Hosting Review: Host Gator

One of the key decisions you’ll have to make when building your website is choosing a hosting company. A hosting company owns the (physical) servers where your website is located, allowin people on the Internet to access it. There are a wide range of hosting companies these days, with a varying features and costs.

One such company is Host Gator. The Dallas-based company was founded in 2002 (in founder Brent Oxley’s dorm room) and today offers shared, reseller and dedicated hosting services to over 150,000 customers. Currently, the only offer linux hosting, but their website promises they will be offering windows hosting soon.

For shared services, there are three different levels of hosting – hatchling ($ 4.95/month), baby ($ 7.95/month) and business ($ 12.95/month). They offer unlimited diskspace and bandwidth and pop3 accounts at all 3 levels, and unlimited domains at the baby and business levels. They support (unlimited) mySQL databases, Wordpress, Ruby on Rails, SSH, CGI, Perl and a host of other programs.

For those in need of more features and security, Host Gator provides dedicated servers as well, which come with up to 8GB Ram and 2 500GB hard drive and several programs pre-installed. If you ever wanted to build your own web hosting company, the Host Gator offers reseller accounts.

If you plan to put up and e-commerce site, then Host Gator has the tools you’ll need. They offer 4 different shopping cart programs (Agora, ZenCart, OsCommerce and Cubecart) and the Shared SSL will assure that all sensitive information (like credit card numbers) will be kept safe and secure. The cPanel allows you to have all of the tools at your fingertips, in an easy to navigate interface.

If you don’t know where to begin and don’t have a design for your site, Host Gator has you covered as well. You can use their Website Builder, where you can create and edit different aspects your your site or you can use one of their pre-made web templates.

Another interesting aspect is that Host Gator has recently gone green. They claim that 130% of their servers (shared and reseller) are powered by wind, through purchase of renewable energy credits. While their hosting capabilities are already quite substantial, caring for the environment certainly does give people an added incentive to use their services.

Host Gator does everything they say they do, has industry standard uptimes (99.9% and above) and lots of extra bells and whistles, which is not unusual for any web hosting company. What sets them apart, is the excellent customer service they provide. The company doesn’t spend a lot of time or money marketing their services, probably due to the fact they have a good reputation and word-of-mouth marketing. Customer service is available 24/7 via email, telephone or live chat. Apparently, if you have a problem with their customer service, Brent Oxley will personally see to your problem. If you’re unsatisfied at all with any of their services, they have a 45-day money back guarantee.

Review: Spydermate SEO Analysis and SEO Tools

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for any webpage these days. With over 4 billion websites on the internet, how can you make sure your future customers will be able to find your site? Making your site search engine friendly can be easy, with the right tools.

Spydermate is free, web-based SEO analysis tool. Created by Mentormate, Spydermate assesses your website’s SEO “health”, allowing you to see an overview of your site’s search engine rankings. The tool is free, and even if you don’t register, you get up to 6 “free” analyses. Registered users, however, can take advantage of more searches and tools such as the compare tab, which allows you to compare the SEO of 2 different websites and the history tab, which stores information about your past searches.

The tool itself is easy enough to use – after registering, simply type in your website’s URL and wait for the results. For SEO novices, the “Site Analysis” is fairly useful, especially if you haven’t used any SEO techniques for your site. It gives you an over-all “Spyder Ranking”, which evaluates your marlketing efforts (based on their standards). If you’re haven’t checked your Google or Alexa ranking, then this page gives this as well. However, except for the broken links, all the information on this page is probably nothing new if you’ve had your site assesed previously.

The next tab, link equity, gives you a more detailed analysis of each page on your site, such as h1 tags, meta descriptions and any broken links. In addition, it also gives you a targeted keyword analysis tool (based on SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool), giving you suggestions on which keywords you should be targeting for your pages, based on what people are searching for.

After you’ve done more than 2 searches, then you can use the compare tool, where you can see the rankings of two websites side-by-side. While this would seem like a useless tool, it’s actually an easy way of seeing how your website measures up to your competition, and give you ideas on how to outrank your competitors. Spydermate also saves the different searches individually on the history tab, so you can also compare the same site from two different days, allowing you to see the improvements made on a particular site.

Over-all, Spydermate is a good, free all-around SEO tool. For beginners or casual users, it’s a great way of learning more about your site or blog. Having all the information in one place is much more convenient than using several tools and trying to piece together the information. It’s simple and easy to use, even for the most basic users. SEO professionals may want to invest something that will give more in-depth information, or use Spydermate in conjunction with other tools.