It’s become standard practice even for some of the hosts on my site to offer Adwords and Yahoo or MSN Search Marketing Vouchers for which they will bag a referral fee when they refer a client. And you can bet they refer a lot of customers. Other services may include an improved Spam Protection, site templates, Search engine submissions, or other SEO related services.

Hostgator famously caused a storm of protest in the forums earlier this year when they decided to monetize the 404 error pages accross all of its hosted sites. When you hit a 404 on a Hostgator site that doesn’t have a custom error page installed you see a Google Adsense Search box and a Google Adsense Firefox referral link. Personally, I think Hostgator didn’t do themselves any favour by trying to optimize their cash flows on the back of its users. They claim that everyone is free to create a custom 404 page but that requires a certain level of knowledge which I think you can’t necessarily expect. It’s a bit like when you live in a house on a busy street and your landlord decides to plaster the facade with billboards to make some extra cash flow.

Very recently I caught a hosting affiliate program that tried to make a little extra by including a referral link to Paypal. This will work nicely accross a big affiliate base. On the other hand affiliates are by and large pretty web savvy so they are probably more likely to have an account already.

Lunarpages has a lot of great features and all plans are affordable considering the features they offer. Just read my review.

Go to Lunarpages.

Create a test setup:

Lists – An overview of the all the clicks on your site

Heatmap – Where are your visitors clicking? Take a look at the heatmap.

Overlay – An exact overview of clicks and percentages of total clicks and where they occur on your site.

Blocking – Block your own IP and localhost

Automatic Archiving

RSS and email notifications – you can keep yourself updated about the activity on your site.

In this test version of Crazy Egg you can only track up to 6000 hits and 4 pages. Mind you that there are sites that create more or less hits. Although I don´t know how the tracking of Crazy Egg works exactly, a hit is usually caused by every file that is loaded on your server. I.e. if your page at Lunarpages contains 10 javascripts, and 8 pictures for your site design and another 2 in your page body you will get 20 hits with every page view!

I’m just warning you that you might burn those 6000 hits rather quickly if you have one of those sites. If this is the case I suggest you better get proper tracking of your most important page to get a bigger sample set. Check out my Lunarpages review and take a look at their hosting plans here to see what else you get with this award winning host.

Other important things you need to look for in a blog hosting provider are bandwidth/transfer, uptime, storage and all the other usual goodies like email/webmail, databases, supported scripting languages, .htaccess support etc. Many webhosts I reviewed have very generous bandwidth and storage allowances and unless you run a very popular blog (and I mean very popular) these hosts will meet most blogging newbies requirements.

HostICan will buy out your previous contract up to $40 and do the site transfer for you.

Hostgator also offers a free website transfer service.

Lunarpages does not offer to do the transfer for you but they add on up to six months of your previous hosting contract for free!! In addition they offer a 90 days money back guarantee

In CPanel go to

Update Billing Info >

Update Now >

Customer Preferences >

MySQL Whitelisted IPs

Enter the IP

Done

1215 N. Research Way, #Q3500
Orem, UT 84097

Both are run by the founder Matt Heaton but Bluehost is a lot bigger than Hostmonster. There has been some discussion on the Bluehost forum regarding the differences between the two. Hostmonster´s plan is about $1 cheaper a month but has pretty much the same features. Hostmonster has unlimited FTP accounts and twice the number of PostgreSQL databases and MySQL databases. In line with Bluehost´s upgrade Hostmonster now also has 300 GB storage and 3000 GB bandwidth. So what´s the difference between the two? Rumour on the Bluehost forum has it that Bluehost runs on better servers and equipment than Hostmonster. That is why some say that Bluehost hosts more sites per server than Hostmonster.

Subsequently here´s a quick overview of the features:

Bluehost:

Linux plan, 300GB storage, 3000 GB transfer, unlimited domains, 1000 FTP accounts, 50 MySQL databases, 50 Postgre SQL databases and more. For all the features and a more in depth description please take a look at my Bluehost review.

Hostmonster:

Linux plan, 300GB storage, 3000 GB transfer, unlimited domains, unlimited FTP accounts, 100 MySQL databases, 100 Postgre SQL databases and more. For all the features and a more in depth description please take a look at my Hostmonster review.

At the end of the day these two are both great hosts so it really is your call whether you go for the cheaper price at Hostmonster or believe the rumour about the better equipment at Bluehost. In any case you´ll end up with an excellent cheap hosting provider.

Read my bluehost review here!

Hostican states that you can host anything as long as it complies with US law. You may be asked to upgrade to a dedicated server if your site uses huge bandwidth or processor capacity. I have a more detailed analysis of this host’s features in my HostICan review.

Lunarpages is another cheap web hosting firm which has no problem with hosting adult content. On their site they state:

“Yes, we do allow adult sites to be hosted here. Lunarpages has no restrictions upon content of your website as long as it is legal as defined by California law.However, adult sites that require extreme amounts of server resources and bandwidth will not be accepted.

Please thoroughly read our “Terms of Service”, http://www.lunarpages.com

We allow all kinds of adult sites except, free tgp (thumbnail gallery posts), circular pop up sites and free image galleries. Other than that, feel free to be as adult as you can be under the law of California.”

For more info on Lunarpages please read my Lunarpages hosting review.

Update: Thanks to a post in the Hostgator forum I became aware that they offer adult web hosting as well. Check their knowledge base and T&C for specifics. Make sure you go to my main site and read my Hostgator review.

You can assign one link to each click id in this script which may be handy if you´re working with affiliate programs or are using other links regularly.

<? $ID = intval($_GET["ID"]);
switch($ID)
{
case 1: // Deal/Location B
$url = "http://www.affiliatesite1.com/track.php?affid=1234";
break;

case 2: // Deal/Location B

$url = “http://www.affiliatesite2.com/track.php?affid=5678″;
break;

default: // If there is an error, send them somewhere else
$url = “http://www.affiliatesite3.com/track.php?affid=5764″;
break;
}
header(“Location: $url”) ;
?>

Save this file as click.php and put it in your root directory. If you want to send somebody to your deal 1 – http://www.affiliatesite1.com/track.php?affid=1234 just enter the link www.yoursite.com/click.php?id=1 and 2 for Deal 2 and so on. You can add as many cases as you like. Pointing the default to the homepage would also make sense.

As you can see this is a very simple program for assigning and calling links from a php script. If you want to have a complete and powerful click tracking, advertising software I can suggest Openads . This software was formerly known as PHPAdsNew and is testament to the power of open source software development. If you don´t have a hosting account yet that supports Openads take a look at my webhosting reviews as these hosts all offer this script.

When you register your domain make sure you point your domain to your hosting provider´s name servers. They will look something like this ns1.yourwebhost.com ; ns2.yourwebhost.com. You can find these in the knowledge base most of the time otherwise just ask support.

First, log into your CPanel account. Then under “domains” go to addon domains. You will see a form like this:

Under the heading CPanel tells you pretty much everything what you need to know. After you registered your domain and pointed your servers to your host just enter the domain name in the required field and enter a folder in the “new subdirectory folder” space. Use something inconspicuous like /24523yourdomain/ so nobody can just type it in with a random guess. The password is what you will use for your FTP client. Next disallow that addon domain folder through the robots.txt of your root domain. Otherwise crawlers will just treat it as a subfolder of your main domain. Fiinally email your hosting support and tell them that you´ve registered domain xyz and you pointed it to xyz addon folder so they can set up the SOA records. After this your new domain should resolve within 48-72 hours and you will be able to access your site from your browser.

This will work for all CPanel hosts in my cheap webhosting reviews.

The Yahoo starter plan comes with a free domain name, 5 GB storage, 200 GB transfer, 200 email addresses and supports the industry leading scripting and database tools PHP, Perl and MySQL.

If you´re interested in this offer make sure you sign up soon as the offer will expire on April 30th.

The following hosting firms have AWStats pre-installed: Bluehost, Hostgator, Hostmonster, HostICan, Lunarpages, Powweb.

If you host more than one domain on an account you can switch AWStats on for every domain through the Stats Manager in CPanel. For those who want to take a shot at installing AWStats on their local server or web server there are a few good links here.

For the rest of you who are still reading, I will introduce you to the main features and the AWStats output.

Summary: The summary field summarizes the number of unique visitors, the ratio of unique visitors/number of visits, the total pages viewed, the pages/visitors ratio and bandwidth used. AwStats also distinguishes between your human traffic and non-human traffic. The number of unique visitors is the main indicator for the traffic of a website. From the ratio which compares unique visitors to total visits you can see whether or not visitors are returning. Everything above one is good and means your site manages to encourage visitors to revisit your site. Getting close to two is the holy grail. The pages to visitor ratio is a good indicator as to what extent your visitor browsed your site. Obviously, if a visitor browses an average of 10 pages per visit your site is more interesting to your visitors than one which only gets 1.5 pages per visitor.

Monthly History: This section provides a monthly overview of unique visitors, number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth. In the bottom row you can also see the totals for the year. The ratios are not provided but can be easily computed.

Days of month: Gives you a breakdown of the aforementioned statistics by day of the month. Usually, I don’t find this very insightful. Only extreme daily changes will show up and can be explained. If you get a high traffic link, your server goes down etc.

Days of week: This section provides an overview of the average activity on each week day. The results may be slightly distorted as not every month is divisible by 7 and most of the time some days may occur more often than others. The activity can be useful for you to see when to announce a new feature (highest activity) or to schedule maintenance (during lower activity/server load).

Hours: Provides an overview of the average activity during the hours of the day. Again this is useful for technical staff for scheduling jobs on your site. Days of week and hours are both important to monitor the success of your marketing activities.

Countries: Shows you what countries your visitors are from. Be weary of visitors that don’t visit very often but use excessive bandwidth, and view a lot of pages. Those “visitors” may actually be malicious bots that steal content or perform other unwanted activities.

Hosts: A breakdown of your most frequent visitors by I.P. address. If you find something suspicious you can do an I.P. lookup which won’t be necessarily insightful but you can at least find out where their ISP is located.

Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 25): Spiders that visit your websites will show up here. The traffic is counted by hits (before the plus) and successful hits on robots.txt (after the “+” sign).

Visits duration: How long are you visitors staying on your site? The longer the better.

Files type: What files types where requested most? Could urge you to use smaller file if you’re using too much bandwidth. It may also indicate if someone is hot linking to your site.

Pages-URL (Top 25): Which ones of your pages are most frequently visited. The top rank is usually occupied by your home page. This section also provides the number of entries or exits of a particular page. If you have a high number of exits as a percentage of entries than the page in question is not doing a very good job at retaining your visitors and may need some extra attention.

Operating Systems (Top 10): A detailed analysis of the different operating systems used by your visitors. This can be used in conjunction with the browser report in order to optimize your site design.

Browsers: A list of the browsers used by visitors to access your site.

Connect to site from: This is one of my favourite reports within AwStats. First you can see what percentage of your visitors accessed your site through direct type in or bookmark. You can also see whether you have incoming links from search engines and other websites. The columns show you the hits and pages generated by these incoming links and what their percentage is based of the total of hits and pages.

Search Keyphrases and Keywords: The keyphrase would be a google search for “Cuban cigars” and the keywords are “Cuban” and “cigars”. This is a very helpful feature to assess how well you rank for certain keywords in the search engines. Compare this to the “links from search engines” to get an idea which search engines are providing your traffic.

Miscellaneous: Monitors whether your user’s browsers support certain media types. Although this is useful my columns always stay empty even though I’m pretty sure that a lot of my visitors have .pdf enabled for instance. So either my AwStats is not properly configured with regards to this section or something else is wrong here. Another very useful metric to gauge your site’s appeal to your visitors is the “Add to favourites estimated” which measures how many visitors out of the total bookmarked your site. This is a key retention indicator as this will most likely bring in repeat visits and help you build a solid and steadily growing traffic base.

HTTP Error codes: Here you can check what errors are occurring on your server and start to fix them. 404s are listed by URL so you can easily achieve zero 404s from your indexed or internal links. If someone performs false type ins then that’s beyond you of course. I also like to monitor if all of my 301 permanent redirects are working. For particular 301s you would use a redirection check tool but it’s nice to get a feeling for how often these redirects are taking place on your site.

By now you will have probably realised that Awstats is one of the best free stats tools available. If you go through the hassle of plugging some of the data into an excel sheet you can produce some really insightful graphs and get a really detailed understanding of what is taking place on your site and in your linking neighbourhood.

If you liked this post, here´s the link:
AwStats hosting