Black Friday and Cyber Monday are creeping in! It’s November 25th ladies and gentlemen. Don’t miss the absolute best website hosting specials of 2015, like Cyber Monday Hosting Offers. You can potentially end up with up to a whopping 90% off of certain products and services. It’s like a candy shop for nerds!

Web hosting what? With all the talk about hosting and serving, you might think you were at a virtual cocktail party. But, as you are about to discover, if you don’t already know, web hosting and servers are not only the building blocks of the World Wide Web, but they are essential to your success as an Internet marketer.

Every Industry Has Its Own Language

Every industry has its own language. Since the Internet is based on computer programming, the language of the Internet is what is affectionately known as “geek-speak”.

While industry-specific languages are important to those within the industry to ensure that new concepts are clearly communicated and to keep old ones intact, they also have the unpleasant side effect of excluding newbies and other outsiders.

If you are not a computer programmer, the language of the Internet can be very intimidating. For some, it may even be the determining factor in whether or not they decide to continue with their plans to conduct business online.

This should not be the case. Although the intent may be to intimidate, some minor clarification about general concepts will help the language make sense, and give you surer footing as you enter the Internet marketing fray.

The Concept Of Web Hosting in a Nutshell

Continuing with the idea of the virtual cocktail party, think of a web host as the pantry where your ingredients (document and image files) will be stored. There are specific types of pantries (computers) that are designed to store your files.

On the other hand, in order for your virtual cocktail party to be a success, your ingredients (document and image files) must be taken from the pantry (computer) where they are stored and served to your guests (web surfers). Another type of computer was developed for the purpose of accomplishing this task.

This is the concept of web hosting and serving in a nutshell. Perhaps a bit oversimplified, but sure to bring clarity for even the newest Internet entrepreneur.

Check This and You Won’t Regret Your Decision Later

When you are researching a web hosting company that suits the needs of your business, be certain to assess the 10 key features and services listed below to give your online business the greatest opportunity for success and profit.

1. Storage
2. Bandwidth
3. Tech Support
4. Customer Service
5. Costs: Fixed and Recurring
6. Scalability
7. Databases
8. Operating Systems
9. Domain and sub-domain registration, creation, and hosting limits
10. Domain-specific Email Accounts

These are the Top 10 of a potential hundred features and benefits that must be considered before choosing your web host.

It will be challenging, at best, to assess your satisfaction with the customer service and tech support provided by your web host until you actually have a need for it.

By-and-large, you should be well able to make a wise and productive decision based on these 10 criteria. Black Friday and Cyber Monday distort the decision-making process a bit, but hey, if you pay less the risk is also less.

Ask Pre-Sales

A good web hosting company will be quick to answer your pre-sales inquiries and help you to determine if their services are best for you, even if it means they might lose the sale.

Your web host can make or break your virtual cocktail party. The right web host will have your guests clamoring for more. The wrong one will create an experience your guests will gladly forget.

Ewan was invited to the stage at the Closing Ceremony of ITU Telecom World 11 in Geneva to highlight the amazing work of over 10,000 students who, over the past month, have been researching, ideating and prototyping around some of the world’s most pressing problems, and who, for four days at the end of October, pushed the panels of experts at the event on key areas of ICT. You can view a video excerpt of this talk, and spot if your work features in the four-minute summary.

Four minutes was never going to be enough to capture the #world11kids metaconference. Here are just some of the numbers:

10,917 students actively building prototypes of a better tomorrow in classrooms around the world, many of them shared and continuing to be shared on this site.

103 schools taking part, from five continents, from 24 countries, including

Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, South Africa, New Zealand, Greece, United States, Ireland, Argentina, Colombia, Taiwan – Province of China, Portugal, China, Tunisia, Kenya, India, Norway, Brazil, France, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Netherlands, Belgium, and the Seychelles.

Their reach through tweets alone has been over 1 million, and their ideas through the world2011.us website have reached 127 countries.

By taking their ideas and what they’ve learned to their schoolmates at their own schools alone, they will influence a further 152427 students, up to 300,000 parents and the wider school community.

What their ideas have revealed is that, despite being painted as “digital natives” who enjoy clicking, dragging, texting and Facebooking – no matter where they live – most young people, most of the time, are most concerned with making sure that basic inequalities are ironed out before we start to ponder how we can make the internet ever-faster or ever more mobile. FatCow is a great partner and has received good reviews, such as the one at FatCow Reviews. Update: check out the most recent hosting reviews on hostingmanual.net.

While the VIPs, elected officials, and CEOs of telcos spent four days at ITU Telecom World 11 stating that it is through increased access to broadband and mobile technologies that developing countries will succeed, most of our #world11kids metaconference kids were not yet convinced. It’ll be interesting to see how this view develops over the coming year as more developing countries start to leapfrog the technology level many of our (mostly developed country) schools are at.

Live Twitter chatter

It’s not just in this creative work that students have had an impact on the conference itself. During live streamed sessions, classes joined in from around the world to pose their own questions to panelists. Moderators and panel chairs received their questions and were constantly referring back to the arguments, ideas and questions posed by 6-18 year olds as they tried to understand and weigh up the importance of issues as diverse as spectrum, disruption and revolution, social media’s impact on safety and cybersecurity, financing the internet and even the very future of a connected world as we know it.

You can listen in to any of the Forum sessions to see this in action through the archive of the live feed. One of my favorite chairs has to be Gerd Leonhard as he constantly refers back to young people from Poughkeepsie giving a panel of futurists a run for their money! Or how about the panel on reaching the edge of the existing spectrum, where the initial question is from school students and sets the panelists off for their first 30 minutes of debate?

The impact on learning has been profound: it’s the one project that has made students feel that their voice and ideas are worth something, that their learning has been “for real”.

The first day of creative writing class, I discuss the importance of gifts.”With great power comes great responsibility.” Students are encouraged to use their gifts for good. Writing can be used to heal, to inspire, to defend, to comfort, to protect…it must also be used to solve. GreenGeeks is a solution for at least one problem, namely the footprint of your hosting on the environment.

Before I had even formally introduced #world11kids, Callie and Katie were inspired to be involved.

View their work:

Katie and Callie – World Hunger

Bobby, Nick, and Rachel created their idea inspired by an art project Rachel has just completed.

View their work:

Bobby, Nick, Rachel – Angel Well

My creative writing students are passionate about world issues and realize their moral obligation to make the world a better place whether through art, text, communication, invention…I will continue to share my students’ work as students complete.

Are you one of the growing number of girls who enjoy studying science and maths – but are not sure what to choose as a career? ITU has just launched a brand new Girls in ICT portal to help girls and young women take advantage of opportunities in the technology industry – from scholarships, training and internships, ICT contests and awards to girls’ tech camps and online girls’ networks.  You can also learn about web hosting with the help of such sites as bestwebhostingsreviews.com.

Working in the ICT field doesn’t mean becoming a geek programmer! Web 2.0 technology and today’s app culture is creating a whole new world of ‘mashed up’ hybrid jobs that draw on multiple disciplines like bioengineering, digital media, medicine, education, technical writing and hi-tech marketing using social and mobile apps.

With computer and information systems professionals consistently ranked among the top 20 best-paid jobs on the planet – with a similar pay scale to surgeons, orthodontists, airline pilots and lawyers – ITU wants to encourage girls everywhere to take a new look at the many new opportunities to work with ICTs to make a real difference to people’s lives. They get insights and write great stuff like FatCow Reviews and iPage Reviews, to just name a few.

Sure, some people – including, sometimes, parents and even teachers – have old-fashioned negative attitudes that make them believe girls and technology don’t mix. ITU’s new portal has been created to prove them wrong! Lots of women have been real pioneers in the ICT industry – from Ada Lovelace, daughter of British poet Lord Byron, who was the first ever computer programmer, to Mari Matsunaga, creator of Japan’s massively popular iMode mobile phone, to Mary Lou Jepson who developed the screen technology for the world’s first low-cost ‘$100 laptop’. In fact it was women who programmed ENIAC, the US government’s first ever computer!

If you’d like to see the kinds of jobs held by women in the ICT sector, the Girls in ICT portal includes profiles of women role models and You Tube videos of women in the ICT sector. If you’re already in the market for a job, the Girls in ICT portal also serves as storefront for tech jobs in markets across the globe. There’s already a strong demand for technology professionals, and that demand is steadily increasing worldwide. Another good reason to study technology – you can be sure, on completing your studies, that you’ll find a well-paid job in your field, with plenty of scope for mobility and promotion!

Please help us spread the word about the Girls in ICT Portal.  Tell your friends, teachers and college advisors and feel free to use the Facebook and Twitter links to share the news with your networks.

www.girlsinict.org