Finding the right host for you

Sooner or later everyone faces the task of finding a good web host. We have compiled a short guide that equips you with the most important things you should look for when evaluating a web hosting company.

The Myth of Unlimited Bandwidth
There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. The hosting provider has to pay for its internet connection and prices his packages accordingly. The practice of overselling (assuming that costumers won’t use up their alloted resources and accordingly offering larger, more powerful hosting packages) is very common in the hosting industry and can prove fatal to smaller hosting operations. For the sake of clarity, let us use an example. Hosting company A has one server and 10 clients on it with a package that offers “Unlimited Bandwidth” - As long as each of the clients is using less than 10% of the available resources on average things will operate smoothly. But as soon as one of the customers experiences a traffic explosion, the availability of resources is diminishing. Now assume that a few of the clients start seeing dramatic increases in traffic - The whole venture starts to turn unprofitable and the hosting company is likely to go bankrupt if it were to continue offering these offerings to its clients.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything comes at a price. So if you are being offered incredible amounts at bargain prices you should become very cautious as this occasion may cost you dearly at a later point of time. They are usually what the name implies: Incredible.

Evaluation of the Web Hosting Company
Another thing that is of the utmost importance is to check the company before placing an order. You do that by entering the host name into the search engine of your choice. In most cases you will find a plethora of search results that provide you with ratings and reviews by people that have/had experiences with the company. Evaluate and judge carefully. By doing so you can avoid lots of hassles as customers with bad experiences have a tendency to warn potential customers from bad hosts by letting off steam on sites that feature web hosting reviews.

The Importance of Support
Support is yet another important issue. How savvy is the tech staff? What is the availability of support? Where is the support located? Is there someone able to help you in case your website goes offline on the 24th of December? These are some of the question that come to mind when thinking of tech support. You might want to test the quality of support before placing an order by testing the time it takes them to reply to your requests. In addition, feel free to ask technical questions as well as inquire whether telephone support is available. Our experience has shown that many minor issues are being solved easier over the phone rather than email.

Summarizing, we believe that it all comes down to your needs. In case you are just hosting a site that features photos of your pets, uptime is not as crucial as if you were to operate an ecommerce site. By carefully answering the questions of how much you are willing to spend, how much reliability you need and the features that are crucial to you, the quest for finding a web host will be a successful one.

What Good Web Hosting can mean to your Business.

This is the age of information. Information that is accessible at the click of the computer mouse! The Internet is a very powerful medium of providing information because of world wide accessibility. A strong presence on the Internet can mean a strong presence in the market for any company. For this reason most business organizations have started their own websites to provide users more information about themselves. Today on the Internet, there are thousands and thousands of websites that provide information on an infinite number of topics.

To setup a website, it is necessary to register a domain name and host the domain name at a web host. The quality of web hosting is very important. It can mean the difference between a fast-loading website that is up and running all the time or a sluggish slow-loading website that is down most of the time. For this reason, proper research should be done before hosting your website at a web hosting company.

It is also possible to host the website yourself. If you have a computer that runs fine and a fast connection to the Internet, it is possible to run the website(s) on your own. However, this is not recommended unless you have the required technical expertise to handle things when they get out of hand. There are many things to take care of-uptime, security, software updates and patches. The best option would be to choose a good web host. Web hosting companies have powerful servers that are located in data centers with optimum environmental conditions. Further, they employ experienced staff to take care of everything. Hosting your website at a professional web host can save a lot of trouble.

There are many factors that should be considered before choosing a web host. A simple search in Google can turn up dozens of companies claiming to be web hosts. Usually, most of these are resellers and only few of them are "true web hosts" that have their own servers. Larger web hosts that have a history of providing quality support are usually preferable to smaller ones.

Web hosts offer the following: space for hosting your files, bandwidth, data transfer and support for other things like scripting languages and databases. Space refers to memory on the hard disk of the server. Bandwidth refers to the bandwidth of the Internet connection by means of which the server is connected to the Internet. Data transfer is the amount of data transferred (upload + download). While choosing a web host, it should be ensured that the features provided are sufficient enough to meet all the requirements.

We recommend any of the webhosts advertised on this site. Here is why we chose Lunarpages for our first web host.

Tags: web hosting, hosting, website, shared hosting

Data centres

Computers are so vital for the business in this highly competitive era. For bigger firms for proper housing of the computer related accessories are necessary for the proper functioning of it. Facility for housing computer systems as well as components associated with can be termed, as a data centre. Data centre does the dissemination, storage as well as management of information and data which is important for the operations of organizations. Main associated components are storage as well as telecommunication systems. It includes devices for security, back up power supplies, air conditioners, fire extinguishers, data communications connections that are redundant etc. The size of the data centre depends on the operational needs of the company. Cabinets of size 19-inch rack of servers makes up most of the equipments are arranged in rows. The mainframe computers, storage devices can size up same as that of racks.

In this era for any business organization, it is inevitable to have reliable IT Operations. For effective operations of companies, there is reliance on information systems of its own. There fore the modern data centers should be able to provide secure environment, good functionality, as well as integrity to the computer environment, which is hosting.

Data centers are classified as tier one data center, tier two data center, tier three data centre, tier four data centre etc, with the first one being the simplest while the fourth one being the stringent. In the fourth tier data centre, there are biometric access controls as part of security measures.

Networks based on suite of IP protocol aids the data centers’ communications. Transportation of traffic between outside world and the servers is undertaken by a set of switches as well as routers. Multi homing aids the internet connections redundancy. For the functioning of some internet as well as intranet services, few servers in the data centers are availed. Usage of Intrusion detection systems, firewalls, VPN gateways etc are there for the purpose of net work security related to data centers.

It is important to select the right data centre, as per the requirement of the organizational requirements. Multiple applications, which are necessary for company, may be based on dedicated servers and operating systems. The data centre should be compatible to various servers and operating systems. Companies may be relying on web hosting services like shared hosting, reseller hosting etc. Therefore, the data center should be able to get along with those services. So the datacenter should be having advanced technology to able to perform optimally.

For powering the data centers and saving some money as well as for getting energy credits, companies can look forward for solar power. Solar panels can power the data centre with greater efficiency with the new technology.

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Reseller web hosting

Reseller web hosting

Reseller web hosting is a type of web hosting where you can divide disk space and bandwidth into packages and sell them to others. Reseller web hosting can be a steady source of income to you if proper marketing is done. However, the competition is very stiff and so it may not be profitable all the time for everyone. Still, there are many advantages associated with resellers web hosting accounts.

Reseller web hosting is usually costly when compared with ordinary shared web hosting accounts. You can get a decent shared web hosting account for about $10 a month. However the cheapest reseller account costs about $25 a month. At the same time, the disk space and bandwidth that come reseller plans are very low when compared with shared accounts. Despite this, reseller accounts are more advantageous than shared accounts.

Shared accounts run the risk of getting suspended for excessive usage of server resources. Most web hosts mention this in their TOS. However, if you have a reseller account, you can always suspend the domain name under question. Most of the time, these server loads are caused by DDOS attacks, etc and a reseller account allows you complete control. Another advantage associated with reseller plans is that the individual domains gets their own cpanel. In shared hosting, additional domains are hosted as a add-on and this feature is not so convenient.

Along with the reseller web hosting plan, you may also get a domain name reseller account. Using this, you can start a mini web hosting company yourself. Usually, most web hosts provide a free enom domain reseller account with their reseller plans. Reseller accounts also come with additional IP addresses. Though, it is not clearly known whether having a dedicated IP address provides any advantage in search engine rankings, many SEO experts prefer to have dedicated IP addresses for their sites.

There are many hosting companies that offer reseller plans. Some of these include www.resellerzoom.com, www.hostgator.com, etc. I have a reseller account with www.westnic.net and I am very happy with them. They provide 8 dedicated IP address and have excellent support. They will also arrange for class-C IP addresses for free if you need them. While choosing a reseller plan, always research about the company. User reviews and discussions in forums can provide more background information about the company and its services.

Technorati : reseller hosting, reseller webhosting, web hosting, website development

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

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