A good, shared Web host must provide reliable and reasonable quality of service. Many times, a consumer will sign up with the least expensive provider only to experience many technical difficulties and the inevitable and frustrating experience of changing Web hosts. To avoid this experience, it is best if the consumer chooses the right hosting company. Ensuring that a shared Web hosting firm has the following characteristics will increase the probability of consumer satisfaction.

Quality Server Technology The use of quality server technology is important. Since shared hosting services utilize multiplexed equipment, consumers must ensure that the server and server technology used can accommodate the number of users on your particular server.

System Administrators Make sure that knowledgeable system administrators are operating your hosting company’s technology.

Network Redundancy Your shared hosting package must have multiple connections to the Internet. Network redundancy ensures that if one Internet connection goes down, traffic can be re-routed through another connection.

Network Connectivity It is important to find the fastest Internet connection possible. Since you are competing with other users for resources in a shared hosting environment, you should ensure that you have at least T3 connection that is using less than 50 per cent of available bandwidth.

You should also consider the following factors before selecting any type of shared hosting solution for your Web site. By considering these factors, you will save money in the long run by selecting a solution that grows with your business.

Purchase only what you need Select a Web hosting solution that corresponds with your business needs. Only purchase services that your site will require to provide your specific content. Don’t sign up for an all-inclusive account with a hosting firm if you won’t use most of their services. This will unnecessarily increase your costs.

Select a scalable solution Make sure that your hosting solution can grow as your site grows in complexity. Ensure that you can upgrade your site to accommodate increased bandwidth and other demanding resource requirements such as server-side scripting, database support and multimedia streaming.

Find prompt tech support Only use a host that provides prompt and knowledgeable customer care. A dependable host should offer 24×7 toll-free technical support rendered by experienced and professionally trained technicians.

Check references Before you commit to a particular hosting firm, ask for references. Make sure to canvass other webmasters running sites with similar specifications. Browse their Web sites and measure response times at both peak and non-peak periods.

Watch your billing and keep your receipt Many hosting firms are notorious for their horrid billing practices. Check your credit card statements to ensure that you are not being overcharged or billed at an incorrect frequency. Most purchases occur online, so make sure to print out your receipt. Most companies will require you to remit that receipt by fax in order to cancel.

Back up all your data Do not depend on your host to recover any data you publish on the Web. Most hosting firms are only equipped to recover files in the event of a system failure. Ensure that you have a copy of any data that you post to the Web on your own hard drive.

Own your own domain Make sure that your Web host will not hold you hostage to their service by exercising administrative control over your domain name. Your host should only be listed as a technical contact. You should exercise administrative control over the domain name from the point of purchase.

Do extensive background research Find out whether a host is real or whether it resells hosting solutions. Also check what payment processor the host uses to run credit card transactions. Determine who owns the hosting company and whether they possess the technical expertise required to run it effectively. All of these factors impact upon the credibility and reliability of the host and the services you provide your customers.

Obtain assurances You should obtain assurances concerning service quality before you sign up for hosting services. A quality Web host should assure some form of service quality and compensation if you experience an interruption in service.

Understand your obligations Before you sign up with a Web host, you must understand what your obligations are concerning payment for service and permissible behavior. Certain hosting companies will not permit high traffic content, such as adult material. Other hosting companies will permit such content, but only if a special hosting service package is selected.

Establish an exit strategy Always have a backup plan in case your host goes belly-up or experiences an unrecoverable failure. Redundancy should always be a priority if you are running an Internet-based business. Remember that any service outage can completely compromise your source of income.

Article Source: http://www.christiannotepad.com

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Analysts are alarmed at a perceived discrepancy in the figures in iPhone sales figures. Jonny Evans, Macworld

Analysts are mulling over Apple’s iPhone sales numbers and are alarmed at a perceived discrepancy in the figures.

Apple claims slightly over 3.7 million iPhones were sold in 2007 — yet AT&T this week revealed it ended the year with “just at or sightly under two million iPhone customers”.

That two million has been boosted somewhat by an estimated 300,000-400,000 sales in Europe, analysts believe.

The discrepancy is that the 3.7 million iPhones Apple says it has sold and the estimated 2.4 million sold by its network partners still leaves 1.3 million of the devices unaccounted for.

That implies that around one in three iPhones are being purchased in order to unlock the device for use on other networks and/or for use with unapproved third party applications.

While it’s possible some iPhones were sold over the Christmas period but not activated immediately as new users (perhaps) worked to cancel their existing mobile contracts, the discrepancy still implies an active market for unlocked iPhones.

Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook told analysts this week that the company believes the number of unlocked iPhones in the wild to be “significant,” but declined to furnish accurate figures.

Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein Research cites these figures in order to claim a substantial market in unlocked iPhones, and speculates this news may also mean a build-up in iPhone inventory.

“It indicates end-user demand for iPhone is lower than many investors may think based on Apple’s sales figure — and it points to slower iPhone sales in the current quarter, since much of this inventory is likely to be drawn down,” the analyst explains.

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by Steve MezakOutsourcing your software development can save you time and money if you know what you need. Too often US companies attempt to outsource without a good understanding of what their software should do, and this is the biggest cause of outsourcing failure. It is unreasonable to expect your outsourcing team to have a menu of software, pre-prepared, so you can just select the items you want.Ever go to a restaurant with a picky eater? They tell the waiter in excruciating detail how they want their food prepared. And heaven forbid that the food arrives different from what was requested! Back to the kitchen it goes to be “fixed” to make the picky eater happy.

Sometimes US companies hire an outsourced partner as if they were going to a restaurant. They select the cuisine based on the flavor of the technology they require. Chinese .NET or Indian Java? How about some Russian C++? Unfortunately there is rarely a menu for the exact items you might like to order from an outsourced team.

Are you approaching outsourcing your software like you are walking into a restaurant? Are you expecting the outsourcing team to advise you, like an attentive waiter, on the way your software should look, be prepared and presented to your customers?

Instead, bring your own recipe when you start work with an outsourcing team. Unlike your dining experiences, you cannot ask for the daily special. You have to provide a specific description of what you would like to have, and how it should be prepared. Without such a recipe, your outsourced software development efforts can be starved for success.

Poorly specified software is often the result when “subject matter experts” are involved. Subject matter experts, or SMEs, know a lot about a particular subject, like IC design, business process workflow, inventory management, etc., but very little about designing software. SMEs can struggle to get their ideas encoded in the software. They need to work with someone that knows the best way to design and develop software.

Sometimes, there is a fear of getting bogged down in the details. Since some software executives are great with people, they feel much more comfortable hiring a person to handle the details. They know how to manage a person here, better than they can manage an offshore team of programmers in a remote offshore location.

One Accelerance client is in this situation. The CEO wants to outsource the development of a new software product. But there is no specification. In this case Accelerance is acting as a virtual CTO, responsible for the design, and development of the client’s software.

The client is essentially saying, “Design the software for me, and I’ll tell you if it matches what I am thinking.” This can work because the cost of outsourcing is so low that rework and multiple design iterations are affordable.

This type of arrangement only works when paying on a Time and Materials basis. There is no way to offer fixed pricing because the end product is not defined.

Of course, not having a specification may not stop you from asking for a fixed price bid! In this case, you can outsource the creation of a specification that defines your software for a fixed price. Then the resulting complete design specification is used to create a second fixed price bid for writing your software.

Another factor comes into play when you pay a fixed price amount for a software design specification. You usually have to pay at least half up front. This is to protect the outsourcing company from delivering a specification for creating the software and then not getting paid.

Because software design often occurs at the beginning of a relationship, both parties seek to minimize their risk. You minimize your risk by selecting an outsourcing team with a proven track record and great references. The outsourcing team reduces their risk by getting partial (sometimes full) payment before starting.

There are multiple deliverables that should be produced during the design phase of creating your software, whether you do it yourself, or outsource the design:

* Marketing Requirements
* Storyboard Demo
* Functional Specification
* Multiple Release Milestone Schedule
* Detailed Task Schedule for First Release
* Detailed Design Specification (optional)

Unfortunately, software development has not progressed to the point where ready-made modules are available to order and combined to create your software. There is not yet a menu of choices available to anyone that is hungry for new software. Instead, you must provide your own recipe for what you need. The good news is low cost outsourced software design and development resources are now available to create your custom software to meet your exact specifications. 

Source: http://www.articles-hub.com/index.php?article=36823&highlite=offshore,software  For more information please visit offshore software development , web development and designing  

Welcome to 1websitedesign.net. We are helping our customers build successful online business by providing services like custom website design, custom web development, ecommerce websites and internet marketing services. 

Unlike other website design companies, we don’t just create websites, but we create them to sell. The reason behind this philosophy is that we are a website design company that understands the marketing strategies that can help you generate targeted traffic to your website, convert that traffic into prospects and ultimately convert those prospects into sales. 

The secret behind any successful website is not how beautiful it looks, but how effectively it has been designed. If you ever had an experience of working with a website design company, you must have good idea of how difficult it really is to communicate your marketing mind set to those designers. You have to really have to struggle to convey your ideas properly to the guys who only know some HTML and nice graphics. Well, not any more… 

Package prices have no hidden costs or reoccurring fees. The turn around time mentioned for each package doesn’t include the delays from client’s end during approval and content provision. It is not mandatory to host your web site with 1websitedesign. If you already have a domain name or hosting, once complete we will put your web site live on your existing domain and hosting. 

Checkpoint Technologies, a premier professional services firm specializing in software quality assurance and testing, announced that it has become an authorized reseller for SPI Dynamics, the leading provider of web application security testing software.

Checkpoint Technologies will offer SPI Dynamic’s comprehensive and accurate suite of application security products that support the entire Web application lifecycle, from development and quality assurance to deployment, ongoing operations management and auditing.

“Our partnership with SPI Dynamics enables us to provide web application security solutions that will further enhance our client’s ability to deliver trustworthy software”, said Bob Crews, President of Checkpoint Technologies. “SPI Dynamics is widely known as the web application security experts.”

About SPI DYNAMICS
SPI Dynamics’ comprehensive suite of products and services identify and remediate web application and web services security vulnerabilities throughout the application development lifecycle. These award-winning solutions also enable security professionals, QA testers, and developers to work together to verify compliance with over 22 security policies like SOX, HIPAA and PCI. For more information, visit http://www.spidynamics.com.

About Checkpoint Technologies
Checkpoint Technologies is a premier provider of leading edge solutions and services in all areas of Quality Assurance and software testing. The company delivers a wide range of highly customized and focused solutions including senior-level consulting, training, mentoring, contracted staff supplementation, outsourcing and Quality Assurance software products that optimize an organization’s investment in technology. More information about Checkpoint Technologies is available at http://www.checkpointech.com.

By: Daniel Punch
If you’ve ever browsed the World Wide Web and wondered how you could stake your claim on the Internet, like the millions of others that have done so already, then web hosting can provide you with the services to do just that. The Internet is a great way of sharing information and it is possible for you to take a portion of the web and make it your own. This article introduces the term “web hosting” and provides some useful tips for web development once you’ve obtained some web space.

What is the World Wide Web?
The “World Wide Web” is the network of computers from all over the world that communicate with each other using the HTTP protocol, a language that allows the transmission of web documents. Be careful as this term is not synonymous with the “Internet” because it is defined as a network of networks, where the computers communicate with protocols other than HTTP. The web is what you see on your Internet browser, the web pages complete with graphics, sound and other information. All this has got to come from somewhere, and this is where web hosting comes in.

Web Hosting
The information that you see from your web browser is contained in web pages. These web pages are kept on computers called web servers. Web hosting is about the storage of the web pages so that people can access them. It is possible to host your own websites yourself but the reasons stopping most people doing this is that there are issues to consider with having the right hardware and software to successfully host your web pages. Your web pages will take a certain amount of space, users will need to download each page to view them and your Internet connection needs to be fast to offer good performance to your viewers. Using specialised companies that offer web hosting capabilities on their web servers will take most of these worries away from you but you will need to choose wisely and weigh up the costs and your needs. In addition to having access to a web server, you will also need to register a domain name (for a cost) that uniquely identifies your website.

What Web Hosting Can Do For You
The most basic service that web hosting offers is that it exposes your web pages for others to see. The other services are: email capabilities that allow for email to be received and sent from your server; database capabilities that allow for large amounts of information to be updated and accessed on the web; and dynamic content which allows for users to interact with the web pages you’ve made.

Website Development
Poorly designed websites will most likely turn away users and harm the credibility of the information it contains. Thought should be put in on the way it looks and the way you intend your users to interact with the content. It is also recommended for more complex websites, a structured development process should be followed. Here is a guide to the logical steps of web development:
* Requirements Analysis: What is the purpose of the website? What content should it contain?
* Design: How should the pages be linked? What structure should they take? How should the pages interact with the user?
* Implementation: This step is the actual coding of the websites in accordance to the previous websites.
* Testing: Does the website do what it should?
* Maintenance: Is the information on the website up-to-date?

Some useful hints for web development below are taken from software quality aspects but they apply to the development of websites as well. They are described in terms of web development:

Reliability: Is the website reliable? Do faults allow for the system to continue running?
Robustness: How does the website respond to incorrect input?
Performance: How fast does the web page respond to user’s actions? Is it efficient in processing requests and inputs?
Usability: Is the website easy to navigate and understand?
Maintainability: Is the website easy to change? Can new functionality be added?
Portability: What software requirements does the website require? Will this limit the amount of potential users?
Understandability: How well do you understand the website you’ve developed?

When designing your website, keep these quality aspects in mind as they will help you develop pages worth visiting. How to choose the way to host your website is half of the problem, the other half is to create a website that people would want to visit and come back to. Knowledge of producing a good design can help you get the most out of your creations.

William Ly
M6.Net
http://www.m6.net
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Article Source: www.iSnare.com

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