• What is Hosting?
• What is Hosting a domain?
• What is hosting a website mean?
• What is hosting a bandwidth?
• What is hosting server?
• What is WordPress?

These questions are asked thousands of times a day on search engines, we will give short simple answers to help you on your road to a better internet experience:

The questions above might seem a bit cryptic and incorrect grammer, but this is how thousands of internet users are asking the questions:

1. What is Hosting? this question we have covered in another blog on this site, click this link and you will find the answer.
2. What is Hosting a domain? As with a website, a domain (which is the websites address) also needs to be hosted somewhere. International domains such as .com & .net, .co, .org etc are hosted at the domain registrar, this means you can approach a domain registrar, like ENOM or Godaddy & purchase a domain without a hosting package, ir a place to install a website. These domain hosts or domain registrar’s normally give you admin access to update the domains nameservers to point to a website. Your hosting company will give you the nameserver and then your domain is pointing to your website, this process can take up to 48 hours to resolve. BUT with our South African users, the CO.ZA registrar does not HOST YOUR DOMAIN, the domain is hosted with the hosting company, such as IDS HOSTING. The registrar only diverts the request to the hosting company. Thus in this case the domain host is the hosting company.
3. What is hosting a website mean? The hosting company, which is the company that has access to a server, which is a computer with a hard drive (the space where data is kept) will place your website on its server, give it an allocation, so it can be found again, give it an address so those browsing the internet will have access to it. With all that said, it just means the hosting company, like us at IDS HOSTING, will place your website in a safe place and allow it to be seen on the internet via an internet browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc.
4. What is hosting a bandwidth? This phrase does not really makes sense, but its how many have asked the question. Bandwidth or traffic as its also referred to is the amount of data that is or has passed a certain point of measurement. It is used to configure hosting packages for example. IDS HOSTING entry level package for example has a bandwidth of  4000mb for R20/month. Thus every calender month 4000mb of data is allocated to your hosting account. Every time a website page is opened, a file is downloaded, email is sent or received, the size of that action is subtracted from your 4000mb. A website page is say 75kb in size, so when somebody opens that website, 75kb is subtracted from the 4000mb. At the end of the calender, its reset to 4000mb again, no matter what its value is.
5. What is hosting server? This is the server, or computer that’s specially made to keep your website & emails on. Servers normally have quite a number of hard drives, and large amounts of RAM.
6. What is WordPress? This question is asked thousands of times on the search engines, we have answered this in more detail in another post please follow the link.

I hope we have managed to answer a few of your questions.

Should you require HOSTING or WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT, please contact us

So it makes sense to answer it …….

This term can be used in a few disciplines, Internet have adopted it as well. Its in the IT world that we will discuss HOSTING briefly.

As a HOSTING company its very important to our clients that this term is well understood.

There are three aspects to HOSTING.

• Domain
• Website
• Website space

A good comparison would be of a house, with an address and a stand to build the house on:

• The Domain is the address of the website or the houses address we are drawing a parallel with, sometimes called the URL (Universal Resource Locator)
• The Website is similar to the house
• and the HOSTING is the space for the website to be built on, or in the house scenario, the hosting will be the stand or piece of ground the house is built on.

So when you hear someone saying you need hosting for your website, its saying you need a piece of internet space to install and operate your website on.

There are so many types of hosting packages and types of servers (the computer used to host your website) and that will not be covered in this blog.

Should you require hosting for a website, or a blog (web log), or just to have your own email personalised email address our products are extremely reasonable.

IDS Hosting & WebDesign.

It is software that is used to publish blog websites!

Its very good software, open sourced thus cost effective and extremely flexible to do more than just blogs (web logs).

WordPress although best suited for blog websites, can be easily configure to be used for more traditional websites with many pages and a full menu structure, including a full shopping cart and many more really good plugins.

WordPress Content Managed websites have been around for a long time, so why blog about it?

To answer my own question, as a hosting company and web developers that primarily develops content managed websites (websites that can be edited easily via an admin or back-end facility) we have noticed a trend towards WordPress websites for a few reasons:

• WordPress has many very accessible plugins, which can do many additional functions other than the core software such as contact page, forms, shopping, multiple templates… and thousands more!
• The code is ‘light’ and takes a little space, quick to load
• Our main interest is that its so SEO friendly, which means in a nutshell, the search engines, especially Google ‘likes’ it.
• Extremely easy to edit & update.
• and the latest development from WordPress is the multi-site, which is installing WordPress once, adding plugins & widgets once, but show them on multiple websites.

IDS WebDesign is focussing more on WordPress as a Content Managed Website solution  and have the in-house skills to develop the required templates.

The look of the website!

And so we set off to create a look and feel, then we start filling it with info, normally adding pages as we create until we feel enough has been said … does this sound familiar? You might not do the website yourself, but probably followed the same thought pattern to some degree.

What you have now is a website which looks OK or maybe even good, filled with information, now what do you need to do?

Now your work starts, you need to get your site seen on Search Engines, and this is probably the first time you or most of you have thought about Marketing your site or making it more visible to Search Engines from the time you started designing your website.

When engineers build a car, long before they reach for the sheet metal and welding machines, they know what the car will look like and all its specs, and even for what country it is designed for, because what sells in the UK will not sell in the USA.

So back to websites!

You need to put a lot of thought into building a site before you even think of doing it.

As developers and host, we have many times been approached by clients who have spent huge amounts of time and energy building a website, then published it on our servers, then as an after thought sent us an email asking what we as hosts going to do to get there website to number one position on Google.

If you want traffic to your website via Search Engine searches, then you need to start from the end and work backwards, this will prevent a lot of duplicate work and time wasted.

So what does this mean in practical terms!

Our advise is before you even think of what colour scheme the site will have or the menu structure etc …. make a list of your main keyword/s that will best describe your new website. This might sound silly, but its not that easy, then under each keyword list a few less important but applicable words to each main keyword.

A website with the least amount of main keywords, even down to one main keyword will probably perform better than a website that has a wide range of unrelated keywords. Search Engines such as Google will visit your newly published website and list all your websites words and the frequency and placement of them to find a theme that runs through your site, and this theme is where it will index your website. So if its very diverse it gets a bit confused, and gives it a poor rating and in some cases will not even index your site at all.

Once you are happy that your keyword structure resembles your business or hobby etc website, start working around these keywords always keeping them in mind right down to style, colour, site flow, menus, text, images.

Thus if you set up your website looking Back to Front, you stand a much better chance of organically setting up your website without knowing all the SEO information, and your site will beat a lot of others to the top of the pile in its relevant keyword/theme category.

Happy Web designing!!

The site has been designed to be pratical & SEO friendly before looking like a design masterpiece that is heavy with graphics and slow. We purposefully used the Joomla foundation to show off how flaxible Joomla is and its a dream to keep updated and develop. we will not ever have to upgrade the site and start from scratch as we did this time around from static HTML. In future we can develop a new template for the site and switch it on … and we have a new look. The pages are easy to change as well as to enable and dis-able. Once you have your head around how Joomla works you will not want to use anything else. Well there are other Content Managed sites like this blog site, its a WordPress site and can be used as a web site as well … easy to use and amazing in features.

With all this free software on the internet and the automatic installers IDS Hosting offers, its a click or 2 and you have a website and just choose a template and start adding your content. Anyone who knows how to move around there PC in a windows environment has the ability to have there own websites.

IDS Hosting & Web Design & Development has also launched a  dedicated website for there websites design component this can be found at this link: http://idswebdesign.co.za.

The new Hosting website will be focussing more & more on SEO, without SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your website is not going to get much traffic. Soon we will have our own dedicated  SEO Website filled with plenty of SEO information.

Since IDS offers Joomla! websites as part of its product range, we have decided to use the same for its own website requirements which will double as a demo site to show how flexible this type of website approach is.

The method used to access & update the site, change its structure, categorise content or re-categorise content, change the look and feel by means of a template that loads over the content which is easily changed and other great advantages like all the content is sourced in a database, to back up a sql database is easy and does not use a lot of space, dynamically created pages and much more …

We will keep you updated on the progress. any input during and after the update will be appreciated.

The site can have have many different themes which can be changed with a few mouse clicks from the backend admin section.
IDS Hosting offers a range of off the shelf templates as well as custom templates, which would probably work out cheaper in the long run in time and money as you will have what you want without customizing another template, which even for experienced programmers/developers will take time to do.

This Content Managed (CMS) website approach has so many advantages it would take quite awhile to list and work through them all. we will mention a few now and will continue to publish a few more blogs on this subject.

• Content Managed: This means that you have access to the content via a non coding approach from the front end and backend. You can nominate others to take on roles of author, editor & publisher, this is done from the front end via the login facility.  Manager, Administrator & Super Administrator have access to the backend.  Each have access to various options but the main thing is any article can be changed, updated and new articles can be added, others can be archived and many other great features.
• Login: A login facility that allows your registered clients to see any number of additional menus and pages. A special login facility for those of your registered clients you mark as special for even more access to information you do not want to share with browser and registered users.
• Default modules: The site will have a few useful default modules such as: custom html pages for the programmers, Archiving of older articles sorted by month, Popular modules,  Advertisement areas, Banner modules, Random images, Search, Category modules,  Section modules, Who’s on line, Wrapper module, Polls, news & news flash.
• Addon Modules: There are thousands of addon modules/components/plugins available. We have installed a few popular modules on our demo site such as: Gallery, Sitemap, Events, Online shopping, Feedback forms, FAQ, Shoutbox.

The great news is that we have our second server set-up and operating, and will probably need to upgrade in a few weeks again.

Should you need a web site or email account or just park that domain you would like to use one day, give us a call on our new national number or contact us via the web site.

New SA National Contact Number: 086 100 2267

Web site: http://idshosting.co.za