New Blog Design - Tyler Cruz
October 28th, 2007 by Dave - Reality Hosting
We’ve just launched a new blog design for Tyler Cruz, an entrepreneur who earns his living online. The site features a custom illustration, full case study coming soon!
Accepting Money Online
August 22nd, 2007 by Dave - Reality Hosting
After developing an idea, a website, and your business plan, figuring out how to actually collect money from your customers may seem easy… but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are many options available to today’s online merchant, and there isn’t “one right choice”. Depending on your needs as a merchant, the right solution for you will vary greatly, so let’s take a look at the options available to you.
Full Merchant Accounts
From a professional standpoint, a merchant account is the best method to collect money online. Your company name appears on the credit card statement of your clients, and the transaction fees are the lowest you’re going to get. However, merchant accounts tend to charge a monthly fee that usually falls somewhere between thirty to fifty dollars per month, and the setup can be costly (usually several hundred dollars). This isn’t a problem if you’re moving large volumes, but it can really eat into your margins if you process smaller amounts on a monthly basis.
Depending on your provider, you may be required to get an SSL certificate to secure your website. They start at around forty dollars for budget certificates and go all the way up to several hundred dollars for the top of the line, but most providers have a virtual terminal on their site that you can integrate into your webpage to eliminate the need for an SSL certificate.
One of the biggest benefits with a full fledged merchant account is the support you’ll receive. They’ll usually have a toll-free number you can call to get any problems solved right away. Finally, you should keep in mind that most companies will perform a credit check on you, and may decline your application if you have a poor credit history.
Third Party Merchant Accounts
Third party merchant accounts have the benefit of a cheap start-up cost (about fifty dollars) and no monthly fees. However the transaction fees are a bit higher than a full fledged merchant account, and they display their company name on your client’s credit card statement instead of yours. This can lead to an increase in charge-backs (when a credit card owner initiated a reversal of the charge from their end) because sometimes your clients don’t recognize the charge on their card statement.
A third party merchant account will not let you integrate the payment page into your website’s specific look and feel. You must forward your customers to the stock page of the company, and this can be a huge barrier to sale. Identity theft and crime is a real problem today, so online shoppers can scare easily. Forwarding them from your site to another to make payment may cause them to abandon the order process.
PayPal
What started as a fad payment method in the nineties has grown into a large, internationally accepted method of payment. While PayPal is largely used to pay for online auctions, there are many online stores that use it for collecting money. PayPal has a lot going for it: the sign-up is free, and the transaction rates are reasonable. In addition, you can transfer money from your PayPal account into your bank account at any time, something that isn’t possible with the methods previously discussed.
PayPal isn’t perfect, though. For someone to pay you with PayPal, they must have an account as well - which means you may lose potential customers if they don’t have a PayPal account already and don’t want to sign up for one. Using PayPal as the sole payment method on your site may also give some of your visitors the impression that your site isn’t very professional.
What’s right for me?
Now that we’ve discussed the various options available to the online merchant, it’s relatively easy to decide what solution is right for you. For the serious, high volume merchant who relies on their website as the lifeline of their business, a full merchant account is really the only choice. The stability, customer support and low transaction fees are vital for them to be able to run a successful online business.
An established bricks-and-mortar business that wants to test the online waters, or someone starting a small online business on the side, should start with a 3rd Party merchant account. Not only is the initial investment small, but in the future if the business turns out to be successful, a move up to full merchant account is possible.
PayPal is best suited as an alternate source of payment in conjunction with an existing merchant account, or as a method of payment on a hobby website, since requiring sign up with PayPal can be a large barrier to sale. Unless you are sure the demographic you are targeting is very computer savvy, then PayPal can cost you sales!
Decrypting Website Statistics
August 20th, 2007 by Dave - Reality Hosting
So, your web hosting account has a fancy website statistics tracking program. It tracks detailed statistics about visitors and their behavior while visiting your site, to help you manage the effectiveness of your webpage. It sounds great, but you can’t make heads or tails of the wealth of information available to you. All that information may seem overwhelming to you now, but by the end of this article you should have a grasp of what all that information means - and you’ll be able to use it to increase your site’s effectiveness.
The Basics
Hits:
Any time your webpage logs a request for information a hit is recorded. This information can take many forms. For instance, if someone visits your webpage, the request for the html file would be a hit, while each image loaded on that page would also count as a hit. If that user then downloaded an image or a zip file from your site, another hit would be counted. So basically, each piece of information that’s requested from your webpage is counted as a hit. One thing to keep in mind when looking at your website’s hits is that one user can be responsible for many hits.
Pages or Pageviews:
A “Page” is counted any time an HTML page from your webpage is viewed. This can be from a direct request (i.e. www.yourpage.com/content.html ) or an HTML page generated from a script (the resulting page from www.yourpage.com/content.cgi ). This number represents the total number of page views only and does not include other ‘stuff’ like image or audio files loaded with these pages. What is actually constituted as a page varies from server to server. The standard pages are .htm, .html, .cgi, .pl and .php.
Sites or Visits:
This is a count of how many visits your page has received. It’s best to think of this total as “sessions” users spend on your website. A unique visitor accesses your site and a visit is logged. If that visitor requests several more pages, a new visit will not be registered unless a certain period of time has passed where the server has had no communication with that visitor.
Unique Sites or Visits:
In addition to the sites/visits column, there is a list of uniques, which is a list of all the unique visitors that have visited your site (when a visitor who has already visited your site visits it again, only a visit is recorded). However, this is not an accurate count of unique people visiting your site. For instance, any time a dial-up user reconnects to the net, their IP changes. Therefore some of your unique visitors could be the same person.
Bandwidth:
Bandwidth is a measure of how much transfer your site is using. It may be broken down into kilobytes or megabytes. Your hosting account probably comes with so many gigabytes of transfer, so to figure out how close you are to your limit, use these figures:
1024 Kilobytes – 1 Megabyte and 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte.
Note: Web stat programs don’t usually doesn’t track other things (like POP3 and FTP traffic) that are often included in your bandwidth allowance. It’s best to check your control panel or contact your host for an exact figure.
Advanced Website Statistics
Now that we’ve covered the basics that are common to the most popular website statistic programs, you should be able to learn all sorts of interesting information about the traffic on your site. Most programs will break this information down many different ways, by day and even by hour. The detailed breakdown should allow you to learn a lot of basic information about your site’s visitors. However, that information is not always useful. Now we’ll look at some of the more important statistics that can actually help you determine the effectiveness of your website. Please note: not all web stats programs track all of the features listed below.
Visit Duration:
Some web stats programs will track how long your site’s visitors stay on the page. This can help you determine the effectiveness of your index page. For instance, if the majority of your visitors are staying for less than thirty seconds, then perhaps your index page should be tweaked to convince more of your visitors to stay longer.
Pages Visited:
If your stats program tracks the number of times different pages on your website are visited, you’ll be able to gauge the effectiveness of your website design from a business perspective. If the majority of your traffic is only visiting your index page and then leaving, you may want to redesign it to convince your visitors to explore your site more (if you are buying a lot of “junk traffic”, then there’s probably not much you’ll be able to do to get most of your visitors to spend more time on your site).
Search engine stats and referral pages:
Chances are your program will have a section that tracks where incoming visitors from your website are coming from. If it says something like “direct request” or “direct access”, this means your URL was typed into the address bar of a browser or visited from a bookmark. If an address to another page is listed, that means someone came to your site from a link on that page. You can use this to track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on other websites. Any search engine links will have the keywords used to find your page listed, and this can help you plan and evaluate your search engine optimization strategy if you have one.
Error Codes
Finally, the error codes section is also quite significant. The most important error code is the 404; you may have some mistakes in your webpage causing people to visit a link to a nonexistent page, and the 404 error codes section will help you identify these problems and correct them.
Welcome to the New Reality Hosting
August 9th, 2007 by Dave - Reality Hosting
As you’ve probably noticed, things are a little different around here. We’ve just updated our site with a brand new design to demonstrate the direction our business is taking. Over the past few years, we’ve transitioned from simply a web hosting company to a full web development solution provider.
Our new website will be focusing more on the benefits and the return on investment that we can provide for your business, as well as providing free information about web design: from simple, inexpensive tips and tricks you can use to increase the effectiveness of your website, to plain English explanations for terms and concepts in this highly technical field.
You can check back here for regular updates or click on the “subscribe link” at the top right corner and have all the latest information sent directly to your email inbox.
$29.95 Merchant Accounts
July 12th, 2006 by Dave - Reality Hosting
Would you like to integrate credit card payments securely and safely in your website to sell products or services online?
We now offer Canadian Merchant Accounts starting at just $29.95 per month. Please contact us for more details!
PHP4 and PHP5 support!
July 7th, 2006 by Dave - Reality Hosting
All Reality Hosting accounts now come with both PHP4 and PHP5 support!
PHP4 is supported by default, but any directories (including your site root) you want to run PHP5 in can be easily activated:
Create a .htaccess file in the directory (or edit the existing one) and add the following two lines:
AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php
That’s all there is to it!
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