HostingZoom Blog

If you don’t use e-mail forms on your site, but you want to present yourself as a company with several “departments”, you can do that without setting up separate POP accounts. Cpanel offers a handy feature which creates e-mail “forwarders”. What this does, as the name suggests, is that it forwards e-mail addresses to another standalone e-mail account.

This also comes in handy if you have employees or partners who have their own e-mail addresses. With forwarding, you can automatically forward e-mail messages sent to sales@yourdomain.com to several e-mail accounts. This allows you to have several e-mail addresses for your website which can then be forwarded to one person or several people, all without the need for creating individual POP accounts.

Another handy use for this feature is allowing people to send messages to your cell phone or BlackBerry without revealing your cell phone’s number or e-mail address. All you do is set up an alias, say mobile@yourdomain.com, which would then forward to your cell phone’s address (assigned through your carrier) without revealing that address to prying eyes.

To set up forwarders, simply go into your Cpanel account and click that option under the “E-mail” section of the control panel. Cpanel will walk you through the process, step by step, and within moments you’ll have aliases (or forwarders) set up.

Why do this over setting up POP accounts? Maybe you don’t want to hand out POP/SMTP accounts to everyone, but you still want them to be able to access website e-mail. By setting up forwarders, you can accomplish that, and you maintain the ability to remove or add people at will.

So you have a website. It’s up and running. Now you need traffic. You’ve submitted your site to Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, but how do you make sure that your listing counts?

Meta tags.

What meta tags do is remarkable: they help you draw in visitors who are looking for specific things. The typical syntax of a meta tag is as follows:

Let’s take a look at an example of a description. This is what search engines would show to people as a brief synopsis of your website:

Here, you have the name of the business, and a brief slogan. This will help draw in customers, because if a potential buyer wants sprockets at low prices (and who doesn’t?), he’ll definitely click on a link with that description! And there’s your traffic.

Perhaps the most important meta tag is the one pertaining to keywords. These are the words that you want to draw people into your site with. The idea is to pull up your website when people search specific keywords. Here’s an example:

Separated by commas, there are several keywords, all of which pertain directly to the business: the type of product they sell, the reason customers would want to buy from them, and a value-added service: quick delivery!

There are many types of meta tags available, and you can use as many or as few as you wish, depending upon the needs of your website. When used properly, meta tags can increase your incoming traffic significantly, when compared to sites that don’t use meta tags (and surprisingly, there are some that don’t!).

If you need help, there are sites that can help you create meta tags, and then “validate” them, or verify that they are formatted correctly.

Meta tags can be a powerful tool for your website, whether that site is for your business, or your own personal pursuits. Using them correctly can increase your traffic, ad revenue, and rankings in search engines.

We here at HostingZoom appreciate how daunting a task it can be to choose the right host. After all, there are so many hosts out there, all of whom promise to give you the best deal.

So how does one choose the best host? Here are some points to consider, and how we fit into the picture.

Customer Service: The last thing you want is to watch your website go offline, and have no one available to help you. At HostingZoom, that won’t happen. We offer several methods of support: trouble ticket, chat, telephone, and we even offer a Support Manager who can address issues if you feel that you’re not getting the attention you deserve.

Reliability: Obviously, you need your host to be reliable. You want your website up 24/7, right? We offer clustered failover hosting, which means that if one server goes offline, your website can stay up. With most hosts, if the server that your website is hosted on goes offline, your website goes with it. That’s not the case with HostingZoom, which means more uptime for your website or blog.

Trust: We understand that some customers may be hesitant to trust a company that they don’t physically visit. We’re located in Houston, Texas, and are accredited by the Better Business Bureau. We are not a “fly by night” company; our parent company, Landis Holdings, Inc., has been around for 11 years. Unfortunately, there are quite a few “hosting companies” run by teenagers out of their bedrooms. While their desire to run a business at such a young age is admirable, your website needs to be in the hands of a company with experience, and resources.

Ease of use: What good is a hosting company if you can’t use their services easily? At HostingZoom, we make the entire process easy for you. In fact, we’ll even help you move from your old host, as long as you use Cpanel as your control panel environment. Not many hosts offer that service!

Here at HostingZoom, we care about all of our customers, and when you sign up for service with us, you’re more than just a number. We think that when you apply the factors mentioned above to any host you may be considering, you’ll see that HostingZoom is the smart move!

Some of those other guys don’t like supporting their customers. They like taking your money, but when it comes to customer service, they’re simply not there for the handoff.

Well, at HostingZoom, that’s not a problem, because we firmly believe in supporting our clients. That’s why we offer several different methods of support.

You can submit a traditional trouble ticket, or you can chat with a support technician. You can also get support over the telephone, or on our customer forums. Whatever method is best for you, we’ll give you the top-notch, quality support that you deserve as our client.

Why is support important? If your website is down, or if you’re having problems with the service, then you’re probably not happy. We don’t like our clients to be unhappy, and just as importantly, we like to know about problems, so we can fix them right away. More than likely, if there’s some sort of network issue, we’re already aware of it, and already working on it, but we never mind hearing from our clients, and we appreciate people letting us know about issues, so that we can respond to them promptly.

At HostingZoom, you never have to worry about being left in the dark, because we offer several methods of support. Some guys only offer e-mail support, and still others offer none at all. That’s simply not how we do business here.