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Crucial Information To Review From Your Hosting Service

Published Sunday, August 3, 2008 by bloggerblognet83460 | E-mail this post

Your online business is critically dependent upon two processes. Tracking your hosting company's downtime and knowing what your customers are doing when they get on your site are two critical pieces of information that can make or break your business.

When your hosting server is down, your customers cannot find you and you will lose sales and your reputation. If you don't know what pages attract your customers and which page lost their attention so they clicked off, you will never be able to effectively tweak your page to lead your customers where you want them to go...to your "Buy it Now" button.

The status of your hosting server needs to be reviewed periodically and will probably be done on a regular basis by your hosting service. Immediate notification of your website being down should be a priority with you if your business is the way you make a living.

There are subscription services that will check your site for you on a regular basis, with the actual frequency stated in your contract with them. They check your site and, if there's no response or activity, they call you to let you know it is down.

Logging your site visitors will return data about their browsing habits that can help you to increase conversions...changing visitors into customers. Here's some data that would be of real value to you:

* Where your visitors came from

* Which search engine sent them to your site

* What pages they visit or links they click on

* How long they stay on each page

* Which pages are the most popular on your site

* What errors occurred when they were browsing

* What page they were on when they left your site

If most of your visitors, or a large number, leave your site from the same page, there might be a problem on that page that you have to fix. This is particularly critical if they get to your "Buy Now" page and leave without buying your product. Your task would be to determine what stopped them from clicking the "Buy Now" button. It could be something as simple as a broken link. Your reports will indicate where your site problems are.

There's a few processes you can set up to make your visitor's movements open to you. A simple one is to put a counter on each page of your site. Another way is to gather information in a Log File . Check your web host to see if your server can log your visitor's actions on your site. If it can, then you would have a logfile that would be filled with good information and need to be analyzed by a logfile analyzer. This software would produce those pretty charts and tables. There's software that runs on your server and lets you look at the data in real-time and subscription services that do it for you.

There's no need to sit in the dark and wonder what's happening on your webpage.

Dan Thompson is a veteran website designer and has used numerous web hosts in his time. Dan specializes in writing web host reviews, his latest article is a Hostmonster Review. You can view Dan's latest web hosting review at http://www.hostmonster-the-review.com