Web Hosting Northampton

When it comes to choosing a domain name for your website, most people follow the simple rule – keep it short and simple. The assumption is that shorter domain names are easier to remember. It is considered that longer domain named will get forgotten. While this could be the case, there is still a very strong argument for selecting a longer domain name.

SEO Benefits

We all want our website to appear at the top of the major search engines for your desired keywords. Having a longer domain name will help this. Search engine spiders love lots of text with keywords. The more relevant text that your website contains the better. This is also a similar case with domain names.

If you company offers pc repair, instead of picking a domain name such as jons-pcrepair.co.uk. A longer domain name with more keywords in will help you appear more in google etc. If you target market is local businesses, you may consider jons-pcrepair-northampton.co.uk. With this longer domain name your website may appear for the keyword pc repair and pc repair northampton.

Stand out from the crowd

All domain names are typically similar lengths, if you have a longer keyword rich domain name, you may stand out more. When you are looking at a list your eyes instinctively look at the odd one out, the one which stands out from the crowd. If all your competitors have similar length domain names and yours is much longer, in website directories etc you will naturally stand out. The same argument could also be made for very short domain names.

Not always hard to remember?

Picking a long domain name does not have to be harder to remember. If you pick keywords which naturally appear in a sentence will make the name easier to remember. For example, if you are a car leasing website, a longer domain name such as bobs-cacontracthirereading.co.uk even tough this is a longer domain name, it is still easy to remember

Conslusion

A shorter domain name still has advantages. However this blog post poses several new arguments which you may want to consider when registering your next domain. A longer domain name is no longer a no-no. Why not play about with your domain name ideas using our online domain checker.

It is the age old debate. You need web hosting for your company, should you use a Linux server or use a Windows server? If you are new to web hosting, you may instinctively go for windows since you will recognise the brand name.

Why should you use windows? There are many disadvantages of using a windows based server. These are the first three which come to mind:

• Cost. Windows based web hosting is typically more expensive. For this blog post, we conducted a bit of research. We were unable to find a decent windows web hosting package with databases for under £10 a month. Why is this? Microsoft are greedy, the company charge nearly £1000 for the operating system alone. Popular Linux distributions are free.
• Less secure. How many times this year have your heard about ‘virus’ threats to windows. This affects windows servers also. Viruses on Linux based computers are much less common.
• Stability. From our personal experience, Linux based servers are much more stable. Linux distributions typically have a much lower RAM memory leak over time, this means the server will need to be re-booted less to keep it running faster
• Harder to use. Plesk and other windows based web hosting control panels can be very hard to use and feel a bit daunting to the user at first. The most common Linux control panel (cPanel) is commonly accepted as being much more user friendly.

With windows based servers, you will pay more, it will be less secure and typically harder to use than the Linux alternative. To us it is a simple answer, Linux based web servers are far superior. However this is not just our opinion, have a look on a search engine of your choice. How many windows web hosts can you find compared to Linux ones? Linux has won the datacentre war.

You should only opt for a windows based web host if you have your heart set on a ASP based website. Linux servers can’t easily run ASP code (there are addons for linux which you can install to run ASP). However the alternative PHP is a much better platform to use! (and its perfect for a Linux web server!)

Yesterday at 4.20pm a few servers were offline for 10 minutes due to a down router. This issue has now been resolved.

Thank you for your patience.

We often get asked by customers which FTP program they should use to connect to their web hosting server. Other people ask, is it worth paying for a FTP program or are free ones as good?

If you are a windows user there are several good FTP programs out there. Cute FTP has lots of features and is easy to use, however its not free.

When it comes to mac, your choices are even less. Many people who use a mac recommend Cyberduck.  - Cyberduck quite possibly has the best looking dashboard icon. However since the release of snow leopard, from our experience, cyberduck does not work correctly anymore. It has a nice interface and is easy to use, however its slow and caused several problems in the office where it would not upload files to a web server via our file server in the office.

Over the last few months everyone here has come to the agreement that Filezilla is simply the best FTP program. It seems to upload files much faster than its competition and ‘just works’. The only negative is that it is not as user friendly as some of its rivals. However if you know what you are doing when it comes to using FTP programs, we think filezilla is a must.

Well worth checking out.

Also .. If you are a windows server administrator, the filezilla FTP server edition is a must. Far far better than the microsoft offerings… and the best bit, its free!

What do you think is the best FTP program, which one do you use? will be interested for your feedback.

Adobe have recently released a great new free service for web developers. The new service, named Adobe Browser Labs enables web developers to test their website in all major internet browsers and all operating systems.

We had a quick play with this new service earlier today and were very impressed. The onion effect which allows you to overlap one browser on-top of another was very handy. The support for all major IE, firefox and safari versions will be very handy.

This resource should be very useful for web developers – we will defiantly be using it. A handy alternative to running a testing server in the office.

For more information, check out the video below:

We would like to wish all our customers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Thank you for all your business over the last 12 months, we hope that we can continue to support you or your businesses further in the new year.

Support Over This Christmas Period

Over the Christmas period, we will not be able to provide constant phone support, If you have any problems customers are advised to use our ticket system. – We will have staff answering tickets every day over xmas.  Over the Christmas period, all servers will be constantly monitored to ensure they stay online as normal.

Coming in the new year…

Early next year we will be releasing a email marketing solution for businesses. The new project, named Mail Manager UK will enable you to easily send our rich html email messages to thousands of subscribers at once. This new project is being worked on in conjunction with our sister company JC Peters. Mail Manager UK is being designed and built in-house on our mac suite. – Watch this space for updates!

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas from all at AGL-Host

Unfortunately due to the snow today (and because our office is in the middle of the country) we are unable to get into work.

Because of this, we are unable to provide phone support during office hours today. In order to compensate for this, we have extra staff answering support tickets today. If you need to contact us, please open a support ticket, we will pickup all tickets as soon as they arrive (there will be no queue to answer).

If you need to open a support ticket, please click on the link below:

web hosting & email hosting support

Many of the large domain registrars are now offering incentives to purchase your domain names in bulk.  Of-course they will want you to buy more domain names, so the registrar can make more money out of you! So what is in it for you? Should you consider buying bulk domains?

Cheaper in volume

Buying several domains at once is going to be more expensive, rather than simply buying just the one you need. However if you do need several domains, buying them all together in bulk can result in saving you money. The average .co.uk domain name cost £7-10 for 2 years registration. When buying in bulk, the cost per domain can be substantially lower.

Get the names before they are gone

When you are buying domain names in bulk, you can also secure all variations of the domain name you want i.e. yourcompany.com, yourcompany.co.uk. When you setup your business, it is a good idea to secure your company name in all major domain name extensions. If you choose to buy extra extensions over a period of time, other people may take them. So register all your domain names in bulk in one go to stop your competitors stealing your name with another extension.

Easier Management

If you buy all your domain names in bulk, in one go with one provider they should all expire on one day (assuming you register them all for the same period). Doing this i will make your domain management much easier, you will no longer have to worry about loosing domains via not being notified when they expire. All your domains will be due for re-new on the same date – much easier to remember!

Summary

As discussed, buying domain names in bulk can offer several advantages. For your business, it might be worth considering buying a bulk load of keyword rich domain names and point them all to your website. Since many registrars are offering discounts on bulk, in the long term this could result in cost savings.

Our planned DNS maintenance was carried out successfully last night. We are pleased to announce that there was no downtime during this maintenance.

Since the upgrades you may notice some performance increases to your service.

At 10pm tonight we will be conducing emergency dns maintenance on our network. During this update there may be some downtime.

This update will be conducted out of working hours to help minimise any inconveniences.