We at BlueStarWebDesign.com are committed to providing excellent web design services at an affordable price. Above all, customer satisfaction is our top priority, as we want you to be happy with the results.

Whether it’s a simple squeeze page, a marketing mini-site, or a full-blown blog, we’re here to help you achieve the appearance, navigability, and functionality that you are seeking for your website.

We recognize that you, our customer, are our most valuable commodity. We will continually strive to provide you with the support and information you will need to manage your website in the most effective ways.

If you’re looking for a fully-customized website, feel free to contact us for a free quote.  For our most affordable web design solutions, check out our package deals.

We look forward to working with you!

Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of different web hosts, and I’ve developed a short list of ‘faves’, based upon a number of features. Let me begin by listing the must-have features that I look for in a web hosting company:

• Disk space – lots of it
• Bandwidth – as much as possible
• Unlimited domains
• Unlimited SQL databases
• CPanel administrative interface
• Fantastico
• 24/7 support
• At least 99% uptime
• Reasonably priced

Based on these features, these are the web hosting companies that are on my ‘short’ list:

1. HostGator

2. HostMonster

3. BlueHost

I’ve worked with all three of these hosting companies, and all of them meet my ‘minimum features’ list. I’ve been very satisfied with all of them.

My top pick right now? HostGator is my top choice, and it’s where this website is hosted. I have the ‘Baby Croc’ plan, which includes 600GB of web space and 6000GB of bandwidth (file transfer).

For the price, services, and reliability, it’s unbeatable.

If a site goes down, you get them on live chat support and they fix it within minutes…and they almost never go down.

You can try HostGator out for a full month for just one cent.

However, if your blog generates too many pings, you run the risk of having your blog banned by the pinging services. And as much as I love WordPress – for both blogs AND static sites – one problem is that by default, pings are generated not only for newly published posts, but for edited posts as well. If you edit your post eight times, eight pings will be generated.

So what can you do? Simple. Get the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin. With it, when you create a new blog post, your blog will send a ping as usual. But when you edit that post, no ping signal is sent, and your blog is safeguarded against being banned.

Using ping services properly can get you a ton of traffic. Protect your blog with this easy-to-install plugin. No configuration is needed. Install it, activate it, and you’re good to go.

You can get it here: http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo/

Domain registration involves the reserving of a selected domain name for your exclusive use. It’s similar to registering a business name in your state, disallowing all others from using the same business name.  Domain names are registered with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

However, we cannot directly interact with ICANN, but rather must work through one of their approved registrars. You can find a list of all approved registrars here:

http://www.internic.net/regist.html

Some of the ‘domains’ that are available include .com, .net, .org, .info, and many others.

The very first domain registrar, back in the old days, was Network Solutions. They’re still around, and they’re still charging more than anyone else (about $35 a year).  It’s easy to register a domain name for much cheaper, frequently less than $10 a year. Two of the best are NameCheap and GoDaddy. I’ve done business with both, but am now consolidating all of my domains under my NameCheap account.

In addition to reserving a domain name that we can use for our website, we also need to find space to store all the files that are associated with our website. This is akin to renting office or store space if we were running an ‘offline’, bricks-and-mortar business.

It is the web hosting companies that provide the service of renting to us the space we need to store our website files. In reality, what we’re renting from these companies is file storage space as well as file uploading and downloading.

This file saving and retrieval process is also called ‘bandwidth’, and refers not to the static storage of website files, but the dynamic process of saving, changing, and retrieving files from the web host’s servers. So two of the most important features to key in on when comparing web hosts are Storage and Bandwidth.

There are tens of thousands of web hosting companies from which to choose, but here are my top three recommendations. I’ve done business with all of them, and they’re all excellent:

1. BlueHost

2. HostMonster

3. HostGator

Web hosting is more expensive than domain registration, running generally between $5.00 and $10.00 dollars a month. But compare that price with the cost of renting a physical site for your business, and you can see that running a business online is a huge bargain!

If you have any questions or comments, post them here!