Yahoo is known for being one of the three main search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing. However, many people don’t realize that Yahoo also provides a plethora of other web-based services such as advertising and even web hosting. Their merchant services are some of their best hosting plans, with a variety of packages available that can accommodate the needs of any online business owner. If you’re interested in a comprehensive eCommerce solution for your online business then you may want to consider Yahoo Merchant Services for the following reasons.

Inclusive Packages

Yahoo merchant services are sold as inclusive plans called Yahoo Store packages. Every plan offered by Yahoo Merchant Services include all of the tools needed to build and design a business web site with minimal time and effort. You’ll also receive a free domain name, an email account, web hosting services, integrated shopping carts, payment processing capabilities, inventory/category management and even advertising credits with Yahoo Advertising!

Three Comprehensive Plans

Yahoo Merchant Services comes in three forms – Starter, Standard and Professional. Most novice business owners will opt for the Starter plan, however you shouldn’t hesitate to purchase a more comprehensive plan if you feel it is necessary for the progression of your business web site. Fortunately, it is very easy to upgrade from one Yahoo web hosting plan to another.

Yahoo Merchant Services has recently updated the starter plan to include a variety of unlimited features, such as unlimited disk space and bandwidth. The Starter plan comes with $100 in advertising credits, which makes it simple to start marketing your business web site with no investment. There is also no set up fee, and you will save twenty-five percent on the monthly bill for the first 2 months.

Yahoo Support

One of the most appealing aspects of any Yahoo service is their world famous support. Yahoo is known for providing quality services that are relevant to the interests and needs of their site visitors. It is a site and company that has been shaped by the media and the world surrounding it. This ability to expand and adapt to society’s changes during the past decade has proved Yahoo’s ability to listen and pay attention to its customers and site visitors. Yahoo support can be contacted at any time of the day or night, via phone, email and even instant chat. Most technical issues can be resolved with the assistance of a qualified Yahoo representative.

Benefits of Yahoo Merchant Services

With Yahoo Merchant services you’ll have direct access to Yahoo’s advertising presence through an integrated user-friendly interface. You’ll also have site building tools that produce professional results and are easy to use. Their eCommerce hosting solutions include a variety of unlimited features and bonuses such as advertising credits, free domain registration, and world famous technical support, which is perfect for novice webmaster.

One of the most frustrating parts of owning and operating an online business can be the occasional need to switch web hosting servers. Changing your web hosting provider may require that a new control panel be mastered. The most time consuming part of becoming acquainted with a new web hosting plan is mastering the new control panel with which you are provided to operate your site.

However, having a Plesk control panel can reduce greatly the amount of readjustment that may be required upon switching servers. Plesk offers the option to carry your previous control panel with you as many different providers offer Plesk as their default control option. If both the new and old hosting solution utilize Plesk, reducing the amount of downtime that your website experiences will be exponentially reduced and having your site up and running will come much sooner rather than later.

Switching Hosting Providers

One of the most commonly encountered issues with switching servers is the loss of data that can occur as a result of the move. The reason for this is simple and easily prevented. The TTL (Time to Live) of a website is not instant and during a transfer to a new server some data may be lost or possibly delayed for long periods of time. In order to prevent this from happening several settings must be changed twenty four hours prior to the move. To make the necessary changes you will need to log into your Plesk account with your current web hosting server and click on “Domains.”

After having accessed this option you will need to locate the name of the server you will be switching to if it is listed. After locating the information you need you will want to access the DNS settings. After doing this you will need to select the SOA record click. Once you have reached this point you will need to then change the default TTL to fifteen minutes or nine hundred seconds. Once all this has been done you will need to click on “Set” to ensure that your data is saved and the process is properly finalized. Doing this will ensure that any changes that occur will happen within fifteen minutes of the change, thereby minimizing on the amount of lagging data and data lost.

How to Restore your Site’s Backup

After a period of about a day or so it will be necessary to log in to your Plesk administrator desktop of your new domain and find the backup manager. After finding this option you will need to create a backup title and click “Personal FTP Repository.” Now you will need to click on “Domain Configuration and Content” and select “Backup.” All depending on the size and amount of data on your site the backup should finish in anywhere from five minutes to twenty four hours.

Finishing

All that will be left to do after backing up your web page is to contact the new host’s support company and notify them of your need to restore the backup of your old site. You will need to give pertinent information such as the name of the directory in the case of http docs. Asking for support in restoring your domain using the backup file you created can also be done and should provide a good amount of assistance in finishing the process with little to no problem.

The web hosting control panel is perhaps the most important interface you’ll have to deal with when building, operating and managing your online business. The control panel represents the entire back end of your web hosting account, which consist of a variety of modules that let you control the front end and administrative interface within a centralized user-friendly control center.

Most control panels are split into sections, to help you become acquainted with the various features as quickly as possible. If you have never dealt with a control before, then it would be best to go with a web hosting company that offers control panel video tutorials. Many web hosting providers give their clients access to a plethora of instructional video clips, so there is never a moment when you’re lost or don’t know what to do.

Email Accounts Module in Your Control Panel

Perhaps one of the most important parts of your online business is communication with your clients, which happens through the email module of your control panel. In the email module of your control panel you can create accounts at your domains, which creates a sense of credibility when establishing communications with prospective clients. You can also assign email addresses to members of your company, setting up individual passwords and and login credentials for each employee. The amount of email addresses you can create will depend entirely upon your web hosting plan and the limitations your web hosting provider has set.

Setting up Email Accounts

To set up email accounts in your control panel, simply go to the email accounts module and begin typing the credentials for the new email account. Some control panels are different, however the most popular control panel (cPanel) will let you begin creating the email account as soon as you enter the email accounts section of your control panel. If you’re hosting multiple domains on a single hosting account, then you’ll need to select which domain you’d like to install the email account for. Once the account is setup you can login and decide which email viewing application you would like to use.

Setting up Email Access

Once you have created your email accounts and logged in using the drop down menu to the right of your email account name, you can then choose which email processing application you’d like to use to view your email. The three most popular email viewing applications are SquirrelMail, Horde, and RoundCube. Out of these three, most people use SquirrelMail. You can setup your favorite email viewing application to open automatically when you check your mail, simply clicking on the enable autoload button below the name. You can also setup the appearance of your inbox, autoresponders, and other personalization features that help you increase your productivity with email. You can setup filters, folders, and even mail forwarding to several accounts for maximum control over your employee’s emails.

Conclusion

Having your own private email address is absolutely imperative if you own an online business, especially if you have several employees that receive support mails on behalf of the company. Any serious online business owner will need to learn how to use the email module in their web hosting control panel.

cPanel is site configuration and management software primarily used in managing web hosting accounts through an easy to use interface. This type of software allows tasks to be completed much more quickly and makes for creating and managing a website extremely simple.

The basic screens in cPanel are:

1. Accessing cPanel
2. The cPanel home screen
3. Setting preferences
4. Mail
5. Files

Logging into cPanel

The most basic step is actually accessing the cPanel interface. To do this, type: https://(your website’s IP address):2083 in an internet browser. After one week of starting the website, replace your IP address with the domain name. Enter your login information (cPanel username and password) and click login. On the first login, a cPanel startup page should appear with the getting started wizard.

Navigating cPanel

Once logged in, the cPanel home screen will appear offering numerous functions. These include; help, logout, trademarks, switch theme, switch account, notices, find, frequently accessed areas, the status menu, the server status page and the preference links. These boxes can all be moved by clicking and dragging the box to a new location. To revert back to the cPanel home screen at anytime, simply click the home button.

The preferences area offers two options, the getting started wizard and all other features. The getting started wizard is available upon first login to set basic preferences. Other features include video tutorials, change password, update contact info, change style, change language, shortcuts and branding editor.

Email Options

The next segment is the mail area. There are many mail options available through the cPanel. The mail options include access to all email accounts, SpamAssassin, Boxtrapper, mail forwarders, webmail, auto responders, default address, mailing lists, account level filtering, email delivery route, user level filtering, important addresses/forwarders, MX entry, email authentication and additional login methods.

Accessing Your Files

The final section of cPanel is the files area which allows the user to manage, upload and move files. More specifically, users can access backup files, a backup wizard, the file manager, the legacy file manager, web disk, disk space usage, FTP accounts, FTP session control and anonymous FTP.

cPanel is one of the most popular web interfaces offered by many of the premier web hosting providers. Due to the numerous functions available, cPanel makes it easy for newcomers and novices to create and maintain a website. As cPanel continues to upgrade and expand, the interface will be more efficient and easier to use.

WordPress has become the most popular content management system in the world over the past five years, although it was originally meant to be a blogging platform. Users around the world now use WordPress to setup and manage websites in nearly every niche in existence. The most appealing aspect of WordPress is undoubtedly the countless plugins that can be used to modify and enhance the functionality of the WordPress interface. Upon first using WordPress, most people are impressed at how simple the interface is designed and how accessible all of the information and settings pertaining to their website is.

Flexibility of WordPress

As you begin to use the platform as a content management system to manage a website instead of a blog, you’ll quickly realize that there are many features that do not allow for simple management of static pages that are necessary in the construction of a regular website. This means your latest post will always appear at the top of your home page. Although this seems like a game breaker, the fact is, there is a plugin for this that lets you make any post a sticky and place it at any point on the page. There is even a plugin that lets you remove the date form the side of the post, to completely remove the blog look and feel. This is just a small example of the flexibility of WordPress.

The Dynamic Nature of a WordPress Database

In order to maintain the above flexibility, WordPress needs to store all your site’s data in a dynamic MySQL database. This means your files are located in a secure database that cannot be modified externally, other than modifying it within your hosting control panel. This means you cannot access your site’s pages within an FTP client, and instead you must access the database directly within your control panel’s MyPHPAdmin section. There you will find all of the WordPress installations you have active on your server.

Adding Directories to Your WordPress Website

Since you cannot directly access your sites web pages through FTP, you cannot upload new information to your site’s pages through an FTP client. Instead you have to upload the page or post within your site’s WordPress admin. You can however upload completely new pages to a new directory on your site. By creating a directory for your site in your FTP client you can easily add new pages to that directory and  then link to those pages within the internal structure of your WordPress site. This is useful when you would like to create reference popup pages within your site that can be linked to via anchor text within your site’s articles.

To create a new directory for your site in your FTP client, simply left-click any blank area in the bottom of the remote side of the FTP client (the bottom quadrant of the right side), then click on “new directory” or “create new directory”. The exact option will vary depending on your FTP client, but you see this command in the left-click menu. Then name the directory and you’re done! Now you can upload custom web pages to that directory that you can link to in your WordPress site!