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Friday, March 31, 2006

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Steps that you need to follow to get your website up and running with a web hosting

There are couple steps that you need to follow to get your website up and running with a web hosting company. First you need to find a domain name for your website.

*Domain Name - The Name that you use for your website. Ex: www.cheap-web-hosting-information.com

*Web Hosting - With this service people are able to see your website. Web Hosting is where you host your site.

A domain name is the name that you use when people visit your page (ex.cheap-web-hosting-information.com) that's my domain name. Once you have your domain name in mind then some of the cheap web hosting companies will allow you to get a domain name for free if you buy a web hosting package from them but If you don't want to get the domain name from the web hosting company then you can go to godaddy.com and buy your domain name from them. Don't include http:// or www when you are registering your domain name.

After you get your domain name register and if you still don't have a web hosting company then you need to start looking for cheap web hosting packages. One thing that you need to have in mind is that it doesn't matter if the hosting package is cheap or not the main thing you have to look for it, is the programming language that the web hosting supports. Some of them support more than one programming language but others support only one. So try to find first the web hosting companies that have the programming language that you are going to use and then look for how cheap are the web hosting packages.

About The Author

You can find more articles or more information about Cheap Web Hosting, Web Design, Webmaster and more at http://www.cheap-web-hosting-information.com/

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - What is Shared Web Hosting?

For businesses, organizations, or people looking to host a website the most popular and cost effective choice is usually shared web hosting. For many websites shared web hosting is the ideal solution. Shared webhosting has it's advantages and disadvantages, you should be aware of before making your decision to use it.

Hosting companies offer shared hosting to customers with websites that have small or moderate traffic levels. These packages are offered at a very modest and reasonable cost. By allowing different customers to share computer hardware resources, maintenance and operating costs are spread over a larger number of clients which reduce costs. Customers may be on the same physical computer but hard drive space is separated so no one else has access to your files or data.

The most attractive aspect of shared hosting for most people is its low cost. Customers can choose the amount of disk space and bandwidth they need. If you are willing to sign up for a longer term contract (6, 12, or 24 months) the prices will be lower than paying at the end of each month. As shared hosting is managed by hosting company, all security, and software updates and performed by their staff. Shared hosting packages usually come with a simple to use client management interface, that allows them to set up file and FTP access,manage email accounts and other basic functions, giving you control over your website. For customers who want more features such as shopping carts, automated backups, and security certificates shared hosting packages offer them as extras to your account.

While there are many advantages to shared hosting there are some disadvantages as well. Shared hosting often means you are on the same computer as hundreds or thousands of other websites. This sharing of resources means your response time may be less than optimal. For example if you are on the same webserver as several other high volume websites you may notice a performance lag. Hosting companies monitor shared servers for abuse and resource hogging, sometimes malicious scripts or bad code can cause it to stop functioning, shutting down every website on the server. Limitations on disk space and bandwidth is another concern. If you have a busy traffic spike you may exceed your disk space or bandwidth allowance. Which means overage fees or your website gets shut down.

While not the perfect solution for everyone, for many people shared web hosting is an attractive option to consider. It allows them to start small and manage costs, costs time and people resources and have access to the technical expertise of the web hosting company all on a limited budget.

About The Author
Eric Fazio runs http://Webhosting-Advisor.com where he publishes articles about web hosting and reviews web hosting services.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Web Hosting Terminology

This article will define what various terms used by web hosting companies mean. It's not possible (and sometimes insulting to the reader) to cover everything so this will just cover the most commonly used and important terms.

Bandwidth (or Transfer or Data Transfer)
Bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is sent (and recieved) by your website. It is usually measured in gigabytes (GB), where 1 GB = 1024 megabytes (MB), and it is usually allocated on a monthly basis, for example you could have 5GB/month of bandwidth, which means that there is a limit of 5GB of files that can be downloaded from your site within a month. Bandwidth is only a concern if you host a lot of files, for example images or movies, as webpages are usually small file sizes.

Colocation Server (or Colocation Hosting)
This is similar to Dedicated Hosting (see below), except the server is owned by a customer and they pay the colocation hosting company to host the server for them - that involves paying a charge for bandwitch which the hosting company provide, the physical space which the server takes up and the power that the server uses. With this set up the customer is responsible for their hardware.

Control Panel
This is a web page with a usable interface which the customer can connect to when they want to tweak their hosting settings, view the transfer statistics, or utilise other features provided with their hosting.

Dedicated Server (or Dedicated Hosting)
This is a server which is owned by the hosting company which they will rent out to you for a monthly fee along with an allotment of bandwidth which you can use with it. This means that you get a whole server to yourself to use for what you desire, this is needed for scripts which use a lot of server resources (for example large message boards, for one of which I pay for a dedicated server). As a customer, you would have full control over the server and could change the configuration as required, a facility not available when you have to share a server with others. With a dedicated server, the web hosting company is responsible for the hardware as they own it, not the customer.

Disk Space
This is the amount of space on the server that you have to upload your files on, it's usually measured in MB or GB.

MySQL
This is a type of database (as is PostgreSQL) which allows the customer to store and retrieve information on the server. A lot of scripts require that a database is present to function.

Reseller Hosting
This is similar to Virtual Hosting (see below), but the customer is given the ability to create small hosting accounts of their own, which they can then give or sell to people if they desire. It usually allows the customer more features, bandwidth and diskspace than with normal virtual hosting.

Scripts (eg PHP, Perl, ASP)
These are server side scripting languages which allow the customer to use already written scripts, or write their own, which provide additional features for the website and increased interactivity (for example message boards and content management systems).

MySQL
This is a type of database (as is PostgreSQL) which allows the customer to store and retrieve information on the server. A lot of scripts require that a database is present to function.

Virtual Hosting (or Shared Hosting)
This is where a webhosting company puts many customers' webpages on the same server - so the server resources are shared amongst all the customers using it. This means that applications which cause a high server load are not suitable, and if one customer uses one then other customers will suffer.

vdhri.net is a website dedicated to providing free lessons and tutorials in many programming languages.

Web Hosting- Is your web hosting company providing all your hosting needs. If not Move On.

What to look for from a hosting companie. If they can't provide 95% of the service listed below then you might not want to invest your hard earn money in them. Let alone start your business using their service

Member Operations Control Panel DNS Management 24/7 FTP Access, FTP Users Web-Based FTP File Manager, Site Manager Password Protect Directories Custom Error Pages SnapShot Instant Click and Restore Daily Backups Unix Platform Supported Software FrontPage 98/2000/2002 Extensions PHP4 & PHP5 w/Zend Optimizer, Perl5, Sendmail CGI-BIN, SSI, .htaccess, Cronjobs Flash, Shockwave, Midi, Multimedia Support Web Statistics & Logs MySQL Database phpMyAdmin Daily Database Backups Email Service Mailboxes (POP3/IMAP & SMTP) Web Mail Access (secure login) Email Forwarding/Email Aliases Email Virus Scanning Spam Filters (Black/White & Greylisting Features) DNS Text Record/SMTP+SPF 30 or more Days Money Back Guarantee E-Commerce Ready and more. Marketing Package, Web Tools & Web Templates FREE! Search Engine Submission Site Utilities, File Permission Calculator HTML Checker, Image Optimizer & Image Site Detection Web Tools, Popularity Check & Meta Tag Generator

And they need to be well known in the online Web Hosting Community. Watch out for Re-sellers.

About The Author

If you want Cheap and Affordable Web Hosting then Visit http://topwebhostingproviders.net : We rated the Top 10 Web Hosting Company Online. Visit us today.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Dedicated Web Hosting Explained

Why is dedicated hosting such a big hit on the business web hosting market? If you look at the costs it involves, usually ranging from $150 - $1000 per month, another question comes into your mind: Does it even worth it?

When you have one single web server is rented to a single customer by the web hosting provider, you have dedicated web hosting. There are two similar solutions quite common too in the web hosting industry: virtual dedicated servers and co-location web hosting.

To make it easier to grasp the concepts, a virtual dedicated server shares the resources of a web server computer with other customers of the web hosting provider. You dont get an entire computer just for you in virtual dedicated server hosting plans.

Co-locating web hosting also shares some similarities with dedicated web hosting. The main difference is that while in dedicated web hosting the web server computer belongs to the web-hosting provider and is only rented by the customer, in co-locating web hosting the customer owns the web server computer. The web-hosting provider only houses the web server computer and sells bandwidth to the customer.

Real dedicated web hosting a single web server is rented to a single customer.

Dedicated web hosting is the ideal solution for businesses that work with high traffic. The functionalities of your web site as well as the application required for its operation will fall under your precise control.

But with dedicated web hosting there are even more advantages.

Your hosting provider handles all concerns regarding the maintenance, the security, and the reliability of your web server. As your rent the computer, not purchasing it you dont have to bother yourself with maintaining the hardware and the connectivity of the computer. This frees you from replacing the component or solving the problem, as all these fall into the providers responsibility. Many web hosting providers will even offer you compensations as part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Usually, in the event of such failure you will be reimbursed with the cost of your hosting plan for a month or a fraction of it, depending of the severity of the failure. Looks quite good compared to having to pay for the component and for the technical support required for actually replacing the component, all this while your web site in not online. At the end of the day you will only pay for functional hardware.

Think what your business could do with all the resources you have just saved on the above maintenance issues.

As the costs of administering and maintaining the web server you have rented vary depending on your web hosting provider, you can choose between managed or unmanaged service levels.

Should you feel uncomfortable with the technical expertise required by the management of a web server computer, you could opt for managed dedicated hosting. This means that you will have available a control panel. The control panel allows you to perform all the essential tasks required by the proper functioning of your web server via a simply point-and-click user-friendly interface. This way you wont need to know or type any command lines, or poses no in depth knowledge of the operating system, while still being able to setup, administer and maintain all the web sites on your web server.

The unmanaged option is recommended only for those with great degree of technical expertise in mastering a web server as it provides root access to the server. This in turn, offers complete server administration, thus the possibility to configure every service on your web server. Of course, not having the necessary services are configured properly, may result in serious system failure. These are the reasons that make unmanaged dedicated hosting only recommendable for people with solid server administration background or for web developers that need custom applications for their web sites, or a customized environment.

Having a dedicated server means that the stability of the computer will not be prone to the plagues affecting shared web hosting solutions. Just think at overload, server being crowded with applications and components required by the other customers, or even errors in programming usually made by the beginners. Add to that the fact that on a shared web server the processor time and the installed memory is shared with the software applications needed by the other users.

Managed or unmanaged, dedicated web hosting makes it easier for you to provide instant support to your own customers when it is required. This would not be possible on a shared hosting plan or you will be faced with delays and possible additional technical support fees. Needless to say a prompt support service on your side also means happy customers and business growth.

For those running a business in web design for example, the advantages of having their own dedicated web server are invaluable. This is true not because his studio will be able to offer pure hosting services, but because he will able to offer them packaged with the web design activity. Modifying a web site for a customer or uploading a new one is a matter of minutes when you have around-the-clock access to your web server. Another advantage comes from the fact that once a complete web presence solution, design and hosting, is offered by the studio to a customer, there is a higher chance for having that customer become a regular.

The benefits of a good dedicated web hosting solution for businesses translate into sales growth, better customer relationship, improved company image, reduced cost compared with in-house web hosting solution, and the list could go on. A dedicated web server means that you can run a better business and better business reads profit.


About The Author

Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin (http://www.hostpinpin.com), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory Resource.

HostPinPin.com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting reviews, compare hosting plans, web hosting articles, tips and more.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Yahoo Small Business. Why is Yahoo the Number 1 Small Business Web Hosting Company Online Today.

If you plan on starting any type of business online, then you need to find a reliable web hosting company. That company needs to have a track record and needs to be establish in the web hosting industry for many years. Make sure they are not some fly by night operation.

They need to be able to provide you with a lot of referrals from customers that has dealt with them in the past. A hosting company needs to be a hosting company. Try to stay away from hosting with Re-sellers. Re-sellers borrow space from a top hosting companies and sell it to you at a wholesale cost. That sometimes maybe good to you because you are paying far less for hosting, but that's not how we recommend you get your business of on the internet. Just think of how many people are using this reseller hosting space. Your website maybe in jeopardy of crashing because of too many people hosting on one server from that particular reseller.. If you plan of putting your business out there you need to have the back up and support that an establish web hosting company can bring you. Do your homework.

On that note, I would recommend you host your business with Yahoo! You won't have to worry about your website not being online or being gone completely. Yahoo will always be there and they don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon.

Yahoo provides Trust and Respect in the online community that hosting company needs to have. Their skilled customer care associates make it easy to take your business online with Yahoo. Get everything you need to build, manage and market a successful online store with their merchant solutions package. If you need to start a small business fast and easy. Yahoo is the way. You can also advertise on Yahoo! Network to access potential customers and increase awareness of your business brand.

Yahoo FEATURES INCLUDED IN ALL HOSTING PACKAGES

Personalized domain name (www.your-business.com) Business email addresses (you@your-business.com) Disk space for storing content like images and media files Data transfer (bandwidth) Multi-user FTP for quick file upload Matching web site sub domains (sales.your-business.com)

Customer Support 24-hour toll-free phone support Online help center Primary email support Web Site Design Options Free Yahoo! Site builder site design software (incl. 380+ web site templates) Support for other third party tools (like Macromedia Dream weaver and Adobe GoLive) Perl support, for building advanced web applications PHP/MySQL support, for building database-driven sites Email Email storage per account SpamGuard Plus junk email protection Norton AntiVirus screening and cleaning Default mailbox for misaddressed email Email forwards Vacation responders Site Statistics - Site Security - Prebuilt Tools and Content and more Discounts on Marketing Services Yahoo! Sponsored Search: $50 credit Google AdWords: $50 credit Yahoo! Local Enhanced Listing: Got Campaigner email marketing: free trial for three months KeywordMax keyword-tracking software: Submitnet search engine submission: free trial for three months

If it's Trust you looking for. You found it. Yahoo is the way.

About The Author

This article was written by Stanley Amazan. http://topwebhostingproviders.net - Top 10 Web Hosting Providers Online. Find Cheap and Affordable Web Hosting! http://stanleyamazan.ws - Free Web Hosting! http://freehomebizresource.com - Free Home Business Resource. Helping you make money online for free.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Web Hosting Explained for New Adsense Entrepreneurs

First of all Let me tell you , It's not that hard and it's not that expensive. The biggest misconceptions when it comes to starting a series of websites to capitalize on the Adsense advertising empire is the price for hosting and confusion surrounding it.

When I started my network of websites I already happened to have the best hosting package I've heard of. DreamHost.com I bought it because I wanted my own email domain, Unbenounced to me I had just purchased the hosting package that would set my Adsense campaign on fire!

6 Months Later when I started to get an interest in Adsense I created my first few sites, and when I went to my hosting panel to see what the deal was for adding additional websites I found out I could add an unlimited unlimited! I couldn't believe it , upon further investigation I realized I had 20 gb's of web space and enough bandwidth for an army of sites, A TERABYTE!

So I started creating like a mad man.To date I have 74 Fully Hosted Websites they each have their own domain names and still I only use less than 8% of my account resources.

Is it Hard to setup and manage the hosting of websites?

No, it is not, web hosts , DreamHost included make it very easy to create and manage the hosting properties of each fully hosted domain. Infect the process is down to a few clicks of the mouse, then upload your files. .info domains can be purchase for $2.99 and .com domains for as low as $6.99. The nice thing about hosting accounts is you can create sub domains. If you've registered the domain example.com you can create free sub domains which would look like site1.example.com and site2.example.com. but call them anything you like. You could really get started fast if you chose this method.

If you do not have web design skills but you still want be involved in the Adsense fury, don't worry on eBay you will find people selling pre made Content WebPages. So you don't have to do any work, just make a couple changes, usually fairly simple then upload your files and you are making money. The Sign up for most affiliate programs including Adsense is Free and Very simple.

So it's not hard and expensive like everyone says. You can started with a hosting account , most come with 1 Free domain upon signup, get yourself some content sites and you are off to the races!

The thing is not to have any reservations, dive in head first. You will see it's very simple and the speed at which you learn will be incredible.

If you decide to go with http://dreamhost.com I've found this promo code for the following discounts on signup. PROMO CODE: 2007DISCOUNT Monthly $20 discount on signup 1 Year $30 discount on signup 2 Year $40 discount on signup

About The Author

Bigdosman Designs and sells a series of Content Websites With RSS feeds embedded so his sites run on autopilot. 90% of the content sites are under $10.00, and there are package deals. If you are interested in hearing about his content sites email him at help at bigdosman.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Affordable Web Hosting - Important tips to consider before buying

Deciding on a web host can be a daunting task at first, but hopefully these tips will help you to find the best host to suit your requirements.

When choosing a web host you will need to find a company that has a good array of plans to suit a variety of requirements. Also you will need to find a host that allows plans to be upgraded easily with little to no downtime as your site grows and attracts more visitors. Initially when you have a new site to that you want to place online you may not know what resources the site will require, so there is little point in purchasing the best plan a host has on offer as you may be wasting hard earned money on services you may not need.

Ideally you should only pay for the plan that meets all your requirements initially, and as the requirements of your site grow you can then upgrade to higher priced plans, if you have chosen a good hosting provider this should be as simple as calling their sales department or sending an email to make the changes happen.

Personal Web Sites

Entry level hosting generally includes 100mb of storage space and up to 10GB of monthly data transfer (commonly known as bandwidth), this is usually enough for a personal web site or a small business web site. Entry level web hosting plans such as this are available for as little as $1.95 per month with no setup fees. If you have any plans in the future to host a lot of large images or video files and offer them for download, you should consider something more than what an entry level plan provides.

Other drawbacks of entry level hosting include a lack of database support, support for databases these days is essential for anything but static html sites, if you have plans of running a forum, photo gallery, shopping cart, or even a simple blog (weblog), you will need hosting that supports databases. Most often the database required is MySQL due to the large amount of open source applications that use this type of database.

Business Web Sites

For a business, a host that supports databases is normally a must have feature and as such I recommend that for a business web site you choose a plan that support this feature, the cost of this feature is not a lot more, for $3-$7 a month your host can supply support for databases and a whole lot more. Most business plans will also include more storage space, more bandwidth, and other useful features such as shopping carts.

Another feature you should consider is email, for a business, multiple email addresses are becoming the norm, you may want each employee to have an email address for example, plus a few common email addresses such as "info@", "sales@" etc., the web hosting plans from $3-$7 a month generally support 100 to several thousand email addresses which should cover your needs well into the future.


About The Author

Affordable Web Hosting Reviews at www.Webhost-Advisor.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Dedicated Web Hosting : The Executive Summary

What is Dedicated Web Hosting?

Dedicated web hosting can alleviate the need to share hardware or software with any other sites or web pages. Webmasters are given the autonomy to decide on applications that are installed on the server to create specific configurations for their web needs, and have the ability to provide a secure environment for their site. As compared to a shared-server environment, dedicated web hosting offers a peace of mind that a site will be delivered in a reliable and secure manner.

There are major benefits of dedicated web hosting, as discussed below. However, the major disadvantage, cost, is quickly being overcome. Because of continual growth in the dedicated web hosting industry, the rates for dedicated server plans are rapidly declining. A competitive environment drives up the level of service and decreases cost. This reduction is powered by an increase in small and medium-sized businesses gaining an online presence and the rapid proliferation of web hosting providers.

Advantages of Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated server hosting is favorable because of 2 major assets: control and reliability.

Since a dedicated web administrator has more control over a dedicated server, it tends to be more secure, compared to a shared web server. By knowing what exactly is installed on a dedicated server through full root access, a system administrator is able to confidently make decisions on the software and application updates necessary to maintain the dedicated web server and keep it running in its most optimal configuration.

Increased reliability is another major asset of dedicated server web hosting, as a server administrator has the self-sufficiency to optimize page loads by tweaking variables such as page load speed and general server resource allocation. This server reliability translates to customer satisfaction and an increase in the bottom line goals of a web site's presence.

DisAdvantages of Dedicated Web Hosting

While the benefits of dedicated web server hosting is apparent, the bottom line consideration, especially for business purposes is cost. Dedicated web hosting is significantly more expensive compared to shared or virtual web hosting, and until recently, could most commonly be quoted at several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars per month. Although cost may still be exorbitant, most businesses are able to justify the use of dedicated servers through a true web analysis to weigh the resources necessary to run applications and code.

Another drawback is the need to be able to monitor, install, upgrade and configure programs, add sites, deal with potential hacks, and troubleshoot systems. Therefore, the necessary system administration skills, if one does not possess them, may definitely inhibit the successful implementation of a web site hosted on a dedicated web server.

Benefits:

The direct benefits of a dedicated web hosting plan surround the ability to totally administer a web server. The advantage to be able to effectively maintain a dedicated server lies in one's ability to control the variables associated with reliability and stability. In a dedicated environment, server overload, malicious scripts from other users, and too many installed applications are variables which can be controlled, as compared to this loss of management in shared server hosting.

Furthermore, a dedicated server allows one to only install applications or software that applies to the major hosting goal at hand. Conversely, shared web hosting has installed software that may or may not be related to the web hosting goals.

Reliance on the web host repair services and time delays of platform repairs can be minimized, as one may intervene and provide solutions to existing problems with dedicated web hosting. Having the option to add patches, upgrade software, or tweak performance is invaluable and allows the dedicated server administrator to work with 24 hour access to perform adjustments, corrections, or updates.

Lastly, speed of downloads can be determined through the amount of bandwidth that is dedicated to just your website. Statistically, visitors will quickly leave a site if the load time was long. Dedicated servers allow quick delivery of web pages, which increases the probability of keeping web site visitors on a site that may convert them to paying customers. Furthermore, quick loading pages enhance the company's image and may encourage existing customers to refer your web-based services to others.

What is the best application of a dedicated web hosting service provider?

Utility of a dedicated server environment is best suited to those with a working knowledge of server operating systems and those who don't mind troubleshooting problems which may arise.

Server administrators must be able to apply kernel upgrades, service packs, and software patches, as well as provide ample security, monitor traffic, update server applications, balance server loads, and configure email, FTP, and DNS services.

* In exchange for competency in the above functions, the best uses for a dedicated web server environment would be: mission-critical sites requiring custom server management and software implementation.

* dedicated hosting resellers, web developers and designers who need greater flexibility, reliability and security for their clients

* backbones of corporate intranets

* robust and dependable servers for streaming media, online gaming, and e-mail or chat applications

* complex application sites with high traffic and secure information such as ecommerce, database, and multimedia sites.

* enterprise-level web sites * Web sites which may have content restrictions if hosted elsewhere (e.g. adult targeted sites.)

How to decide:

Overall, the cost, security of data and equipment, bandwidth availability, the knowledge and integrity of the web-hosting provider, uptime, hardware maintenance, and any technical support offered by the dedicated web host are important deciding factors. Although your specific dedicated web hosting needs may be unique in a few ways, generally, one can make a decision on a dedicated web server provider by considering the following things:

Data Transfer Rates:
Data transfer will need to be determined based on the amount of information that will be downloaded, as well as the type of content a site will be sharing (general text vs. high resolution graphics and multimedia). A dedicated web host will generally have various packages that will allow one to choose the data transfer level, normally measured in "gigabytes per month". Higher levels of data transfer rates normally mean more cost, so utilization of the first few months to correlate data transfer rates and traffic patterns is key.

Platforms:
The two most common systems available are Windows based servers versus some flavor of UNIX (Linux and Solaris). Windows is historically more expensive, but is generally regarded as more user-friendly, especially with the ubiquitous presence of Windows-based pc's and administrators. Linux, on the other hand, is less expensive to install, but harder to maintain, as a steeper learning curve exists for those unfamiliar with it. Therefore, the operating system installed on a dedicated web server should depend on a couple of factors.

First, the platform should be conducive to the coding in which the website and necessary applications are developed. Next, since administration of the dedicated server will be done by the subscriber, the necessary skill base to support the platform must be in place. Commands and administration techniques are definitely platform-specific.

Monitoring:
Dedicated server monitoring works to prevent service interruptions. The web host will provide a service that can, at a pre-set frequency, check a website to see downtime.

Automation:
Although dedicated web servers may require a greater degree of skill, certain dedicated web hosting companies may offer software that will automate common procedures, thus lessening the high level knowledge necessary to maintain servers and implement new services.

Data Backup:
Some dedicated web hosting providers assist the web hosting subscriber with data backups. Finding a dedicated server provider who will assist in this process could alleviate the hassle of doing it yourself and can allow one to devote time to other things.

Scalability:
Dedicated web hosting providers should be able to account for major growth. Progressive expansion can be accounted for by asking a web host if modules of extra space, bandwidth, or better yet, larger packages can be purchased to allow easy transition to better hardware and software.

Service Level Agreements:
More dedicated web hosts are publishing their SLA's, which thoroughly documents what they will do in exchange for what the customer is responsible for. For instance, some dedicated server hosts are offering features such as: 100% uptime guarantees, unlimited live answer technical phone-based support, free upgrades of patches, hot-fixes, personal Dedicated Sales account managers, maintenance staff with spare parts for all server configurations, and more. A full understanding of the commitment that a dedicated web host is offering will help in a decision to utilize that service.

About The Author

To find the best home based business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit: http://www.Money-Making-Opportunity.net

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - The Third Wave of Web Hosting

The First Wave - ISP Wave

The first wave of Web hosting started in the middle of 1990s. At the time, there weren't really many web hosting companies. Web hosting was a part of ISP (Internet Service Provider) operation. Within two years, the number of ISPs had grown from a few dozens to a few thousands in United States alone. Many analysts predicated that the consolidation of ISP industry was unavoidable. But the analysts didn't pay much attention to the future of the web hosting. The web hosting clients for ISPs were most small to medium-sized organizations which couldn't offer to have dedicated Internet connection.

The Second Wave - One Plan Hosting Wave

As large telecommunication companies entering into the ISP industry and the prevailing of broadband connection into both commercial and residential buildings, a few leading ISP, such as AOL had grabbed residential users from small ISP companies, and telecommunication companies had stolen or acquired commercial clients from small or regional ISP companies. Because of the economy of scale, ISPs couldn't compete with either AOL, Comcast or Qwest for Internet connection service. Most ISP companies were disappeared as fast as they were emerged.

On the other hand, the growth of the Web has pushed the second wave of web hosting. The web hosting companies offer hosting service at a fraction of cost of what ISPs used to charge. In contrast to the Web hosting service from ISP, which is often customized for each client one way or another, the idea of one hosting plan has helped grow the client base from a few hundreds to hundreds of thousands at few leading hosting companies in a few short years. Todays' web hosting companies don't offer Internet connection service at all. It's unbelievable that early ISP companies had never attempted to transform themselves into web hosting companies to survive the inevitable consolidation of ISP industry.

The Third Wave - Hosting Plan for Users

Seasoned webmasters can easily setup a new website in minutes with one of their preferred hosting companies. Novice webmasters are often confused by the various web hosting plans - ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, Dedicated Servers, eCommerce Hosting, FrontPage Web Hosting, Hosting With Templates, Managed Web Hosting, PHP Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Shared Hosting, Unix / Linux Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, Windows Hosting or Co-location Hosting. The size of the Web will continue to grow exponentially as more and more people join the crow to create their own websites. If web hosting companies do not expect average Joe to understand operating systems, programming languages or variations of web servers, they'll develop the service and sell the hosting plan that'll make sense to average Mary. New web hosting plan will be labeled in terms of what is can do for hosting customers, instead of technical buzzwords.

The Web hosting industry has been enjoying healthy growth as the global economy and IT industry revives. It's too early to see the tide of the third wave in Web hosting right now. If the first and the second wave of Web hosing were pushed by the start of a new economic cycle, the coming of the third wave may not be an exception either.

About The Author

Bruce Zhang has over 10 years of experience in web development, database design and managing web servers. He currently manages dozens of websites using ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, Dedicated Servers, eCommerce Hosting, Managed Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting for web hosting needs.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - New Techniques for Marketing Your Web Hosting Company in 2006

There are many ways to market a web hosting company. Traditional methods include web hosting directories, banner ads on webmaster sites, search engine placements, ppc advertising, and so on. These are all effective methods if used and managed properly. These techniques, however, market primarily to a limited target audience: Webmasters, Programmers, Graphic Designers, and small hosting companies.

With the evolution of web hosting and website builder tools, as well as the ongoing education of the common person, the average web hosting customer is no longer a Webmaster. It is more likely an alumni association, a church, an artist, a soccer club, or a family photo album. Recently, the staff of Hostchart.com analyzed the signups from several popular web hosting companies across the month of January, and here is what they found: the number of signups from people in the industry was less then 20%. Over 80% of all Hosting customer signups were from people who are not Internet professionals! So, how best does a Hosting Company target such a wide audience?

Assuming that 80% of your customer base is non-internet professionals, a Hosting Company's marketing methods should be greatly expanded beyond Webmasters alone. If your marketing budget includes online marketing only, then some potentially rich areas to find Hosting customers may be on sites like Vacation/Travel websites, Investment sites, Retirement websites, or any site that has a potential customer base with expendable time and/or income.

If a Hosting Company's advertising budget includes non-Internet methods, it may want to consider marketing on billboards, in newspapers, phone directories, or even brief commercial ads. GoDaddy has proven how powerful a TV ad can be with it's provocative Superbowl ads the last two years. Even a simple advertising method like handing out free t-shirts can have a farther-reaching impact on branding a Hosting Company's name than one might think.

Another noticeable change in the Web Hosting industry is the comfort level customers have with switching Hosting providers. Historically, customers did not change hosting companies. Most people were not comfortable moving their website for fear of downtime and lost data. The times have changed. People are more educated on websites, and there are plenty of web Hosting services that will move sites at minimal charge and without downtime. People feel free to move from Host to Host when they are offered a better plan. It is an increasingly competitive market, where companies must find new and better ways to stand out from the competition, whether that be from decreased cost, increased Customer Service, or farther reaching advertising campaigns. But Hosting Companies need not lose heart, for although competition is increasing, the number of people Worldwide who are getting connected to the internet is increasing at an exponential rate. It is a good time to be in the Hosting Industry!

About The Author

About the Author: Rodney Ringler is President of Advantage1 Web Services, Inc., which owns a network of Web Hosting Informational Websites including HostChart.com, ResellerConnection.com, FoundHost.com, ResellerForums.com, and HostingKnowledge.net. Rodney has over 15 years industry experience from programming to internet marketing.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Web Hosting Common Mistakes

In the course of doing business, we serve many customers. Likewise, in doing business, we will also be plagued by different problems.

Following is a list of the common mistakes that different web hosts tend to commit.

1. Falling For The Price Trap A website price at a very low rate will generally provide extremely slow site or common services will be denied because the bandwidth was maximized. Use your instincts and avoid low-priced websites.

2. Lack of Reseller Research Reseller hosting is not bad. As a matter of fact, good support is provided by resellers. However, it will be safe to research your reseller. They may offer good packages but they may be inexperienced in other aspects of web hosting. A good reseller must know their products inside and out.

3. No Clear Definition of Web Site Requirements. List down the resources that your web site will need and add more as you begin to expand. This facilitates everything when an upgrade of your website is needed as you can simply discuss them with your host.

4. Purchasing Hosting In An Auction Auctioned hosting, to say the least, is not unreliable as it may seem. However, these hosts have a great deal of terms and conditions which are usually more than what that regular websites would offer. As a result, inflexibility of the package may be experienced.

5. Forgiving A Host's Bad Or Limited Website Host that do not develop their own informative sites are unlikely to spend time developing informational site for your website.

6. Putting All The Eggs In One Basket Putting several sites in a single account may seem like a good deal. This does not hold true most of the time. When you site is income-generating, it may not be wise to interconnect them. Chances are when all your sites breakdown, your income will be lost. Try to work out with your host about how to spread out the connection of your sites.

7. Taking Testimonials At Face Value Not all testimonials are similar or true for customers. Ask the host if they have a contact of their customers and if you can talk to them. If the host does not want you to do this, that is a danger sign.

8. Not Keeping A Record Of Their Contact Information Keeping track of telephone numbers, addresses, contact persons or e-mail addresses is important. When a problem occurs in your site or when the system goes down, you can easily talk to the customer service to troubleshoot the problem for you.

9. Relying On Host Backups It is advisable to keep a back-up copy of your website. This is critical in times of emergency.

10. Trusting your host to have the latest software Viruses and computer hackers can strike anytime. It is always safe to check the software versions that you are planning to purchase from your host. Make sure that it is always updated.

About The Author

Michael Colucci is a writer for $2.99 Hosting and Low Interest Credit Cards

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Choosing the Wrong Web Hosting Plan Can Cost You Customers, Even Your Business

Do you regularly buy goods online? Does this experience sound familiar.. you go to an e-commerce website, only to find, to your annoyance, an excruciatingly slow response. You wait over 5 minutes for the next page to load. In the end you give up, and never make that purchase. Presumably many other people also give up, causing the loss of many other purchases.

Now imagine that you own that website, and run that online business. You set everything up properly, but you find that many people face the situation described above. You lose customers, and eventually you lose your business, and all this principally because you chose the wrong web hosting plan.

You see, when you set up any online business, I cannot over- stress the importance of choosing the right hosting company and plan.

In choosing a web hosting plan, you must decide whether to go for shared or dedicated hosting. With a shared hosting plan, your website co-exists with other websites on a computer, known as a server. With a dedicated hosting plan, your site, and your site alone resides upon just one server. You can get a good shared hosting plan for under $10 per month, whereas dedicated hosting plans can cost from $50 to over $100 a month.

For shared hosting, one server handles the traffic (visitors) coming to all the websites it accommodates. So if your site shares a server with other high-traffic sites, then it could run slow because the server works extra hard. Maybe the site will run slow at peak times during the day, when you would expect most customers to come and buy, causing the nightmare scenario above. However, hosting companies usually use many servers, with only a limited number of sites on each, thus spreading the load. I therefore advise you to read reviews on hosting companies to see whether people complain about sites slowing down due to overloading. I will say more on reviews later.

For dedicated hosting, your traffic does not compete with traffic to any other web sites. However, this costs much more, so I do not recommend dedicated hosting unless absolutely necessary.

When choosing a hosting plan, you must consider bandwidth. I'll give you a simple explanation of bandwidth. If your hosting plan allows you 10GB of monthly bandwidth, it allows you 10GB (10,000MB) of data transfer from your site each month. If each visitor to your site accesses pages containing 300kB (0.3MB) of data on average, then your plan allows you 10,000 / 0.3 = 30,000 visitors a month, or 1000 visitors a day. Ask yourself, do I need more than that?

Imagine the scene: your site averages 2000 visitors a day. Two weeks into the month, with your monthly bandwidth quota used up, your site "goes offline" until the beginning of next month, or until you buy more bandwidth. How devastating for your business! Take my advice: get enough bandwidth before you start.

Most importantly, you must know the effectiveness of your hosting company's customer support. Many companies offer 24/7 phone support, where you can ring them up any time day or night with a problem. But imagine this scenario:

Ian Clarence

You created a database on your site for storing all your customers' details. One day, the data gets corrupted, and everybody accessing your site sees an error message. Trust me, it happens! You need an administrator to tweak the database at their end. You must get this sorted out immediately but the hosting company gave you only an email address, so you send an email. Then you could wait two days for a reply. Many companies would actually email you back within the hour. However, a company with 24/7 phone support allows you to talk directly to a real person. He or she could then keep you informed of the situation as it progresses.

Always look at the hosting company's "uptime guarantee". Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers, which sounds quite high at first, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time: over 7 hours out of each month! If you can, choose a host guaranteeing 99.7% uptime.

When you decide upon a hosting company, always look at what other people say about them. Go to Google.com and type the web hosting company name, and "reviews" or "testimonials". This will give you a very rich list of sites where you can read other peoples' reviews, testimonials, reports, etc. so you can form an educated opinion. A word of warning, you will always find someone who says something negative about even the best web hosting companies.

So finally, before settling for a specific hosting plan and entrusting your precious online business to them, ask yourself these simple questions:

* Do they provide 24/7 phone support, not just email support?

* Does their bandwidth allow the number of visitors that you expect?

* Does the hosting plan enable your site to avoid going slow? What do the reviews say? What do the testimonials say?

* What uptime do they guarantee? Would your business survive your site going down for the remaining percentage each month?

* And can you find plenty of good reviews, and testimonials of many happy customers, and no too many complaints?

If you can answer yes to all these questions, then go for it! I wish you every success with your online business.


About The Author

Do you need a good, reliable but low cost web host?
Ian Clarence has put together HostCream.com.
Everybody says different things about web hosting, but HostCream.com regularly searches the internet for peoples' views on the best affordable web hosting package.
Visit HostCream.com before you choose!

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - ASP Web Hosting

by: M6.net

ASP web hosting refers to web hosting companies who provide support for ASP (Active Server Page). If you want a dynamic data-driven web site you may wish to embed ASP code into your web sites HTML Pages. When a user is viewing a web site that is developed using ASP, the pages can change depending on the actions of the user. ASP code allows you to link your web pages to a database, where users can interact with the web page by logging in and using their own personal settings or they can interactively place orders on your web site.

What is ASP?

ASP stands for Active Server Pages. Active Server Pages are HTML pages with embedded ASP scripts that are processed on the server before the page is sent to the user. ASP allows you to create dynamic database driven pages, a user can access data in a database, and interact with page objects such as Active X or Java components.

How does ASP work?

When you type a URL in the Address Box or click on a web page you are asking the web server to send a file to your computer; if the file is standard HTML, then, when your web browser receives the web page it will look exactly the same as it did on the web server. However if an ASP file is sent to your computer from the web server, firstly, the server will run the HTML code; and then, run the ASP code. For example: the ASP code could be the current date, or time; and other such information.

How to find an ASP web host

You will need to find a web host who will host your website on a Windows 2000 server. It is safer to host your ASP pages on a Windows 2000 server as they are more stable and most ASP components work with IIS (Internet Information Services), specific to Windows. You also need to consider if your web site uses a database (e.g. SQL, Access) and then make sure your web host provides support for the type of database your web site uses.

About The Author

M6.net
http://www.m6.net
priyankaa@m6.net

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - How to find good Web Hosting for your site!

by: Jonathan White

When building your first site the main things that you will probably think about is what types of content you will be adding to your site, how you are going to get visitors to your site and how you are going to generate good revenue from your site.

Well, all of the things mentioned above are crucial things to consider, but then again, whats the point in thinking about them if you cant even get a good Web host to host your site with. If you choose a Web host that has a poor service then it can do more damage to your site than good. If your sites host goes down often then your site will also go down and your visitors will get annoyed and will go elsewhere. Your sites earnings will decline and many people online will ignore your site, as people will start to think that your site is down more than what its up.

So now you are probably thinking to yourself, where and how can I find a good Web host to host my site with, which is also reasonably priced?

If you need a Web host that is reasonably priced so that you can make more profit from the turnover of your site, then a good place to start looking is by using a few Web hosting directories. You could start by using http://www.1hostseeking.com.

Ok! Now your probably think why would I want to use a Web hosting directory as they contain many Web hosting providers and not all of them are likely to be good.

The main reasons why you should use a Web hosting directory to find a Web host is so that you can easily find and compare a large amount of Web hosting providers that offer the services that you need to run your site successfully. You can also compare each Web hosts prices against each other and then you will be able to find a reasonably priced Web host.

Once you have narrowed down your search to a few Web hosts from the Web hosting directory, you could then go to your chosen Web hosting providers sites and check them out to have a better understanding to what they offer. If they look good, then the best thing to do is not to purchase any hosting from them until you have checked them out more virally. Checking a Web host out to see if they are reliable can be done by searching through some of the major search engines for reviews on your chosen few Web hosts and also you can check through some of the larger forums that discuss Web hosting topics. If you cant find any information about the few Web hosts that you have narrowed down and chosen within any of the forums that you use, then you could always bring up that topic yourself and ask others what they think about your chosen Web hosts and if they have had any experiences with the them.

Once you have received other peoples opinions about the Web hosts and you have also read a number of reviews about them, you will then have a better understanding of what Web host should be the best to use for you Website.

About The Author

Jonathan White has been involved in Web Hosting and other Webmaster activities on the Web for over two years now and is the Webmaster of http://www.1hostseeking.com - a categorized Web hosting directory listing a large amount of Web hosting providers.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Choosing A Web Hosting Provider

This article has been written with reference to Shared Web Hosting. Shared Web Hosting is suitable for anyone looking for an economical Web Hosting solution with total Web Space Requirement not exceeding 2 GB.

Decide your Requirements before You Choose Anything

Before choosing which hosting plan you want, decide what software you want to use first. It should not be that you buy a hosting account with a web hosting company, and then start looking around for software that does what you desire. When you eventually find what looks like the perfect software, it turns out that the software is not compatible with the web hosting account. Most often, in a Shared Hosting environment, any kind of customization is not possible.

To cut a long story short, decide upon your requirements before you actually start zeroing in on a Web Hosting Provider.

What you Need

If you are just starting out with your online Web Presence, you do not need to start off with a fancy Hosting Account. You can start off with a Basic Hosting account and upgrade as and when your requirements increase.

Implementing an E-Commerce site requires web-hosting services, which are somewhat different from the plain vanilla hosting services. Issues like SSL set up and Payment Gateway Integration need to be resolved. Your web-hosting company can usually take care of these 2 matters. However what needs to be taken care of is compatibility between what the Web Hosting Company is offering and what are your requirements. Take the example of Payment Gateway Integration. You might have decided to buy Payment Gateway services from one service provider whereas the Web Hosting provider would be in a position to provide Payment Gateway Integration for another service provider.

The Bare Minimums

A few of the givens with any good web hosting company are Unlimited FTP Access, 24*7 Web Support, and Uptime guarantee, Money Back Guarantee in case of non-satisfaction. Some of the other expected features are No Set Up Fee, Web mail with email, Web Based Site Admin, Email Forwarding, Unlimited Email Aliases, Email Auto Responders, server anti Virus Protection, etc.

Deciding Criteria

In terms of short listing a web hosting provider, look at the past record of the web hosting provider, number of years in web hosting business for the service provider, type of clients they have, their SLA, location of Data center and technical specifications of the hosting servers that are being offered for your shared hosting.

If the service to be signed up for includes some advanced features like Tomcat support, look for compatibility between your applications and the hosting features offered by the Hosting provider. Look at the Control Panel offered by the Web Hosting Provider and what exactly is offered in that Control Panel.

While deciding upon which Web Hosting Provider to go for, pay the utmost attention to your requirements and Compatibility between your requirements and what the web hosting service provider offers.

About the Author:
The author works with http://www.winwinhosting.com, a site dealing with Shared Hosting Services and Solutions, Anti Spam Solutions and Email Hosting Services. Win Win Hosting offers Affordable and Reliable Shared Web Hosting Services and Web Hosting Solutions.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Web Hosting Guide for Beginner

First and foremost, for non-IT savvy, it might be a little tough for them to comprehend the meaning of web hosting. I believe if you search it on any search engine, of course there will be answer and explanation for them. But, how far do you really understand? Honestly, when I first get to know this term few years back, I had problem understanding myself. Then, I found one simple explanation that might be easy for people to understand. So, today, if anyone were to ask me what is "web hosting", i'd explain as follows...

Imagine you are homeless and you want to rent a room or buy a house. In order to get a shelter for yourself, you need a room. So, you imagine yourself as the website and the room as the hosting that you need to place yourself in. That means your website need a web hosting. Then, that's the time you start finding yourself a web hosting provider. Here, web hosting provider would be the house owner who rents you the room. So, in order for your website to be available and browsed by Internet users, you need to make sure your website is hosted in a web server provided by a web hosting provider.

So, when you finally understand what web hosting is, next will be the time to find out more about the different types of web hosting available. You have shared hosting, dedicated hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and colocation hosting. You name it, the Internet has it! So many to remember and differentiate..so, let's get the ball rolling with...


Shared Hosting


Shared hosting means that a web server has its resources shared by many other websites. Or you can put it as, in a house, there are many tenants. Usually small or normal e-commerce businesses will choose this type of hosting. Websites with high traffic might not be able to choose this type of hosting due to insufficient webspace.


Dedicated Hosting


Dedicated hosting refers to hosting in which you rent a server from your web hosting provider and will be placed at your web hosting provider's datacentre. They will provide software installation and connection to Internet. This will indicates that the website owner has control over the server as they don't share it with other websites. In short, dedicated hosting is where only 1 user hosted on the server machine and have a full privilege over the server to manage it by themself. The server machine will be still belongs to the web hosting provider.


Colocation Hosting


Well, this hosting has the features which are almost the same as dedicated hosting EXCEPT that you provide your own server and web hosting provider just help you to plug it into their datacentre. You need to install own software and hardwares. Everything is DIY.


Reseller Hosting


Reseller Hosting is a hosting where the account owner has the priviledge to allocate the webspace and bandwidth access and resell them to his clients. This shows that reseller hosts act like a middleman and is usually not responsible for any software or hardware intallation. They only buy webspace and resell to clients.


VPS Hosting


VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It is almost the same as dedicated server. Hence, it's sometimes called Virtual Dedicated Server. Generally, it means that the account owner has the feeling as though his owns a dedicated server. In real sense, it's actually separating a physical server into several independent hosting spaces or VPS-es, each isolated from the other. This will allow you to create and manage multiple sites and domains and take full control of your VPS with root/administrator access which allows you to access the virtual hard disk, RAM and to reboot your private server independently from other VPS-es.


Domain Name


After we are done with the different types of hosting, there is something else which I want to touch on. It is none other than the "domain name". So, ever wonder what is domain name? Wow, sounds technical? Not really actually. Don't be scared. Last time, when I saw the words domain name, it freaked me out too. Now, when I got used to it, it's not that nerve-wracking after all. So, domain name is just the normal web address or url (Uniform Resource Locator) you type in the "address" area when you open a browser. Examples of domain name are "exabytes.com". You know? Just the normal web address. Well, since it's a web address, it's a unique name. Hence, there will be no other same domain name. In fact, domain name is actually corresponding with numeric IP address. So, every domain name will have its numeric IP address. For example, the IP address for exabytes.com is 72.18.131.206

When you see exabytes.com, ever wonder ".com" stands for what? It actually stands for commercial. Whenever you see .com, .org, .net or others which ends after the final dot or period (.) of a url, it is known as top-level domain. It actually tells you what kind of website it is, indirectly. And the commonly used domain name extension nowadays will be .org, .net, .com. However, there are a lot of new domain extension up for grab lately such as .aero, .info, .museum, and .name. Next in the list that I shall explain is, Country Level Domain Name. Examples of country level domain name is exabytes.com.my. It has ".my" as its country code top-level domain (ccTLD). .my here represents the country "Malaysia". Of course, different country will have different ccTLD. For example, .jp stands for Japan, .au for Australia, .ca for Canada.

There are more to learn in order to excel in web hosting industry. Hopefully this simple guide will help all those novice out there. There are other things you need to know as well. But, it will be in my next article. Cheers!

About The Author

SY Ho is an Online Marketing Executive for http://www.exabytes.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Web Developers can be successful Web Hosting resellers

By becoming a reseller, not only can web developers create websites for their clients, but they can provide their clients web hosting, as another studio service. All you need to become a reseller, is to find a web host who: offers multiple website hosting accounts; along with reseller services; and then its up to you to host your clients web sites from your own account. Your clients will be happy with the low fees you can offer; and, you will have yourself a very profitable side business.

So what do you need to be a successful website hosting reseller?

Multiple domain hosting To become a web hosting reseller, the first step is to get yourself a multiple domain account. For example, if you take out an account that allows up to 6 websites (or domains), you can use one of the domains for development of your own site; and, still have 5 domains to allocate to your clients sites. All you need to do is pay your regular fee to your web host; then, you can charge your clients what ever you like.

Control Panel It is preferable to have full administrative control over your clients web sites. Make sure that, not only does your web host provide you with a control panel that includes full administrative facilities to easily manage your multiple account, but that your host provides your clients with their own control panel too. Most importantly your web host should give you the facility to hide your web hosts identity so clients are unaware that you are offering a third party service. Ensure that you can customize your clients control panel to suit your own requirements.

Terms and conditions Terms and conditions are essential when offering any service, ensure that all your clients have a copy of your terms and conditions. Many resellers forget to create their own terms and conditions, as they are often very time-consuming to write. If you ask a web host you will find that some of them will either let you copy theirs or they will just supply you with terms and conditions specifically written for this purpose.

Fast and reliable support - Fast and reliable, service and support, is essential, from your web hosting company. If something happens to your clients web site it is important to be able to get the problem solved as soon as possible. You dont want clients being unhappy with your hosting services, as this will reflect badly on your other services too.

Reselling can be a very profitable side business if you find the right host. It may take up some of your time, however, if you put the time and effort into providing a little bit extra in your services, not only will your clients be a lot happier you will have a rewarding total web services business.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - It is time to become a web hosting reseller

As we know the web hosting industry is a multi billion dollar market that has became easy and automated which enables anyone to offer high quality web hosting services without spending a lot money so if you buy a reseller hosting package today then you will be running your own web hosting company overnight in the same time estimating the sure profits that you will make.

Everyday people from all over the world start new hosting companies by buying a reseller hosting package from a hosting company .There are many reasons which make people start hosting companies and the following are some of them but are not limited to.

Add more value to your current business .

Adding a web hosting service to your current business will add more value to it.No matter what kind of business you are in you can add web hosting service to it.

You will be able to offer many different services to your current customers including the most important one which is web hosting because everyone wants to have a site online these days for many purposes.

Increase your monthly income.

When you add web hosting service to your current business then you increase your monthly income by 100%. Lets suppose you have 200 web design customers who spend $5.00 per month for web hosting service which you outsource to a web hosting company .

And now by calculating what these customers of yours spend the outsourced hosting services then it will be $1,000 .So as you can see you are losing $1,000.

Wouldn't it be better if you offer them your web design service plus web hosting service and increase your monthly income by 100% ? Sure it is.

Even if you are not a web designer and have another service that has nothing to do with hosting but still you can offer hosting services to your current customers in the same time increase your income. So add web hosting service to your current business and see your income souring.

Set your own prices .

When you buy a reseller hosting package and start your own web hosting company then you will be able to set your own prices and be your own boss. You will be able to charge your customers what you want . Bill them the way you want.

You can even offer free hosting to whoever you want to offer .
Also can set lower prices compared to the prices of the hosting company which you bought the hosting reseller package from in that way you can get many customers in no time in the same time make profits.

Set up Customer accounts

Before I started my hosting business I used to get hosting for some of my web design customers from a hosting company which was good .

But there was one problem which was about the account activation time and I found that a big problem.They used to activate accounts within five business days !can you believe that? If I knew that it will take all that time to activate account with them then I wouldn't have bought any hosting package from them. I think you see the point.

Having your own web hosting company lets you set up customer accounts instantly or whenever you want .You will not have to wait some hosting company to set up your customer accounts instead you will do it by yourself .It is your company and you are the boss.

No need to worry about getting customers.

Whenever someone stars a hosting company the first question they ask is "How will I get customers"? Even though most of those people have some ready customers like friends etc but the question still is being asked.

But you don't need to worry about getting customers because you already have customers.For example if you are a web designer then your current web design customers will get hosting from you so that means no need to worry.

Of course not only web designers have ready customers for their new web hosting service but anyone with any business that has customers have also ready customers for his new service which is web hosting.

Conclussion

These were some of the main reasons which make people start their own web hosting companies . So it is time for you to add a web hosting service to your current business and get your share from this muli billion dollar industry .

If you don't know what to look for in a reseller hosting package then make sure you read my article which is titled "Six main things to consider when buying a reseller hosting package" .

That article has some of the main things you should consider when you are about to buy any reseller hosting package. Until next time good luck with your new web hosting company .

Everyday people from all over the world start new hosting companies by buying a reseller hosting package from a hosting company .There are many reasons which make people start hosting companies and the following are some of them but are not limited to.

Add more value to your current business .

Adding a web hosting service to your current business will add more value to it.No matter what kind of business you are in you can add web hosting service to it.

You will be able to offer many different services to your current customers including the most important one which is web hosting because everyone wants to have a site online these days for many purposes.

Increase your monthly income.

When you add web hosting service to your current business then you increase your monthly income by 100%. Lets suppose you have 200 web design customers who spend $5.00 per month for web hosting service which you outsource to a web hosting company .

And now by calculating what these customers of yours spend the outsourced hosting services then it will be $1,000 .So as you can see you are losing $1,000.

Wouldn't it be better if you offer them your web design service plus web hosting service and increase your monthly income by 100% ? Sure it is.

Even if you are not a web designer and have another service that has nothing to do with hosting but still you can offer hosting services to your current customers in the same time increase your income. So add web hosting service to your current business and see your income souring.

Set your own prices .

When you buy a reseller hosting package and start your own web hosting company then you will be able to set your own prices and be your own boss. You will be able to charge your customers what you want . Bill them the way you want.

You can even offer free hosting to whoever you want to offer .
Also can set lower prices compared to the prices of the hosting company which you bought the hosting reseller package from in that way you can get many customers in no time in the same time make profits.

Set up Customer accounts

Before I started my hosting business I used to get hosting for some of my web design customers from a hosting company which was good .

But there was one problem which was about the account activation time and I found that a big problem.They used to activate accounts within five business days !can you believe that? If I knew that it will take all that time to activate account with them then I wouldn't have bought any hosting package from them. I think you see the point.

Having your own web hosting company lets you set up customer accounts instantly or whenever you want .You will not have to wait some hosting company to set up your customer accounts instead you will do it by yourself .It is your company and you are the boss.

No need to worry about getting customers.

Whenever someone stars a hosting company the first question they ask is "How will I get customers"? Even though most of those people have some ready customers like friends etc but the question still is being asked.

But you don't need to worry about getting customers because you already have customers.For example if you are a web designer then your current web design customers will get hosting from you so that means no need to worry.

Of course not only web designers have ready customers for their new web hosting service but anyone with any business that has customers have also ready customers for his new service which is web hosting.

Conclussion

These were some of the main reasons which make people start their own web hosting companies . So it is time for you to add a web hosting service to your current business and get your share from this muli billion dollar industry .

If you don't know what to look for in a reseller hosting package then make sure you read my article which is titled "Six main things to consider when buying a reseller hosting package" .

That article has some of the main things you should consider when you are about to buy any reseller hosting package. Until next time good luck with your new web hosting company .

About The Author
Abdillahi Abdillahi is a web designer, founder and president of http://kooshin.com , a company providing affordable web hosting and web design solutions to small to medium sized businesses and individuals. For more information , please visit http://kooshin.com

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Should You Use Free Web Hosting?

There are literally thousands of places to get Free web hosting. Maybe you already have one. Are you happy with it? Do you wish you could do away with the advertising you must put up with?


There a number of reasons why you should not use free web hosting. If you only have a personal website for friends or family, than a free website is fine. However, if you are trying to sell a product or attract people to your website, it is a bad idea. Here is why.

1. Free Websites have no guarantee. They may be here today gone tomorrow.

2. Free websites usually put ads on their website, making your website look like an advertising medium for who knows what product.

3. Who is going to remember the long domain name.

4. A personalized business domain name is much easier to remember.

5. If I am interested in your service or product, and you have a free website, I am assuming that you are not offering a serious product or service.

Web Hosting is much cheaper than it used to be. You also get tons and tons of options with the plans these days. If you are interested in seeing plans from a number of different providers, check out www.bestwebhostingco.com.

About The Author

J. Ratliff offers a website for people looking for the best web hosting at www.bestwebhostingco.com.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - The Confusing World of Web Hosting: Making Your Decision

Before you can get a website up and running, you need to have a place to put it. Paying for web hosting is, basically, like renting a small amount of space on someone's server and paying what it costs them to send your web pages to your customers. Fortunately for you, though, web hosting has never been cheaper.

Domains and Hosting Together?

Many domain name companies have taken to offering you hosting when you buy your domain from them. This is generally an expensive option, and a bad idea - you'll be getting few features compared to what you're paying. Few people who are serious about web hosting get it from the same place they get their domains.

So Where Should I Start?

Well, that all depends on what your website is going to need. How many visitors do you expect to have? Are you going to have lots of large graphics on the site? Do you have a lot of articles or products that you want to put in a database? Do you want to have an email address at your website (yourname@yourdomain.com)? On and on it goes. Each host you look at will offer you different combinations of features at different price points, and finding the one that's right for you can be quite a task. Here's a technical-to-English guide to what you should be looking for.

MB storage. The more MB of storage you have, the more you can put on your website. For most websites, this number can be really very small without it being much of a concern - the pages would be too big for anyone to download and see before they'd be too big to store. You only really need to worry if you're planning to put something apart from plain pages on your site. If you want to make a gallery for your digital photos or let people download ebooks from you, for example, this number needs to be higher. GB bandwidth per month. This is a limit on how much data your website can transfer each month. For small websites, you don't need to worry too much, but as you get more visitors the amount you need will increase sharply, especially if each one looks at lots of pages or downloads large files from the site. The amount of bandwidth your site needs is generally considered to be the deciding factor in how 'big' it is, and how much it will cost you.

MySQL databases. The number of databases your website will have to store things in. It will make it much easier for you if you have one. Don't pay more to get extra, though: one database is all you need. It's worth noting that if your host may offer some other kind of SQL instead of MySQL (for example, PostgreSQL). You should usually avoid anything apart from MySQL, unless you know what you're doing.

PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby. These are all scripting languages, used to write your website. You should make sure your host offers the languages that any software you plan to use is written in. If you don't have specific requirements, then you should be fine with just Perl and PHP.

Subdomains. These allow you to split your website into more sections than just 'www' - you might decide, for example, that you would people to be able to go to 'shop.yourdomain.com' and 'news.yourdomain.com' and see pages there. You don't really need these, though, as doing the same thing with subfolders ('www.yourdomain.com/shop') is usually just as effective.

FTP accounts. An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) account is what you'll use to upload your website to your host. You'll always get one of these. The only situation when you'll need more is if you want to let someone alter things on your site without giving them the master password.

POP3 accounts. POP stands for 'Post Office Protocol', which is just fancy-speak for email. The more POP3 accounts you get, the more email addresses you can have: useful if you want to have sales@yourdomain.com for new customers and support@yourdomain.com for existing ones, for example.

About The Author

Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - How To Choose The Most Suitable Web Hosting

Choosing the most suitable webhosting type would naturally depend on your web site's type and its requirements and would play a vital role in your Internet activity.

You can divide all the web sites into three categories, such as:

- Small Business Homepages;
- Websites for E-commerce;
- Information Providers.

These three web sites types would require different amount of Disk Space, Bandwidth and so on. Small Business Homepages make the "smallest" web site type in the industry and there are probably most of them exciting today. The best option for these web sites is to purchase a Free or Shared (Virtual) webhosting package.

Websites for E-commerce are the websites that require more disk space and other resources and tools comparing to the previous website type. As if your website is to sell some goods or services you should expect for lots of visitors to come and their higher requirements. As there is a high competition among such sites and if your web site is down or if it doesn't operate in a proper way you'll probably lose a number of your potential clients and your profit as a result. Owners of such web sites should notice that best webhosting types for them are Co-location, Dedicated Servers (if you have a large Eshop). And Shared/Virtual or Virtual Private Server if you have no need in large Disk Space and Traffic amount or some other resources.

Information Providers usually make the most demanding web site types as they are to provide users around the world with the necessary information. That would require much traffic spending. So it's best for such web sites to be hosted on Dedicated Server, Co-location or VPS (Virtual Private Server).

The classification mentioned above is a bit rough and that is simply to give you the whole idea. Of course choosing a webhosting plan would require information that is more specific. Though no article can give a certain answer for example considering the amount of Storage space you'd need for your website. You may receive such information from the webhosting provider's support team. In this article we can only tell you about all the possibilities so that would be easier for you to choose.
So coming back to webhosting types that have already been mentioned above there is an obvious need in their more specific description.

Free webhosting and Shared/Virtual webhosting are similar in the way they are provided. In both cases you rent disk space from the webhosting provider on its server. You receive no control over the server's operating. Unlike Shared/Virtual webhosting Free webhosting does not provide you with any guarantees. So you get totally unprotected from the webhosting company's possible incompetence or its dishonesty.

Dedicated webhosting is mainly for large companies or for resellers as the Disk space amount ranges from 800 MB to 25000 MB and even more. Most of Dedicated webhosting options are to be managed and secured by your own highly professional IT stuff. This could be pretty expensive too. Many wehosting companies today also offer such solution as Managed Webhosting that leaves all of your concerns for the cheap webhosting company to solve. There is also a Dedicated webhosting subtype and that is Co-location which means you place your own sever in the cheap webhosting company's Data Center.

There are also two options of Co-location depending on that who maintains your server. That could be Managed and Unmanaged Co-location. These solutions work same as Manage or Unmanaged Dedicated webhosting.

VPS/VDS (Virtual Private Sever/Virtual Dedicated server) make the best solution for large web sites too. This webhosting type took its place between Dedicated and Shared web hosting and has got the best from both of them. It is organized almost in the same way as Shared webhosting as you share one physical server with other customers but you have your own virtualized disk that is totally independent from other disks. So you don't have to perchance too much Disk Space if you don't need it and still have same security that is available with Dedicated webhosting.

Today all the webhosting companies offer same webhosting solutions and there is a difference in prices and plans content only. So it would be more important for you to choose a cheap webhosting company and to make plan defining the main parameters when starting your Internet activity.

About the Author: Victoria Nikolayeva is a writer and articles editor of sites http://www.cheap-web-hosting-directory.com , http://www.web-site-hosting-reviews.com and http://www.web-hosting-review.net.

Web Hosting in 2006 --- Finding the Niche and Cashing in!

Over this past year, web hosting has grown to be the biggest it has ever been. With more companies appearing every day, the demand for web hosting has never been higher.

In 2006, web hosting will be even bigger.

It has been estimated that 38 million people will put their very first websites online in this next year. And, by 2008, the internet sales industry will top the 120 billion dollar mark.

What does this mean for you?

Finding the right web host for your application will be easier. Quality web hosting companies will separate themselves from the rest of the industry, and unprofessional web hosting companies will suffer. Support will become the number one factor for people when choosing a web host. Traditional advertising will become less and less effective, as most people will choose a web host based on colleagues recommendations.

This is going to create a great opportunity for web hosting affiliates, and resellers. By simply referring people to hosting services, many people will be able to make full time income. They are doing it right now.

Think about it. Everyone who wants a web site needs a web hosting company to host it for them. Currently, there is no definitive hosting industry leader, and most people choose hosts based on recommendations.

If you are happy with your web host, check to see if they operate an affiliate program. Instead of paying them every month, or year, imagine them paying you? It can be as easy as putting a small powered by or hosted by link on the bottom of your page.

Why pay for web hosting if you dont have to? Why not get paid to let people know you like your web host.

Remember when choosing a web host; choose one that has fantastic customer support. Look for hosting affiliate programs, or even RESIDUAL affiliate programs, which are programs that pay you a percentage every month for a client you refer, and allow you to build a steady income.

For more information about our web hosting and affiliate program, please visit our site www.markethoster.com

About the author:
-------------------------------------------------
Evan Ernst is the owner of Markethoster, and the innovator of the Residual Profit Affiliate System. Need a free web hosting solution? How about getting paid too?
www.markethoster.com
-------------------------------------------------

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - A Few Benefits of Affordable Web Hosting

There are many web hosting providers offering incredibly low prices in the web hosting industry today. It is amazing to see how times have changed. Looking back to even just ten years ago, web hosting could run in the hundreds of dollars for each month of service. Today, people are getting web hosting for less than ten dollars a month. The prices definitely have gone down but how about the service and quality of the web hosting? Let's take a look at what are some of the positives of selecting an affordable web hosting provider.

What you get from affordable web hosting
The most obvious benefit of affordable web hosting is the low price. Typically, the price will be less than $9 a month. This is a major plus for a majority of webmasters with web sites right now. They are now able to have web sites without pay a ton of money each month. Now, they can quit their second job that they needed to pay for the web hosting service.

Another benefit to affordable web hosting is that you personally have more control over your site. Basically, we are looking at a "self service" type of hosting where much of the control over your web site is controlled by you and not by the web hosting provider. This allows greater and faster updates to your web site. You don't have to wait for someone from the company to make the changes or additions and then make it all live. You can decide on the update schedule and even make corrections as you work. So now designing and uploading sites just takes minutes instead of days of waiting for the web hosting provider to make the changes for you.

A new standard that is beginning to show up more among affordable web hosting providers is the ability to host multiple web sites from just one hosting account. So let's say for example you are paying $8 a month for web hosting by a provider that offers this multiple web site hosting plan. If you decide to create 3 more web sites and host from the same account, in essence, it will be like only paying $2 a month for each web site.

Many affordable web hosting providers are doing other things like adding extra features and increasing resources to get you to select them as your choice for affordable web hosting. Competition has always been good for customers and in the case of web hosting this still holds true. So now, customers are getting a lot more for the low price. This is definitely a good thing.

When in doubt...seek help in selecting an affordable web host
In conclusion, these are just a few of the benefits that are available to webmasters willing to take a chance on affordable web hosting. Of course, each individual hosting provider will have some features that make them better than others so it is a good idea to shop around. To help in the selection process for a web hosting, you may consider checking out web hosting review sites to help you make an informed decision on the affordable web hosting provider that has everything you need.

About The Author

by Webhostingrevealed.com staff A Few Benefits of Affordable Web Hosting ? 2006 Webhostingrevealed.com

Friday, March 17, 2006

Web Hosting For Internet Marketers

Anybody researching the internet for web hosting services will find an abundance of hosting providers to choose from along with a multitude of plans available. You'll also discover that the majority of providers will offer many of the same plan features. However, there are some hosting companies that offer additional tools directed towards internet marketers and the home business industry.

Even for experienced internet marketers, with the variety of companies and plans available, it's not always easy to determine which web hosting service will best meet his or her specific business needs. With so many options, how do you know which hosting provider is best suited for you and your business?

One thing for certain is that whatever you decide, do not make the mistake of basing your decision on the price of hosting alone. One thing that has been substantiated time and time again is the old adage "you get what you pay for." Well, this also applies to web hosting!

If you're an internet marketer or own an internet home business, listed below are some common features you should be looking for in a web hosting package. Of course, it will be easy to find providers that offer more that what's listed here (e.g. 1,000 MB of disk space, unlimited sub-domains, unlimited emails, etc), not to mention a number of additional features, so keep in mind that these benchmarks only represent a few of the minimum requirements:

- 300+ MB of Disk Space - 10 GB or more of Monthly Bandwidth - 50+ Email Accounts - 20+ Sub-domains - CGI-Bin - 3+ MySQL Databases

In addition to these common features, there are some web hosting companies that cater to internet marketers and home business entrepreneurs by offering useful marketing tools as part of their hosting package. As you probably know, having access to in-demand marketing tools is a key ingredient in becoming successful on the internet. Some of the tools I'm referring to include:

- Unlimited Follow-up Autoresponders - Resalable E-Book Collections - FFA Leads - Lead Capture Systems - Ad Tracking - Shopping Carts - Scripts - Affiliate Programs and Commissions

These tools are a great benefit to both new and experienced internet marketers. But, in addition to the tools, another very important difference I've found with these types of providers is their exceptional level of customer support. Whether it's assisting with the installation of a script, a problem copying files to the server, or responding to a general question, the support staff tend to be very knowledgeable and can be contacted around the clock either via telephone, live chat or email.

Compared to some web hosting services, you may notice the cost of these plans to be slightly higher because of the extra marketing tools and the quality of customer support provided. However, with the growing popularity of internet marketing and the ever increasing number of new home businesses popping up on the internet, these providers can definitely give you an advantage over your competition. And, if you choose a provider that offers an affiliate program, you could even end up with free web hosting and a profit to boot!

About The Author
John Purdy operates 1st Web Hosting Plans, a directory of popular and affordable web hosting providers. We also feature web hosts dedicated to internet marketing and the home business industry. Visit us today at: http://www.1st-web-hosting-plans.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Free Web Hosting Options

Where can I find free web hosting?

Where can I find free web hosting?
There are hundreds of free web hosting services on the web. You can type free web hosting into any major search engine and get an expanded list. However, when you sign up for free hosting account, you are basically signing an expanded advertising agreement.

What exactly is free hosting?
In exchange for free hosting, the company can place ads your website. The ads can be placed on the top of the main page, the top of every page, or on the sides. The ads are usually not targeted. It is possible that they wont match the demographics of your web visitors. In addition, they are not customized to match the content on your web page.

This is a very expensive exchange program if your goal is to build up an online business. The area above the fold, everything that is visible without scrolling, is the most effective advertising area on the entire site. This is the area you should use for your affiliate links, Google Adsense, paid links and expanded site navigation.

Some free web hosting contracts go a step further and ask for your participation in their email marketing campaigns. You will receive emails that require a click through to a merchant site, and/or fill out endless surveys. This can be very time consuming and annoying.

Before you sign any free hosting contract ask to see sample sites. You want to get a feel for the types of ads that are being shown on other website. What do you want to look for?
1. Do you see pop-up ads? What about banners?
2. How large are the ads?
3. Are they just off topic or are they inappropriate?
4. Where are the ads? Are they on every single page or on selected pages?

Even if the ads are not on every page, watch out. It could mean that the hosting service has figured out which pages bring in the most revenue and they can afford to ignore everything else. Guess what? If it brings in lots of revenue for them, it could probably bring in lots of revenue for you.

Theres free and then theres FREE
If the space is free, what about the domain name?

If your new site will look like http://yoursite.freewebhost.com youre getting a subdomain for your site. Its not really your unique domain name. They are simply loaning you a space for your stuff.

This is not a unique domain name that you can use to brand your business. You cant use it anywhere except with this particular web hosting company. Ditto if the new domain names is http://www.freewebhost.com/yoursite/.

So what if they offer a truly unique domain name?
How long will it take before you actually own the domain name? Even the cheap web hosting services will require that you stay with the company for thirty to sixty days before you can keep a free domain name.

What happens if you want to switch to another company before the period is up? Sometimes theres a charge to keep the domain name or to transfer it. This should be clearly stated in their FAQ's or in the text of the hosting contract before you agree to use their service.

Do you have enough bandwidth?
Many free web hosting services are providing their services in such a way that you will need to upgrade your hosting package if your site has any degree of minor success. The tipping point is usually bandwidth. That is a measure of how much text, pictures, ftps etc. you can send to your web customers every month.

The Bandwidth in your contract is measured on a monthly basis. Check the contract to see if there are any fees for going over your monthly amount, or if you will lose your free hosting privileges.

Free host today, no host tomorrow
There is a very high turnover for free web hosting services that heavily depend on advertising revenue. Even the most successful web companies will find that their advertising revenue varies on a monthly basis. Will the company suddenly go out business if they hit a three month slump?

There should be a written policy on what happens to your content if they site suddenly goes out of business. Can you still access your files? Is there an alternative URL or login site with your information? How much time do you have?

You are only as reliable as your hosting service
Check out the statistics on the uptime for their servers. This applies to any hosting service, whether you are paying or not. If their uptime is in the low 90s and below, then try to find another hosting provider.

You are taking a big risk if you use a free web hosting services for your business site. The inability to control your advertising, high turnover rates among the free hosting providers, and variable contracts usually spells disaster for e-commerce sites.

To run a successful online venture, 24-hour live customer service, high uptimes ratios and control of your advertising space is a must. These features are also the major weaknesses of the average free hosting provider.

A better option for you company would be to sign up for an affordable or cheap web hosting provider. You will have many service options in this category and can usually avoid the limitations of the free hosting companies.

Syd Johnson is the Executive Editor of RapidLingo.com, a Financial Solutions Website. This article may be freely distributed as long as the author's bio is included with an active link to http://www.rapidlingo.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - When is it time to change your web hosting provider?

Building a web site is the easy part, getting it hosted right is difficult. There are many options like Host way, iPowerWeb, Homestead, which are paid hosts and many free ones like GeoCities.

The cost of a paid service would be between US$ 5 and US$10 a month. The most immediate advantage is that you pass on the burden of storage, security, and bandwidth to another's shoulders.

A good host whether paid or free should have in place:

* Usable web design tools. And an updated server software.

* E-commerce advice as well as options likes form remailer, chat, or bulletin board.

* Remote access. Allows access to and uploading of files from anywhere in the world.

* Unparalleled services. Answers to technical questions as well as solutions to problems. Customer service must be 24x7 in actuality.

* Plan options.

* Sufficient disk space and bandwidth.

* A 24x7 uptime.

* A free trial option.

* Quality Internet connection plans. The host should be clear about what they can offer for example, if they offer T1 then it allows only 1.544 Mbps while an OC-256 allows 13,000 Mbps.

* Server speeds that are not hindered by the number of sites being accessed simultaneously. Ping a site and see the response time.

* Processors that can take immense load and not slow down the site's transmission.

* Tight and dependable security measures. Ensure that your site will be protected from unwanted intrusions. Security protocols should be clearly outlined. The hosting company must have plans in place to upgrade and maintain security measures.

Sadly a web hosting dream can become a nightmare when: the host does not keep promises, the site outgrows the hosting plan, there are no responses to your e-mails or phone calls of distress, the charges are way beyond your budget, the server has a virus or other problems.

Do not panic, take a breath and try and solve hosting problems by using web hosting talk forums. These are interactive and you will get many suggestions and offers within a minute or two of posting your dilemma.

Do your homework well visit one of the links below it will narrow as well as facilitate your work.

* HostIndex.com at http://www.hostindex.com/ is a well organized directory dedicated to aspects of web hosting .Has in depth information on the top 25 web hosts, domain registration, SME hosting , e-commerce advice, and more.

* CNet.com at http://reviews.cnet.com/Web_hosting/2001-6540_7-0.html is a complete directory on web hosting. Covers articles, buying advice, hosting plans, as well as news and developments in the field. Offers comparisons between services of different providers and invaluable editor's ratings.

* 1st Site Free has at: http://www.1stsitefree.com/selecthost-directory.htm a comprehensive listing of various web hosting directories.

Web hosting is not difficult if you plan well, know your options, and keep abreast of technological developments.

About The Author

Paul Wilson is a freelance writer for http://www.1888Discuss.com/web-hosting/ , the premier REVENUE SHARING discussion forum for Web Hosting Forum including topics on technical support, security issues, domain name discussion and more. He also freelances for the premier Web Hosting Site http://www.1866WebHosting.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Choosing the Wrong Web Hosting Plan Can Cost You Customers, Even Your Business

Do you regularly buy goods online? Does this experience sound familiar.. you go to an e-commerce website, only to find, to your annoyance, an excruciatingly slow response. You wait over 5 minutes for the next page to load. In the end you give up, and never make that purchase. Presumably many other people also give up, causing the loss of many other purchases.

Now imagine that you own that website, and run that online business. You set everything up properly, but you find that many people face the situation described above. You lose customers, and eventually you lose your business, and all this principally because you chose the wrong web hosting plan.

You see, when you set up any online business, I cannot over- stress the importance of choosing the right hosting company and plan.

In choosing a web hosting plan, you must decide whether to go for shared or dedicated hosting. With a shared hosting plan, your website co-exists with other websites on a computer, known as a server. With a dedicated hosting plan, your site, and your site alone resides upon just one server. You can get a good shared hosting plan for under $10 per month, whereas dedicated hosting plans can cost from $50 to over $100 a month.

For shared hosting, one server handles the traffic (visitors) coming to all the websites it accommodates. So if your site shares a server with other high-traffic sites, then it could run slow because the server works extra hard. Maybe the site will run slow at peak times during the day, when you would expect most customers to come and buy, causing the nightmare scenario above. However, hosting companies usually use many servers, with only a limited number of sites on each, thus spreading the load. I therefore advise you to read reviews on hosting companies to see whether people complain about sites slowing down due to overloading. I will say more on reviews later.

For dedicated hosting, your traffic does not compete with traffic to any other web sites. However, this costs much more, so I do not recommend dedicated hosting unless absolutely necessary.

When choosing a hosting plan, you must consider bandwidth. I'll give you a simple explanation of bandwidth. If your hosting plan allows you 10GB of monthly bandwidth, it allows you 10GB (10,000MB) of data transfer from your site each month. If each visitor to your site accesses pages containing 300kB (0.3MB) of data on average, then your plan allows you 10,000 / 0.3 = 30,000 visitors a month, or 1000 visitors a day. Ask yourself, do I need more than that?

Imagine the scene: your site averages 2000 visitors a day. Two weeks into the month, with your monthly bandwidth quota used up, your site "goes offline" until the beginning of next month, or until you buy more bandwidth. How devastating for your business! Take my advice: get enough bandwidth before you start.

Most importantly, you must know the effectiveness of your hosting company's customer support. Many companies offer 24/7 phone support, where you can ring them up any time day or night with a problem. But imagine this scenario:

You created a database on your site for storing all your customers' details. One day, the data gets corrupted, and everybody accessing your site sees an error message. Trust me, it happens! You need an administrator to tweak the database at their end. You must get this sorted out immediately but the hosting company gave you only an email address, so you send an email. Then you could wait two days for a reply. Many companies would actually email you back within the hour. However, a company with 24/7 phone support allows you to talk directly to a real person. He or she could then keep you informed of the situation as it progresses.

Always look at the hosting company's "uptime guarantee". Many guarantee 99% uptime for their servers, which sounds quite high at first, but it does mean that your site could go down for 1% of the time: over 7 hours out of each month! If you can, choose a host guaranteeing 99.7% uptime.

When you decide upon a hosting company, always look at what other people say about them. Go to Google.com and type the web hosting company name, and "reviews" or "testimonials". This will give you a very rich list of sites where you can read other peoples' reviews, testimonials, reports, etc. so you can form an educated opinion. A word of warning, you will always find someone who says something negative about even the best web hosting companies.

So finally, before settling for a specific hosting plan and entrusting your precious online business to them, ask yourself these simple questions:


* Do they provide 24/7 phone support, not just email support?
* Does their bandwidth allow the number of visitors that you expect?
* Does the hosting plan enable your site to avoid going slow? What do the reviews say? What do the testimonials say?
* What uptime do they guarantee? Would your business survive your site going down for the remaining percentage each month?
* And can you find plenty of good reviews, and testimonials of many happy customers, and no too many complaints?

If you can answer yes to all these questions, then go for it! I wish you every success with your online business.


About The Author

Do you need a good, reliable but low cost web host?

Ian Clarence has put together HostCream.com.

Everybody says different things about web hosting, but HostCream.com regularly searches the internet for peoples' views on the best affordable web hosting package.

Visit http://www.hostcream.com before you choose!

Web Hosting Server - What to look for

As with any service, the question of what to look for in server hosting packages depends largely on the goals you have. If you have a company in need of a server host, your needs are naturally going to be much different than if you are an individual looking for a server host.

To get a basic understanding of what to look for in server hosting packages, you should first understand what is meant by server hosting. On a very basic level, computers simply communicate with other computers in order to get information delivered to your screen. In order to view any Internet page - including this one - you either ran a search or typed in an Internet address and the page appeared. In order for the page to appear on your screen, your computer communicated the request to another computer. In this situation, your computer is called a "client" or "user" computer. The other computer is called the "server" computer. A server host is a company that provides some services for those server computers, usually in the form of housing the computers, maintaining hardware and sometimes even maintenance of programming.

If you have a company and are in the market for server hosting packages, you first need to make a list of your specific requirements. Amount of space, services and speed are probably among the most important aspects of what to look for in server hosting packages. As you decide what you want from your server host, you should consider not only the current needs but also the future needs of your company. Do you expect to expand some day? Are you going to need a bigger website with more features at some point? Sometimes, web hosts limit users to "static" websites, while others allow for interactive sites. Remember that an interactive web page will typically require more space but will be more likely to draw visitors to stop by again.

Especially if you have no one on staff who is computer savvy, server maintenance, website design and other services might be an important part of what to look for in server hosting packages. It could be a great benefit to you if you can describe what you want and be handed a finished project, ready to start serving customers. Remember that your business will not likely stay exactly the same and you might find yourself in need of additional services - interactive website design, increased security or greater flexibility in e-mail accounts. Finding a server hosting pack from a company that can provide any services you might need is important for a fledgling company. It's also a good idea to assure yourself as much as possible that the company you choose to be your server host can keep pace if your company does grow.

As you consider other things to look for in server hosting, remember that you are the customer and the company you are considering should have great customer service. You should read reviews on many of the major server hosts, and you can likely find others who are using that server host and will attest to the reliability (or unreliability, as the case may be) of the company's dedication to solving problems in a timely manner. After all, even the best hosting in the world isn't going to benefit you if you can't get problems solved.


About the author:
Brian Thorn is an avid internet enthusiast who writes easy-to-understand articles about web hosting. Also check out: cheap web hosting package, internet service provider hosting and email domain hosting.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - What Exactly Is Virtual Web Hosting?

So you have decided that you want to start a website, or even an e-commerce site. You have managed the site design, and have even purchased a domain name, but now what? You will never get any visitors to your site if it isn't accessible via the web. The only way to do that is by using a server. The server will maintain a permanent connection with the web and on the server will be stored all the information about your website. In effect, users will come onto the server access your website and then when they decide to move to another website they will access information from another server. So, the real question is, what type of server do you need?

For all individual users and most small e-commerce users, virtual web hosting is the way to go. The other option, having a dedicated server, means that you will actually go out and purchase a big and very expensive piece of hardware that will be used for your website alone. Virtual web hosting is, essentially, renting a small piece of someone else's server. Virtual web hosting which is also called shared hosting, because it usually means many different sites are all located on a single server, and is vastly more economical than owning and maintaining your own server. But beyond just economics, there are a great number of reasons to use virtual web hosting rather than dedicated hosting.

One primary reason is downtime. Running a server is often quite a bit more complex than running your own personal computer. There is a real need to stay on top of technological advancements, watch for usage spikes, and maintain adequate bandwidth access. A server is hardware that must stay in constant contact with the internet if people are to be able to access your site. As a result, trying to manage all of the aspects of a server, in order to ensure that the individuals are able to access your website all the time, can easily be a full time job. A job which, for most individuals and small companies, is simply unreasonable.

Consequently, the virtual web hosting industry has flourished. With easy to use interfaces, individuals who have no experience with internet hosting, or building their own website for that matter, are able to set up an account with a virtual web hosting company. These companies also often provide one stop shopping services such as email forwarding, data transfer, backup services for your website in case of a crash, technical support, and often your own set of email addresses specifically for your website.

All of these features are ultimately designed for one purpose, to make the process of putting up and managing a website a realistic possibility for individuals and small companies that would otherwise find the prospect of hiring a full time staff to maintain hosting impossible. The ease of use and the affordability of virtual web hosting have harnessed the power of economic collaboration to provide individuals and companies with a practical way to get and keep their site on the web.


About The Author

Paul Herbert writes about a variety of web development topics and recommends Net Explorers for web hosting in the UK.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Choosing Your Web Hosting Reseller Software

As a web host reseller, one of your most important business decisions is your choice of web hosting control panel software. The web hosting software you use will save or cost you time, money, and frustration.

What reseller control panel features will reduce your workload? What hosting software programs are integrated with the reseller control panel or work with it? What website control panel features will your clients like?

In this article, weve compared four quality web hosting reseller software programs:

Alabanza
cPanel
H-Sphere
Plesk

All of these reseller control panels come with control panels for your clients. They all have numerous features advanced email management, web statistics, pre-installed scripts, multi-language support, and more. They all work on Linux platforms, while H-Sphere and Plesk also work with Windows. According to the cPanel website, a Windows version of cPanel is in development.

Other features that set these control panels apart are their degree of automation, the number of features and ease of use for the end user, and the features and ease of use for you, the reseller.
Alabanza

When you become an Alabanza reseller, you dont just have a reseller account you lease a dedicated server from Alabanza. Alabanza owns the control panel the server, and you resell directly for Alabanza. If you lease a dedicated Alabanza server, you can create your own reseller accounts. However, only you can set up hosting plans; resellers below you will be limited to hosting plans that you create.

Alabanza offers resellers a high degree of automation with its Domain System Manager (DSM), which can significantly reduce overhead and time spent on routine tasks:

Account creation
Billing and invoice management
Credit card processing
Domain registration
Email notifications
Ordering fraud protection

Even novices can sell hosting with this level of automation.

DSM also integrates with bulkregister.com for domain name registration. It does not easily integrate with other domain registrars, though.

A key Alabanza feature that resellers can offer their clients is the Xpress Product Suite, which provides web development and email management tools. The Xpress Product Suite includes SiteXpress, a website-building program that features over 300 templates and requires no web design skills.

cPanel

For resellers and end users, cPanel is known for its ease of use and range of features. cPanels collection of over 50 pre-installed scripts and Fantastico auto installer help clients set up their sites with little web development knowledge.

A basic cPanel reseller account comes with two separate programs for resellers to manage their business:

WHM (Web Host Manager) is used to create accounts and packages, add and suspend sites, modify passwords, view bandwidth usage, park domains, install SSL certificates, and perform other administrative functions.
From the resellers cPanel control panel, a drop-down menu takes the reseller to the control panels for each of the sites on the reseller account, including the resellers site.

With the addition of an optional program, WHM AutoPilot, you can automate account creation and suspension, email notifications, and other tasks. WHM AutoPilot also integrates with common payment gateways and has a helpdesk, an invoice module, and other tools.
H-Sphere

H-Sphere is designed for both Linux and Windows platforms. Moreover, resellers can set up plans for both Linux and Windows and administer sites on different servers from the same control panel. The control panel, actually a separate server, also provides administrative access to the integrated helpdesk.

The H-Sphere control panel server automates account configuration, credit card processing, domain registration, and email notifications. It also includes a built-in billing module and supports over 20 payment gateways.

From the resellers point of view, H-Sphere has a higher learning curve than most other control panels because of its numerous features. For example, when setting up a new plan, the administrator has two pages of features to choose from, including setup and monthly pricing for optional services.

Beginning webmasters may find H-Sphere too complicated for their needs. More advanced users, however, appreciate the features and control that H-Sphere offers the end user. A key feature is the ability to have control over separate domains with multi-domain hosting.

H-Sphere comes with the website builder SiteStudio, which guides users through a variety of style choices and stores content separately from the layout. No HTML or FTP knowledge is required.
Plesk

Plesk is known for its stability and security. Resellers and end users like its simple navigation, its clean interface, and its professional appearance. It comes in versions for both Linux and Windows platforms.

With Plesk, all users use the same control panel but with different levels of control:

Server administrator
Client / reseller
Domain owner
Mail user

Each level of the control panel gives the user control of that level and the level(s) below it. Email users, for example, can log into their mail user control panel to change their password, add autoresponders, and change other personal settings without having access to the domain owner control panel.

Plesk handles SpamAssassin at the mailbox level rather than at the domain level.
This feature enables users to whitelist or blacklist email for each email address, allowing each email user to have individual settings.

SWsoft, the company behind Plesk, also offers SiteBuilder, a five-step website builder using pre-built templates. SiteBuilder has over 300 templates in different categories to choose from, and users can publish their sites without any HTML or FTP knowledge.

If your Plesk reseller account is with a web host that offers HSPcomplete, you will have some automation available with your account, such as credit card charges and email notification.


About the author:
About the author: Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for Website Source, Inc. http://www.websitesource.com. Her established writing skills coupled with experience in the website hosting industry have provided internet professionals with marketing, product and service ideas for many years.


Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - The Problem with Free Web Hosting

There are literally thousands of places to get Free web hosting. Maybe you already have one. Are you happy with it? Do you wish you could do away with the advertising you must put up with?

There a number of reasons why you should not use free web hosting. If you only have a personal website for friends or family, than a free website is fine. However, if you are trying to sell a product or attract people to your website, it is a bad idea. Here is why.

1. Free Websites have no guarantee. They may be here today gone tomorrow.

2. Free websites usually put ads on their website, making your website look like an advertising medium for who knows what product.

3. Who is going to remember the long domain name.

4. A personalized business domain name is much easier to remember.

5. If I am interested in your service or product, and you have a free website, I am assuming that you are not offering a serious product or service.

Web Hosting is much cheaper than it used to be. You also get tons and tons of options with the plans these days.
If you are interested in seeing plans from a number of different providers, check out www.bestwebhostingco.com.

About The Author
J. Ratliff offers a website for people looking for the best web hosting at Best Web Hosting.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Having The Best Web Hosting Plan

If and when you're interested in starting a business online, there are a lot of things that you have to study first before you can rightfully expect a high ROI or return on investment.

First, you have to make sure that your company website has a user friendly interface which basically means links are visible, easily located and properly labeled and that the content provided in the website is complete, interesting, effective and grammatically correct.

Secondly, there's the little matter of search engine optimization or SEO which requires you to employ a number of strategies that your company website is heard and seen by the right people. Common search engine optimization strategies would be keyword listing, site code optimization and top search engine placement.

And of course, we finally come to the main theme of our article: web hosting. No matter how great your website looks or how effective your SEO strategies are, if you don't have the right web hosting plan, none of those would see the light of the day because your web hosting plan simply prevents them from being properly uploaded and viewed.

Web hosting is integral to your plans if you want your website to have its own niche in the Internet so do read carefully what we're about to teach you.

You have mainly two choices when it comes to web hosting - you can get it for free or you can spend for it. Naturally, it would be lovely if web hosting would be free for all of us but understand that all the needs of your company website must be met by the free web hosting plan if you want your future to look rosy.

In order to determine whether your company website could do well even with a free web hosting plan, here are some key issues to address.

Are you willing to put up advertisements that may take too much space or would have an irritable effect on your readers? These ads are often required by free web hosting plans because it's the only reason they can continue letting people enjoy free web hosting.

Are you okay with low bandwidth access and minimal web space? Because of these constrictions, you may not be able to create a website that's exactly to your liking.

Are you capable of some basic software troubleshooting? Most free web hosting plans do not offer any free live customer support so you might be forced to solve a problem or two on your own when something wrong happens.

If you're not ready for the situations enumerated above then perhaps it's better that you go for a post paid web hosting plan so that all your worries would be over.

About The Author
Michael Colucci is a technical writer for $2.99 Hosting - A site that offers different web hosting packages starting at $2.99 per month.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Should You Use Free Web Hosting?

There are literally thousands of places to get Free web hosting. Maybe you already have one. Are you happy with it? Do you wish you could do away with the advertising you must put up with?

There a number of reasons why you should not use free web hosting. If you only have a personal website for friends or family, than a free website is fine. However, if you are trying to sell a product or attract people to your website, it is a bad idea. Here is why.

1. Free Websites have no guarantee. They may be here today gone tomorrow.

2. Free websites usually put ads on their website, making your website look like an advertising medium for who knows what product.

3. Who is going to remember the long domain name.

4. A personalized business domain name is much easier to remember.

5. If I am interested in your service or product, and you have a free website, I am assuming that you are not offering a serious product or service.

Web Hosting is much cheaper than it used to be. You also get tons and tons of options with the plans these days. If you are interested in seeing plans from a number of different providers, check out http://www.bestwebhostingco.com

About The Author
J. Ratliff offers a website for people looking for the best web hosting at http://www.bestwebhostingco.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - The Human Side of Web Hosting

M6.Net, a web-hosting company (What the hell is that?) has turned this techno-phobic writer into a working member of a new age information and communication team. Let me tell you a story, a story about a crazy company that sits high up in the clouds looking at its global community. I had always been afraid of computers, such a sterile environment, and no trees to sit under. Of course this has become redundant with the advent of laptops and Broadband Internet, but heres the truth of the matter: I believed computers were for geeks and nerds, and the radiation from the screens caused one to go sterile or infertile. The day I walked into M6.Net my assumptions were not alteredlooking around at the bland walls, the plant-less vacuum of faces staring into screens tapping away foreign codes that only astro-chipmunks could comprehendWhy am I here? I thought as the people started to talk computer jargon to me. What do these freaks want with a creative writer? Let me out of here quick!

After talking to one guy for about fifteen minutes he finally realized I didnt understand a thing he was saying. It was like I had just gotten off a spaceship on the planet Googamooga! Then one of the bosses came over for a little chat. I say boss because the owners of this company dont act like authorities or the top of a hierarchal chain. They say theyd rather see all humans as equals, Dont call me sir, please call me Michael. he had said with a smile. This made me feel a tiny bit more relaxed; I still wanted to leave, as it just wasnt my kind of place if you know what I mean. Then Michael and I had an interview. He asked me if I knew anything about computers or the Internet. I said nope. He said cool. I knew then that I was in for an unexpected twist in my lifes journey. Well, life is a mystery anyway, I guess I needed to learn not to judge a book by its cover, to spit out a clich that has been used a few too times but with good reason.

This guy Michael then went on to ask me what I wanted to do with my life, where did I see myself in the future? I said I sure didnt see myself working for some Internet company. After a bit of relaxing laughter, Michael said it just might be pretty cool to hear from a perspective of a technological novice, as most of the world was in similar shoes as myself. He intimated that maybe some of the reasons people were so afraid of the Internet was because they had no one to relate to on a simple level when it came to working with the new mysterious, unknown technology. I said Id be willing to give it a shot, and so began my adventure into the far reaches of cyberspace. Luckily I already had a spacesuit from my intergalactic journeys taken in an overactive imaginary youth. I strapped in, we hit light speed, and the bland walls and monotonous tapping became a blurred rainbow and tribal rhythm in my consciousness. I realized eventually that I had been given a ticket to join in with the human evolution process. The Internet became the tool I had always needed to connect with the spirits of the terrestrial world.

After getting to know my team colleagues through face-to-face interaction and Messenger email chats in the open-spaced offices (no walls), I realized these people werent mindless zombie aliens as I had once expected. These were real actual human souls like myself! I just couldnt believe it; my previous perception of computer nerds was destroyed. These people lived whole and exciting lives inside and outside the office. The reason they had once looked blank-faced was only because they had reached a deep level of concentration needed to solve the problems presented in this process of furthering humanitys communication possibilities. I now realize that each and every individual is constantly treading on worlds that will always be unknown to me.

M6.Net is a web-hosting company, that is true, but like every snowflake, everything in existence is individual. The things they do here, the ideas that are formed, these are like no other place in the Universe. Not everything good in life has to scream out its beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if one looks hard enough at anything you will see the hidden magic beneath the surface. I have discovered that a web-hosting company is helping the people of our world to unite, I mean, how many other web hosts have creative writers writing childrens stories for education sites? These people have helped to teach me to look outside the box, to use another clich. Its funny how clichs actually ring true. Its also funny how good things in life make life good.

By Jesse S. Somer
http://www.m6.net
Jesse S. Somer is walking, talking story just like every other human being on the Earth.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Setting Up Your First Web Hosting Account

Setting Up Your First Web Hosting Account

by: Russ Mate

The Basics

Setting up a web hosting account for the first time can be confusing and frustrating for the novice. This article will guide you through the steps of setting up a new web hosting account for your website.

Setting up your web hosting account will depend upon many things, the first of which is:

Do you already have a website built and ready to be hosted?

If the answer to that question is yes, then your next set of questions should be:

How was your website designed? Did you design it yourself using Microsoft FrontPage, or did you use some other WYSIWYG website building software? Did a professional designer build your site for you? Did they use Microsoft FrontPage, or did they use some other WYSIWYG website building software? Did your designer use a database driven software, such as Cold Fusion? Maybe they coded your site using a text editor youll need the answers to these questions.

If you have a FrontPage website, youll need a web host who supports FrontPage. If your site was developed with Cold Fusion, youll need a web host who supports Cold Fusion. This also applies to other design software not mentioned here. Check with your web designer and/or web design programs documentation for further help with this.

Maybe you havent yet designed your website. Many web hosts offer online website building software that requires no programming or HTML knowledge. If this is your strategy, make sure your web host offers such software, and find out if theres a cost for you to use it.

Finding The Right Web Host

Locating a web host that gives you the reliability you need, plus excellent customer service, and that offers all the features youre going to need, can be challenging.

You can begin your search by asking business associates, friends and relatives who have websites of their own, who they use. Just as you would get a recommendation for a good restaurant, word of mouth can sometimes steer you in the right direction.

You can also check out the many web hosting directories on the web. These directories are set up to allow you to search using the features that youre looking for in a web host. Keep in mind though, that many of the listings you see may also be paid listings that are pushed your way for obvious reasons.

Once you narrow down your search to a few potential web hosts, your next step will be to visit the many web hosting message boards and forums on the web. Perform a search on each of the potential web hosts that you have in mind read through the posts and see what other peoples experiences have been with the hosts you have in mind. If you see too many negative comments or experiences by others, you might want to take a hint from that and rule out that particular hosting company.

Once youve narrowed down your search to a few web hosts, you should make contact with them and get answers to any questions you have. Since youre a beginner at this, you might strongly consider using a web host that provides telephone support. A web host that provides only email support may not be able to fully answer questions that you have this applies to sales questions as well as support questions.

When you make your inquires, keep track of which host responds to you the quickest. Which of these hosts answers your questions patiently and takes the time to go over details with you? Do they seem more interested in getting you to sign up, or do they address topics you have no concern about, beware of those danger signs.

Signing Up For Your Web Hosting Account

Most web hosts have multiple plans that you can choose from. The trick is to choose a web hosting plan that provides you the features you actually need, without choosing a plan that offers you features you dont need, or may never use. This is probably the most difficult thing a novice will be faced with when choosing a web host. Youll need to choose a plan that strikes an even balance between what you need right now and what you may need a month or two down the road. Your website might remain the same size as it is today, by next year; however, your site may grow quickly, requiring additional resources in a relatively short period of time.

Consult with your web designer and with your potential new web host about these issues. Ask you potential web host if its easy it is to upgrade your account if you need additional services. Ask if there are any additional charges if you upgrade your account.

The last thing you should do before signing up for a web hosting account is to read your web hosts AUP (Acceptable Use Policy), and/or their TOS (Terms Of Service), and/or their SLA (Service Level Agreement). Make certain that you understand and agree with your new web hosts policies, and that your website does not break any of your new web hosts rules and regulations. By not reviewing your new hosts contracts with you, you may find your website and email shut down without prior notice for breaking a rule you were not aware of, or you might end up paying for fees you didnt know you were liable for.

The majority of web hosts require you to sign up for a hosting account by using your credit or debit card. Some hosts offer online check payment, as well as paper check payments. Many web hosts accept PayPal. You might want to ask if your host offers discounts for advance payment. Some hosts offer substantial discounts if you prepay a year in advance. I dont recommend this until after youve had some time to experience your new hosts level of service and support.

Most importantly, dont rush into signing up. Wait until you get all of your questions answered to your satisfaction.

About The Author

Author: WebSite Host Directory .Com


Date: 6/15/2004


Email: mkt@websitehostdirectory.com


The WebSiteHostDirectory.Com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a website hosting company or a quality expiring domain name. WSHD is part of the Techpad network of sites.


Contibuting editor Russ Mate can be contacted at www.matemediainc.com

This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the About and weblinks are kept intact. If you publish this article, we would love to know the location. Feel free to email us.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - 3 Deadly traffic killers courtesy of web hosting services

Web hosts, who are supposed to be your close business partners, and whom you expect to be prepared to do virtually anything to help lift your business to success, can also be the biggest stumbling block and the worst enemy in your search for high traffic and web site success. Heres how.

a)The old game of now your site is available and now it is not, greatly affects traffic to your web site. This unreliability can be caused by many factors. It can be the web host using sub standard low quality servers. It could even be the web host overselling their services and signing up many more accounts than their available resources can support.

b)Some sites are pretty basic and should load quickly and yet they still take ages. Most browsers (and your potential clients) will not wait but will close the slow window and move on somewhere else. These slow speeds may in some cases be caused by the same reasons as Ive listed in b above.

c)Lack of proper support services means that web sites can often go through long downtime periods where a lot of traffic can be lost, literally forever. Some web hosts are nothing more than a part-time basement setup with no proper customer service arrangements. It is not uncommon to call your web host and get an answering machine. Some web hosting services have even outsourced the technical and customer service functions. One entrepreneur even complained recently that when they called the technical support department of a certain host company, the phone was answered alright but by a non-English speaking technician.

Do look out for these 3 deadly traffic killers, courtesy of your host.

About The Author
Luis Perez is the president and CEO for MDS-Host, a web hosting company. He can be reached at info at mds-host.com. Send for your free report on the checklist you should use when selecting a hosting service.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Where to Get Cheap Web Hosting

If you are looking for a cheap web hosting company you may wish to know where to look. Cheap web hosting is available to anyone. But the cost of it depends on several factors. For some people, it may be impossible to get cheap web hosting. You will have to see what is available based on you needs.

First, to see if you can use cheap web hosting you need to know how much disk space you will need. How large is your website? How many pages, video files, music files, etc. do you need? Second, a cheap web hosting company will need to know how busy your sight will be. If your site is going to have a lot of visitors, cheap web hosting may not be for you. Third, how many email accounts do you need? Cheap web hosting companies do not usually provide many. Lastly, how much are you willing to spend? Cheap web hosting is not as technical as the more expensive web hosting.

If you go online, you can find a list of the top 10 cheap web hosting companies. The top 10 cheap web hosting companies are rated by their price, quality, and service provided. The cheap web hosting companies are priced between $4.95 and $19.95 a month. The cheap web hosting company's price varies on what kind of things you need. The disk space provided can be from 3000MB to 5000MB. The bandwidth varies from 40GB to 300GB. If this is not enough for you, then a cheap web hosting company is not an option for you. Most of these cheap web hosting companies offer free set up. This will make things much easier for you. Be aware of cheap web hosting that offers unlimited disk space. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

The top 10 web hosting companies reviewed are: Blue Host, Power Hosting, Pages Garden, Pro Logic Hosting, Easy CGI, Gigabyte Package, Yahoo! Hosting, iPower Web, Lunar pages, and Dot5 Web Hosting. All of these are very cheap web hosting companies. You will find them listed at top10webhosting.com. At this website you will also find customer testimonials and thorough listings about the cheap web hosting company's services they offer to you.

For those of you who still think that this is not cheap web hosting, you can also find free web hosting. It still comes with a price, however. Comcast offers free web hosting to anyone who subscribes to their internet service. You still have to pay for the internet service, but the web hosting is free. That's the best that can be done about cheap web hosting. Weigh the odds, and see which route is best for you.

About The Author

Jay Moncliff is the founder of http://www.cheaphosting-center.info a blog focusing on the Web Hosting, resources and articles. This site provides detailed information on Web Hosting. For more info on Web Hosting visit: http://www.cheaphosting-center.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Web Hosting Reviews - Can You Trust Them?

The market is filled with web hosting services providers of all shapes and sizes. In this jungle of hosting companies, how do you make a good choice? Should you trust the sites offering web hosting reviews?

Imagine doing a search on Google for "web hosting company", and coming up with around 1,700,000 hits! How can you possibly find the best web hosting plan for your needs among all those? You may look at the prices, thinking: "I will get a good deal by looking for the cheapest web hosting plan".

Well, not a good idea IMHO. Because of the fierce competition between providers of web hosting services, they often try to cut costs by cutting down on support, and also by vastly overselling hardware and bandwidth resources. The result: poor support and poor reliability. Simply put: your website goes down, and nobody listens to you when you try to tell your hosting company about it.

What you want and need is not a cheap web hosting plan, but a good web hosting plan that fits your budget. Having realized this, you start looking around for advice on good web hosting. Now, chances are you will then stumble upon some web hosting review site, which is happy to tell you that xyz.com is the very best web hosting provider in the world! Fine, you think, now my problem is solved thanks to that piece of valuable information.

Wrong again - most likely. The truth is, that many web hosting companies pay very generous commissions to those who refer new customers to them. It then becomes very tempting to set up a "web hosting reviews" website which is actually nothing but a billboard for the best-paying web hosting services providers, with no regard for their actual merits. And so it goes. I have personally looked over about a hundred of those web hosting reviews' sites, and in most cases they are just that - billboards. Often, they strongly recommend web hosting companies that are actually known to have a very poor customer reputation. Thus, they are really spreading misinformation and confusion instead of offering good advice.

The only reliable way of telling if a web hosting company is worth doing business with, is to see what their customers are saying about it. Such customer posts can be found here and there on various web sites, but you have to know where to look. A few of those web hosting reviews' sites does actually collect and post such customer opinions; and you can also find authentic posts by searching on large web hosting forums such as WebHostingTalk.

Needless to say, you should NOT bother with the "customer opinions" posted by the web hosting companies themselves on their own sites. Often, those "reviews" are fabricated, or simply copied from somewhere else.

About The Author

Kai Virihaur

I am a researcher, an artist, and a web developer. On my website, TheHostingFinder.com, I offer some information on the good type of web hosts - the kind that has a majority of happy and satisfied customers. I hope these web hosting reviews may prove helpful to some people.

Web Hosting Bandwidth Explained

When shopping for web hosting, a very common concern, and legitimate one, is the amount of bandwidth you will need. This article is intended to help you determine just how much of bandwidth your web site requires.

When shopping for web hosting, a very common concern, and legitimate one, is the amount of bandwidth you will need. This article is intended to help you determine just how much of bandwidth your web site requires.

When you are buying insufficient bandwidth, you might find yourself in two undesired situations: paying, usually high fees, for the extra bandwidth your web site needed or having your web site shut off. Overbuying bandwidth is not a good thing either as it will put you in the position to pay for something you dont use. This article is intended to help you determine just how much of bandwidth your web site requires.

What is bandwidth anyway?

Lets just see what bandwidth is. Bandwidth is the term that is used to denote the amount of data that has been transferred from your web space to the computers of your visitors. To put it simple, bandwidth is the amount of data that flows across a network wire in a given period of time. In web hosting industry this time period usually is one month. This happens simply because web hosting providers are also charged monthly for their huge broadband Internet connection. This is the cost that ultimately is then passed on to the consumer in the form price for their individual web hosting plan.

Bandwidth being such a delicate matter for a successful web presence, could you at least estimate the bandwidth needs of your web site? The answer is yes, you can estimate it, but you can never be sure of your estimate being perfectly correct because of all the variables involved.

How do I calculate my bandwidth?

If your index.html page has a size of lets say 50 KB, every time you get a visitor on your start page (assuming that your visitors will only open you first page and not browse your entire web site), your visitor will download 50 KB of information onto his or hers computer. For 100 visitors, you will get a total of 5.000 KB of data being transferred from the web server hosting your site to your visitors computers.

So a formula for computing your estimated needs of bandwidth would look like this:
Size of your web content * number of visitors that accessed that web page = your consumed bandwidth

The formula looks very simple, yet estimating correctly the bandwidth required by your web site is anything but simple. This is obvious when you look at what makes up this formula.

The size of one web page is one thing, and the total size of your web site is another. You should take into consideration the total size of your web site and this means including files offered for download. Also web sites grow in time or even change completely. When this happens, you must redo the estimates for your web site bandwidth.

When it comes to visitors browsing your web site, it is rather difficult to predict what pages your visitors will access. For example, some visitors would stop at the index page, other will look for the contact details, and some will download your brochure. Knowing the sheer number of visitors your site has over one month can be very helpful in estimating the bandwidth required to support them.

Ultimately, when trying to find out the amount of bandwidth your web site requires you must answer two important questions:

  • What is the size of your web site?
  • What is the traffic your web site will get?

For a not very large web site that is not very that doesnt offer audio/video downloads and doesnt get very much traffic, you dont need a very large amount of bandwidth. Average web sites use only about 500 MB of monthly bandwidth. But for small web sites that generate a lot of traffic, you should consider a web hosting plan that offers a lot of bandwidth.

For your reference, an average web site (for example a personal or a family web site) will also get average traffic, meaning a range of 50-500 visitors per day.

When assessing the requirements of your web site bandwidth, you must also understand that although you have purchased your web hosting together with the bandwidth as per month, your total monthly bandwidth is usually broken down into daily rates. Exceeding the daily rates might result in having your web site shut down for the day.

How to keep your bandwidth down?

Having a lot of rich web content (images, flash files, audio files) is a good way to make your web site more attractive for your visitors, but also is the shortest way to burn out your bandwidth. This article wont tell you to give up using such files for your web site, instead simply point out that overcrowding your web pages with images could harm not only your bandwidth, but also the usability of your web site. Good web site design is not proportional with the number of images per page.

Offering downloads on your web such as site music files, .PDF files, flash or video files is another thing that will almost sure consume your bandwidth by just a handful of visitors. The simple download of an average .PDF file half of megabyte in size will consume monthly 1 GB of bandwidth, only with 2.000 people downloading it.

Stick to your goals and adjust your web sites content strictly to fulfill them.

Keeping down the amount of bandwidth your web site is consuming might be easy to achieve with good preparation and excellent web design.

To avoid sky-high bandwidth costs, try to apply the following suggestions:

1) Make the file size of your web pages as small as possible. Lots of tools, some of them freeware can help you to do just that by compressing them.

2) Keep the images on your web site to a minimum. For the images included in your web site, use .JPG or .GIF compression tools to reduce the size and still keep the quality at an acceptable level.

3) Try not to offer too many downloadable files. If your have to offer downloadable files, it is best to only include the ones around 1 MB in size.

The right way the to start when planning your web sites bandwidth needs, apart from the traffic your site will get, is to look at the type your content your are going to serve to your visitors. If your web site is packed with multimedia (video, music, flash etc) or if your offer .PDF files for download, you might consider opting for a dedicated server. Even in the event your web site is just starting out an you have limited funding for its hosting, it would be wise to choose a web hosting provider that will offer you a plan with more resources than your estimate need at a reasonable price.

As no matter how good your estimate is, there is a chance that it will fail, dont forget to look at the charges for the bandwidth exceeding your monthly plan.


About The Author

Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin (http://www.hostpinpin.com), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory Resource.

HostPinPin.com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting reviews, compare web hosting plans, web hosting articles, glossary of terms, free hosting guide, free hosting quote, tips and more.

This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the About and weblinks are kept intact.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - What Is A Web Hosting Provider?

In order for people like you or I to get web pages put onto the Internet, we need to have access to a web server. This is basically a computer which is continually connected to the internet and is capable of supporting many websites contained on its hard drive. Essentially, it can be quite expensive to run because a special internet connection (other than the broadband connection that you are accustomed to) is required. Should a connection go down, then someone really needs to be on hand to get it running again. Therefore, unless you are technically gifted in this area, it is better (and cheaper) to get someone else to do the web hosting for you.

The web hosting can be done by any web server in the world so it does not have to be on your own doorstep. This is great news for you because it means that you can shop around to find a service right for your needs and your own pocket. Having said that, you can use the services of a free web hosting provider if you are new to building websites. The downside to this is that you have no control over any advertising that they may place on your website (after all they need to recoup their money from somewhere).

The web hosting provider will have their computers set up so that all your web pages are stored safely and that anyone typing in your website address onto a web browser will automatically find your website (ie www.your-website.com). However, if you are using a free service, your website address might end up something like www.free-web-hosting-provider.com/homepages/personal/your-website/index.html! So you really need to think about what the purpose of the site is before spending a lot of time putting it together.

You can also purchase your own dedicated domain name (ie www.your-website.com) which can also vary in price depending on which web hosting solution you choose. There are many good ones to pick from (and, unfortunately many not so good ones too. When you purchase your domain name, you pay an annual fee (anywhere between ?2 and ?10, depending on whether it ends in com, co.uk, org, org.uk, biz, info etc). A good web hosting provider will give you sound advice on which one to choose from.
The good thing about using a web hosting provider (as opposed to setting up your own server) is that it frees up your time and resources and can be very cost effective to run.

What has been discussed so far is shared hosting. This means that the web hosting provider can keep your running costs down by having many websites on one server. This can mean that anyone accessing your site will sometimes have to wait a few seconds longer for your web pages to open. This happens when more than one or all of the websites on that one server are being accessed at the same time. If your your web presence is critical to the operation of the business, then you will need to opt for what they call dedicated or managed servers.

Although both types of web hosting means that you will have a whole server to yourself, there is, however, a slight difference between the two. A dedicated server means that you (or whoever you appoint as your website's webmaster) will have full control of what goes on behind the scenes (known as the backend of the server). A fully managed hosting plan means that you have full technical support which includes the server maintenance and back up support if or when the site runs into technical difficulties.

In conclusion, you need to decide on the following before getting started:

Does it matter if you have third party advertising placed on your site? If it does, then do not for the free website option.

Is it necessary to have your own domain name? If it does, then do not for the free website option.

Is the website absolutely critical to the overall success of your business? If it is essential that your website does not slow down during peak times then do not go for the shared hosting option.

Do you or any of your staff know enough about web servers and how to maintain the backend of the domain? If not, then do not go for the dedicated server option.

If all of the above solutions are unacceptable, then paying a little more money for a managed hosting solution.


About the Author:

Brian Simms has taught Information and Communication Technology since 1989. His client groups vary from one-to-one tuition to large corporate groups including seminars. Website Laboratory (http://www.websitelaboratory.co.uk), is his mission to help budding webmasters by providing invaluable guidance.

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Virtual Private Servers (VPS) Web Hosting

A Virtual Private Server (VPS), also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS), provides the features of a dedicated server for multiple web hosting customers to share.

At first instance it sounds contradictory, how can you have a dedicated server if it is being shared by multiple users? Isn't that a regular shared or virtual hosting environment? It is true that with a Virtual Private Server you still share system resources like the CPU and RAM with other users but the resources are allocated in such a way that you cannot tell that the system has anyone else on it, much like a dedicated server. So resources are usually setup in such a way that each hosting client is only allowed to use an allocated percent, meaning that resources assigned to you will always available to you.

Advantages of Virtual Private Server (VPS) web hosting

Most hosting customers would rather have complete control of their server environments. They don't want to be hosted on a server with tens or hundreds of other users, who could easily use up all the resources or cause the server environment to be unstable. But at the same time most websites don't need a dedicated server. The Virtual Private Server (VPS) alternative is a very attractive niche hosting solution for a fairly large chunk of web hosting clients who would like the stability of a dedicated server but on a smaller scale. With the resources setup in such a way that each person can only use what is allocated to them, your site will be more consistent because it will always have the same amount of access to the CPU, memory, and bandwidth. Virtual Private Servers are also more secure since even as you share the memory and CPU time, you are allocated your own file system. If a website on the server is hacked, the hackers will only have access to that particular file system and would not harm the other websites. A VPS is also much cheaper than a dedicated server.

Disadvantages of Virtual Private Server (VPS) web hosting

Now that you have read the pros of a VPS you are probably thinking that this is the best thing since sliced bread. Well, almost - as is the case with every other type of hosting service, not all providers setup or define Virtual Private Servers, also known as Virtual Dedicated Servers, the exact same way. You must make sure that your provider guarantees that their setup is robust enough to handle operations at a peak level. A trick used by many providers in the reselling and shared space is 'overselling'. What this means is selling more in terms of services than what physically available, with the hope that the end users wouldn't use up all the service that were advertised to them. In the realm of VPS this can be a bit more serious, since at least the expectation is that you are operating in a more robust environment and many clients could be running more intensive applications like message boards or custom web applications. A shortfall of resources could end up causing problems for everyone hosted on such a server, therefore negating the benefits of a VPS. In a shared or dedicated environment you might be able to access more resources during peak or spike periods but since the VPS environment limits you to to your slice of the server resources, it can be a drawback.

As if the technology rich lingo of regular web hosting wasn't enough, the VPS services add a few new wrinkles. Apart from storage space and bandwidth you must also deal with CPU cycles and RAM. So you will see ads for hosting that might include *** MHz and *** MB RAM to go with the usual hosting related features. It is somewhat harder to figure out how much CPU time or RAM you might need, so seek out a hosting provider that will provide you with some benchmarks and the ability to upgrade or downgrade the VPS service if needed.

Conclusion

  • Allows complete control of your virtual server and its resources
  • Allows you to run web applications without adversely affecting other clients
  • Flexible - cheaper than dedicated hosting, more expensive than shared

Please refer following web sites for useful resources related to web site hosting:

http://www.vipwh.com
http://www.thehostingguide.com

About The Author

Paras Shah

Chief Technology Officer
VIP PowerNet, Inc.

Phone
: (713)787-6501
Email: paras@vippowernet.com
http://www.vippowernet.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Affordable Web Hosting - Important tips to consider before buying

Deciding on a web host can be a daunting task at first, but hopefully these tips will help you to find the best host to suit your requirements.

When choosing a web host you will need to find a company that has a good array of plans to suit a variety of requirements. Also you will need to find a host that allows plans to be upgraded easily with little to no downtime as your site grows and attracts more visitors. Initially when you have a new site to that you want to place online you may not know what resources the site will require, so there is little point in purchasing the best plan a host has on offer as you may be wasting hard earned money on services you may not need.

Ideally you should only pay for the plan that meets all your requirements initially, and as the requirements of your site grow you can then upgrade to higher priced plans, if you have chosen a good hosting provider this should be as simple as calling their sales department or sending an email to make the changes happen.

Personal Web Sites

Entry level hosting generally includes 100mb of storage space and up to 10GB of monthly data transfer (commonly known as bandwidth), this is usually enough for a personal web site or a small business web site. Entry level web hosting plans such as this are available for as little as $1.95 per month with no setup fees. If you have any plans in the future to host a lot of large images or video files and offer them for download, you should consider something more than what an entry level plan provides.

Other drawbacks of entry level hosting include a lack of database support, support for databases these days is essential for anything but static html sites, if you have plans of running a forum, photo gallery, shopping cart, or even a simple blog (weblog), you will need hosting that supports databases. Most often the database required is MySQL due to the large amount of open source applications that use this type of database.

Business Web Sites

For a business, a host that supports databases is normally a must have feature and as such I recommend that for a business web site you choose a plan that support this feature, the cost of this feature is not a lot more, for $3-$7 a month your host can supply support for databases and a whole lot more. Most business plans will also include more storage space, more bandwidth, and other useful features such as shopping carts.

Another feature you should consider is email, for a business, multiple email addresses are becoming the norm, you may want each employee to have an email address for example, plus a few common email addresses such as "info@", "sales@" etc., the web hosting plans from $3-$7 a month generally support 100 to several thousand email addresses which should cover your needs well into the future.

About The Author

Affordable Web Hosting Reviews at www.Webhost-Advisor.com

Friday, March 10, 2006

Web Hosting Guide for Beginner

First and foremost, for non-IT savvy, it might be a little tough for them to comprehend the meaning of web hosting. I believe if you search it on any search engine, of course there will be answer and explanation for them. But, how far do you really understand? Honestly, when I first get to know this term few years back, I had problem understanding myself. Then, I found one simple explanation that might be easy for people to understand. So, today, if anyone were to ask me what is "web hosting", i'd explain as follows...

Imagine you are homeless and you want to rent a room or buy a house. In order to get a shelter for yourself, you need a room. So, you imagine yourself as the website and the room as the hosting that you need to place yourself in. That means your website need a web hosting. Then, that's the time you start finding yourself a web hosting provider. Here, web hosting provider would be the house owner who rents you the room. So, in order for your website to be available and browsed by Internet users, you need to make sure your website is hosted in a web server provided by a web hosting provider.

So, when you finally understand what web hosting is, next will be the time to find out more about the different types of web hosting available. You have shared hosting, dedicated hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and colocation hosting. You name it, the Internet has it! So many to remember and differentiate..so, let's get the ball rolling with...


Shared Hosting

Shared hosting means that a web server has its resources shared by many other websites. Or you can put it as, in a house, there are many tenants. Usually small or normal e-commerce businesses will choose this type of hosting. Websites with high traffic might not be able to choose this type of hosting due to insufficient webspace.


Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting refers to hosting in which you rent a server from your web hosting provider and will be placed at your web hosting provider's datacentre. They will provide software installation and connection to Internet. This will indicates that the website owner has control over the server as they don't share it with other websites. In short, dedicated hosting is where only 1 user hosted on the server machine and have a full privilege over the server to manage it by themself. The server machine will be still belongs to the web hosting provider.


Colocation Hosting

Well, this hosting has the features which are almost the same as dedicated hosting EXCEPT that you provide your own server and web hosting provider just help you to plug it into their datacentre. You need to install own software and hardwares. Everything is DIY.


Reseller Hosting

Reseller Hosting is a hosting where the account owner has the priviledge to allocate the webspace and bandwidth access and resell them to his clients. This shows that reseller hosts act like a middleman and is usually not responsible for any software or hardware intallation. They only buy webspace and resell to clients.


VPS Hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It is almost the same as dedicated server. Hence, it's sometimes called Virtual Dedicated Server. Generally, it means that the account owner has the feeling as though his owns a dedicated server. In real sense, it's actually separating a physical server into several independent hosting spaces or VPS-es, each isolated from the other. This will allow you to create and manage multiple sites and domains and take full control of your VPS with root/administrator access which allows you to access the virtual hard disk, RAM and to reboot your private server independently from other VPS-es.


Domain Name

After we are done with the different types of hosting, there is something else which I want to touch on. It is none other than the "domain name". So, ever wonder what is domain name? Wow, sounds technical? Not really actually. Don't be scared. Last time, when I saw the words domain name, it freaked me out too. Now, when I got used to it, it's not that nerve-wracking after all. So, domain name is just the normal web address or url (Uniform Resource Locator) you type in the "address" area when you open a browser. Examples of domain name are "exabytes.com". You know? Just the normal web address. Well, since it's a web address, it's a unique name. Hence, there will be no other same domain name. In fact, domain name is actually corresponding with numeric IP address. So, every domain name will have its numeric IP address. For example, the IP address for exabytes.com is 72.18.131.206

When you see exabytes.com, ever wonder ".com" stands for what? It actually stands for commercial. Whenever you see .com, .org, .net or others which ends after the final dot or period (.) of a url, it is known as top-level domain. It actually tells you what kind of website it is, indirectly. And the commonly used domain name extension nowadays will be .org, .net, .com. However, there are a lot of new domain extension up for grab lately such as .aero, .info, .museum, and .name. Next in the list that I shall explain is, Country Level Domain Name. Examples of country level domain name is exabytes.com.my. It has ".my" as its country code top-level domain (ccTLD). .my here represents the country "Malaysia". Of course, different country will have different ccTLD. For example, .jp stands for Japan, .au for Australia, .ca for Canada.

There are more to learn in order to excel in web hosting industry. Hopefully this simple guide will help all those novice out there. There are other things you need to know as well. But, it will be in my next article. Cheers!

About the Author

SY Ho is an Online Marketing Executive for http://www.exabytes.com

Web hosting Benefits of a Dedicated Server

Hosting your web sites on your own dedicated server may seem a little expensive in comparison to shared web hosting, but the end result is more advantageous. Shared web hosting, no matter how well managed, cannot be 100% reliable and stable. However if you have your own dedicated server you can manage to avoid most of the variables affecting the reliability and stability of a server, commonly experienced by shared hosting accounts; variables such as: overload, bad codes and scripts from other users (especially beginners); and, too many applications and components uploaded, and so on.

On a dedicated server you will install only software and applications you want to use, while on a shared hosting server you will find a host of other softwares and applications installed for other users.

By the very nature of the account, a dedicated server: reduces your dependency on the web host; and bypasses time delays and possible expenses incurred from these. With dedicated server hosting you can provide instant support to your own clients whenever required, which is not possible if you are on a shared server. A reliable, and fast support service is vital for your own business growth just like the stability and reliability you wish for your own website. In business, reliability is reflected through word-of-mouth as one of the most effective promotional activities.

For people with clients, such as Graphic Designers and Web Designers a dedicated server is invaluable. A dedicated server will bring extra income into the studio, not just as a hosting facility, but, as a designer knows only too well, for the extra bread and butter income value. If you have 24hour access to your own dedicated server then you can adjust, correct or update a clients website in minutes, allowing you to keep the dollar back in your studio and not in someone elses. Ready availability results in reduced labour costs for the client, but higher studio-income frequency for the designer. Hence you will see the return of all your regular offline clients, bringing their web work with them.

The need for a dedicated server to your average shared server user is realised when stats tell you: how quickly people left your site because it was taking too much time to download; or how many daily visitors you are down by, because your site was not up. The true negative is the worry of how many lost visitors could have been your future paying-customers. The loss could easily equal the value of the upgrade to a Dedicated Server!

For a business, a website that is quickly downloadable and up all the time gives the visitor encouragement that your service is just as reliable, hence you will be more likely to make a sale. It will also enhance the companys image and encourage existing customers to refer your service to others. This will result in more sales for less promotion.

If you are serious about your online presence you need to get a Dedicated Server.

M6.net http://www.m6.net/dedicated_table.asp

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - A Simple Guide to Web Hosting

Personal Computers, Servers Or ISP?

You need a server to host your site so that it can be viewed over the internet. This server can either be an Internet Service Provider or of your own. Most websites are hosted by an Internet Service Provider because they can provide powerful server hardware, high speed connections and reliable server support.

Most providers have very fast connections to the Internet such as a full T3 fiber-optic (45 Megabytes per second) connections which is about 1000 high speed (56 Kilobytes per second) modems combined.

For those who are looking to set up their own servers and host their own websites, a personal computer is often not powerful enough to do the job. As the name suggests, a personal computer can hardly handle multiple visitors to your website- servers are needed to handle these visitors simultaneously.

Getting Your Web Hosting

There are thousands of companies that offer web hosting for your website. Which to choose and what to look out for? With the multitude of features and terms in each hosting plan, it can be puzzling for those who are just starting out. The golden rule in choosing your website: Nothing beats reliable web hosting. Many web hosting plans offer more space, more benefits than others. The decision to your web hosting should be based on reliability. We have seen too many disappointed website owners who chose benefits and space over reliability.

You need a server to host your site so that it can be viewed over the internet. This server can either be an Internet Service Provider or of your own. Most websites are hosted by an Internet Service Provider because they can provide powerful server hardware, high speed connections and reliable server support.

Most providers have very fast connections to the Internet such as a full T3 fiber-optic (45 Megabytes per second) connections which is about 1000 high speed (56 Kilobytes per second) modems combined.

For those who are looking to set up their own servers and host their own websites, a personal computer is often not powerful enough to do the job. As the name suggests, a personal computer can hardly handle multiple visitors to your website- servers are needed to handle these visitors simultaneously.

Getting Your Web Hosting

There are thousands of companies that offer web hosting for your website. Which to choose and what to look out for? With the multitude of features and terms in each hosting plan, it can be puzzling for those who are just starting out. The golden rule in choosing your website: Nothing beats reliable web hosting. Many web hosting plans offer more space, more benefits than others. The decision to your web hosting should be based on reliability. We have seen too many disappointed website owners who chose benefits and space over reliability.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lester Boey works in an Australian Web Design and Internet Marketing company -Australian Seo and Web Designs Services - http://www.definiteweb.com/
His life revolves around websites; providing full-time and freelance seo services to US and Australian businesses. Email: projects@definiteweb.com

Web Hosting Reviews and Tips - Multiple Domain Web Hosting

With low cost of domain names and low hosting fees it is common to own several websites. There are a few ways to manage multiple domains. It's important to know the advantages and disadvantages of each method.

The most basic choice is whether or not to administer your domains with the same host. Most web hosts offer packages which can be set up to allow several sites on one account, or allow individual sites to be operated under separate accounts.

You may have an existing website and like the services your host provides. By starting a new website with the same host you get the reassurance of dealing with a company you know. Sometimes you may get a discount for every additional account with the same host.

Using a different host for a new website will let you compare the quality of hosting services offered by different companies. In addition, separate hosts will provide each of your websites with a different IP address.

Having different IP addresses is useful if you plan to link the sites together for search engine optimization. Incoming links are very important: a website with many incoming links will get a higher position in most search engines. If the links are coming from the same IP address their value will be discounted.

Hosting your websites with different hosting companies guarantees that they have different IP addresses. An individual IP address is available at extra cost from most companies. For a fee each website can have its own unique IP address. Having a unique IP address is required if you want to have a secure connection (https) enabled on your site.

If you decide to host all your websites with the same company, there are three basic ways to go. Each site could have its own account, you could sign up for a reseller account, or you could get a dedicated server account.

Hosting all your websites with one host has a few advantages, but there is one major disadvantage - if your server goes down, all your sites go down. If you depend on your sites for income this can be painful and it's a good idea to have at least one of your sites with a different host.

About the Author

Article by Hosting-Options.com. Find the best small business hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated server hosting package for you.