GoHosting Blog

Do you backup your own website? Or do you expect that your host will back it up? Today we highlight the importance of taking your own backups of your websites / databases or anything else you may have hosted on a regular basis.

Recently a customer who came to us needed a solution for a disaster recovery site for their web application. Their system runs on Microsoft ASP.NET with a MS-SQL backend. We suggested the possibility of MS-SQL mirroring, this solution struck us as being very good for this application because it required very small changes to the application itself and required the minimum amount of hardware and additional software.

Server Hardening is often misunderstood as being a one off process to tighten the security on a server before it becomes live on the Internet. This is only partially correct, sure you want to tighten the security of your server before putting it on a Public Network, but its not enough to put it in and forget about it. The idea behind server hardening is the process of securing the machine not only before it goes live, but permanently.

FTP Stands for File Transfer Protocol and is used to transfer files from your computer to your online web hosting account or your own dedicated server. FTP is a standard feature on all GoHosting Web Hosting accounts. There are a number of FTP programs available for you to use, some are easier to use than others, and some have different features like allowing you to resume file transfers or modify permissions on folders within your hosting account. Most Operating Systems like Windows or Linux / Unix systems have an inbuilt FTP program that you can use without installing any additional software. Some WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors like Microsoft Frontpage, Expressions Web, or Dreamweaver have their own inbuilt FTP program that uploads the site when you publish the site providing you have your settings correct. WYSIWYG is a very common practice in building websites.

So you now have your website built and hosted, but is it worthwhile? Is your website working for you? Is your website linking you with lots of portential customers? I won’t go into a whole lot of detail about the technicalities of Search Engine Optimisation and what are the best methods of increasing traffic or what you can do to improve your visitors and Search Engine rankings. I will just give a brief overview of what it is and why it is important.

A good way to determine if your Website is achieving your goals is to refer to its web statistics. All GoHosting standard hosting packages come with free web statistics tools. These can be access under your control panel.Your web statistics show not just how many hits you’re getting, but which pages are the most popular, who’s visiting your site, when do they visit, and other data that can give you a clear idea of what sort of traffic you are getting to your site.