Web Mining

Web Mining Introduction

 What is Web Mining?   

 

          Web mining is the use of data mining techniques to automatically discover and extract information from Web documents/services.Web mining deals with three main areas: web content mining, web usage mining and web structure mining. In web usage mining it is desirable to find the habits and relations between what the website’s users are looking for. To find the actual users some filtering has to be done to remove bots that indexes structures of a website. 

         Robots view all pages and links on a website to find relevant content. This creates many calls to the website server and thereby creates a false image of the actual web usage. The paper we have chosen to start with [Tang et al. 2002] does not in depth discuss web content and web structure mining, but instead look closer upon web usage mining. This field is supposed to describe relations between web pages based on the interests of users, i.e. finding links often clicked in a specific order which are of greater relevance to the user. The patterns revealed will then be used to create a more visitor customized website by highlighting or otherwise expose web pages to increase commerce.                This is often demonstrated as a price cut in one product which will increase sales in another. On the other hand it is also important to not to misclassify actual users that make thorough searches of websites and label them as robots. 

 1. Motivation / Opportunity The WWW is huge, widely distributed, global information service centre and, therefore, constitutes a rich source for data mining.

 01 Personalization, Recommendation Engines.

 02 Web-commerce applications. 

 03 Building the Semantic Web. 

 04 Intelligent Web Search.

 05 Hypertext classification and Categorization. 

 06 Information / trend monitoring. 

 07 Analysis of online communities. 

 2. The Web 

 01. Over 1 billion HTML pages, 15 terabytes

 02. Wealth of information a. Bookstores, restaraunts, travel, malls, dictionaries, news, stock quotes,yellow & white pages, maps, markets, ......... 

 b. Diverse media types: text, images, audio, video c. Heterogeneous formats: HTML, XML, postscript, pdf, JPEG, MPEG, MP3 

03. Highly Dynamic a. 1 million new pages each day b. Average page changes in a few weeks 

04. Graph structure with links between pages a. Average page has 7-10 links b. in-links and out-links follow power-law distribution 

05. Hundreds of millions of queries per day 

 3. Abundance and authority crisis. 

 01. Liberal and informal culture of content generation and dissemination 

 02. Redundancy and non-standard form and content 

 03. Millions of qualifying pages for most broad queries Example: java or kayaking 

 04. No authoritative information about the reliability of a site 

 05. Little support for adapting to the background of specific users 

 4. One Interesting Approach 

 01. The number of web servers was estimated by sampling and testing random IP address numbers and determining the fraction of such tests that successfully located a web server 

 02. The estimate of the average number of pages per server was obtained by crawling a sample of the servers identified in the first experiment 

 03. Lawrence, S. and Giles, C. L. (1999). Accessibility of information on the web. Nature, 400(6740): 107–109. 

 4. Applications of web mining a.

 a. E-commerce (Infrastructure) 

 b. Generate user profiles -> improving customization and provide users with pages, advertisements of interest 

 c. Targeted advertising -> Ads are a major source of revenue for Web portals (e.g., Yahoo, Lycos) and E-commerce sites. 

Internet advertising is probably the “hottest” web mining application today 

 d. Fraud -> Maintain a signature for each user based on buying patterns on the Web (e.g., amount spent, categories of items bought). If buying pattern changes significantly, then signal fraud  

 e. Network Management 

 f. Performance management -> Annual bandwidth demand is increasing ten-fold on average, annual bandwidth supply is rising only by a factor of three. Result is frequent congestion. During a major event (World cup), an overwhelming number of user requests can result in millions of redundant copies of data flowing back and forth across the world 

 g. Fault management -> analyze alarm and traffic data to carry out root cause analysis of faults 

 h. Information retrieval (Search) on the Web 

i. Automated generation of topic hierarchies 

j. Web knowledge bases 

 5. Why is Web Information Retrieval Important? 

 a. According to most predictions, the majority of human information will be available on the Web in ten years

 b. Effective information retrieval can aid in 

 c. Research: Find all papers about web mining 

 d. Health/Medicene: What could be reason for symptoms of “yellow eyes”. 

 e.high fever and frequent vomitting 

 f. Travel: Find information on the tropical island of St. Lucia

 g. Business: Find companies that manufacture digital signal processors

 h. Entertainment: Find all movies starring Marilyn Monroe during the years 1960 and 1970

 i. Arts: Find all short stories written by Jhumpa Lahiri 

 6. Why is Web Information Retrieval Difficult? 

 a. The Abundance Problem (99% of information of no interest to 99% of people)

 b. Hundreds of irrelevant documents returned in response to a search query

 c. Limited Coverage of the Web (Internet sources hidden behind search interfaces)

 d. Largest crawlers cover less than 18% of Web pages

 e. The Web is extremely dynamic 

f. Lots of pages added, removed and changed every day 

g. Very high dimensionality (thousands of dimensions) 

h. Limited query interface based on keyword-oriented search 

i. Limited customization to individual users 

 6. Web Mining Taxonomy 

 01. Web content mining: focuses on techniques for assisting a user in finding documents that meet a certain criterion (text mining) 

 02. Web structure mining: aims at developing techniques to take advantage of the collective judgement of web page quality which is available in the form of hyperlinks 

 03. Web usage mining: focuses on techniques to study the user behaviour when navigating the web (also known as Web log mining and clickstream analysis) 

 7. Web Content Mining 

 01. Can be thought of as extending the work performed by basic search engines 

 02. Search engines have crawlers to search the web and gather information, indexing techniques to store the information, and query processing support to provide information to the users 

 03. Web Content Mining is: the process of extracting knowledge from web contents 

 8. Structuring Textual Information

 01. Many methods designed to analyze structured data

 02. If we can represent documents by a set of attributes we will be able to use existing data mining methods

 03. How to represent a document?

 04. Vector based representation (referred to as “bag of words” as it is invariant to permutations)

 05. Use statistics to add a numerical dimension to unstructured text. 

 9. Text Mining 

 01. Document classification

 02. Document clustering

 03. Key-word based association rules

 10. Web Search 

1.Domain-specific search engines 

a. www.buildingonline.com 

b. www.lawcrawler.com

c. www.drkoop.com (medical) 

d. Meta-searching 

e. Connects to multiple search engines and combine the search results f. www.metacrawler.com g. www.dogpile.com

 h. www.37.com 

 2. Post-retrieval analysis and visualization

 a. www.vivisimo.com 

b. www.tumba.pt 

c. www.kartoo.com 

d. Natural language processing 

e. www.askjeeves.com 

f. Search Agents 

g. Instead of storing a search index, search agents can perform realtime searches on the Web.

h. Fresher data, slower response time and lower coverage. 

11. Web Structure Mining First generation of search engines
 01. Early days: keyword based searches
      a. Keywords: “web mining”
      b. Retrieves documents with “web” and mining”
02. Later on: cope with
a. synonymy problem
b. polysemy problem
c. stop words
03. Common characteristic: Only information on the pages is used.

12. Modern search engines

 01. Link structure is very important a. Adding a link: deliberate act b. Harder to fool systems using in-links c. Link is a “quality mark”
 02. Modern search engines use link structure as important source of information.
 1. The Web Structure
      a. If the web is treated as an undirected graph 90% of the pages form a single connected component    
      b. If the web is treated as a directed graph four distinct components are identified, the four with similar size.

 13. Some statistics
 01. Only between 25% of the pages there is a connecting path BUT
 02. If there is a path:
        a. Directed: average length <17 -="" 03.="" a="" average="" b.="" it="" length="" s="" small="" undirected:="" world=""> between two people only chain of length 6! 
a. High number of relatively small cliques >
b. Small diameter 

04. Internet (SCC) is a small world graph.
14. Applications Web mining is an important tool to gather knowledge of the behaviour of Websites’ visitors and thereby to allow for appropriate adjustments and decisions with respect to Websites’ actual users and traffic patterns. Along with a description of the processes involved in Web mining [Srivastava, 1999] states that Website Modification, System Improvement, Web Personalization and Business Intelligence are four majomajor application areas for Web mining. These are briefly described in the following sections.

15. Website Modification The content and structure of the Website is important to the user experience/impression of the site and the site’s usability. The problem is that different types of users have different preferences, background, knowledge etc. making it difficult (if not impossible) to find a design that is optimal for all users. Web usage mining can then be used to detect which types of users are accessing the website, and their behaviour, knowledge which can then be used to manually design/re-design the website, or to automatically change the structure and content based on the profile of the user visiting it. Adaptive Websites are described in more detail in [Perkowitz & Etzioni. 1998].

16. System Improvement The performance and service of Websites can be improved using knowledge of the Web traffic in order to predict the navigation path of the current user. This may be used e.g. for cashing, load balancing or data distribution to improve the performance. The path prediction can also be used to detect fraud, break-ins, intrusion etc. [Srivastava, 1999].

17. Web Personalization Web Personalization is an attractive application area for Web based companies, allowing for recommendations, marketing campaigns etc. to be specifically customized for different categories of users, and more importantly to do this in real-time, automatically, as the user accesses the Website. For example, [Mobasher et. al. 1999] and [Yan et al. 1996] uses association rules and clustering for grouping users and discover the type of user currently accessing the Website (based of the user’s path through the Website), in real-time, to dynamically adapt hyperlinks and content of the Website.

18. Business Intelligence For Web based companies Web mining is a powerful tool to collect business intelligence to get competitive advantages. Patterns of the customers’ activities on the Website can be used as important knowledge in the decision-making process, e.g. predicting customers’ future behaviour, recruiting new customers and developing new products are beneficial choices. There are many companies providing (among other things) services in the field of Web Mining and Web traffic analysis for extracting business intelligence, e.g.[BizInetl, 2011] and [WebTrends, 2011].

 19. Summary

01. Web is huge and dynamic
02. Web mining makes use of data mining techniques to automatically discover and extract information from Web documents/services 

03. Web content mining
04. Web structure mining
05. Web usage mining
06. Semantic web: "The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila.

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Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

01.What is SEO? 
      Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic (or “natural”) search results, thus making your website more visible to people who are looking for your product or service via search engines.SEO is part of the broader topic of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a term used to describe all marketing strategies for search. SEM entails both organic and paid search.With paid search, you can pay to list your website on a search engine so that your website shows up when someone types in a specific keyword or phrase. Organic and paid listings both appear on the search engine, but they are displayed in different locations on the page. So, why is it important for your business‟ website to be listed on search engines? On Google alone, there are over 694,000 searches conducted every second.
      I Think about that. Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you are potentially missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities for someone to visit your website, read your content, and potentially buy your product or service. Practicing SEO basics, as well as more advanced techniques after those, can drastically improve your website‟s ability to rank in the search engines and get found by your potential customers. What about paid search? Yes, you can pay to have your website listed on the search engines.
      However, running paid search campaigns can be quite costly if you don‟t know what you‟re doing. Not to mention, about 88% of search engine users never click on paid search ads anyway. Because the sole purpose of a search engine is to provide you with relevant and useful information, it is in everyone‟s best interest (for the search engine, the searcher, and you) to ensure that your website is listed in the organic search listings. In fact, it is probably best to stay away from paid search all together until you feel you have a firm grasp on SEO and what it takes to rank organically.

02.How Search Engines Work?
       Search engines have one objective – to provide you with the most relevant results possible in relation to your search query.
      If the search engine is successful in providing you with information that meets your needs, then you are a happy searcher. And happy searchers are more likely to come back to the same search engine time and time again because they are getting the results they need. In order for a search engine to be able to display results when a user types in a query, they need to have an archive of available information to choose from. Every search engine has proprietary methods for gathering and prioritizing website content. Regardless of the specific tactics or methods used, this process is called indexing. Search engines actually attempt to scan the entire online universe and index all the information so they can show it to you when you enter a search query.
      How do they do it? Every search engine has what are referred to as bots, or crawlers, that constantly scan the web, indexing websites for content and following links on each webpage to other webpages. If your website has not been indexed, it is impossible for your website to appear in the search results. Unless you are running a shady online business or trying to cheat your way to the top of the search engine results page (SERP), chances are your website has already been indexed. So, big search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are constantly indexing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of webpages. How do they know what to show on the SERP when you enter a search query? The search engines consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to prioritize it.
      1. Content on your website: When indexing pages, the search engine bots scan each page of your website, looking for clues about what topics your website covers and scanning your website‟s back-end code for certain tags, descriptions, and instructions.
     
      2. Who’s linking to you: As the search engine bots scan webpages for indexing, they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has, the more influence or authority it has. Essentially, every inbound link counts as a vote for that website‟s content. Also, each inbound link holds different weight. For instance, a link from a highly authoritative website like The New York Times (nytimes.com) will give a website a bigger boost than a link from a small blog site. This boost is sometimes referred to as link juice. When a search query is entered, the search engine looks in its index for the most relevant information and displays the results on the SERP. The results are then listed in order of most relevant and authoritative. If you conduct the same search on different search engines, chances are you will see different results on the SERP. This is because each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm that considers multiple factors in order to determine what results to show in the SERP when a search query is entered.
     
      3.A few factors that a search engine algorithm may consider when deciding what information to show in the SERP include: a. Geographic location of the searcher b. Historical performance of a listing (clicks, bounce rates, etc.) c. Link quality (reciprocal vs. one-way) d. Webpage content (keywords, tags, pictures) e. Back end code or HTML of webpage f. Link type (social media sharing, link from media outlet, blog, etc.) With a 200B market cap, Google dominates the search engine market. Google became the leader by fundamentally revolutionizing the way search engines work and giving searchers better results with their advanced algorithm. With 64% market share, according to Compete, Inc., Google is still viewed as the primary innovator and master in the space. Before the days of Google (circa 1997), search engines relied solely on indexing web page content and considering factors like keyword density in order to determine what results to put at the top of the SERP. This approach gave way to what are referred to as black-hat SEO tactics, as website engineers began intentionally stuffing their webpages with keywords so they would rank at the top of the search engines, even if their webpages were completely irrelevant to the search result.
     
       4.What it Takes to Rank It is not difficult to get your website to index and even rank on the search engines. However, getting your website to rank for specific keywords can be tricky. There are essentially 3 elements that a search engine considers when determining where to list a website on the SERP: rank, authority, and relevance. Rank Rank is the position that your website physically falls in on the SERP when a specific search query is entered. If you are the first website in the organic section of the SERP (don‟t be confused by the paid ads at the very top), then your rank is 1. If your website is in the second position, your rank is 2, and so on.
      As discussed previously in How Search Engines Work, your rank is an indicator of how relevant and authoritative your website is in the eyes of the search engine, as it relates to the search query entered. Tracking how your website ranks for a specific keyword over time is a good way to determine if your SEO techniques are having an impact. However, since there are so many other factors beyond your control when it comes to ranking, do not obsess over it. If your website jumps 1-5 spots from time to time, that‟s to be expected. It‟s when you jump 10, 20, 30 spots up in the rankings that it makes sense to pat yourself on the back.

       5.Authority As previously discussed in the How Search Engines Work section, search engines determine how authoritative and credible a website.s content is by calculating how many inbound links (links from other websites) it has. However, the number of inbound links does not necessarily correlate with higher rankings. The search engines also look at how authoritative the websites that link to you are, what anchor text is used to link to your website, and other factors such as the age of your domain. You can track over time how authoritative your website is by monitoring a few different metrics. There are a variety of tools to help you keep track. HubSpot offers a free tool called Website Grader that will show you how many domains are linking to your website, and also provide your website. Moz rank. MozRank is SEOmoz's general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority or popularity. It is very similar in purpose to the measures of link importance used by the search engines (e.g., Google's PageRank).
      6.Relevance Relevance is a one of the most critical factors of SEO. The search engines are not only looking to see that you are using certain keywords, but they are also looking for clues to determine how relevant your content is to a specific search query. Besides actual text on your webpages, the search engines will review your website‟s structure, use of keywords in your URLs, page formatting (such as bolded text), and what keywords are in the headline of the webpage versus those in the body text. While there is no way to track how relevant your website is, there are some SEO basics you can practice to cover your bases and make sure you are giving the search engines every possible opportunity to consider your website.
      We‟ll get to that in just a bit. Search engines are extremely complex. Bottom line: the search engines are trying to think like human beings. It is very easy to get caught up in modifying your website‟s content just so you rank on the search engines. When in doubt, always err on the side of providing relevant and coherent content that your website‟s audience (your prospects) can digest. If you find yourself doing something solely for the search engines, you should take a moment to ask yourself why.
      7.Content is King We‟ve all heard it - when it comes to SEO, content is king. Without rich content, you will find it difficult to rank for specific keywords and drive traffic to your website. Additionally, if your content does not provide value or engage users, you will be far less likely to drive leads and customers. It is impossible to predict how people will search for content and exactly what keywords they are going to use. The only way to combat this is to generate content and lots of it. The more content and webpages you publish, the more chances you have at ranking on the search engines. Lottery tickets are a good analogy here. The more lottery tickets you have, the higher the odds are that you will win.
      Imagine that every webpage you create is a lottery ticket. The more webpages you have, the higher your chances are of ranking in the search engines. As you already know, the search engines are smart. If you create multiple webpages about the same exact topic, you are wasting your time. You need to create lots of content that covers lots of topics. There are multiple ways you can use content to expand your online presence and increase your chances of ranking without being repetitive. Here are few examples: Homepage: Use your homepage to cover your overall value proposition and high-level messaging.
      If there was ever a place to optimize for more generic keywords, it is your homepage. Product/Service Pages: If you offer products and/or services, create a unique webpage for each one of them. Resource Center: Provide a webpage that offers links to other places on your website that cover education, advice, and tips.
     
      Blog: Blogging is an incredible way to stay current and fresh while making it easy to generate tons of content. Blogging on a regular basis (once per week is ideal) can have a dramatic impact on SEO because every blog post is a new webpage. While conducting SEO research, you may come across articles that discuss being mindful of keyword density (how often you mention a keyword on a page). Although following an approach like this may seem technically sound, it is not recommended. Remember: do not write content for the search engines. Write content for your audience and everything else will follow.
      Make sure each webpage has a clear objective and remains focused on one topic, and you will do just fine. How to Approach Your SEO Strategy When developing an SEO strategy, it is best to split your initiatives into two buckets: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO covers everything you can control on each specific webpage and across your website to make it easy for the search engines to find, index, and understand the topical nature of your content. Off-page SEO covers all aspects of SEO that happen off your website to garner quality inbound links. Let‟s dive into on-page SEO first, and then we‟ll tackle off-page SEO in the next section.
     
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Web Hosting

An Introduction What is Web Hosting

1. What is web hosting?
Web hosting simply means internet hosting that enables businesses and individuals to make their online presence in the form of a website, accessible to the public via internet. A website needs two things to be hosted or to become accessible to everyone: Web space: Website files, HTML codes, images and everything else is stored in this space. The heavier your website, the more is the space you require to store its content.
Bandwidth: In the web hosting industry, bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred to and from a server or a website.
It is the allotted internet bandwidth that makes a website accessible to everyone online. The more the bandwidth, the better and faster is your network, connection and system. Bandwidth requirement is directly proportional to the number of visitors who visit a site. The more the number of visitors, the more is the bandwidth that is required. The requirement of space and bandwidth is fulfilled by a web hosting provider. However,in addition to these two, the hosting provider also maintains the server, ensures website uptime and provides data security.

2. Types of hosting: Depending upon your web space and bandwidth requirements, you can purchase the required hosting from three basic types of hosting available: Shared Hosting: In this hosting, multiple accounts are hosted on the same server and the resources are also shared among them. It is best for small businesses, whose websites have low to moderate traffic and CPU needs. It is like an apartment building, where you need to pay less amount, but you share the space with many other people. You also get affected if your neighbor decides to party as he and his visitors may create disturbance for you or may use up your parking space. Similarly, in shared hosting, if one user uses more bandwidth in case his site has more traffic, then your site may go down.
3. Dedicated Server: In this hosting, the owner has the complete server and all the resources exclusively for himself. However, the convenience and solitude makes it the costliest option in hosting. It is ideal for large enterprises and those organizations, whose websites have heavy traffic and CPU needs. It is like having your own home where you can live according to your convenience, but you will also have to bear the costs for its purchase and maintenance alone. Similarly, in dedicated hosting, you will have to pay more than any other type of hosting for availing server, bandwidth and resources all by yourself.
4. VPS Hosting: In this hosting, virtualization technology is used to partition a computer virtually into multiple servers. No physical partition is there, but because of virtual or software partition, each user is given much more privacy and security as compared to the shared hosting.
It is like living in a comfortable condo, where you get your own privacy, fewer neighbors and better space but you still share your walls and plot with others. The price for added space is obviously more than apartment housing, but is not as exorbitant as the cost of having your own home. Similarly, in VPS, you are less affected with busy websites and the cost is more than shared hosting and lesser than dedicated hosting.
VPS hosting also gives you the freedom to install whatever you want on the server. You can try any new programming language or deploy a custom Apache module. As you have the root access, you can make any changes using the remote desktop command line or remote desktop. VPS hosting offers many more advantages than shared hosting and almost the same advantages as dedicated hosting. But in terms of price, VPS hosting is less expensive than dedicated hosting but more expensive than shared hosting.

How do I choose the best hosting company?
When choosing a hosting company, there are certain ingredients that can make the difference between online success and an internet disaster. Do you want to be able to contact your hosting company at 10pm if your site and email develop problems?

Do you know how secure and stable the providers hosting setup is? Do you want to deal with someone who speaks English instead of technical jargon? There are a number of small hosting businesses set up in garages and basements or with limited staff resources. They may be cheaper, but the smaller the company, the fewer resources they have available to provide adequate customer support or servicing when you need it. It is not unknown for websites to go down only to discover that the person responsible for fixing the server is on holiday or otherwise unavailable. Every time your website is down, your business loses money, so compromises on hosting prices can cost you in other ways. The most reliable hosting companies provide dedicated customer support and technical services, capable of dealing with your issues day and night.
If your website goes offline, you don’t want to wait a couple of days before discovering the problem as you want to be sure your provider will identify and correct the issue before you even know about it. Also, although it is possible to host your website anywhere in the world, choosing a local hosting company can have greater advantages. Dealing with a hosting company in the United States can be frustrating.
Long distance calls are expensive and email support can often be slow and unhelpful outside of US business hours. If your website is suffering costly delays during Australian business hours, you don’t want to wait for New York to wake up before it can be fixed. A reputable hosting provider should have enough back-up safeguards to ensure your website never goes down (well, at least 99.99% of the time).
The last thing you want is the server with your website on it floating through a flooded building with no appropriate back-up stored high-and-dry elsewhere. The same goes for the connections to the web. If the local road works chop through a Telstra cable, wouldn’t you feel better knowing your server was also linked to the net through at least one or two other connections, providing uninterrupted service? Make sure you know how your provider can guarantee your online store will remain open for business 24x7.
Net registry houses servers in the largest data centre in the southern hemisphere, Global Switch in Pyrmont, as well as the E3 data centre in Alexandria, providing reliable, secure, and above all, local hosting. How much uptime is good enough? The last thing your website needs is downtime, which is why many hosting providers offer uptime guarantees. But how much is good enough? The difference between 99.5% and 99.9% uptime might not seem very much, but actually equates to 42.9 hours of your website being unavailable to customers each year.
That is nearly two days of forced closure with no sales and no money coming in. Therefore, 0.4% of difference can cost your business a lot more than you may think. What do I need to consider when choosing a hosting package? There are a number of factors to consider when deciding on the best value hosting solution for your website. It is important to not only understand your current goals, but have an idea for how the website is likely to evolve.
In choosing a hosting plan, there are a few key considerations. Data storage, data transfer, bandwidth, databases and scripting technology. Most hosting accounts come equipped with features such as email. Even so, there are some that consider email an added extra for a fee. Check for the features you need beforehand so you have a clear idea of the total cost of the package. How much data storage is necessary? Most hosting plans contain more than enough data storage for the majority of websites.
But certain files take up more space than others. Lots of image, video or audio files can chew up storage space quickly. It is possible to reduce the size of many large files, so it is worth working with someone with the technical ability to compress the amount of data without compromising quality. If your website is likely to grow over time, this needs to be accounted for.
An extreme example would be a site like YouTube, needing to find storage for thousands of large video files every day. You will probably never be faced with that kind of growth, but even a few large files added regularly over time can soon eat up your storage space. Alternatively, simple text pages with only a few small images take relatively little storage space. You may be able to add hundreds of these pages before filling the space taken by a handful of audio or video files. Where in the world is your web server? Do you know where your hosting company is storing your data? Most Australian hosting is actually stored offshore, although you wouldn’t know it. Storing your website overseas can also impact your website by being slower and being less responsive.
Net registry is 100% Australian owned and run, with the entire hosting infrastructure located and maintained in Sydney. What is bandwidth? Bandwidth is the are that connects your website to the internet. It is a measure of the amount of digital information that can be accessed within a given time period.
For example, if your main webpage is 300 kilobytes in size, then every time a web browser accesses it, 300kb of data travels down the ‘pipe’. How fast this data is transferred depends on how many people are accessing data down the pipe at the same time and how large your pipe is. Larger files, such as audio and video, eat up bandwidth just as they eat up data storage.
Putting a lot of large files in your website can clog the flow of data through the are and make your website much slower to load in a visitors browser if a lot of people access that content at once. Even with small files, your bandwidth can still become bottle-necked. If your data connection can cope with a certain amount of data transfer per second, but the number of people trying to access your website exceeds this, it can also cause a traffic jam. With the data not getting through fast enough, website visitors can receive are timed out error messages instead of your wonderful webpage. If too much traffic tries to access data through this connection at the same time, it is possible to crash the server, putting your website offline until the problem can be fixed. This can make some websites a victim of their own success, with their website becoming inaccessible when they are at their most popular.
If you are expecting a large spike in traffic or an increase in large files, it is worth talking to your web host about bandwidth solutions. This could mean a transfer to a different plan or short term strategies such as website mirrors (a duplicate of the website on a separate hosting server). What is clustered hosting? Hosting usually requires websites to share server space on the one unit, but imagine how upset you would be if the actions of one website impacted on the performance of your business because it shares the same server.
If a website receives too much traffic or overloads (crashes) the server through increased activity, it affects everything stored in the same place. Clustered hosting spreads the load across multiple machines so that no one website can affect any other. This allows for a far more secure and stable hosting environment with fewer risks. Always choose a hosting provider that offers clustered hosting to be sure that your website remains operating at its best.

Should I worry about data transfer limits?
Hosting accounts usually have a data transfer limit. This is the amount of data the hosting package can provide to the internet within the given time period (usually a month). This is similar to you home internet account,
for example, where you pay so much for your connection with a fixed download limit. If you go over your monthly limit, depending on your provider, you may find your internet speed throttled to a crawl or be charged extra for every additional megabyte of data. If either of these outcomes happened to your website, it is not an ideal outcome. Your website could become slow to load or you could receive a larger bill to pay for the extra data transfer. Thankfully, you don’t need to worry. All Netregistry hosting accounts have unlimited data transfer, no throttling and no additional data fees.
What is database technology?
More and more websites now allow visitors to interact and manipulate information on the webpage. This may be by entering and registering their information, performing searches to be presented with a page of specific results, or entering comments into a blog or forum, to mention just three examples. These websites are called are dynamic, and use database technology to store information in sections that can be reassembled into fresh webpages in answer to the visitor request. Classic examples of dynamic websites are blogs, eBay or any site that allows a user to sign in and create a profile. Also, any website that uses a content management system or shopping cart works in the same way. If you plan to include any of these features on your website, you will need to check for database technology on your hosting server.
An example is Netregistrys Business Hosting, providing the most commonly used database features for small business. The database is also bounded by storage limits, and it is worth knowing what these are before planning a complex website. If you don’t plan to use any dynamic features, you may only need basic are statichosting, such as Netregistrys Economy Hosting package, saving you money. Of course, if at any time you decide to develop the features on your website, it is possible to upgrade your hosting plan to the correct configuration. What is Scripting? The most common language used to code web pages is called HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
This code tells a web browser how to display the webpage. But when creating dynamic webpages, some additional scripting languages are needed to tell the web browser where to access the information needed to construct the elements on the page. Because your hosting server will need to interpret these scripts to provide the correct responses from the database, you need to be sure it has been configured with the relevant languages.

Common scripting languages are PHP, Perl, ASP, etc. Unless you are building the website yourself, it is unlikely you will need to know anything about these languages. Your web designer will be able to tell you which particular scripts to look for when choosing a hosting package, but most hosting servers with database technology support the majority of commonly used scripts. Where can I get more advice? You may now understand some of the basics, but relating them to your specific situation can sometimes require experience and further knowledge. If you are still unsure how to choose the best hosting plan for your website, the Net registry sales team is trained in determining your specific needs. The best hosting plan is one that doesn’t require regular attention or additional monthly fees, but can cope with the daily demands of your website without complaint. By addressing the key principles, you can ask the right questions of your hosting provider and give your website the best platform to reach your audience.
Net registry has been providing strong hosting advice and solutions to Australian businesses since 1997. With static, dynamic and e-commerce hosting solutions available, Net registry can provide the reliability and features you need to form the foundations for your new online empire.