There is anxiety about choosing a hosting company and understandably so. Everyone has heard a story or two about unfortunate situations that happen and the vulnerability of not having control. As with many things, nothing beats a recommendation from a trusted source, but there is a practical approach to choosing a host.

Based on the requirements for a site, there are several things to consider:

Web server platform – Does the site need to reside on a Windows server, Linux or Unix server, or does it matter?

Bandwidth – How much traffic does the site have? What kind of content does it display? Rich media requires much more bandwidth than text files.

Drive space – How many and how large are the files (pages, images, audio and video, PDFs…) does the site have?

Email service – How is email provided: in-house, ISP, web host or another provider? If the hosting company will provide email make sure they meet the requirements for users, size limits, spam control, virus protection and web mail.

Functionality – Does the site require additional components to function? Complex sites often rely on applications and server software that provide business processes that must be installed on the web server or another server on the newwork. This is a big issue. For example, if a site has a content management system or e-commerce, is it compatible with the host’s set-up? Will they allow the installation of new components? Some hosts will if they meet their approval, but most are leery of custom built apps.

Database – What kind of database is required? How does it need to be configured and managed? How large is the data. Site traffic also affects data resources.

Add-ons – Hosting companies often have add-ons included with their hosting packages: shopping carts, payment gateway APIs, blogs, forums, wikis, site builders, newsletter distribution apps, the list goes on and on. Which of these are most useful?

Site & account administration – This can make managing your site easy or a pain. Hosting companies with good administration consoles allow users to log-in via a browser and control preferences and settings to manage the operation of a site and email services. This is important because the more robust the admin tool is the less need for customer service.

Support – Good hosting companies have 24/7/365 support by phone and email with quick response times. Check to see if they have a support ticketing system and logs on responses and resolutions.

Plan variety – Hosts with several plans allow you to choose what is needed without extra costs.

Security – Learn how the host updates and maintains their systems and what their security policies are.

Backups – Learn how often backups are done and whether they have off-site backup facilities.

Availability – Ask about down time for both their internal network and servers and the Internet connections into and out of their facilities. They should have redundancies throughout.

Price – Hosting prices have dropped steadily for the past several years and are a value now. Do some competitive analysis and find a good deal with a good company. They’re out there. One may also renegotiate their current plan based on the competition’s rates.

Depending on the specifics of a site’s requirements this list can get pretty long, but these are the main points to research. On-line places to look for leads on hosting companies are developer portals, software manufacturers support sites, resellers, and hosting watchdog sites. Also ask other business associates, especially IT folks. Be cautious of companies that host sites, but it isn’t their primary function. Often they provide this service to clients for which they have other relationships and market it as a side business. They usually cannot provide the level of service a true hosting company can. Quick action must be taken when the site is down and costing the business money. The more learned about hosting, the more confidently a sound decision can be made. Take time to do research and get help from a qualified consultant.

In addition to having the goal of learning Ruby on Rails, I am also diving into ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual Web Developer Express Edition.

My first impression, after using it for a couple days now, is Wow; a lot has changed from ASP.NET 1.1. I'm getting hung up on a variety of things like, no Bin folder, changes in namespaces and new server controls for data access. This is also my first use of the built in web server and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Administrating these is different - simpler, but still different. I'm trying to compare using these free development tools to experiencing RoR for the first time.

A concern of mine is using the new server controls instead of the 'ol fashion way of writing things out. I remember how poor Visual Interdev was at generating clean code with their drag and drop controls, but I can already see these are much better, but usually IDE speed = more code generated and more resources at run time.

My goal is to quickly develop simple, robust web apps. The web projects I work on are usually not too complex: simple CRUD apps with emphasis on the interface. Rarely do I get into n-tier architectures. However, the tutorials do show how easy it is to build sites with several layers if needed.

RoR has a preconfigured app architecture that is more robust than the single tier project I'm currently working on and that's a good feature. It makes you conform to best practices.

More to come as I proceed.

On a recent trip to New York City I was pleasantly surprised to learn that all restaurants, bars and clubs are smoke free. Even the elevators in our hotel lounge seemed happy about it.

I just created a GMail account. The first step is to enter your name and your cell phone number. GMail then text messages you a numeric code needed to complete the application.

I'm not sure why they do this, other than to be cool, but it was a new experience for me. Perhaps they are showing off their technical prowess, or introducing you to one aspect of their GMail functionality. GMail does provide IP telephony and text messaging via your browser.

As far as user experience goes it was kinda neat, but the impractical nature of having to access your cell phone just to do something that really didn't require a phone isn't big on usability.

Matt Linderman at 37 Signals wrote a post on their blog singing the praises of their "simpler is better", iterative methodology by remarking how confidence plays an important role in development practices.

I commented with a more corporate viewpoint and several others have elaborated on the realities of working for clients.

Methodology and practice is a topic on a lot of project manager's minds and it seems I am not alone in my uncertainty. I try to look at each project and team. Then see what will work for that situation. At least I'm exploring and not stuck with the same 'ol, same 'ol, but I can say it is rare the any project gets done without a fair amount of planning and paper work.

... well, maybe not, but it's really good.

A truely interactive site that is educational, experiential, well produced and cutting-edge, from an insurance company no less.

Travelers In Sync Challenge

Bud.TV Coming To A Small Screen Near You

$30,000,000. I hope someone in Saint Louis is working on part of this.

It’s often useful to have custom tool tips (mini info pop-ups located by your cursor when you hover over a link or other HTML object). The stock tool tip created by using ‘alt or ‘title’ attributes in the A tag are ugly and do not allow for custom formatting. Here are two good solutions that are flexible.

OverLIB - A JavaScript library created to enhance websites with small popup information boxes to help visitors around your website.

Walter Zorn DHTML Tooltips - A cross-browser tooltip JavaScript that can be customized in multiple ways.

A nice implementation of overLIB.

The Ruby on Rails phenomenon has caught my attention; so I've decided to learn how to program with it using the book, Agile Web Development with Rails. I'll be comparing my experiences to ASP.NET, my current programming framework.

I wanted to use my Mac, but was quickly discouraged by the complexity of installing Ruby, Ruby Gems and Rails. With a PC, it's just a few clicks and presto, everything's ready to go.

Installation on my PC was successful and I have completed the exercises up to Chapter 5 with no real issues - simple so far. The model, view and controller terminology is new to me, but it relates to the separation of functionality similar to code behind files, an n-tier architecture and an object oriented approach used with Microsoft technologies.

An often underestimated part of creating a web site is content development. The creative direction is given attention and technical aspects also are in the forefront, but content is often not addressed early in the lifecycle as it should be.

Content should be the first concern after planning has been completed. Designers can more easily visualize how to present the content if it exists than not. They can plan their layouts to accommodate the different formats of text and graphical information and eliminate the changes that always come with receiving content late in the design process.

When gathering and organizing content, the structure of the site also takes shape; the number of sections, subsections and pages often change from the proposed site map during this process. Content gets added, combined, edited and removed as it goes through the revision and approval process. It’s also far easier to revise and proof content in a text document than in web pages.

Beginning with database design, it’s also important to have content ready during development. The developer can tell what the data types, text character lengths, hierarchies and relationships are which is important to creating an optimized data structure. Programmers can use it as real, test data ensuring their code is sufficiently crafted to perform business logic and display the interface properly.

At crunch time, the end of the project, it’s far better to have content finished early, or as least in a “final” state, than to have to incorporate makeshift text and graphics into the site when functional testing, or when everyone is seeing the site for the first time. Poor copy distracts from the review process. There are so many other pressing issues at this time and having to create content late often causes the project miss deadlines, when it could have been avoided.

A particular situation where careful attention to developing content is crucial, is with small companies, or companies that are new to the web. Often they think they have enough information to make a good site, but when it is placed in the site the content is weak, incomplete, or does not fit well into how the site had been planned. Then what do you do? Change the site, or change the content? There’s a costly miss-match.

If search engine optimization and search engine marketing are important, content has to be created early in order for it to be optimized properly and the site built correctly. Although copy should be written so it reads well to the audience, keywords and search phrases should be incorporated. Any information hidden to search bots in graphics should be exposed by using the correct HTML attributes, or appropriate captions. Having both company specific information and general industry information helps round out content aiding in search rankings.

Source material for content can come from several areas:

Client – Have them gather information and past documentation.

Industry – Industry web sites and publications often have information that can be easily modified.

Competitors – Read the client’s competitor’s sites and collateral material. See how they are presenting their message.

Suppliers – If your client is a manufacturer or distributor, their suppliers and manufacturers have catalogs and sell sheets loaded with useful information.

Customers – Customers can provide a different perspective and may have unexpected information especially if looking for applications and uses of products.

Just as design and development specialists are required to make a good site, copyrighters are also important. Visitors spend more time reading than anything else so the copy must be well written to communicate effectively and project the proper image.

Do yourself a favor on your next web project. Concentrate on content. Afterall, it’s why you’re building a site in the first place, and the site will be better for it.

Allway Sync is a free file and folder synchronization software for Windows. Allway Sync uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and more.