Westnic user reviews

I am currently hosting many sites with Westnic.net and I hope to start and host more in the future. I am not associated with westnic in any way. I am their customer and I am really happy with everything they offer. Their hosting features are super cool and so is their customer service. I have a shared account with them. Initially, I had a reseller account with them. I decided to downgrade as I was not able to make use of the reseller account properly. Webhosting is a very competitive niche.

Westnic has been around since 2002. However, I couldn’t find any reviews on the Internet before I tried them. They have over 12,000 or so customers. When compared with other companies, I believe westnic is a small player, but nevertheless their service is at par or even better than most big hosts. When web hosting companies grow big and bigger, they seem to care about everything except for customer services. However, the customer service at westnic seems pretty much okay to me.

All customer requests at westnic are done through the ticket system. If the request is very urgent, you can also make use of the live chat system. Usually, tickets are answered very fast. I opened up a new ticket, and it was answered within 2 minutes. I was really amazed at this! However, if tickets are opened at the wrong time, they may take some time to be cleared. However, all the tickets I opened were solved very soon.

One feature I loved very much about westnic is that they seem to care a lot your search engine optimization efforts. If you have multiple websites and want to interlink all of them, having all the sites on the same ip address may raise flags. In such cases, you can request different ips for each of the sites. These ips may or may not be dedicated, but will help. Westnic also provides you with class-c ips. Till now, I have not come across any other webhost which does this. Most of them will charge money for dedicated ip addresses. In addition, even the shared accounts come with whm. It gives you the ability to create separate cpanel accounts for your domains.

I hope to stay with westnic for a long time to come. And I hope they provide the same services and maintain the same level of professionalism for a long time to come.

Tags: webhosting, shared, westnic, web hosting

Dedicated Hosting Services

There are many web hosting companies that provide cheap dedicated server web hosting. If you are not satisfied with your current shared web hosting account because of reasons like high traffic or lack of control over the server, you may consider buying a dedicated server. This way, you will not only get good website performance but also complete control over your website.

When you buy a shared web hosting package, the web hosting company will create your account and place your website on a shared server. This server may be hosting thousands of websites and the resources get shared among these websites. This is done to reduce the cost of web hosting and for this reason, it is possible to get shared web hosting for as little as $10 a month.

Shared web hosting has many drawbacks. For example, the same IP address is shared by many websites. While there is no concrete proof that websites on shared IP addresses do not perform well in search engines, there are other issues like email spamming that need to be given consideration. Another drawback with shared hosting is that some websites may use too many server resources and cause your site to be sluggish. These drawbacks are eliminated in dedicated hosting.

Dedicated server web hosting usually costs about $100-400 per month. However, there are some hosts which can offer dedicated servers for as low as $50 per month. In addition to the server itself, other add-ons may have to be purchased separately. For example, cPanel license costs more. Additionally, additional IP addresses may also have to be purchased. Dedicated servers usually need more attention as there are many factors like software patching, monitoring, etc that need to be given attention.

If you are running large websites that get huge amounts of traffic, a dedicated web server is an absolute must. However, if you are running smaller websites with less traffic, usually a shared account or at most a reseller account should suffice. However, if you still want to try your hand at dedicated servers, we recommend you to search for a reliable web hosting company that offers cheap dedicated server web hosting.

Tags: webhosting, web hosting, shared web hosting, hosting

Web Hosting for Your Blog

Most of the people who use the Internet have their own blogs. Even business establishments have blogs which they use to announce news and new developments. If you use adsense, you might have come across the adsense blog where Google makes announcements about new developments with the adsense program. If you are thinking of starting a blog, you may have to get a place to host your blog. This article explains more about blog web hosting and I hope to provide with information to make your decision about blog web hosting.

If you want to start a blog, the first thing you have to do is to use a blogging software or blogware. There are many free blogware and you can download one of them and use it to create a blog. My personal favorite is wordpress. Wordpress is very easy to learn and it is also very easy to modify it. Besides, because of its wide popularity among bloggers, there are numerous themes and plugins which you can use freely. To host your blog you may consider buying a web hosting package that supports PHP. I recommend a cpanel based account. Cpanel comes with an automatic script installer which enables you to install many scripts with a few clicks of the mice.

Another blogware called movabletype is also very popular. It is used by large business establishments and high traffic blogs. You may also consider using it. However, movabletype is not free and you have to pay them some money to use it. In order to use movable type, you have to use a web host which supports perl. There are some hosts that sell movabletype hosting packages. If you buy one of these packages, they will install the script for you. All you have to do is to blog!

There are other scripts like nucleus, pmachine, etc. I would not recommend them as their use is difficult and demands experience. The learning curve for these blogware is quite steep. However, still if you want to install these you can do so using fantastico. Other disadvantages with these include less number of free themes and plugins. Last but not the least, there is blogger-the blogging website owned by Google. In order to use blogger, you don’t have to download or install anything. Just enter your web hosting details and press publish and your blog gets updated. It is suggested that you choose a web host supporting SFTP in order to use blogger. SFTP stands for secure file transfer protocol and is such secure than ordinary ftp.

I hope that this article was informative and helpful in choosing a good blog web hosting package.

Tags: webhosting, blog hosting, wordpress, movabletype

Free web hosting services

Are free web hosting services reliable? This is a question that comes to the mind of everyone who has intentions of creating a website. Sadly, the answer is no! Free web hosting services are extremely unreliable and for this reason, I would stay away from them. If you are serious about making a website that makes money, I would suggest you to buy a good web hosting package. There are many good web hosting companies and it doesn’t cost more than $10 for a very good shared hosting account.

Free web hosting services are unreliable because you don’t pay them and so they are not responsible to you. This is usually mentioned in their terms of service (TOS). Most of the free web hosts do not offer any kind of customer support. If the server goes down or you get some errors, all you can do is to wait for them to fix it up at their leisure. On the other hand, paid web hosts offer a much better customer support and if something goes wrong you can always call them and clear matters.

How do free web hosting services operate? There are many types of free web hosts. Some of them put ads on your pages. When somebody clicks on these ads, the web hosts makes some money which covers the web hosting costs. The disadvantage with these hosts is that these ads are really ugly! However hard you try, these will never blend properly. Some hosts also add annoying pop-ups to the pages. There are some hosts that do not put ads on the pages. Instead, they put ads inside the control panel. It is better to use these hosts, but the threat of the web host going out of business still exists.

There are other web hosts that provide free web hosting in exchange for participation in their forums. These are usually started by new forum owners. In an attempt to boost the popularity of their forums, they may provide free hosting. However, you have to make a certain number of posts every month to keep your account alive. The disadvantage with these web hosts is that you have to spend certain time participating in their forums. These forums are usually full of rubbish or copy-paste content which the users post to keep their account up and running.

I would suggest you to stay away from free hosts at all costs. If you are serious about creating a good website, you should buy web hosting. Web hosting costs have come down significantly in the recent years and so it is possible to get very good hosting for pocket change!

Tags: free hosting, webhosting, web hosting, free web hosting

Affordable Shared Hosting - What to Look For.

You might have seen numerous web hosting companies advertising about their affordable web site hosting plans. And again you might have come across discussions in forums about the same. What exactly constitutes an affordable web site hosting plan? This article explains, some of the features that make a hosting plan affordable. Just like with all things in life, if things are cheap they are so because of a reason. This fact has to be kept in mind when buying cheap hosting plans.

The first factor that makes a web hosting plan affordable is the price. Usually, one can expect decent webhosting for a price range below $10 a month. Many good hosts like Hostgator have their basic plans priced below $10 a month. However, some hosts provide web hosting for even less. Choosing these web hosting plans is not a good option. If you are really serious about creating a long lasting profitable website, $10 a month is a reasonable amount that you may have to invest.

The next factor is the ability to host multiple web sites in the same account. Most of the web hosts offer this feature. However, certain web hosts have restrictions on the number of websites that can be hosted. There are two ways of hosting more sites. One is to add the new domain as an add-on domain. This feature has many disadvantages like the lack of a separate control panel. The other way is to create a separate new account for the new domain. This feature creates a separate control panel for the new domain. Only few web hosts support the second feature.

Other factors that are characteristic of an affordable web site hosting plan are support for unlimited databases and scripting languages like PHP, python, etc. Usually, the number of databases used is very low. For example, an ordinary site may need 3 MySQL databases, one each for the site, forum and the blog. However, support for unlimited databases is an added advantage. You never know when you may need more. Last but not the least, an affordable web site hosting plan should have the guarantee of a good uptime. This is the most important factor.

Tags: webhosting, web hosting, affordable hosting, cheap hosting

Cheap dedicated web hosting directory

This page is about web hosting companies that provide cheap dedicated web hosting. I intend to list these companies in the form of a general web directory. I would be very glad to know your opinions and suggestions about this mini cheap dedicated web hosting directory. Please add any hosts that have not been mentioned here or leave suggestions for further improvement.

Cheap dedicated web hosting directory:

www.apollohosting.com (Plans start from $99.95)
www.leaseweb.com (Plans start from 39 Euros)
www.lunarpages.com (Plans start from $99)
www.serverpronto.com (Plans start as low as $29.95)
www.startlogic.com (Plans start from $99)
www.xlhost.com (Plans start from $69 onwards)

This list is not complete! I will add more after researching about them.

There are certain points you should take into consideration before choosing cheap dedicated web hosting. Always check the details completely and ensure that there are no hidden costs. If something is dead cheap, there is a reason behind it. Many of these web hosts may charge additional amounts for server reboot, trouble tickets, support etc. We would recommend you to avoid those hosts, as these may prove to more costlier than the hosting package itself.

If you have smaller websites with small amounts of traffic, we would recommend you a shared hosting account or a reseller account at most. Running a dedicated server needs experience and technical expertise. Usually, these may be taken care of by the web hosting staff. However, these services are costly and you may have to pay additional amounts of money. For the same amount as a dedicated server, you will be able to get about 3-5 reseller accounts. And if you host your sites at different web hosts, the problem of downtime can be eliminated to large extent. You cannot expect all the web hosts to go down at the same time! Keeping the eggs in different baskets is good idea when it comes to web hosting.

Tags: web hosting, dedicated server, cheap web hosting, webhosting

The Cheap Affordable Web Hosting Trap

Go to your favorite search engine and search for keywords like "cheap affordable web hosting" and you will find a million websites claiming to provide your the best webhosting services. One website claims large amounts of bandwidth and yet, better still claim unlimited bandwidth. But, in reality but does dead cheap affordable web hosting exist? Usually, it doesn’t. You only get what you pay for: Webhosting is not an exception to this general rule that governs our lives.

A web hosting company usually owns many servers which are usually located in a place where the environmental factors are kept under tight control. This is a costly process. Server equipment is costly, bandwidth is costly and so are the service staff. So, can a webhost offer 1000GB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth for a few dollars a month? In reality it cannot. However, you will see pages after pages full of fictional figures and may be enticed to believe them.

Most of the websites offering web hosting are resellers. These websites buy hosting packages from bigger hosts and resell them at very cheap prices. Typically, a reseller account with 10GB disk space and 100GB transfer costs about $30 a month. So how can the website claim 100GB disk space? The answer is simple-they are lying! This is simply a marketing gimmick. They are aware that it is impossible to use even a fraction of the resources mentioned without overloading the server and this is a good pretext for them to suspend your account.

Before choosing a webhost, you should read the terms of service (TOS). These so called dead cheap web hosts will clearly mention it in their TOS that your account will be suspended if you use too many system resources. If your account is suspended, it will mean a lot of down time for your site(s). For this reason, it is always a good decision to keep away from these so called cheap affordable web hosting companies and stick with good ones even if they cost a couple of dollars more.

Tags: webhosting, hosting, website, cheap hosting