Singapore Web Hosting Blog

every now and then, i receive phonecalls or emails from clients asking, “how come i can’t find my site in google, yahoo, or any other search engines after hosting with you for 1 full month?!”

or a better one, “hi, we host our company site with you. we’re real estate consultants. why i can’t find our site when i search for ‘real estate’ in google?”

when i’m asked such questions, i always wanted to ask, “why do you think your site should be found in google or yahoo?”

well, i haven’t replied that way so far

but the truth is, search engines will not list your site in first 2, or even 20 pages, just because you have a web site. period.

go search for “real estate” in google, you will get 95 million results. those are all your competitors. 95 million. now why do you think your site should be found (normally that means top 20 listings) among 95 million results?

it’s only possible after you spend months, often years, of hard work on your site. or, if you would like someone else to do the work (seo service), it costs at least a few thousand dollars.

it’s not hosting issue, not design issue, it’s search engine optimization, or in short, SEO.

so if your our hosting client, you should not ask us why your site can’t be found in search engines. it has nothing to do with where you host the site. even if you host with yahoo, your site won’t be found in yahoo if you don’t do anything about it. it won’t happen by chance.

we’ve got this question very often.

many clients ask, why my homepage does not show up when i surf to my domain? i’ve uploaded all my web pages. it’s saying “this domain is parked by singapore web hosting instead”.

first of all, the “this domain is…” page is temp homepage which is put into place automatically when clients’ hosting account is created. if you can see it, your domain is resolved to our server and working fine.

now why your still viewing this temp page after uploading your own web pages? a few possible reasons:

1)you upload to the wrong place. all web files (html, images, scripts, etc.) have to be uploaded to public_html directory. you can see the directory once ftp into your account.

we’ve included this point in order confirmation email, however, many clients miss it. i fully understand that. people tend to quickly go through document or faq and want to get things going fast, therefore some details are missed. me too…

2)the homepage has to be named as index.something

if you want your visitors to see the home page by typing http://www.yourdomainname.com/ instead of http://www.yourdomainname.com/mypage.html, you need to define a “default” page. on our servers (most of all servers actually), this page must be named as index followed by an allowable extension. allowable index page names include:

index.htm
index.html
index.shtml
index.cgi
index.php

if server cannot find an index file, it will simply list your entire web directory to everyone that accesses it, which is not so good.

and pls note, unix machine is case sensitive. if your account is on unix hosting plan, Index.htm will not work.

3)you may need to remove the temp index.html file (which says “this domain is hosted by…” as mentioned above), if your index file is named as index.php, index.shtml etc. because index.html would have higher priority than your own index file therefore the old temporary index.html would still be displayed if it’s still there.

4)refresh your browser. if you’ve above two correctly and still cannot see your own homepage, try refreshing browser, clearing computer cache.

still can’t get it work? open a support ticket

hi all,

this is my 1st post in Singapore Web Hosting Blog.

the reason of starting this blog is, (not because blog is hot ), all the while i want to write more tips, ideas to share with our clients and anyone who’s interested. i did that a while ago, in the form of formal articles about web hosting, web design, and seo.

but, writing articles is tiring, time consuming. i wanna talk to client, just like he’s sitting in front of me (when i don’t have to care about grammar, spelling, etc.). i don’t want to write any articles anymore.

i want to share my ideas with you, but in an easier way.

for those who’re not singaporean, sometimes our english here in singapore may sound wired to the rest of the world. we always say, can lah, can lah, meaning “yes, sure”. so called “singlish”. do americans speak this way? don’t shoot me email when you see that in my post here, hehe…

and of course, as you can see, i don’t like to capitalize first letter.

i have been in singapore web hosting industry for years, i do have many things to share with you.

so here you go.