Customer Service and Support
Does the hosting company offer 24/7 technical support? Is their tech support by phone, email, or live chat? A good hosting company provides quality customer service and support. And usually they tech support is by phone or live chat, don’t just settle for support by email only.

To test the quality of customer service & support, just send them an email and see how long they take to respond.

Guaranteed Uptime
Another important thing to look out for is web hosts reliability or uptime.If their guaranteed uptime (time when the server is functional) isn’t above 99.9% you should probably look elsewhere.

Space and Bandwidth
You will need to determine if the web hosting company offers enough space and bandwidth for your website. If your website has a lot of images and videos , you will need more bandwidth and space.

Control Panel
Do they offer a Control Panel? What they Control Panel like? A Control Panel is a software that offer a web-based interface to help you manage various aspect of your web hosting account. A good web host provides an easy to use control panel.

Other Features
Some common features that atleast a good web host should provide are POP3 email access, email forwarding and FTP access.

Cost
And finally the last thing you should check is the cost. You should compare prices between the different web hosting companies. Just don’t settle for cheap web hosting, it can result to many unforeseen problems.

Make sure to follow these tips to find the right web host for your website.

We helped Jenny to implement her brand new website.

But before we can start optimizing our Wordpress blog/website we first need to see how long it takes to load it and what it’s size is. To be able to do that I would recommend using tools such as Pingdom.  Now you should be able to measure the progress i.e decrease in load time which translate to increase in speed.

So lets start:

Upgrade Wordpress
Keep your Wordpress version up to date with the latest version.Upgrading to the latest Wordpress version is necessary because upgrades usually include several performance upgrades and new features.

Remove Inactive Plugins
Most of the time, we try out new plugins but forget to deactivate or delete them. This causes unnecessary server load of unused scripts to our Wordpress installation. It’s good to deactivate all those plugins you are not using and it’s even better to delete the inactive plugins.

W3 Total Cache Plugin
W3 total cache plugin is a must have plugin, its the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. It caches(minifies and compress) your pages, feeds, posts, and database.

Download W3 Total Cache Plugin

Use FREE CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The user’s proximity to your web server has an impact on response times. Deploying your content across multiple, geographically dispersed servers will make your pages load faster from the user’s perspective. A content delivery network is used by almost all popular websites like google, twitter, mashable etc.

Using CDN is highly recommended as it reduces server load and bandwidth thus improves stability and availability. But they is a catch,commercial CDN are too expensive and most people can’t afford them. But there is a free alternative; Free CDN, it’s a plugin that rewrites your static files’ URL’s (JavaScripts, CSS, images etc.) so that they are served from powerful Coral’s server clusters instead of your own.Just activate the plugin!

Reduce Image Sizes
We usually use (lots of) images on our posts which put a high load on our web server. Reducing the size of images inturn speed up our blog/website too. You can use the WP Smush.it plugin for wordpress to compress the images. It will compress the images without much loss in quality and your site will load faster.

Optimize Database
Just like your computer hard disk, your Wordpress database get fragmented.You should optimize your wordpress database every week. You can optimize your database via phpmyadmin or using a plugin. A highly recommend using a plugin, you can use: Optimize DB or WP DB Manager.

Flush the buffer
A web server has to generate a web site every time a person visits it. Usually the web server creates the whole HTML page code and then sends it to the visitor. It can takes around 200 – 500 milliseconds for the web server to put together the HTML page, during this time the browser remains idle.

By using php flush function, the web server can load the partially ready HTML response to the browser as it load the rest of the contents.

Also note ,flushing the buffer in your templates while using W3 Total Cache plugin is not recommended.

To insert the flush() function, open up your theme header.php file and insert just right after the closing head tag:

Valid XHTML
While Firefox and Safari renders non-valid XHTML correctly, IE6/IE7 doesn’t! Sometime you may forget to close a tag or declare a doc type, this causes mayhem in IE6/IE7. Always make sure your XHTML is valid, you can validate it over here.

Margins
IE6/IE7 interprets margins differently and it add it own margins to an element, in what is commonly known as the double margin bug in IE. This makes an element to display in an incorrect position etc To overcome this, always make sure you define margins for your elements in your CSS. Use the shorthand margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;

Another great way to overcome the margin issues is to declare *(margin:0px; padding:0px;} on top of your CSS.

Repetitive IDs
IE6/IE7 interprets repetitive IDs in a page as invalid. IDs should be unique in a specific page or page unlike classes where you can repeat them in a page.
For example:

#widget{
margin:0px 4px 3px 0px;
width:100px;
border:1px solid #ff0000;
}

And in our HTML page we call id widget maybe twice, this return invalid markup and calls trouble in IE.To overcome the scenario,simply declare id widget as a class.

Clear
Clear, is to clear any float elements so that they will not overlap on each other. If you have nested div’s and you don’t want them to overlap each other , it’s good to use clear after each
div definition. You could write a clear class, for example:

.clear {
clear:both;
height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
}

I know this is not much, but I hope it helps.

It will also act as our support portal for our clients, If you have a problem drop us a support ticket.