Okay, I started a blog entry about the reasons you may choose to post content on your website in PDF format rather than creating an HTML or other type of web page. It turned out to be a rather long write-up so I chose to post it in the Articles section of the website. Check out the final results at “Five Reasons to Use PDFs on your Website.”

Coming soon, I will also document some ways to create PDFs without buying expensive products like Adobe Acrobat (although I highly recommend Acrobat for people who need to create PDFs on a regular basis).

This past weekend we took our two seperate existing RSS feeds- one for our blog, the other for our ‘standard’ content like our articles and services- and combined them into one easy-to-access feed.

If you are wondering what RSS is, it means ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Simple enough that once you subscribe to a web site that has this feature, you keep up-to-date with new information without having to check the site every day. You can do get newsfeeds from major news networks, entertainment sources, and business news and aggregate it to access it all from one place.

Once you get started, your favorite parts of the Web come to you. No need to go out and check for updates all the time. If you do not want to download rss reader software, its really easy to subscribe to your favorite feeds through My Yahoo or My Google (free personalized homepages).

To get started with the YNot Web feed, click the orange feed “chicklet” on the lower left side of the screen. This takes you to our Feedburner page, with subscriber options for web-based and desktop-based feed readers.

For another quick overview of RSS and feeds seeFeedburner’s Feed 101.

Our Server migration is complete and email appears to be stable, so its back to business as usual for YNot Web. We hope you all had a enjoyable and relaxing Labor Day.

I will be updating YNot Web’s servers which could affect availability of both the website and email for the next day or so.

I am hoping to have everything re-stabilized before the end of the holiday weekend, but if you need to contact us before Tuesday, calling by phone will have better reliability for the time being.

Thanks for your patience while we upgrade our services.

I’ve been dealing with several clients whose websites have been down or not functioning properly due to server issues at their various web hosts.

No host can provide a 100% uptime, but what DO you look for when shopping for a host?  First, they should publicize some sort of “uptime guarantee.” Without a guarantee, you have no assurances that they are at least trying or providing due diligence in keeping your website available.  I’ve recently seen a popular host REMOVE their guarantee from their sales pages.  Not a good sign of things to come for their clients.

So what kind of uptime guarantee is good enough? This depends on your needs and, honestly, your budget.  Of course, no one wants to have their website DOWN ever, but what do these numbers mean?  Here are some common guarantees in the industry today and the actual amount of downtime per month involved.

• 99.5% uptime = Over 3 HOURS (216 minutes) of downtime in a month
• 99.8% uptime = 86.4 minutes of downtime in a month
• 99.9% uptime = 43.2 minutes of downtime in a month
• 99.99% uptime = 4.32 minutes of downtime in a month
• 99.999% uptime = 0.432 minutes (26 seconds) in a month

Based on these numbers, I would never recommend a host with less than a 99.9% uptime guarantee and I would rather see my clients on a 99.99% uptime server.  I only know one host, Rackspace, that gives a 99.9999% uptime guarantee and they only do managed server hosting and is much more expensive than standard hosting.

So check for an uptime guarantee as one of the necessary elements when shopping for a web host.

YNot Web is once again sponsoring the Fair Oaks Metric Century Ride which takes place Sunday August 27, 2006.  This event is a great familing biking day put on by the Fair Oaks Chamber of Commerce and sponsored by many great local businesses.  Check it out at http://www.fairoaksmetriccentury.org (we also donated the website).

YNot Web has added a blog option to both our Enhanced Site Design and Professional Site Design packages. This will allow our clients to easily have blogging capabilities added to their new websites.  Blog software can be customized to match the “look” you want and gives you the ability to change and add content and pages as you please.

Check out our complete Enhanced Site Design and Professional Site Design package definitions under our Web Site Design and Site Builds services.