Devlounge

Design, Develop, and Grow

Choosing A Host

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More often then not, you find yourself looking for web hosts to house your own sites, blogs, and other projects. How much thought do you put into deciding what host to go with? Maybe you should put a little more into it.

The Shelter For Your Site

Choosing a host can be a daunting task, because every other site you see, and every other advertisement in most popular design communities are all for hosting, and all with different hosting companies. Each one offers different features, and all for different prices.

To start, choosing a host is not something to be taken lightly. When you host your site on another companies servers, you expect your data to be protected. By protected we mean safe from everything – crashes, attacks, and oh yeah, the hosting company just vanishing one morning.

Tip 1: Your Needs

The first thing to consider when choosing a host is your needs. How many sites do you plan to host on this one plan? What amount of space and bandwidth will you need? You always want to give yourself a little bit more room to work with than a little less. For example, you plan on only writing a blog, so you settle for a meager 25MB. You soon find you posted images in every entry, and you’ve loaded the server up with extra things – and now you’re out of room.

First things first, create a list of what you’re looking for in terms of features. Try answering some of these questions:

  • Cpanel or Plesk? – Both offers there own pros and cons. Take a look around if you’ve never worked with either of them before, and decide what control panel you’d rather have.
  • How much storage space am I looking for? – Come up with a rough estimate on how much space your site(s) may need, and try adding 5 to 10 extra megs, just in case your estimation was short. In most cases, you can cut down that extra space for a few dollars off your monthly bill.
  • How much bandwidth will I need? – Is your site original or has the potential to become very popular? Or are you running a small site or portfolio? These factors can help determine how much bandwidth you’ll need to handle your traffic. Most of time, it’s better to start off small, and buy more bandwidth as your traffic increases, because all sites start off slow, and an excessive amount of bandwidth would in turn be wasted in the first few months of a new site.
  • What features do I need support for? – Are you going to need Mysql databases and php support? It’s important to know ahead of time what extra features and things you need in order for your site to operate. While most hosts offer mysql databases and php by default, some may not, and there may be other features you need, such as support for Ruby On Rails, which not all hosts have.

Paying for Content: Worth It?

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The days, quality content is a must to the success of any site. Content has always been essential to a great website. But, it’s how we get our daily content that has changed.

Introducing: Contents Writer

Before, you couldn’t get away with having the title as a “Content Writer” unless you wrote for a newspaper or magazine. Now, you can be a “professional content writer”, and even earn money doing it. How you ask? and Why? We find ourselves sitting here asking the same question. If you’re a freelance writer looking for work then a writers job board is a good place to start.

Paying for Content

It makes sense that, like everything else, you should be able to pay to get certain things done. In many cases, a busy webmaster doesn’t always have the time or effort to put together daily content updates, and they need someone to take care of it for them. That’s where today’s hired content writers come up. They will write original articles for your site, for a fee per article, week, etc.

This can become a savior for the webmaster, who can worry less about content, and focus on other site management and maintainence.

But at the same time, what does this mean for the user?

The Truth Behind Paid-For-Content

Don’t get me wrong, paid for content contributors can be great, but it depends on the type of site and type of content you have. In Devlounge’s case, I made the decision not to go with paid content.

A few things paid content seems to lack.

  • Real Meaningful Posts – No matter how well the writer is, and how much they know the subject they’re covering, in the end they are writing for commission, not for the benefit of the visitors.
  • Caring About the Community – When you have a group of editors willing to contribute freely, you get a more connected feel between your regular site visitors and your staff. There are follow-up posts, tips, comments from the autor, follow-up discussion, and you know the author was in it to help the community, not to help themselves.The same seems to be true for buying out posts and forum members on a forum. This idea emerged a few years ago, and has taking off, with companies and such offering members and posts to your forums, to boast your site traffic and community members. But, are you really gaining anything? No. In situations like that, the members you are receiving really don’t have interest in your site / forums, otherwise they would have joined on their own.

    Solutions

    The best solution – write your own content.
    Have original articles written by yourself and a home-grown group of staff dedicated to contributing good, quality entries and supporting the site and it’s visitors.

    Your Turn – Voice Your Opinion

    What do you think about Content Writers for hire? Good idea or bad? We want to hear from you. Discuss below, and we will post a follow-up article in the near future.

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