In today’s Internet, security is the top most important aspect of selecting a hosting plan. The Internet is a wild place. Hacking is on the rise and we hear horror stories of how credit card numbers and identities were stolen. If a server is not secure enough, badware viruses are installed in website coding and downloaded on any visitors’ computers.

Of course, most Internet users have a good virus protection on their computers (or at least I hope they do), but still, nobody wants their site to compromise the security of their visitors.

Fortunately, Google uses automatic algorithms and user feedback to compile lists of sites that may be dangerous (read: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=45432).

This will protect visitors to enter a site with a badware or malware. However, if it happens to your own site, it is bad news for your business. Google will warn anyone who wants to visit the infected site. It can take days to bring it back to a normal listing (after the badware or malware is removed from the website).

In addition to security, it is important you discuss with your website design firm the type of server configuration that you will need before purchasing any hosting plan. For example, depending whether the site will be built using PHP or asp.NET or any other languages, the hosting plan will need to be bought accordingly.

There are various server options: dedicated (you own the entire server), virtual (you own a partition of a server) and shared severs (you share a server with others). The dedicated server gives you the most flexibility and options but the cost is much different from a shared servers.

Why blogging?
Here are a few reasons:

1. you are passionate about your business or a topic.
2. you want to communicate with your customers, clients, friends, community, etc.
3. you want to educate and share your knowledge.
4. you want to make a difference in your industry or community.
5. you want to make a point and contribute your ideas.
6. you want to give your website more visibility on search engines.

and of course, there are many more.

You are ready to blog, what tool should you use?
The most common: WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad.

Our favorite: WordPress. The “pros” are: it can be integrated into a website and have the same look and feel as the website itself. There are also many plug-ins available from the WordPress community that can be added at any time (see the choice of plug-ins: 5499 plug-ins as of June 14th, 2009). The “cons”: it is important to … upgrade WordPress to the latest version, when available. WordPress is very popular and is also a target for hackers.

Here are some WordPress integrations that we did: Be Visible Associates, Martha Atkins, Rail Europe, and Dr. Andrew Millar, and among others.

How much does it cost?
WordPress and Blogger are free. Sometimes a WordPress plug-in may require a small fee. TypePad has a 14-day trial and a small monthly fee thereafter. There is a fee associated with setting it up with your website. Please ask us about it.

What about search engines and blogs?
Google has a blog search tool: http://blogsearch.google.com/. Your blog post can be ranking very high on Google blogs results. It will depend on several factors.

Your blog can be a source of a better ranking on search engines. Search engine optimization includes many parts to reach the highest ranking and a blog is part of the tools.

Happy blogging!