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Features include: Flash header, rotating quotes, WordPress 3.0 menus, custom jQuery for expanding/collapsing sidebar menus, custom page templates and unique header images for every page.  The site is cross browser optimized, including for the iPhone and iPad.

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After:

Features include:  home page slider, full page events calendar and PHPuchase e-commerce plugin for membership and gift shop.  The site is cross browser optimized.

Without mentioning specific hosts (that’s a different post) I’d like to give you a run-down of some of the key elements you should consider when choosing a hosting provider.

While you may appreciate the speed of a website, you probably don’t realize quite how important it is. Studies have consistently shown that users respond to speed- or rather, if your site isn’t fast, they leave. For example, Tests at Amazon revealed that every 100 ms increase in the load time of their site decreased sales by 1%. As another example, Google discovered that changing a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds into a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. Clearly, speed has become an essential part of a web user’s experience.

Speed isn’t everything, though. The reliability of a site is crucial. Your website should always be up, and your e-mail should always work. Any good hosting provider should rarely have problems like this. And if they do, their support better help you fix it right away.

The importance of the support provided by a web host cannot be understated. Can you get on the phone with someone? What is their help documentation like? Your web host is only as good as the people behind it, and if those people won’t talk to you, you’re in trouble.

Another thing that needs to be mentioned is scalability. If your site gets popular, are you going to have to switch hosts? Some hosts are just not prepared for your site to become popular, so if you are expecting a large increase in traffic, it may be safer to go for a host that can accommodate that sudden popularity. I speak from experience when I say that it is incredibly unpleasant watching your site become crushed under the weight of its visitors.

Finally, although nearly every web host will run WordPress, some are much more helpful to developers than others. There are certain plugins or applications that require custom server settings, and your ability to use those applications depends on the server environment. You may want to run custom scripts in a different language than PHP, or you may need to change your Apache or MySQL settings. On some hosts, that’s impossible. On others, they’ll make it very easy.

Web hosts will give you many different statistics- everything from bandwidth to the number of subdomains they allow. Don’t worry about those statistics. For the most part, each of those numbers in some way affect the overall support, reliability, scalability, speed, or developer-friendliness of the hosting provider. Although they need to be taken into account, choosing a provider based on those numbers- even the price, within about 30% – is like buying a rain-jacket based on the thread-count of its inner lining.

Next: read more about hosting options.

• Shared Hosting
• Virtual Private Server
• Dedicated Server
• Managed Dedicated Server

I’m Guru Khalsa, one of YCB’s contract programmers. This is a follow-up to my post about what to look for in a hosting provider.

There are several different types of hosting, and the main distinction between them is price. Shared hosting costs less than a VPS which costs less than a dedicated server. Usually the price goes up by a factor of four at each level.

Understanding which one you need is the first step towards choosing the right host. Let’s take a look.

Shared Hosting

For shared hosting, many websites are all put on the same physical server. The hosting provider will have some system set up that manages who owns which domains, and will allow you to control your site through a control panel. Since there are restrictions to how many system resources you can use, you’ll have to be careful. A shared host can, depending on the site, usually handle up to 10,000 pageviews per day or more without any sweat if you are running WordPress. It won’t necessarily be the fastest of solutions, but if you choose a good host, there is no reason to get anything else, if you get less than that sort of traffic. Things to look for in a shared host: cPanel, bandwidth of around 100GB/ month, and good support. Shared hosts can handle many websites, but at a certain point you may want to consider upgrading so you have more control over your sites.

Personally, I can recommend UberHost, WebFaction, and DynaDot as a standard web host. I would stay away from bigger companies like 1and1 or GoDaddy (speaking from experience). WebFaction is very developer friendly, and DynaDot is also a great place to buy and hold your domains.

Virtual Private Server

A VPS is exactly the same as a dedicated server, except there are multiple servers on the same physical machine. This option should really only be considered by people who are comfortable with taking on a more technical role, or know someone who is. A VPS gives you the keys to the kingdom, and it’s a powerful kingdom. You have complete control of everything that your system does, so it’s great for hosting multiple websites. I recommend looking for something with the cPanel/WHM control panel. Stay away from Plesk. I don’t have any specific VPS recommendations, but I encourage you to stay away from the big hosts, like 1and1 or GoDaddy. Lesser known hosts are more likely to have better support.

If you are a developer, looking to dramatically improve your linux skills, I would encourage you to look into linode or SliceHost, since they provide a lot of really cool tools for developers.

Dedicated Server

This is it- your very own server. It’s amazing and powerful and gives you more control than you know what to do with. All of the same advice that I gave about a VPS apply to this, except you don’t need to worry about anyone else eating up system resources, or you using up too many yourself. If you use too many, you will know. I can recommend UberHost, but I encourage you to shop around to find something that suits your needs. You want great support, plenty of bandwidth, storage space, and cPanel / WHM. Also, at least 2GB of RAM. And you want to be able to get a response from them within 15 minutes, whether it be by phone or instant messenger. I would again advise against the large web hosts. A dedicated server requires that you know what you’re doing (just like a VPS), so make sure that you’re ready for it.

Overall, the choice of where to host your site is fairly simple. If it is only one or two WordPress sites, you will almost always want to host it on some form of shared hosting. Nowadays, you can find shared hosting that’s run on the cloud (like WebFaction), so if you need to grow it’s really easy, and you leave all of the server management to them, while being able to handle huge numbers of visitors.

Here’s a list of shared hosts we recommend:

• BlueHost
• UberHost
• Laughing Squid
• WebFaction
• DynaDot

by Andy Harris for Refcardz
“HTML and XHTML are the foundation of all web development.  HTML is used as the graphical user interface in client-side programs (JavaScript) and in server-side languages (PHP).  Fortunately HTML and XHTML are actually simpler than they used to be.”

Features include:

• transparent background images
• jQuery accordion and buttons
• ipod style menu navigation
• looks great on handheld AND extra large monitors