Financial & Travel Musings

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Whilst we’d all like to think that our website is amongst the fastest and most dependable around, it’s better to know that it’s fast and reliable.

How long does it take to load? You can find this out with the speed test at iWebTool (an excellent source of website tools). So, for example, it says that this website loads in 0.03 seconds which is pretty reasonable. However, that test is from here and if you run exactly the same test from somewhere else in the world the results will be different (which is one reason why we host some sites both in America and in the UK).

Naturally, part of that will depend on the design of your own website. For example, it’s increasingly common for people to copy photos straight from their digital camera directly onto their website. That’s one sure way of slowing down the loading of your site quite dramatically. Typically a low-end digital camera these days will produce an image of over 1MB in size vs the size of the photo here of 11k. If you upload the full-size digital images then you’re looking at a website that takes nearly 100 times as long to load as it needs to. So, step one in improving the speed of your website is to reduce the resolution of the images.

What about the reliability? The easiest way to keep tabs on reliability is to sign up with one of the website monitoring services such as HyperSpin. If you’ve loads of websites you might need to upgrade to their paid services but even the free service is pretty good. We keep tabs on three different hosts that hold our websites and interestingly it’s the cheapest one that’s the most reliable (and, so far, has had the quickest and most useful responses to our support questions too).

Generally speaking, you can usually do something about the speed of your website but can’t really control the reliability short of moving to a new hosting service (which is much easier than you might think). In terms of speed, look first at the size of the images that you are using: full-screen is rarely appropriate in the main text (you can always make the image click-through to the full-size version) and never, ever upload images directly from your camera without resizing them first.

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One of the problems online is that people tend to use searches to find your product and that makes it a little more difficult to sell a product that has a higher value (and price) than the equivalent from your competitors. There are a number of ways to get around that though.

A very successful way for consumer products is to create a coolness about it. That’s worked many years for Apple products and those that produce the accessories for them too. The added price that you can pull in via this method can be very substantial: whereas a typical MP4 player was selling last year for around the $20 mark, Apple were selling a much less functional product for over five times that price. The difference? Simply that Apple created a “must-have” image for their iPod whereas the cheaper products just didn’t have the marketing budget for that.

Whilst that’ll work well for many consumer products and particularly those targeted at the young, it doesn’t work for all products so you need other approaches. Typically you can shift higher value products by repackaging the product as a lower value version with limited functionality but with the ability to upgrade the product. As you’re reading this, I’m sure you know very well how this works in computer sales outlets. There’s often a low ticket price but the salesman will say that you really need two or three times the memory to get a fast machine, that you really must have a Blu-Ray writer, and you definitely have to have extended warranty.

In the information age, there’s the possibility of using built-in obselesence. Perhaps the current best example of this is the new version of the TomTom satellite navigation unit. It’s priced quite low in comparison to their previous generation of products and comes with the maps for the area you buy it in. It looks like a great deal and it is but it doesn’t have the memory card slot that the previous version had therefore when you want to add more maps or even upgrade to the latest version, you need to buy a new unit. Naturally, the more expensive version doesn’t have this limitation.

So, think of using coolness, upgrades and limitations on the product to give your customer reasons to buy the higher end products that you have.

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Over the last week or so I’ve been going through reviews of a number of different hosting services to see what would be the best one to go for with our American targeted sites.

Even though there are a handful of hosts that seem pretty much perfect in all the review sites (of which Web Hosting Jury seems the most useful), for every PerfectHost.com, there’s a corresponding PerfectHost-Sucks.com and oodles of blogs running them down. Now obviously, any hosting service is going to make mistakes and the better ones tend to talk quite openly about the mistakes they’ve made but just because they’re not talking about them doesn’t mean that they’re not happening.

What’s also clear is that good hosts can go bad very quickly indeed. Powweb for instance seems to have been consistently excellent until they were taken over by Endurance in 2006. This isn’t reflected as quickly as you might expect in the various review sites as they tend to take into account all reviews so a company sitting with 90% ratings will take some time to drop to 70%.

Even with sites rated as excellent, they are quite consistent in taking a very dim view of you writing very negative comments about their service on your blog whilst it’s hosted with them and seem to suspend hosting accounts very quickly in those circumstances. Whilst taking down a blog would usually fall into the category of unfortunate but livable with, it’s clearly going to be a different matter if you’re hosting sites which provide you with a living on the same service.

Which is a long way of telling you that it’s prudent to have more than one hosting service to play with.

Too expensive? Certainly if you were running simultaneously with two fullscale hosting accounts it might be but since you can get US hosting for as little as $12 per year and UK hosting for around £25 per year it’s pretty cheap to have another hosting service waiting in the wings for when you really need it. You wouldn’t be limited to the cheap service plan were you ever to need to start using it as your primary hosting service as it’s very quick and easy to upgrade these plans.

One other key thing to avoid is registering your domains with your hosting service. Many of those people who did have issues with their host found that they then couldn’t move their domain to another hosting service. Many people end up in this situation as they’ve taken up the offer of a free domain with their hosting service but you have to question whether saving $10 a year is worth it when you consider the problems that can arise from it should you ever fall out with your hosting service.

What do I do about all this? Well, I use godaddy as my registrar, this site is hosted with EUKHost in the UK and I have 1and1 as my UK backup host which is probably overkill but the extra £25 per year that this costs seems pretty cheap insurance to me.

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