Without an ecommerce hosting provider that can guarantee your site will be displayed virtually 100% of the time your business will always be at a disadvantage.

Visit his web site about ecommerce to pick up your copy of his 7 step ecommerce guide.

Finding a professionally run ecommerce hosting company is one of the most essential steps you need to take in setting up your ecommerce web site.

Ecommerce Hosting Essentials

Follow these tips and you should be well on the way to choosing a quality ecommerce hosting provider that fully meets your needs.

• 24/7 support with a fast response time, ideally using an instant messaging service such as that provided by Hostgator. This is a very effective way of resolving issues with your site, particularly when you are going through the initial set up phase.
• Regular data backups. You need to be reassured that if the worst does happen that your ecommerce hosting service will be able to restore your web site in a short period of time.
• Look for flexibility in their services particularly the upgrade path. This ensures that as your web site grows you do not have to look for alternative ecommerce hosting or pay an exhorbitant amount to change your package.
• Secure server facilities to take confidential information with and to reassure your customers. Any ecommerce hosting service worth its salt should be able to provide this, stay away from those that do not.
• Support for the add on scripts and server side programming you or your web site developer will require. Most ecommerce hosting services offer more than enough support but it is as well to check before committing yourself.
• A comprehensive web sites statistics package. The better hosts will have a range of reporting packages from which you can choose your favorite. If the host offers the cpanel control panel then you should have a good range to choose from.
• Fully featured accessories package that enables you to automate tasks such as your shopping cart facility and merchant account selection. This benefit can save you a lot of money in web site development costs.

There are plenty of hosting companies out there to choose from. Do some comparison shopping to find the best ones. Talk to other people who use hosting companies you are thinking about using. A happy customer can be the best reference.

Affiliate programs abound on the internet today. Affiliate programs usually involve you promoting a product such as an e-book, audio cd teaching programs, a software program, etc. The only drawbacks to these types of affiliate programs are that it's usually a one time sale per person. They purchase the program or product, you get your commission, and it's done and you're off to find another customer.

With hosting service affiliate programs you have the opportunity to make money month after month for as long as your buyer remains with the hosting company. This can produce a significant source of passive income for you.

When shopping for a hosting company one of the things to look at is if they offer an affiliate program. If they do you now have the opportunity to promote a service that you can make long term income from and give first hand accounts of how well they provide hosting service.

The easiest way to promote a product or service as an affiliate is having faith and confidence in the product you are promoting. If you can give personal testimonials for the product and how good it has been for you, you will sound much more convincing in the way you talk about it. And the fact that you use the service yourself shows the potential customer you actually believe the statements you are making about the service. Otherwise why would you be using the service?

Author: Mike Hagerty
I have been working and playing on the web since back in 1995 with my first computer, a Compaq 386, with the "lightning fast" 56k modem, that new fangled windows 95 OS, and my massive 40MB hard drive and omg 16MB of RAM! .....my how times have changed.

Of course you have to do your "due diligence" as they say. You aren't going to want to have a questionable company hosting your own site, and certainly won't want to recommend it to others as an affiliate. So don't just jump on a host company just because they offer an affiliate program and you start seeing dollar signs from commissions.

Hosting service is a very important part of your online business. But in addition to providing hosting service for you, many hosts now offer the opportunity for you to make money through them as an affiliate.

Search Engine Optimization - Impact of Hosting Location

But what about hosting location?

Then a few months ago, we relocated our website to a hosting provider in Malaysia.

Following the relocation, we noticed some major drops in ranking for pages from our site on Yahoo. For example, what was on the first page of Yahoo before the relocation dropped to about number 200 after the relocation. Our ranking on Google dropped slightly. Our ranking on Live Search did not seem affected.

Then we noticed something else: our site started to appear in the SERPs for searches on Yahoo Malaysia, and has been ranking very well since then. Our ranking on Google Malaysia has improved, and recently, our ranking on the main Google site has improved too.

Our company is located in Malaysia. Our website used to be hosted in North America and we were getting some good rankings for many of our major keywords in the three major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. However, our site was not indexed by Yahoo Malaysia.

Impact of Hosting Location on Search Engine Ranking

On-Page optimization is concerned with page structure, choosing the right keywords and supporting words (for Latent Semantic Indexing purposes), placing these words and phrases in the right places and with the right density, optimizing the title tag, meta tags, alt tags, image names, and so on.

Copyright Ridzwan Abdul Rahman

It is often said that domain extension can affect search engine ranking. A domain name with a country extension (such as .co.uk or .net.my) tends to do well in that country's version of the major search engines, but not as well in the main search engines. Similarly, a domain that does not have a country extension will not do too well in that country.

Off-Page optimization refers to tasks that are performed external to the web page. The most important task is often said to be getting a high Google PageRank (PR). To achieve this, a search engine optimizer will try to get as many links as possible from other sites (whose contents are relevant or related to the contents of the page to be linked to) that themselves have a high PR.

Recently, though, I came across another factor that has an impact on search engine ranking. It is something that does not seem to be written about much. At least, I have not seen any book or web site that mentions it.

However, PR alone is not sufficient for off-page optimization. The text on the incoming links - the anchor text - is very important too. If anchor text does not support a search term, then it is possible for a lower PR page to rank higher than a high PR page, even if on-page optimization has been done for both pages.

Obviously, we cannot come to conclusions based on a single example. However, for us, the result of the hosting relocation is real enough.

There are many articles and books that discuss the basics of Search Engine Optimization. As a result, we already know that Search Engine Optimization can be broken down into two parts, namely a) on-page optimization and b) off-page optimization.