Does your website need an IP Address?? Does it really matter?

A Web site hosted with a "dedicated IP" never changes location. The advantages of having a dedicated IP number is that dedicated IP's tend to lend themselves much better to advanced web development, they are much easier to work with and they are more compatible with server side applications. So why don’t all hosting companies offer all their customers a dedicated IP? There are numerous reasons ranging from cost to availability of IP addresses. In reality this is a hotly debated topic that no one can prove which is better, or in reality; battle is are dedicated IP’s per website better for owner of that domain and his web presence then a shared IP environment. This in my opinion, is real question.

I like to break things down in real laymen terms and forget all about SEO optimization jargon; IT terms etc and let’s examine at it from point of physical street address.

Shared IP’s is like an apartment building where you can have one address i.e. first Avenue but then have 1000 apartment numbers. The mail and people show up to front door and gatekeeper lets them in and points them in right direction. The people usually find right apartment. A Dedicated IP per website is like living in a single detached house and your address is 3 First Avenue – The people knock on door you answer – faster and less chance of something going wrong. The search engines “BOTS” as they are called come and knock on doors, read and examine you site, determine how many people want your site, look at certain content etc and then leave and compile information for their search engines. Do they penalize a website for being in an apartment building? More than likely NO! Now do you want to be in that apartment building if you neighbour is a spam artist, or do you want to be in that apartment if people above you a running a high volume mail order business? Sometime you need to wait for elevator to come get down to leave or your customers waiting at front door because of you neighbour high use of front entrance.

How to create an RSS feed

An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your target audience. It is an ideal means of notifying people of new content on your website without need for them to keep on visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership without having to use email and risk being accused of spamming. You will be comfortable in knowledge that people who request your feed are actually interested in it because they have actively subscribed to it. This article will explain just how to create your own RSS news feed.

There are a couple of ways to create an RSS file, you can use an editor designed for purpose or you can create a file using a simple text editor. The latter will require you to learn some XML whilst former will do hard part for you. First off I will describe an RSS file, there are several versions and I will be showing you version 2.0, latest RSS version.

An RSS file looks just like an HTML file except it has different tags and files end in .rss or .xml rather than .html. The file is made up of header information and item information, item information contains actual news items.

The first section of file contains header information. This states that file is XML and which version, encoding used and version of RSS that you are using. This part of file is mandatory. Next up is channel tag, this encloses whole of rest of file. This is followed by a title, description and link which explain what feed is about and what website it is associated with. The final part of header is optional image information. If you use this software that is used to parse or read your file can display a small picture such as a logo.