There are many factors involved in choosing the right web hosting plan for your new website. The trick is to weight the cost against the features provided. Of course it is easy to get the cheapest price web hosting plan with a XYZ company. But this plan does not have SQL or PHP functions, it has limited traffic bandwidth etc. So, really it depends on what your web site needs are.
To select a good web hosting plan, I recommend that at least the following features are included:
1. Big traffic bandwidth.
2. Supports SQL and PHP.
3. Supports sub domains.
4. Cpanel for easy control.
5. At least 5000Mb storage space.
6. Auto responders.
7. POP email accounts.
8. FTP accounts
9. Backup support
Then from all these features, select the price that is within your budget. Some hosting providers charge a one time setup fee, and some charge less if you pay one year fees in advance. Also look out for incentives like free domain names provided, this is a powerful draw which is quite common nowadays.
If you are planning to host multiple web sites, you need to choose a plan that supports multiple domain hosting on one single account. Some providers do support this and it is mostly 2 or 3 domains. I heard of others that support unlimited domains, but you need to analyze the price factor against this option.
The downside is that if the hosting provider server goes down, all your web sites will be down as well. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket so to speak.
Probably there are many other considerations before you decide on the web hosting plan that is most suitable for you. But time and effort spent on getting the right plan the first time round is worth investing in.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Choosing The Right Web Hosting Company
The number of firms performing their businesses on the internet has increased today. We can observe websites selling all kinds of stuff on the internet. If you are thinking about setting up on online sales store, an auction site or other business online business of your choice, the first and most important task for you would be to find a good web space will provision of all the additional tools you need.
Web hosting has itself become a major business in the recent years. There are such a large number of web hosting companies that it sometimes becomes impossible to determine which the right one is. A good web hosting company is that which sells or rents some space to you on their server and look after all the matters related to its technical maintenance. Hence, the client only needs to worry about building his online business now.
There is a list of things that you need to consider when selecting a web hosting company.
a) Uptime guarantee: Your web hosting company should provide a minimum uptime guarantee of 99%. If this is not the case, the web hosting company can be taken as unreliable.
b) Speed: The websites hosted on the web hosting company’s server must open and load fairly quick, otherwise the visitors will be drawn away due to long loading period. It should be easily accessible even through a dial-up connection to attract maximum visitors.
c) Popularity: the web hosting company should have a large number of clients, whose number keeps increasing consistently. Such companies have good marketing plans in place which can help you promote your online business.
d) Disk space offered: The web hosting company should provide enough disk space to set up a webpage with minimum graphics initially. It should also provide an option for upgrading to a bigger space latter.
e) Control panel: A control panel is the tool using which the user can control, access and update his website regularly. For instance, cPanel is the most popular control panel used by most web hosting companies.
f) Bandwidth: It measures the amount of data that can be sent or received in unit time. It regulates the speed with which data is transferred in and out of the server computer of your website.
Ability to handle huge databases is also another plus point. Apart from all this, the company should provide good customer support to all its clients who purchase server space from the company.
Web hosting has itself become a major business in the recent years. There are such a large number of web hosting companies that it sometimes becomes impossible to determine which the right one is. A good web hosting company is that which sells or rents some space to you on their server and look after all the matters related to its technical maintenance. Hence, the client only needs to worry about building his online business now.
There is a list of things that you need to consider when selecting a web hosting company.
a) Uptime guarantee: Your web hosting company should provide a minimum uptime guarantee of 99%. If this is not the case, the web hosting company can be taken as unreliable.
b) Speed: The websites hosted on the web hosting company’s server must open and load fairly quick, otherwise the visitors will be drawn away due to long loading period. It should be easily accessible even through a dial-up connection to attract maximum visitors.
c) Popularity: the web hosting company should have a large number of clients, whose number keeps increasing consistently. Such companies have good marketing plans in place which can help you promote your online business.
d) Disk space offered: The web hosting company should provide enough disk space to set up a webpage with minimum graphics initially. It should also provide an option for upgrading to a bigger space latter.
e) Control panel: A control panel is the tool using which the user can control, access and update his website regularly. For instance, cPanel is the most popular control panel used by most web hosting companies.
f) Bandwidth: It measures the amount of data that can be sent or received in unit time. It regulates the speed with which data is transferred in and out of the server computer of your website.
Ability to handle huge databases is also another plus point. Apart from all this, the company should provide good customer support to all its clients who purchase server space from the company.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Web Hosting Concerns For Ecommerce Businesses
Ecommerce businesses have needs that many websites do not. Whether the site is a content management system (CMS) that has thousands of pages with advertising on them, or a shopping cart, or a member only site, the site will one day reach a level of success that forces the company to reconsider their platform.
Platform
A platform is the system the ecommerce business is built on. it could be something simple like a MS FrontPage generated ‘static’ website. Or, It could be a Drupal content management system, with all the bells and whistles, including shopping cart, chat rooms, newsletters, and a podcast.
Many ecommerce businesses start with ‘wizard’ or template generated sites. This type of short sited thinking can be extremely costly in the long run.
Every business should assume they will need a bigger platform. A small business may not have the time to manage a Drupal site, or the resources to hire a programmer who is familiar with Drupal. They need to start with something smaller, and build a bigger platform later.
Programmers
One of the biggest mistakes ecommerce businesses make is believing that all programmers who code in PHP and MySql can handle all CMS platforms. This is not true. Grace Publishing Media, a medium sized social networking business paid $8000 for a platform that never worked, they had to trash it. They hired programmers who were familiar with the software platform, and had a new site within two months, for less than $900.00.
Types of Web Hosting
There are four types of web hosting, community shared, shared, virtual, and dedicated.
Community hosting is free, and is on a site where everyone shares a similar domain name. This type of site is impossible to promote. It may be free, but it will never rank high enough on the search engine sites to generate enough sales to keep the business solvent.
Shared hosting is the most common. It costs about $5 - $25 a month. Each website has their own private space, and their own management panel. The most common admin panels are CPanel and Plesk. The bandwidth, CPU burden, and other web resources are shared.
The second type of hosting is good for a small start up business. The important thing to confirm is that they use up to date databases and they have excellent customer service. However, as the business grows it will cause more burden on the CPU as more people use the site at the same time. This can cause problems that will not only crash the ecommerce site’s website, but it may also cause problems with the adjoining sites.
The third and fourth types of hosting, virtual and dedicated, is more private. A virtual server is one that has been broken into sections. Each ecommerce business has their own section, databases, bandwidth, and admin centre, but the CPU is shared. The ‘burden’ on the system of each website is still controlled tightly. This can cost $25 - $100 a month.
The dedicated server is the same as owning your own server. Everything is private. The business is allowed to max out all their resources without worrying about being limited or suspended by the hosting company. This service regularly costs $50 - $250 a month.
Managed
The most important aspect of hosting for the ecommerce business is finding ‘managed’ hosting. Never opt for unmanaged. It can result in dramatic down times, corruptions, and even having a lost system.
Back Up
No ecommerce business should sign for any hosting service that doesn’t offer backup. However, take a ‘lesson learned’ from companies who preceded yours – also learn how to back up the company on a hard drive in your computer, or a zip file.
Hosting companies, even the big ones, go out of business regularly, losing everything on their servers.
Platform
A platform is the system the ecommerce business is built on. it could be something simple like a MS FrontPage generated ‘static’ website. Or, It could be a Drupal content management system, with all the bells and whistles, including shopping cart, chat rooms, newsletters, and a podcast.
Many ecommerce businesses start with ‘wizard’ or template generated sites. This type of short sited thinking can be extremely costly in the long run.
Every business should assume they will need a bigger platform. A small business may not have the time to manage a Drupal site, or the resources to hire a programmer who is familiar with Drupal. They need to start with something smaller, and build a bigger platform later.
Programmers
One of the biggest mistakes ecommerce businesses make is believing that all programmers who code in PHP and MySql can handle all CMS platforms. This is not true. Grace Publishing Media, a medium sized social networking business paid $8000 for a platform that never worked, they had to trash it. They hired programmers who were familiar with the software platform, and had a new site within two months, for less than $900.00.
Types of Web Hosting
There are four types of web hosting, community shared, shared, virtual, and dedicated.
Community hosting is free, and is on a site where everyone shares a similar domain name. This type of site is impossible to promote. It may be free, but it will never rank high enough on the search engine sites to generate enough sales to keep the business solvent.
Shared hosting is the most common. It costs about $5 - $25 a month. Each website has their own private space, and their own management panel. The most common admin panels are CPanel and Plesk. The bandwidth, CPU burden, and other web resources are shared.
The second type of hosting is good for a small start up business. The important thing to confirm is that they use up to date databases and they have excellent customer service. However, as the business grows it will cause more burden on the CPU as more people use the site at the same time. This can cause problems that will not only crash the ecommerce site’s website, but it may also cause problems with the adjoining sites.
The third and fourth types of hosting, virtual and dedicated, is more private. A virtual server is one that has been broken into sections. Each ecommerce business has their own section, databases, bandwidth, and admin centre, but the CPU is shared. The ‘burden’ on the system of each website is still controlled tightly. This can cost $25 - $100 a month.
The dedicated server is the same as owning your own server. Everything is private. The business is allowed to max out all their resources without worrying about being limited or suspended by the hosting company. This service regularly costs $50 - $250 a month.
Managed
The most important aspect of hosting for the ecommerce business is finding ‘managed’ hosting. Never opt for unmanaged. It can result in dramatic down times, corruptions, and even having a lost system.
Back Up
No ecommerce business should sign for any hosting service that doesn’t offer backup. However, take a ‘lesson learned’ from companies who preceded yours – also learn how to back up the company on a hard drive in your computer, or a zip file.
Hosting companies, even the big ones, go out of business regularly, losing everything on their servers.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Hosting Service Providers and Identity Theft
My Hosting Service, My Security Service: How much protection does your web host give you from identity theft...and how much can they?
There are laws now that protect us from identity thieves, sure, but oftentimes, by the time the law gets involved, the damage is already done. Your website may be defaced. Your name may be sullied. Your hosting service may have locked you out. You lose customers. You lose money. To recover, you have to regain lost ground, which also takes time and money. But what can you do to protect yourself? And can your web hosting service help?
In two words: they'd better. At the very least a hosting service in the age of spammers, hijackers, and hackers (oh my!) should at the very least have one or more firewalls protecting your data. They should also be able to offer you protection from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, a common outcome of internet identity theft. Some hosting services may offer you a Virtual Private Network (at relevant expense, of course) for additional protection.
Your payment area should be completely secure, at the bare minimum promising SSL digital encryption of all incoming and outgoing data. You should also make sure the shopping cart your hosting service provides is compatible with the major online payment processing gateways, such as PayPal, NETeller, Citadel, FirePay Click2Pay, UseMyBank, and others.
Identity thieves will often try to access your hosting service account using the "fruits" of their thieving. Once inside, they can hijack your domain away from you or delete important files from your hosting service. If this happens to you, one thing to do is check the server logs of your hosting service to figure out the exact date and time that the theft occurred. Note the IP addresses involved in the action and contact the associated ISP. This alone won't resolve the problem. But it's a start.
If your email address is stolen, you may find you start receiving returned messages that you appear to have sent but which you know for certain you did not. Print each and every one of those messages out immediately and make copies -- they're evidence. Not only may they come in handy in tracing the source of the theft, but they may be the very things that keep your hosting service from terminating your account (if, for one hypothetical example, a thief uses your email address to send X-rated material).
The other immediate action to take if you ever suspect yourself of being a victim of internet identity theft is notify your hosting service, your ISP, and your domain name registrar. Any instructions they give you, follow. You could also file a police report (and probably should, at least to get the crime on record), but as it's unlikely anything will come of it (at least not immediately), this should really only be done after you've first contacted your hosting service, ISP, and registrar.
******
There are laws now that protect us from identity thieves, sure, but oftentimes, by the time the law gets involved, the damage is already done. Your website may be defaced. Your name may be sullied. Your hosting service may have locked you out. You lose customers. You lose money. To recover, you have to regain lost ground, which also takes time and money. But what can you do to protect yourself? And can your web hosting service help?
In two words: they'd better. At the very least a hosting service in the age of spammers, hijackers, and hackers (oh my!) should at the very least have one or more firewalls protecting your data. They should also be able to offer you protection from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, a common outcome of internet identity theft. Some hosting services may offer you a Virtual Private Network (at relevant expense, of course) for additional protection.
Your payment area should be completely secure, at the bare minimum promising SSL digital encryption of all incoming and outgoing data. You should also make sure the shopping cart your hosting service provides is compatible with the major online payment processing gateways, such as PayPal, NETeller, Citadel, FirePay Click2Pay, UseMyBank, and others.
Identity thieves will often try to access your hosting service account using the "fruits" of their thieving. Once inside, they can hijack your domain away from you or delete important files from your hosting service. If this happens to you, one thing to do is check the server logs of your hosting service to figure out the exact date and time that the theft occurred. Note the IP addresses involved in the action and contact the associated ISP. This alone won't resolve the problem. But it's a start.
If your email address is stolen, you may find you start receiving returned messages that you appear to have sent but which you know for certain you did not. Print each and every one of those messages out immediately and make copies -- they're evidence. Not only may they come in handy in tracing the source of the theft, but they may be the very things that keep your hosting service from terminating your account (if, for one hypothetical example, a thief uses your email address to send X-rated material).
The other immediate action to take if you ever suspect yourself of being a victim of internet identity theft is notify your hosting service, your ISP, and your domain name registrar. Any instructions they give you, follow. You could also file a police report (and probably should, at least to get the crime on record), but as it's unlikely anything will come of it (at least not immediately), this should really only be done after you've first contacted your hosting service, ISP, and registrar.
******
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Cheap Web Hosting Companies and the affiliate system
Customers searching in a search engine query for web hosting reviews are bound to find websites offering many similar companies and portraying identical layouts of web hosting reviews and comparison charts. Customers browse between many identical hosting service providers across a large spectrum of different web hosting review websites, and feel perplexed by having to distinguish which hosting providers are the best when all reviews are covering equivalent web hosting companies.
What’s the reason for the similarity in web hosting companies, cheap prices, and the amount of benefits? That’s simple, affiliation.
So just what is an affiliation? Affiliation is what the top web hosting companies do to control the web hosting industry by setting-up a “retailer” like environment across the internet. It is a modern day version of how corporations franchise themselves globally. In this scenario, a normal person can set up their own website and affiliate themselves with any of their review website’s self-proclaimed “top 10 web hosting companies”.
How is this affiliation system trustworthy when it is so widespread across the internet? The affiliation system allows web hosting providers’ greater access to their target market without the necessary work to expose their sites online. Through search engine optimization and letting people accomplish the work for them, hosting providers become increasingly popular for customers seeking the best web hosting companies. The affiliation strategy also creates a shakeout in the web hosting market; smaller web hosting companies cannot afford to compete or pay people to affiliate and are thus back shelved in the lower ranking pages on search engines and therefore never seen by customers.
Although the affiliation system portrays web hosting review websites as a scam, that is not the case. The affiliation system permits web hosting review sites to create a site which is based upon the best top web hosting service providers. If these hosting companies didn’t have the money to spend on affiliation, they certainly wouldn’t have money to spend on customer service, greater benefits, high quality servers, and hosting millions of websites across the internet yearly. This affiliation is what allows review sites to create a site solely constructed around all the benefits, and cheap prices, as well as coupons and deals (such as a free month off) .
If it wasn’t for hosting affiliation, review sites (and SEO specialists) wouldn’t combine to bring you solid reviews concerning the top web hosting providers on the market. In today’s world is everything is profit oriented, but that is the flexibility which creates these review websites and allows you to purchase a company which fits your financial needs and attain benefits which support your website structure.
What’s the reason for the similarity in web hosting companies, cheap prices, and the amount of benefits? That’s simple, affiliation.
So just what is an affiliation? Affiliation is what the top web hosting companies do to control the web hosting industry by setting-up a “retailer” like environment across the internet. It is a modern day version of how corporations franchise themselves globally. In this scenario, a normal person can set up their own website and affiliate themselves with any of their review website’s self-proclaimed “top 10 web hosting companies”.
How is this affiliation system trustworthy when it is so widespread across the internet? The affiliation system allows web hosting providers’ greater access to their target market without the necessary work to expose their sites online. Through search engine optimization and letting people accomplish the work for them, hosting providers become increasingly popular for customers seeking the best web hosting companies. The affiliation strategy also creates a shakeout in the web hosting market; smaller web hosting companies cannot afford to compete or pay people to affiliate and are thus back shelved in the lower ranking pages on search engines and therefore never seen by customers.
Although the affiliation system portrays web hosting review websites as a scam, that is not the case. The affiliation system permits web hosting review sites to create a site which is based upon the best top web hosting service providers. If these hosting companies didn’t have the money to spend on affiliation, they certainly wouldn’t have money to spend on customer service, greater benefits, high quality servers, and hosting millions of websites across the internet yearly. This affiliation is what allows review sites to create a site solely constructed around all the benefits, and cheap prices, as well as coupons and deals (such as a free month off) .
If it wasn’t for hosting affiliation, review sites (and SEO specialists) wouldn’t combine to bring you solid reviews concerning the top web hosting providers on the market. In today’s world is everything is profit oriented, but that is the flexibility which creates these review websites and allows you to purchase a company which fits your financial needs and attain benefits which support your website structure.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Aspects For Consideration When Comparing Web Hosting Services
Of course now that your website is nearing completion you will need a web hosting service for your website as soon as it is done. If you have already taken the time to scout around on the net for a web hosting service you may have noticed a few things and one of them is that there is a massive quantity of web hosting services available on the Internet.
It is virtually impossible to determine just how many hosting services that there are on the net, because new ones are constantly making their debut and many of them are destined to fold up in a matter of time due to the intense level of competition in the web hosting business.
So, what are the requirements that you will want to look for in a web hosting service that you can use in making your final decision? One mistake that many people make when choosing a web hosting service is that they focus exclusively on the technical aspects of a web hosting service. They will look at their amount of bandwidth and gigabytes to the exclusion of all other aspects that should also be considered.
This is due to the fact that too many people are overly optimistic with regards to the projected level of success that their website is going to have. They assume that it is going to take off and run off of its own momentum and there will be little or no need for promotion. The fact of the mater is that the Internet is a very competitive place to do business in and no matter what genre your website is in you will be competing against others.
This is why you should give future search engine optimization or SEO consideration when selecting a web hosting service. SEO is simply the description of the process or processes that are used to better the position of your website on the various Internet search engines. The optimal place of course is the top of page one and the least optimal position is the last place on the last page.
It is for this reason that there is therefore more then just the price and technical aspects to consider when examining a web hosting service. The first tool that you will want a web hosting service to have for you is a tool for researching and analyzing your competition on the Internet and for planing the use of your keywords.
Another thing that you will want to look into is whether or not a web hosting service currently creates site maps and if they automatically ping Google, Yahoo and Ask after you have upgraded or added a page to your website.
This is important, because if they don't you will have to do this yourself which can be somewhat time consuming. One more tool that you will need to have at your disposal is a tool that will review your web pages and make suggestions for changes that will better your position with regards to SEO.
It is virtually impossible to determine just how many hosting services that there are on the net, because new ones are constantly making their debut and many of them are destined to fold up in a matter of time due to the intense level of competition in the web hosting business.
So, what are the requirements that you will want to look for in a web hosting service that you can use in making your final decision? One mistake that many people make when choosing a web hosting service is that they focus exclusively on the technical aspects of a web hosting service. They will look at their amount of bandwidth and gigabytes to the exclusion of all other aspects that should also be considered.
This is due to the fact that too many people are overly optimistic with regards to the projected level of success that their website is going to have. They assume that it is going to take off and run off of its own momentum and there will be little or no need for promotion. The fact of the mater is that the Internet is a very competitive place to do business in and no matter what genre your website is in you will be competing against others.
This is why you should give future search engine optimization or SEO consideration when selecting a web hosting service. SEO is simply the description of the process or processes that are used to better the position of your website on the various Internet search engines. The optimal place of course is the top of page one and the least optimal position is the last place on the last page.
It is for this reason that there is therefore more then just the price and technical aspects to consider when examining a web hosting service. The first tool that you will want a web hosting service to have for you is a tool for researching and analyzing your competition on the Internet and for planing the use of your keywords.
Another thing that you will want to look into is whether or not a web hosting service currently creates site maps and if they automatically ping Google, Yahoo and Ask after you have upgraded or added a page to your website.
This is important, because if they don't you will have to do this yourself which can be somewhat time consuming. One more tool that you will need to have at your disposal is a tool that will review your web pages and make suggestions for changes that will better your position with regards to SEO.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Affordable Php Mysql Hosting Is Within Your Reach
Gone are the days of expensive web hosting. There was a time, just a few years ago, when hosting was not as cheap as it is now. Lets see why.
Hosting is all about storage on a hard disk (which resides on the web server) and bandwidth for your data. Till a few years ago, hard disk storage was not as large as it is now. Now-a-days hard disk drives come in a typical 400 GB to 500 GB capacity ranges. Even the smallest ones for home computer usage come in over 100 GB sizes. Compare that with a 40 GB hard drive just a few years ago.
A few of these 400 GB to 500 GB range hard disk drives in a typical Linux powered web server with 4 Intel Xeon Central Processing Units gives more than enough processing power and storage capacity to host hundreds of websites on one server, all of them running happily.
Throw in open source (free) Apache + PHP + MySQL combination and you have a recipe for hosting a real working dynamic website at very low costs. What was once a premium combination is now very standard and very cheap and very affordable. It is not uncommon to find hosting plans as cheap as just 99 cents per month, which come complete with all features including PHP and MySQL and enough storage + bandwidth.
There is, thus, no reason for anyone who wants to host anything from a personal homepage or a home business / small business wanting a dynamic website for their online business, to go only for simple HTML websites. No. That is long gone.
Shared web hosting has become very affordable for every kind of use and application. As storage and processing technology advances, hosting will be available with even better capacities and more powerful features. It makes complete sense to use the power of PHP and MySQL when it is well within everyone's reach.
Hosting is all about storage on a hard disk (which resides on the web server) and bandwidth for your data. Till a few years ago, hard disk storage was not as large as it is now. Now-a-days hard disk drives come in a typical 400 GB to 500 GB capacity ranges. Even the smallest ones for home computer usage come in over 100 GB sizes. Compare that with a 40 GB hard drive just a few years ago.
A few of these 400 GB to 500 GB range hard disk drives in a typical Linux powered web server with 4 Intel Xeon Central Processing Units gives more than enough processing power and storage capacity to host hundreds of websites on one server, all of them running happily.
Throw in open source (free) Apache + PHP + MySQL combination and you have a recipe for hosting a real working dynamic website at very low costs. What was once a premium combination is now very standard and very cheap and very affordable. It is not uncommon to find hosting plans as cheap as just 99 cents per month, which come complete with all features including PHP and MySQL and enough storage + bandwidth.
There is, thus, no reason for anyone who wants to host anything from a personal homepage or a home business / small business wanting a dynamic website for their online business, to go only for simple HTML websites. No. That is long gone.
Shared web hosting has become very affordable for every kind of use and application. As storage and processing technology advances, hosting will be available with even better capacities and more powerful features. It makes complete sense to use the power of PHP and MySQL when it is well within everyone's reach.
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