web hosting

Free Hosting Is Not Always The Best Choice

With the economy hitting not only the individual but also businesses, many are looking toward free web hosting services to house their online site.  For monetary reasons, this looks great on the surface.  But going free is not always the best choice and may, in fact, cost your business money in the long run.

Ads

While a company may offer hosting at no cost, they are by no means not making money off of your site.  Nearly all free hosting offers will involve advertising placed on your pages.  These will be completely out of your control.  Some companies try to gear ads toward being relevant to the site topic but this isn’t always guaranteed.  Add in the very real fact that your competition may be placed on your web site and this can equal a loss of revenue for you.

No control

Another downside to hosting for free is a severe lack of control.  Most free hosting companies do not offer a control panel or an ftp access account to allow administration of a web site.  This means you cannot make page changes on the fly or add in programs that may be needed by your business.  If you are a retail business, this means no ability to add in a shopping cart or software that helps you control your inventory.  Putting a bit of tracking coding is not an option unless you can have access to the page coding.  Even attempting to change the look of your web site can be an issue.  Some free hosting sites will give you access to templates and a few will even allow some minor changes made to backgrounds.  But, all said, you are very limited to what you can do within your own site.

Support

Support is another problem with free web hosting.  You’ll be limited to perhaps some online forum areas to ask your questions but you won’t have numbers to call, ticket support systems or one of many options offered by paid hosting.  If your business site isn’t working, this can end up costing you a lot of money.

Affordable solutions

Paid hosting these days really doesn’t put a huge dent in your pocketbook.  Some hosting companies run specials on a regular basis and you’re sure to find one that will fit your budget.  You can find hosting from as low as $3-$5 a month, depending on what your business web site requires.  Many of these companies also give a lot of great features for your money – including unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth and a huge assortment of easy to install programs to get your site up and running quickly.

What it boils down to

When all is said and done, you need to ensure your business is hosted with a company that you can rely on for support and also one that gives you the needed tools to ensure your online site is a success.  This is one time when you do not want to “tighten your belt” or “pinch pennies.”  Do a bit of research and find a good, solid hosting company with a price you can afford.

SaasS Content Management with Clickability

Previously known as cmPublish, the Clickability Platform is a CMS with a different approach on content management.  Developed by CMS provider Clickability, this platform is delivered on an on-demand basis, as well as full service with the company’s “Innovation as a Service” solution.  Aside from content management, the Clickability Platform also offers analytics, email campaign, web 2.0 and advertising among other functionality.  While there is obviously far more to the Clickability Platform than content management, this is indeed the focal point of the package.

Core Technologies

Though a licensed commercial product, Clickability Platform is based on powerful open-source technologies such as PHP, MySQL and Java.  It utilizes Apache as its web server and Velocity for the templating system.  Even though you have to pay for a license, the leveraging of various popular open-source tools makes Clickability Platform a cost effective CMS product.

Clickability Content

The main content entity in the Clickability environment is the item.  Authors have the ability to create content items by selecting various types of content from the navigation pane.  This CMS gives you a number of different content items out of the box, including jobs, blogs, press releases, case studies and FAQs.  Furthermore, custom content types can be created as well.   The templating system is a major part of the process as it allows you to actually get the content on your web pages.  These templates can be tailored to display numerous types of content in different sections of a single page.  While this feature caters to beginners, Clickability Platform also has something for developers with advanced creation environments and other customizing assets such as stylesheets.

Additional Features

Clickability Platform certainly isn’t short on features.  The package bundles streamlined content management capabilities alongside a host of SEO tools, Web 2.0, capabilities and the following list of features:

Newsletters – Publishers can create a newsletter of content and automatically distribute it to subscribers.  They can also manage mailing lists and have the ability to provide subscribers with double opt-in capabilities.

Advertising - Adverting functionality is tightly integrated into the Clickability Platform.  This allows administrators to create and maintain campaigns as well as all the details that go along with them.  Because ads are considered content pieces, they have targets that provide administrators with a way to track and keep up with the history of their performance.

cmSideKick – Clickability Platform allows you to run your website in the browser and the intuitive cmSideKick in a second frame.  cmSideKick is a utility that enables you to perform deep analyzation of statistics, allowing you to view your site in the administrator mode or selective views to modify certain areas.  This is one tool that you are likely to put to great use in the Clickability environment.

Conclusion

Clickability has come a long way since its days as cmPublish.  However, it has managed to maintain all the basics of content management and received some nice upgrades to compliment the emerging technologies and web trends.  Clickability Platform is definitely a enterprise CMS solution and can help to satisfy the needs of businesses of all sizes.

How Does Cheap Web Hosting Stack Up? A Closer Look at Your Options

Ever wonder why cheap web hosting is so popular these days?  Well for starters, it provides individuals and small businesses with a means for creating a presence online.  It makes sense – but why go cheap when you can pay for something that is more reliable?  Besides, “cheap” doesn’t have the most appealing ring to it.  Moreover, if saving money is the issue, why not cut your costs entirely by signing up with a free web host?  If you are still struggling with the concept of cheap web hosting, this article will explain why it makes a viable option between free and costly alternatives.

Free Equals Limited

Most free web hosting providers leave you very limited and are not recommended for business purposes.  For example, most of them will litter your web pages with banner and pop-up advertisements in exchange for their free service.  This can be a huge distraction to the people who come visit your website.  Many of them also limit you in terms of ownership.  Sure, they may provide you with a domain, but it is generally attached to their website, leaving you with a name that is both hard to remember and unprofessional.  Last but not least, free web hosts typically provide you with minimal bandwidth and disk storage.  Once you start to generate traffic and popularity for your site, you will eventually exceed the allotted resources and have no choice but to upgrade to a premium package.

More Freedom at a Great Price

The limitations of free web hosting is what leads most individuals and businesses to more flexible yet affordable solutions.  Cheap hosting delivers the features and flexibility you need at a price that is easily within reach.  With so many providers offering service, several companies price their plans considerably low to keep pace in the highly competitive web hosting industry.  Play your cards right and you can find a host offering service for under $10 a month.  It isn’t hard to get yourself a package with a generous supply of disk space, bandwidth and features.  Today’s cheap web hosting services are geared for individuals and businesses, providing email accounts, e-commerce applications and everything needed to open an online storefront.  These plans are widely available so why pay extra for something that could end up setting you back?

Don’t Forget the Essentials

Cheap web hosting offers many benefits but it can also be a disaster if you overlook some of the critical aspects.  Even though you are paying less for service, your hosting account should still come with acceptable customer service and technical support.  Getting answers from the experts is important as your customers will surely be needing an explanation from you if something should go wrong.  Additionally, you should never  go for any cheap web hosting plan that advertises an uptime guarantee less than 99.9%.  Excessive downtime is something you can’t deal with as it is the best way to cripple your web presence.  When knowing what to look for, you can go in on a strict budget and come out with a great web hosting package.