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Monday 26 August 2013

Types of Web Hosting for Every Blogger

Web Hosting Services
What is the very first thing a new blogger has to do before he starts his blog? Assuming he has already bought domain, of course.
Choosing a theme? Picking between WordPress and MovableType? Writing epic stuffs?
Nope. None of that. Sure, you could do any or all of them first but without having a web hosting service, nothing you do will matter. Why? Because you don’t start buying furnitures or hire an interior decorator before you buy a house.
Now you could pick any hosting service that comes up on your search. You could ask your friends. Or you could just go with the company a blogger you read is recommending (*cough* affiliates *cough*). But does it guarantee that you will be in good hands?
You see, a good hosting service is very important. For every successful blog, there is always a reliable hosting service behind it. Ask Copyblogger, Problogger or any top names in blogging world and they will confirm this. Why? Because your blog simply won’t survive on a bad hosting.
But then picking a hosting service is not easy. We get it. There are several kind of hosting, and there are hundreds of hosting firms out there. It’s like walking in a maze with eyes closed for starters.

Choose Best Web Hosting Service

So, here are rundown of hosting services, and reasons why you should be choosing any of them.

Shared Hosting

This is typically the most affordable option and most popular too. Guess price tag and popularity go hand in hand. Shared hosting will put your website on same server with a lot of other websites. Don’t worry. The servers are powerful enough to handle a few hundred websites on it. Hopefully. If your web hosting company is a good one, of course. Shady ones will use low-grade hardware and try to squeeze out every juice out of it. Stay away from them.
This is where you start if you are just starting out. Sure it won’t be ideal if your blog is getting loads of traffic but for most starting blogs, it will suffice. There are a lot of affordable but good hosting services out there. What you should prioritize here is in good customer support, uptime guarantee and money back guarantee. Not on imaginary “unlimited” bandwidth and storage space. Minimum 500MB storage and around 10GB bandwidthwill be plenty for any kind of starting blogs. You can easily search good ones using hosting services comparison tool on BestHosting.org. You can easily get one in the range of $4 ~ $8 a month range.

Cloud Hosting

Now we hear this term a lot in recent years. But it is not some magical new platform. It is just a new way of structuring infrastructure and using virtualization and other technologies to deliver hosting service that is so much more redundant and has better uptime. Now you see, if you didn’t understand what was just said, chances are, you don’t need cloud hosting yet. Plus, most companies offering “cloud hosting” are actually offering glorified shared hosting anyway. Some of them are legit though, since they use same technologies to build cloud platforms to deliver shared hosting services to you. But the term cloud hosting is so loosely used all over that it can cover from shared hosting type to VPS type.
This is for you if you want more redundancy, better uptime, better load balancing and perhaps access to resources like hosting your blog on one web server, store your blog’s data on separate database servers, and so on. This is higher end level of cloud hosting. If you really want shared hosting level of cloud hosting, you might want to look into MediaTemple and Site5.

Virtual Private Server Hosting

Virtual Private Server (VPS) gives you a lot more control than shared hosting. Basically, virtualization technologies are used to create virtual servers on a powerful physical server hardware, and you get complete access to one (or more, if you are paying) VPS. Complete control, it’s all yours. With such control comes responsibility. You are fully responsible to manage your server, including security updates, deploying whatever server software on it and everything that has to do with managing a server. You could buy managed VPS solutions though, which comes with a sysadmin that will manage your VPS. At a price tag, of course, you can do a lot of things with a VPS. The same things you could do with a dedicated server to yourself, but at much lesser cost.
If your blog is getting a lot of traffic and shared hosting services aren’t cutting it anymore, this is your option. You will have access to powerful system resources (gigabytes of RAM, dedicated processing power and all that), a lot more dedicated bandwidth and storage, and no other websites gnawing at your precious system resources. It is also a lot easier on your wallet too.

Dedicated Servers

The ultimate of hosting solutions. You will get the whole physical server hardware to all yourself. No hundreds of other websites or even a few VPS sharing the resources of one hardware. You get everything to yourself. Just like VPS, it also comes with huge responsibility for you. You can either manage it yourself, hire someone or get managed dedicated server hosting from companies that provide such service. The pricing varies depending on if you are getting managed or unmanaged, and what kind of hardware you are looking for. Entry level servers are pretty affordable and you can even get them under $100. But then, you can get similar kind of system resources on a VPS for around $50 or so. If you are going dedicated, then your need better call for good hardware. And when you use good hardware, you won’t regret your decision. You can either rent the existing setups from hosting companies or with some, you can even customize the hardware to your heart’s content.
Your blog is going to be really big (think Problogger and Copyblogger level) and famous if you are looking into dedicated servers. They can handle a lot of traffic and a lot of loading stress. Comes with a proper price tag too. But if you are not experienced in managing a server, we suggest getting a managed solution since your inexperience might lead to bad security practices which in turn lead to being hacked.

Sunday 18 August 2013

Italian Food

Italian Food


Italian Food is a blogger template with 2 columns, right sidebar, footer columns, slideshow, social bookmarking icons, posts thumbnails and gradients.Excellent layout for blogs about food and drink.


Zylyz



Zylyz is a blogger template with 2 columns, right sidebar, footer columns, slideshow, posts thumbnails and vectorial elements.Excellent layout for blogs about girls or nature.

Thursday 1 August 2013

Easy Steps to Stop Spam Comments in Blogger

Prevent Spam Comments

Blog commenting, no doubt, is one of the best ways to build links for our blog.
And due to this reason, many newbie bloggers, who have no proper knowledge of blog commenting, start adding links in their comment body and leave low quality or spam comments on our blog.
These type of activities on our blog not only harass us but also consume our precious time to delete those unwanted comments.
I would like to convey a message to all newbies that adding links in comment body is not a good idea.
If you are curious to build backlinks for your blog via blog commenting, then you must leave your valuable comments onCommentLuv and KeywordLuv enabled blogs.
If you are really keen to build genuine and dofollow backlinks, then instead of leaving spam comments, try to invest your time and energy in writing posts for guest blogging. Check below guide to learn about guest blogging and its benefits.
Now, let’s back to the topic. We were discussing about preventing blog from spam comments.
When we talk about preventing blog from unwanted comments, the first thing comes in our mind is Moderation.
We can set our comments on moderation before they start appearing on our posts. But moderation is not actually the best option. Why?
Our blog commenting system should be easy and clean. I saw many blogs using captchas and moderation in their comments to stop spamming that makes commenting system weirder to use.
Our readers give their time to comment on our posts, so we must provide them easy to use commenting system that looks clean also.
This is a fact that our readers interact with us mostly on new posts as compare to old posts. That’s why I am using moderation only on older posts but not on my newer posts.
Doing this helps me in many ways like:
  1. Stop spam comments from auto publish.
  2. Only quality comments get approval.
  3. New posts are free from moderation that improves reader’s engagement on my blog.
  4. Newly published posts get maximum comments as clean and easy to use commenting system.
  5. Comments on new blog posts get published instantly that makes readers more active on my blog.
  6. I keep checking my new posts to reply the comments and if I found any spam comment, I remove it instantly with single click.
Do you want to use same technique on your blog? It’s too easy. Just follow below steps to make your blogger blog free from spam comments.
Prevent Spam Commenting In Blogger
  1. Navigate to you Blogger blog > Settings > Posts and comments.
  2. In Comment Moderation settings under Comments section, choose Sometimes.
  3. Enter number of days in the text field. Like if you want to set moderation on posts which are older than 1 day, then type 1.
    You can choose number of days according to your choice.
  4. Now click on Save Settings button from the top right corner.
Blogger Comments Setting
CONGRATULATION: You are done!
These were the three easy steps to make your blog clean from spam comments. Now you can approve those comments which you found valuable for your blog and for readers as well.