It has been most remiss of me not to mention that I can host forums for clients as well. In fact, I’ve been doing it for awhile but have never mentioned it.  So I thought I should make mention of it now and add a page to this website.

If you have a club, group, industry interest or perhaps a set of friends or work colleagues that you’d like to keep in constant contact with then there are two good choices to maintain that contact. An email list or a board forum. Both mean that emails are received into your mailbox, however with a board forum it gives you the opportunity to choose which message threads you want to follow, rather than every single conversation as in an email list. And you can also add an avatar in the way of your photo if you wish to let fellow members know what you look like.

Both email lists and board forums allow you to create a signature block to showcase your business or favourite site.  And both work very well, depending on your needs.  A board forum can be designed to reflect your organisations corporate colours and logo.

Here at ACS-Webhosting we offer two options, phpBB and SMF, which are both very popular forum software programs.  To find out more please visit the Forum Hosting page on our site.  Available at a very affordable $9.95AUD a month.

I often get people commenting to me that they have no idea who their domain name is registered with and that their webhost has handled that for them.  That’s fine until something changes and the client doesn’t want to be with that host anymore but didn’t want to ask for details about their domain.

I believe that the true owners of a domain should have that information – even if they don’t access it personally.  It’s important to have the login details and that renewals for the domain are sent to the owners, not to the webhosts.

There are two sources on the web that I use:

For Aussie domains go to http://www.melbourneit.com.au/cc/whois/

For non-Aussie domains you can use http://www.whois.net/

Both of these will tell you the owner of the domain name, the nameserver the site is currently hosted with and who the registrar is that the domain name was registered with.  The only exception is if the domain has been privately registered but you should still get info on the nameserver and registrar.

I often do register domains on behalf of clients or direct them to http://www.acsdomainservices.com to register a domain.  When I do the registration I make sure the domain is in the name of the client and that I’m added as the Tech Contact. That way I can assist on a technical basis and if the registrar can’t get in touch with the owner for renewals I can be contacted.

When you’re planning to set up a website, there are three components to be organised:  the domain name, the webhosting and the website itself.  This is not always evident to those new to getting a website, but let me explain it like this.

The address is where people will find your website – this is the domain name or URL.  You can purchase these through domain registrars and you will find them at all sorts of prices. I have a service available here.  The domain should always be registered in your name and not your host’s name or your webmaster’s name, although they may be listed as your technical contact.  Important that you have control of your domain at all times.

The webspace is where your website is hosted – where it lives.  It is space on the web that is reserved for your website and the address is pointed to that space. This blog is attached to my webhosting service.  Your site might be hosted by the same company that sells you your domain but it doesn’t have to be.  However, if it is, make sure the domain name is registered in your name and not their’s – otherwise you may experience problems if you decide to shift hosts.  You don’t want to have to start all over again with a new domain name and lose any traffic (visitors) you were receiving at your old domain.

The website is created by a web designer.  Again, it could be the same person providing all three services, or you might have each one handled by a different business.  The website is the visual that people see when they call up your domain name.  Websites can be created in several different programs. My program of choice is WordPress (with which this site has been created) but I also use Dreamweaver for creating or maintaining sites if clients prefer.

To simplify how it works. Think of your domain name as your business name.  Think of your webspace as the postal box your mail is sent to.  If you shift premises often you will change your postal address but your business name will remain the same.  The same applies to shifting webhosts – you keep your domain name and never have to notify people of a new email address or domain address and no-one will know you’ve shifted hosts.  I hope that simplifies how things work.

I get people bringing their websites to my server, or alternatively moving to another server, but it’s not always obvious what needs to be done – unless you’re the one that has set up the website in the first place. So I thought I’d share on what needs to be done.

Firstly, plan when the shift is going to be done.  Preferably evening (if you get mainly local traffic) or on a weekend – a time when traffic and email is going to be at a low rate.  If necessary, notify clients and other important persons of the shift and possible downtime for a couple of hours.

1. Your domain name. Whose name is it registered in?  Important that it’s in your name and you probably don’t want to instigate a shift to a new server until you are sure of that. Otherwise you might find the domain is no longer available to you.
2. Join your new host and determine the size webspace and other services you need.
3. Back up all of your data – if you don’t know how to do this, ask for help from your web designer.  If you are using WordPress, this includes your database.  This can be done via SSH or cPanel’s phpMyAdmin
4. Make a list of all email addresses being used and passwords.
5. Log into your domain registrar and point your domain to the new DNS name servers given to you by your new host.  Name servers usually look like this (replace “yourhostname.com” with your host’s actual domain name or the settings they advise):
   ns1.yourhostname.com
   ns2.yourhostname.com
   If you have purchased your domain from acsdomainservices.com we will happily do this for you.
6. Log into your new webspace and upload/re-set up your website.  Check that everything is visible and working.
7. Re-set up your email accounts – these won’t automatically transfer with the website.
8. Test your email and make sure it’s working.
9. Wait about 48 hours as it can take this long for domain changes to propagate on the web around the world.
10. Contact your old webhost and advise them the site has been shifted to another server and they are no longer needed – important you do this. The webhost won’t know you’ve shifted the site and will continue holding that webspace for you (and bill you) unless you let them know.  If you purchased your domain through them, do not cancel the domain – webhosting and domains are two separate things.
11. Test your scripts and forms.
12. Check your links to make sure they’re all live – some might be referencing pages you forgot to re-upload.

Things to look for in a new webhosting service:

• The right webhosting service. Best to see what you’ve been using before from your old host and look to match with a similar service from the new host i.e. are they running Unix, Linux or Windows?
• How much webspace do you really need?
  Data transfer limits. What’s available?
• Email capabilities – is there a restriction on how many email addresses you can have?  This may, or may not, be important to your business or website.
• Database programs – if you’re using WordPress, in particular, your new host will need to support that need.
• What type of scripting abilities do you need?
• If you were used to using cpanel before, you might like to check the new host has that.  For those who haven’t used it, this is an easy to use control panel giving you control on setting up email addresses, using different opensource software and watching your stats.  Or what other control panel do they have available?
• What is the uptime the host promotes?

Got more tips for shifting to a new webhost? Leave a comment below.

When I was first introduced to WordPress it was simply for blogging purposes.  I’d been writing a family blog, a business blog of my own and one for a client at Blogger.com.  I’d gotten up to over 100 posts on my business blog (it now sits at over 760) and I was concerned about backups and how to protect my content. I’d heard stories of blogs that had gone missing at Blogger or of being hacked, and I didn’t want that happening to what I considered to be valuable content for my industry.  Every now and then I would publish all the blogs to one page and then do a File, Save As, as a simple way of backing up my content, but I was restless to get more control.

I’d learnt how you could ftp the blog to your own server and toyed with that idea when I also started to explore WordPress.  I knew it could be installed on the server and you could self-host your own blogs.  So, I shifted the family blog over first and tested with that, to make sure I understood what was needed. Once satisfied I shifted my own blog over to my server and then eventually my client’s blog too.  By that stage I was hooked.  I had my own server, I was able to buy domains as often as I wanted and suddenly there was no reason why I couldn’t have as many blogs as I wanted.  At one time (2006-2007) I owned 15 active blogs.  whew!  That was probably an overkill, or should I say I was suffering from gluttony!  You could definitely say I was in the zone and enjoying what I was learning.

Not long after that I began to see websites that were being created in WordPress and it occurred to me that I could do the same too.  Convert the Frontpage and Dreamweaver sites I owned into WordPress… because whenever I wanted to change the look it was as simple as finding a new template and making the click to change it. No more long hours of redesigning, then making sure the css code had changed all the web pages connected on that site and so on.  It all began to make sense and gradually I changed a number of sites I owned, and several client sites to WordPress.  All new sites I began working on were mainly in WordPress, with only the occasional one in Dreamweaver. By that time Frontpage was no longer available to upgrade and the version I had wasn’t working on my later computer (I usually update every 2-3 years).

So, some of the main benefits of using WordPress over html programs? In my eyes they are:

• Easy to use if a client wishes to update their own content – it’s simply login and add/change content and upload images
• Change the look of a website very simply by clicking on a button in the dashboard, once you’ve chosen your new look template
• Easy add-on tools (plugins) for extra items on your sites
• A backup tool that works easily to back up your website or blog
• Search engines love WordPress and instead of waiting the traditional 4-6 weeks (at least) to get listed with a html site, it’s now virtually as soon as you publish the site

And there are lots of other things too, which I will share with you over time.

Subscribers, up till now, have been receiving updates, only when it relates to a change in the server or something else relating to their webhosting service.  However, I now wish to use this blog for also writing about the benefits of WordPress, how it will enhance your site if it is already in WordPress, or the benefits you can experience if your site is later updated to WordPress.  Server announcements and other information will continue to be published via this blog as well, from time to time.

I’ve been setting up websites and providing web hosting for many years now. I began doing it just for myself and then when clients mentioned the dismal service they were getting from other webhosts, I began to take over their hosting as well.  Today I have two servers, one in Australia and one in the US, both have good uptimes and I have little problems with them. I have a small team of IT/programmers in the background who assist with the more technical stuff and they allow me to get on with setting up new accounts, setting up webspaces and getting the websites created and uploaded.

When I first began working on websites in 1996 it was with Microsoft’s Frontpage (now superceded by other programs) and I used that for several years.  In 1999 I took on a 6 month intraweb database project with a company supporting a hospital group that required the work to be done in Dreamweaver, so I spent time learning that and teaching some of my Virtual Assistant team as well, so we could manage that project.  I continued to use Dreamweaver, with Frontpage occasionally till around 2007 when I realised that the blogging software, WordPress, that I had been using for 3 years, was capable of creating CMS (Content Management Style) sites.

WordPress has moved forward in leaps and bounds and is now my program of choice, along with tens of thousands of other web designers.  What many still don’t realise is that WordPress is a free program.  You can get the community based free WordPress at wordpress.com but it is important to understand that it is not meant for business use, but rather for other things, hobbies, personal use, community projects and so on.

If you pay for webhosting many hosts now have WordPress available as part of the package. WordPress itself is free and can be downloaded from wordpress.org where there is also a great forum and community of users, ready to help you when you have a need.  So, even if your webhost doesn’t provide it you could install the package quite easily yourself, or with assistance.

My own webhosting facilities has cpanel, where you can set up email addresses, track the stats for your website and a number of other tools, and Fantastico which has a number of open-source software programs available including WordPress.  What I love about WordPress is its ease of use – for beginners and those more advanced.  Almost anyone could set up a WordPress site in a couple of hours or more.  It’s knowing how to edit and tweak the templates and make the best use of the other facilities available, that helps make a site look different from the many other thousands that are out there.  And once it is set up, the marriage between search engines and WordPress makes it the perfect tool for Search Engine Optimsation (SEO) and ensuring that your website is noticed by the search engines out there.

I’ll continue writing about aspects of using WordPress for website design so stay tuned!

I recently invested in a new suite of Wordpess themes and am impressed with how easily modifiable they are. This site below looks nothing ike the original theme I started with.  As you are probably aware I am a keen advocate of WordPress – great for beginners and advanced users, gives owners of websites control of updates of their content (if they wish) and the search engines love it – it is very SEO compliant.

Dandenong-Ranges-Photography.com.au  Photography site and blog. Recently upgraded to StudioPress theme Lifestyle.  Do you like this look? I can do one for you too – your choice of colours.