Horaciobra Hosting Blog

If you are running a small sized company, an affordable small business web hosting plan is absolutely ideal for you. It’s very easy to start a small online business as small business website hosting plans are available at affordable price.

What should one look for when selecting a web hosting plans for small business?

Unlimited Features

The aim for your small business is always to grow, so ensure that you sign up with a hosting company that offers unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited domain names support. The good news is that these days the biggest hosting companies can offer you unlimited features with the same price as that offers limited features.

Excellent Uptime

If the company offers less than 99% uptime forget it. Technologies are quite reliable these days and if the company can’t support that kind of uptime than you can easily find one that can offer you 99% uptime.

Extra Features

Look for unlimited friendly support at no extra cost, especially if you’re a beginner. If you plan on building a website by yourself then some companies may offer you a free website builder.

The best small business web hosting companies don’t have to be limited for their price. In fact you’ll find that companies such as Bodhost, which is one of the top ranking UK web hosting providers, can often be cheaper and reliable than any other web hosting companies. So choose a hosting company that will be prepared for your future small business expansion at no extra cost to you.

There are a number of web hosting plans that are appropriate for small businesses. The type of plan will depend on the type of site you have. You may require a small business web hosting option that includes e-commerce. You may need something that will keep track of your customer list. Your site may be simple and only include product and company information.

To find a small business web hosting plan that is right for your company, you will first need to decide exactly what your site will be used for. Do you want it to be very informative and content driven? Would you like to sell your products online? Do you just need a simply designed website? Do you need a database?

Compile a list of companies that offer small business web hosting plans and then see if they provide the features that you need. The best way to find a trustworthy web hosting company is to find current customers and ask them about their experience with that company. In order to truly understand how their customer service and reliability measure up, you will need to get past their website and see what other people have to say.

Detailed list of important tips/guidelines for video search engine optimization

People usually love video, millions of Americans consume videos online and same is the case world over. A consumer is most likely to keep in mind and refer to a video in comparison to a print advertisement. These days video making is very economical as compared to the cost of a traditional commercial. Broadband is getting enormous popularity worldwide. Now people can watch videos without long download times or quality issues. Present generation considers video to be a reliable source of news and information. Online video for them is second to nature.

Here are a few tips/hints for optimizing your video:

It is recommended that you create and submit a transcript for users and the search engines, add a transcript to each video file you’ve uploaded via your Video Status page. Create a Keyword Rich Title for your Transcript; include a brief introductory paragraph/synopsis that describes the subject matter of your transcript (and video) and be sure to publish your transcript.

Don’t forget to encode the keywords you are targeting into your video. Try to use the word “video” as much as possible, make sure the word “video” is used in your title, description, meta data etc.

Search engine crawlers rely a lot on the link texts to figure out what the video is all about as they are not capable to figure out the contents of the video otherwise. Therefore it is advisable to get as many back links as possible for your video.

It is advisable to create a separate sitemap just for your videos in your site and try to keep your video files in one directory this would help the web crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.

It is very difficult for the web crawlers of any search engine to crawl into the video contents inside flash players so they usually prefer to stay away from such files. It is therefore advisable not to use such kind of file formats which discourages the web crawlers.

It is advisable to optimize the URLs of your video pages for the search engines with the help of mod_rewrite function so that the pages are freely assessable by the search engines.

Various video search engines use to capture thumbnails of your in different manner. Some of them take the first frame of your video, while others try to take from the middle or end. It is better to experiment with each site individually to make sure they are displaying the right thumbnail for your video. A video thumbnail is always crucial when it comes to decide for a viewer which video to watch.

Beside the above mentioned points there are few more points relevant for the optimization:

Always make sure viewers are searching for your targeted keywords regularly. If not, try to find the closest related keywords being searched.

Viewers who offer feedback are most likely to take the desired action on your video. This could be a good opportunity for you to submit fresh contents, if the most popular videos were included months ago, it really helps.For more detailed tips on video seo, visit ReelSEO.com

Self-Taught PHP – String Functions Quick Start

by Bill Hamilton

An on-the-fly kind of programmer looking at an unfamiliar lanquage needs first of all a reference of the set of necessary and commonly used functions. This tutorial provides a quick reference of the essential string functions followed by some condensed notes and then a very brief list of PHP operators and process control.

Functions

substr($S,start,length)                     portion of string S from start with length

strstr($S,$lookfor)                             first part of string S, up to string lookfor

strstr($S,$lookfor,True)                    last part of string S, beginning with string lookfor

strrchr($S,$lookfor)                           last part of string S, beginning with last character lookfor

strpos($S,$lookfor)                          first position of string lookfor in string S

strrpos($S,$lookfor)                           last position of string lookfor in string S

strlen($S)                                       Length of string S

chr(ascii)                                         Character specified by ascii code

substr_replace($S,$R,s,L)              Put $R into $S, beginning at position s (optional length L)

str_replace($F,$R,$S)                   find and replace string $F in string $S, replacing with $R

trim($S)                                         strip whitespaces from end and beginning of $S (also ltrim and rtrim)

$S.$T                                                 concantentate strings, place string $T at the end of $S

echo “hello world”                            writes “hello world”

Here are some translation examples for Visual Basic programmers:



Basic PHP Returns

right(”abcde”,3) substr(”abcde”,-3) “cde”

left(”abcde”,3) substr(”abcde”,0,3) “abc”

mid(”abcde”,3,2) substr(”abcde”,2,2) “cd” (count starts at 0)

len(”abcde”) strlen(”abcde”) 5

replace(”abcd”,”bc”,”XY”) str_replace(”bc”,”XY”,”abcd”) “aYXd”

instr(”abcd”,”c”) strpos(”abcd”,”c”) 2 (starts at 0)

chr(27) chr(27) escape character

ltrim(” abc”) ltrim(” abc”) “abc”

These are the basic string functions you expect of a scripting lanquage – finding a substring, replacing portions of a string, and breaking a string up. All of the indexes into the string are zero-based (the first character is at position 0). A handy feature to keep in mind is that the starting positions can be negative, which means you count from the end of the string rather than the beginning. The final necessary function is combining strings, which in PHP is simply a period operator.

Process Control

PHP implements a very basic set of process control statements, which behave in the usual fashion. They are the familiar If statement, While loop, For loop, Case block (switch), the Foreach loop, and the break and continue.

The syntax is a little different. Where I have {code} below it means any line or lines of PHP code including the curly brackets. Each line must end with a semicolon ;. The brackets group the lines into a unit. For example, the {code} after the If statement or While statement can be either a single line with a semicolon without brackets, or one or more lines with brackets. The continue command which skips the rest of the current loop iteration, has an added feature: add a number to skip the rest of nested loops. For example, continue 2 skips the current iteration and also a loop enclosing the current loop.

if ($A==”value”) {code} If statement to execute the bracketed code. Use === three equals to test boolean values

while ($A==”value”){code} While loop executing the bracketed code

for ($i = 1; $i $V) if you need to access the array element and not just the value,

{code} $key is a variable for the element of $A array, $V is the value

include ’scriptfilename’ inserts the contents of a file into code

The Arithmetic, logical and boolean operators are exactly as one would expect and listed below to round out this reference:

Arithmetic

-$a negative of $a

$a + $b add

$a * $b multiply

$a / $b divide (float value unless both are integer)

$a % $b remainder

Operators

&& logical AND bitwise and is &

|| logical OR bitwise or is |

! logical NOT bitwise not is ~

xor logical XOR bitwise xor is ^

 

Bill Hamilton is a former Database Administrator for United News and Media, and VNU inc. He currently operates several php/mysql driven websites including www.mysticgemcreations.com