Better yet, look for a host that does nightly *off site* backups. This means the backups are not stored on the same server as your website. In the case of huge disaster, your site files are still safe.

Hardware failure is not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN (all hardware will eventually fail). Is the host you're considering prepared for this event? See if the host you're considering offers RAID on their servers. RAID stands for "redundant array of independent disks." In a RAID 10 configuration, all files on the server are mirrored. This means there's a real-time second copy of everything. So if one drive crashes, no data is lost and it takes only minutes to get back online.

* Support Options

One of the most important things to research about a potential website host is their support system. What options do you have when you need help?

Look for self-help options like flash (video) tutorials that walk you through basic tasks like creating an email address, and for an online knowledgebase that you can search for help.

Check to see what type of support system they offer when you need to contact a tech for help. Do you send an email or is there a trouble-ticket system? A trouble-ticket system is a better option since it reduces the chances of lost email, and allows you to track responses online in case your email is down or blocking mail from reaching you.

Also look to see what the general response time is. You don't want to spend 48 hours waiting for a response from support if something goes wrong with your website. Send a test message through the hosts support system and see how quickly they reply.

Does the host offer an off-server emergency site? If your website is down, that means the company's server is down. If their website (and email, and support system) are hosted on the same server as yours, you won't be able to contact them when it matters.

* Customer Testimonials and Experience

New hosting companies pop up daily on the internet. Some are fantastic. Others aren't so fantastic. Look for a company with a verifiable track record. Take time to read the testimonials offered on their website (and find out how long those customers have been with the host). Or, better yet, if you've got a friend or colleague who's online, ask if they're happy with their host. Find out how quick and helpful support responses are, and whether they've had extensive down time or any other problems. A reliable host will have satisfied customers.

About the Author

Find Michelle Shaeffer online at The Small Business Muse where she shares weekly tips and strategies for small businesses in The Muses Brainstorm. Stop by The Muses Guide for inspirational guides to help your small business grow.

Whether you want a website for business or pleasure, you might be feeling a little bit reluctant to get into the world of webdesign.

After all, isn't this something that people get paid hundreds of dollars to do? While that is true, this doesn't mean that you will come up short when it comes to a website.

Think of website design as singing. There are a few people who are at the top of the profession, many more who manage to make a bit of money doing it, and plenty of people who just do it for their own purposes.

That doesn't mean that any of those people have bad singing voices, so remember that getting the proficiency to make your own website is fairly straighforward.

The first thing that you need to think about is a host, a service that will sell you a domain name and help you keep your sight up on their servers. You'll find that these hosts are fairly inexpensive and that they will also likely provide you with some basic website templates to work with.

While these are fine for general purposes, you might have more needs than they are willing to account for. Think about what you need your website to do and don't stop until it does that!

When you have the matter of hosting taken care of, it's time to take a look and find out what WYSIWYG program is available to you.

WYSIWIG stands for the phrase "what you see is what you get" and it will be your best friend while you are designing your webpage. Essentially, a WYSIWIG program will allow you to build your webpage up simply by adding features to a page template.

This is straightforward in the extreme and relies on no knowledge of coding at all. With a little bit of practice, these programs can become quite instinctive.

Some WYSIWIG programs include Adobe GoLive, Dreamweaver and FrontPage, and you'll find that they are all similarly useful. You'll be able to type text directly into the page itself, and you'll find that there are many different things that you can do.

A rudimentary knowledge of word processing can do a lot of good to you here, but even that is not vital. In no time at all, you'll be able to design your pages.

Remember to test them as you go, to ensure that you have no dead links or similar problems, but you can do quite a lot just on your own.

After you have the design of your webpage set up, you'll find that all you have to do is FTP them to your webserver, where they will be accessible to the rest of the internet.

Making your webpages this way, you don't need any knowledge of code, nor do you need to worry about making updates through a difficult interface.

Designing webpages has never been easier, so take advantage of programs like this to put your page up!

About the Author

Alojate.com is the premier web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range or services for all business needs.
http://www.Angelopolis.com http://www.veracruz.com.mx

What exactly is Cpanel anyway? It is short for "Control Panel". It is a interface used by website owners to maintain and keep their websites up-to-date.

Cpanel was created to offer an easy to use solution for website owners to cut out the middle man, or in this case, the webmaster. Most hosting companies provide Cpanel as an default option with their hosting plans.

This is often the deciding factor for most people seeking a new hosting company. If a hosting company does not provide Cpanel web interfaces, then that are not with "the program" so to speak.

Cpanel is a great way to manage your website or websites from one main interface. From the control panel main interface in your hosting account login page, you have access to many account specific modules such as email accounts, visitor stats, subdomains, domain parking, cron jobs, and more.

Most basic user friendly modules are positioned closer to the top of the accounts page. Almost anyone at any stage of Internet and computer usage abilities can use Cpanel. This is the way to programmers of Cpanel wanted it to be.

It was designed to be a user friendly interface so more average website owners could get a feel as to how the websites run and work.

As mentioned above, it is very easy to use. It was design to accommodate most ages and educational groups of computer users. To make it even more easier on the website owners, Cpanel includes a package called Fantastico.

Fantastico makes it easier for website owners to install programs such as Wordpress, Moodle, phpBB, mambo, and Joomla with one click. If website owners would try to install these programs alone, it would take hours to install them all.

But with Fantastico it takes little or no time at all. Fantastico allows owners to create blogs, discussion boards, and CMS sites right from the control panel.

The Cpanel also offers databases and database management from the main screen. This is a time saver for those who are not experts in creating databases.

The control panel makes it all the more so easier to accomplish the task of maintaining the website, from an inexperienced standpoint. The benefits outweigh any negative issues with Cpanel.

Besides ease of use, Cpanel offers freedom and gives the website owner a new appreciation and respect for the website as a whole. The Cpanel program is good for users of all levels of experience.

When choosing a hosting provider, make sure the company has Cpanel as a part of its hosting packing and see for yourself how good Cpanel is.

The only con to this great piece of software is that it takes consistent monitoring; however, it is not something that happens that often.

Hacking cPanel is just something that most webmasters need to understand. If you want to avoid it altogether, simply set up your site with "0" sub-domains or the exact amount of sub-domains you need for your needs.

If you have 100 sub-domains with your package, ask the administrator to reduce it to 5 until you need more. In that way, you can benefit from the fantastic feature-rich cPanel interface and won't need to deal with the crap that comes along with it.

There is so much positive advancements in using this interface, that the sub-domain problem shouldn't be a deterrent to using it. It is definitely the best system on the market.

About the Author

Alojate.com is the premier web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range or services for all business needs.
http://www.Angelopolis.com http://www.Virtual5.com.mx

If you have a website, one of the most important things you need to know about is bandwidth. You don't know what that is, you say? Okay, here we go.

Basically, bandwidth is the amount of data you can transfer at one time. When you have less bandwidth, your site takes longer to load regardless of what connection your visitors have.

With more visitors, each visitor is going to have to wait his or her turn if you don't have enough bandwidth to accommodate everyone.

If you can lower the amount of data transfer you have on your end, you'll have a site that more people can visit, because you won't have to worry about exceeding the amount of bandwidth your hosting provider allows you.

The more data you transfer, the more bandwidth you consume. The less data you transfer, the less bandwidth you consume. Therefore, keep it simple for best results.

How much bandwidth do you need?

How much bandwidth you need for your site depend on a number of factors. Basically, you want to keep your site as simple as possible, to reduce the amount of bandwidth.

This, in turn, makes it possible for more visitors to visit your site. Not just that, they'll be able to visit your pages more easily and will be less likely to leave because they're waiting for your pages to load.

To determine how much bandwidth you currently use, take a look at your traffic history.

If you don't have a site yet and you want to get one, you can estimate how much bandwidth you use by estimating the following factors:

-Daily number of visitors, or the number you expect -Daily average of page views per visitor, or the number you expect -Size of your site, including graphics, or the size you expect it to be

Then, take each of those numbers and multiply them by 30, then add them together. This gives you a rough average size of your monthly transfer needs. If you're also going to offer downloads, then take the number of expected downloads per day, multiply times 30, and add that to the above transfer total.

You should also give yourself a small percentage extra in transfer needs to account for e-mail traffic and any uploads you make.

Are "unlimited" hosting plans a good idea?

You might have noticed that some hosting plans offer "unlimited" bandwidth. In theory, this is a good idea, because it means that you don't have to watch how much bandwidth you're using.

However, that's only in theory. What really happens is that you're given a fixed amount of bandwidth no matter how many visitors you have. Therefore, if you have a small amount of visitors, their transfer times and therefore their wait times are small.

However, if you have a large amount of visitors, they simply have to "get in line" with everyone else and their allotted amount of bandwidth is going to be proportionately smaller depending on how many more visitors there are.

This means that they are going to have much longer wait times than if you don't use much bandwidth, even if you're using an "unlimited" hosting plan.

Therefore, your true best bet in most cases it's going to be to limit the bandwidth you yourself use (including for website graphics and things of that nature), so that you have more left over for your visitors to use.

Optimize graphics, and build cascading style sheets, call JavaScript externally if you use it instead of embedding it yourself, and don't use streaming audio or video. You can also clean up the HTML in your page by reducing the amount of META tags, white space, and comments.

You can also cache your website for easier and faster loading, but then set a date of expiration in the HTTP headers so the browser will refresh content after a certain amount of time.

Spiders too can reduce your bandwidth, but if you use robots.txt, this can help keep them in control.

About the Author

Alojate.com is the premier web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range or services for all business needs.
Pedregal.com is the real estate agency located in La Paz with experienced agents and consultants.
http://www.bigonmusicvideos.com

Perhaps your business is growing faster than your web hosting company can keep up with or maybe your chosen site just isn't up to par with your sites' needs.

In any case, the best solution to this conundrum is to switch web hosting companies. Before you dive blindly into what can be a sea of confusion, there are a few steps you should take to ensure the transition from one site provider to another is seamless and worry-free.

As with any type of renovation project, embarking on a web hosting company change will go much easier if you develop a plan and then stick to it.

In order to ensure a smooth and efficient transfer from one web hosting company to another, you should allow yourself enough time to complete each step and then run tests for accuracy and accessibility.

Generally this type of transition requires at least three to four weeks from the initial planning stage to the date your new site is up and running.

Once you have completed your research and determined which site you will do business with (bear in mind there are hundreds of thousands of sites you can form an alliance with, so this can sometimes be a daunting and often frustrating task.

However, doing your homework at this stage can eliminate a lot of aggravation later.), you can have your new site activated usually within 24-48 hours.

The first, and most important, step at this stage is to ensure you do a secure and complete backup of all the files on your current (old) web hosting provider's site regardless of whether or not you have the files stored on a local computer.

Backups are like insurance, you never appreciate having them until a catastrophe strikes, so even though it may be tempting to eliminate this step, you may live to regret it should the proverbial "Murphy, what can go wrong will go wrong " be lurking in cyberspace to sabotage your efforts.

Besides backing up the customary HTML files, it is a good idea to have copies of script, database and server log files. Creating a directory structure that mirrors the one on your web server makes downloading files easier and the transition a lot more efficient.

Following confirmation from your new web hosting company that your account has been activated and your file transfer protocol procedures are operational, you are ready to upload your files to the new server.

Since you have already saved your files in a familiar directory structure, uploading your information to the new site should progress without a hitch.

Following completion of the above steps, you can now run some tests on the new web site in order to verify that all modules are working perfectly.

Once everything is working flawlessly, you are ready to change your old Domain Name Server (DNS) to the new one which would have been provided by the new web hosting company.

All that's left now is for you to sit back and wait for the hits to begin.

About the Author

Alojate.com is the premier web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range or services for all business needs.
http://www.expomascotas.com.mx http://www.pedregalescapes.com

Content management systems are a suite of tools that handle a lot of the technical aspects of website management for web developers.

While you can make a simple static web page with just raw HTML, the sophistication of how web sites are built and maintained mean that this can be a Sisyphean task over the long haul, with Cascading Style Sheets, Dynamic HTML and embedded RSS feeds.

Good managers can not only make your life easier, but it can save you time, money, and above all save you from the headache of manually updating your site or outsourcing changes.

Here are seven ways it can benefit your business, no matter level of technical knowledge you possess.

What used to take legions of programmers weeks to do is now packaged in a set of server side applications that you can install (or may already be installed) on your web server.

What a CMS does is provide you with an easy (well, easier) to use interface on the fiddly details of managing the cascading style sheets, and cascading elements of your web site.

Instead of having to dig deep into the code, you're presented with a style editor, and can change font selections, point sizes, background colors recurring graphical elements, all without having to dig into the coding yourself.

Furthermore, good content management systems also provide you with an interface to upload new content, new graphics, blog posts, controlled posting areas, the ability to add graphics to a library without doing a lot of hand coding.

Now, there is a time investment in learning a content management system. Getting the hang of a content management system early on will give you an advantage in maintaining your sight in the long run.

As a matter of fact, the time spent in running a content management system can pay for itself in under a month. Even so, the time to go to a content management system may be after you've done your first few pages on the site, rather than from ground zero; certainly by the time you put three pages up, a content management system is probably a better choice.

If you want to publish a newspaper, managing articles or looking for a consistent look and feel you should use a CMS, using which you or your associate can easily maintain and extend yourself without having much knowledge of programming or designing.

This way you can always greet your website visitors with fresh contents and your current information's. I can foresee that if you want to extend your net presence content wise strongly you should be adopting a content management system which can be easily customized as per your needs.

One of the other major benefits of a content management system is preventing link rot, where old links tend to get outdated; a content management system is critical to making your web site easy to update and easy to maintain.

To summarize, a CMS consists of an easy-to-use administration area that allows for fast, simple updating of a website's content, while hiding the technical details of how a database stores and retrieves that content.

About the Author

Alojate.com is the premier web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range or services for all business needs.
http://www.actitudpublicitaria.com http://www.Virtual5.com.mx