A dedicated server is a type of web hosting system where the client leases a web server for themselves only, and no-one else shares it. Having a secure private network can give great peace of mind, particularly for firms who have sensitive personal and financial information concerning their clients.

This also means that you can be assured having full access to the data processing power and memory of the server whenever you may need it, as opposed to being at the mercy of other users on your server who may decide to take up a lot of power or memory just when you need it most.

Many suppliers of dedicated servers will let you have unlimited bandwidth, which means that you can have as much online traffic as you want to your dedicated server without being charged any extra fees. A major advantage of leasing dedicated servers is that you can always have the latest top of the range hardware for your business applications, just like when you lease a car and change it after three months to another newer model.

The suppler will have access to the latest technology and you will not be stuck with equipment that is getting more and more out of date. Similarly the dedicated server supplier will be able to save you money. For example they will be able to broker advantageous licensing deals for associated services like control panel access.

Another major advantage of dedicated servers is the ability to choose your operating system, for example Linux or Windows, so you can have the kind of operating system that fits the needs of your business. The ability to have full remote control of your dedicated server is an important requirement. This way, you can have access to the server control panel whenever you want, from anywhere in the world. You may need for example to re-boot your server, and with this capability you can do it yourself.

Effective technical support is vital if you have a dedicated server. You need to have access to experts whenever you need them, and the best dedicated server suppliers will be able to provide this kind of support twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. These experts will be able to manage and monitor your server, particular during times when there is a lot of online traffic.

The best dedicated server suppliers will have assembled a comprehensive online knowledge base, where you can read frequently asked questions. This is a great way to get a steer on what to do, especially at the beginning of a new arrangement. It is important to work with a dedicated server suppler who has a flexible back-up capability, which can be added to as your business grows, or you amalgamate with other companies.

Most suppliers of dedicated servers will have a number of packages that they can offer you. These will be typical arrangements of hardware and levels of management and monitoring that they find works well with other clients who are similar to you in size and business needs.

When it comes to building a website you need to build it with one thing in mind and that is your visitors. Your website needs to be structured in a way that makes sense to those that visit it.

While visiting your website if they become confused they will merely hit the back button and you will be left with nothing. Your site needs to make sense and as a consequence you need to lay out the content of the site in a clear concise manner.

Avoid clutter and make sure that your navigational structure is easy to follow so that they can find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Structure it in a way that they will follow the path that you desire them to follow.

Not only do you need to cater to your human visitors but you also need to take care of your robotic visitors. You want to ensure that the search engine spiders can read and understand the content on your site.

This will enable your site to become indexed within the search engines faster for your desired keywords. To ensure this happens you need to focus on relevancy as this will help all your visitors.

To conclude search for things that you like using the search engines and make note of the sites that you find are helpful in providing the information that you are looking for then use this as an example. This will help you stay focused and provide a good site with good layout and content for your visitors.

Ten years ago you could include a hit counter on your website and announce proudly that your site was doing "very well" as soon as the number reached 100,000. The current process is not nearly as simple or straightforward. The internet works in complicated ways that have evolved to solve a number of small problems. Consequently, concrete statistics are often difficult to obtain. If you believe the number of online visitors is a reliable indicator to gauge the popularity of your site or the potential sales of your product, you should consider the following:

1. Hit - Every time a user requests a file on your site (a page, not a picture or link to another site) it counts as a hit.

2. File - When a file or page is actually sent to the user, it counts as a file. Files normally outnumber hits, but neither is very useful in measuring traffic. Any IP can request all of the files on your page several times in one hour without any actual involvement from the user.

3. Impressions - This is a concept that has existed in advertising for many decades. For example, a 2-page magazine advertisement counts as one "showing of a creative concept". This equates to one impression every time a reader sees it. If your web page contains five small banners, you could have 10,000 page views, but 50,000 impressions.

4. Page Views - Almost everyone believe this is the most important traffic statistic. This term simply refers to the number of times any particular page has been viewed. This metric can be useful. However, values can often be over-inflated and should always be considered in conjunction with unique visits.

5. Visits & Unique Visits - A visit is simply logged every time a remote IP requests one of your pages for the first time in a timeout period. A unique visit is usually defined as "one visit per IP per day", regardless of timeouts.

The above are all very important metrics, but understanding them properly is key. The best way to decide how your site's traffic is performing is by creating a formula. If you know what you are doing, you can develop your own formula. However, there are plenty of effective formulas currently available. A basic idea of how to evaluate your traffic involves reviewing monthly averages, unique visits and page views. This will give you an idea regarding how many individuals visit your site, how many pages they view, and how long they remain.

A basic formula from MarketingExperiments.com would be:

C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) - 2A

This formula shows that conversions are a product of motivation (M), value (V) and then the friction (F) elements minus the incentives (I). This will help you determine how many customers are likely to purchase your product. However, you need all the values first! You can purchase online analytic tools or download them for an upfront or monthly fee. All of them can return useful data to a webmaster.

If you are not an expert webmaster, or you do not understand many of the technical intricacies of web traffic, you should download Google Analytics. This is one of Google's new free products, and all you require is a GMail account and a web site. The program provides easy to read analytic data in a web-based form for your website. This can make it easy to determine which metrics would be most useful for analyzing your online traffic.

Michael Ehlert
RevUpYourWebBusiness.com