Mymumdom is a relatively new mummy blog following the adventures of the Watkins family.  Jacq started writing towards the end of January, and has already got to a point where she’s averaging around 250 unique visitors a day. This is pretty good going, and reflects how much of a dedicated blogger Jacq has become!

My favourite post so far must be ‘expressions’ – check it out, it’s sure to make you smile!

We’re proud to host such an interesting site!

Find ‘email accounts’ in the email options box and click on it.

Click on  ’create account’ and you’re done! 

Any difficulties with this? Just let us know!

There are countless hosts available and knowing which country you need hosting in will help you narrow down your choice.

Before you start, you need to know and understand your target market. Are you aiming for readership from the UK or elsewhere? If you decide that your readership is coming from more than one location, consider purchasing the corresponding location domain names and hosting each domain name (even with identical sites) in each location. The rest of this post assumes you have decided that you need a UK readership; but the information applies equally well to any other location.

Your readership need to be able to access your website efficiently. The servers closest to your readership will almost always deliver your content the fastest. You should therefore use UK hosting if your readership is in the UK.

Another consideration is that Google (and other search engines) have a search facility that allows website users to narrow their searches to a particular region. Google have loosely published how they decide which websites get listed in each regional search group. If you have a .co.uk , you’re pretty much home and dry. You could host anywhere and Google will still recognise that you are aiming at the UK market and will list your site on the UK Google.

If you have a .com however, things are not so simple. A .com domain doesn’t give any indication of the site’s location. In this instance, Google will consider two other location factors, and your best chances are if the results of these are the same. Firstly it will consider where the domain is hosted. If this investigation comes back as ‘on a UK server’, Google will be happy to include your site on the UK Google (provided it is happy to list you in the first place of course!). You can also tell Google where you think your domain should be listed. It will consider this, but there’s no guarantee that it will believe you, especially if it doesn’t tally with the server location.

Finally, be aware that if you do choose to host outside of the UK, you do so under the jurisdiction of the country that you host in. Make sure you understand what rules might apply, particularly about taxation, legal content and intellectual property – and what penalties there might be for omitting to adhere to them. This is vital in the case of blogs and similar sites where what is seen as a personal opinion in the UK could be breaking the law elsewhere.

Are you ready to buy some UK hosting now? Or do you have any queries on this article? Get in touch and we’ll try to help.

If you have a small or medium sized website – such as a blog, online shop, photo gallery or business e-brochure; you probably don’t have a big enough turnover to justify the ultimate in hosting offerings – a dedicated server or even dedicated cluster of servers.  You therefore need to opt for shared hosting. Traditional shared hosting offers your website space and bandwidth on a single server, alongside many other websites. This is very economical, and there are literally thousands of traditional shared hosting companies offering incredible deals to choose from, if that’s what you’d like to do.

Unfortunately, shared hosting isn’t without its problems. If the server needs rebooting, or worse – has some sort of hardware failure, your website is left unavailable until it is fixed. Any host offering 100% uptime on shared hosting, is just hoping the server won’t fall over (or won’t fall over while you’re watching!).  Furthermore, if one of those websites you’re sharing with suddenly gets stuck hogging all of the server’s processing powers, or all of the websites attract a lot of visitors at a particular time of day, your website will run incredibly slowly or give your users repeated timeouts. Not an ideal solution after all.

This is where cloud hosting comes in. Similar to shared hosting – it is affordable and shares resources with other websites. However, unlike shared hosting, cloud hosting uses more than one server. Copies of each website exist on each part of the cloud. If one server falls over, there is enough capacity in the rest of the cloud to immediately take over, so that your website continues to be available.

Also, crucially, if load on the cloud increases (say, during an evening) additional servers can come into play so that response speeds can remain steady and your website will be unaffected by changes of demand or usage of the other sites in the cloud. Search engine algorithms are increasingly inspecting response times for websites, so it pays to host your website on a fast and reliable cloud arrangement.

Finally, if more resources are needed on a shared hosting server, websites on that server would need to be moved or the server would experience downtime while new hardware is fitted. With cloud hosting, any upgrades can happen seamlessly by bringing in further resources from other services.

Why don’t you give cloud hosting a try, right now? Get in touch, and we can get the ball rolling straight away!