In the era of computerization where most of the work is dependent on computers,web Hosting is serving as a boon for business for any sector or any activity. Web Hosting is a type of internet hosting system that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own websites accessible through world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center . Webhosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called collocation.

Types of hosting.

Moving further on the above topic , following are some of the commonly known types of hosting.:

- Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider. Resellers’ accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a colocated server.

- Shared web hosting services: one’s Web site is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.

- Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.

- Free web hosting service: is free, (sometimes) advertisement-supported web hosting, and is often limited when compared to paid hosting Virtual dedicated server: slicing up a server into virtual servers. each user feels like they’re on their own dedicated server, but they’re actually sharing a server with many other users. The users may have root access to their own virtual space.

- Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.

- Colocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of the web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client’s machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.

How to obtain Hosting?

Now-a-days its easy to avail this facility of web hosting due to enormous growth of I.T.sector and more enormous competition among several providers. Web hosting is often provided as part of a general Internet access plan; there are many free and paid providers offering these services.

A customer needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux,Apache,MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python. The webhosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. A customer may also choose Windows for its hosting platform. The customer still can choose from PHP, Perl, and Python but may also use ASP .Net or Classic ASP.

Web hosting packages often include a Web Content Management System so the end-user doesn’t have to worry about the more technical aspects.

One may also search the Internet to find active webhosting message boards and web hosting blogs that may provide feedback on what type of webhosting company may suit his/her needs.

The one who wants to enter in this web world and desires for a long time survival, then he/she should be familiar with each and every terminology used in this field. If user considers all the important factors before choosing a hosting plan then only he/she will be able to have a successful future in this world .User should not choose any of the plan, rather he/she should opt the best and most suitable one and this can only be made possible by fetching more and more informations and also by studying properly all the requirements. New comers should start from the basics .They should learn the meaning of each and every term used and also in addition those factors that can affect his/her selection.

Web Host

Web host refers to a computer connected to the internet. Web host can also be termed as ‘web server’. The computer that is playing the role of the web server needs to be more powerful than normal PCs and the function of this web server is to serve up websites.

The website content of the user will remain will on this computer, so as the people who are surfing on the internet can get a way to access his/her website.

There can be three main categories in which the web host can be classified based on the economic factor and common features:

1. Free Hosts:

The users who are not professional but are making website only as a hobby then for them free hosting can be a good option. In free hosting space, bandwidth and other features provided are very limited. With free web hosting one can not only make his/her website successful but is also suitable for personal websites or for temporary usage. Generally free hosting enforces pop-up, text or banner ads. Reliability, best performance and customer support lacks in case of free hosting as well. When a user registers for a free host then the word free host gets added with the user’s domain name that gives an adverse effect in the eye of the visitors.

2. Shared Hosts:

The next type of the web hosting to be discussed is shared hosting. This hosting service is used by many of the web sites .This type of hosting service is Suitable for personal, small and medium businesses. This service can be used by paying $1 to $25 per month. The features provided by this service vary from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. The users host their website by this type of hosting service and it has its own top level domain facility. No doubt that shared web hosting is quite better than free hosting but still it does not provide 100% satisfactory services. In case of shared hosting one server is shared by the number of websites so its performance and availability gets affected. More websites usually means less performance. If less number of websites are hosted by one server then it will be more expensive, but in this case there are more chances of reliability. There are many companies allowing customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account.

3. Dedicated Hosts:

The next type of hosting is dedicated hosting. This type of hosting is most reliable hosting. In this type of hosting a full server is dedicated to a single customer. Generally this type of hosting is used by large businesses, professionals and very active websites dealing with thousands of visitors daily. The customers having dedicated hosting can have their total control over the server as well as able to create as many websites as they like. Customers can run their own hosting company on a rented dedicated server. Payment module is mentioned according to specifications and services provided with the server, which varies from $100 up to about $800 dollars per month.

4. Collocated Hosts:

Now the other type of hosting service to be discussed is collocated hosting. This service is very much similar to dedicated hosting. The difference between collocated hosting and dedicated hosting is that in collocated hosting the customer owns the server hardware instead of renting it. In this service the server will be placed in provider’s data center. This service is more expensive than dedicated hosting.

5. Reseller Hosts:

In reseller hosting the providers offers web server storage to their customers, and resells the web server storage to them. Generally providers offer resellers a discount price.

6. Other Hosts:

Including the above type of hosts there are also many other hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these hosts will not be discussed in this article.

Domain Name

Domain name is the name which shows the place where one’s website is located. The actual address of the website is a set of numbers. Each and every web server has its own unique address. Domain name indicates the real addresses of every websites. One can easily remember the domain name of any of the website. Remembering domain name is easier than recalling the IP addresses.

Space / Storage

Space is one of the services provided by the web host. It plays a very important role in the website development. It happens many times that the customer requires more space but the host fails to provide it, so customer should be very careful while choosing the web host. Storage is the amount of web server’s disk space available for customer’s website files, images and databases. Space can be according to the requirement; it can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Earlier prices of the space were very high but prices reduced significantly during the last few years. The hosting plans offering 3GB of space for less than $10 a month can be easily available.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth can be defined as the amount of data transferred from web server to clients’ internet browsers. When ever a person outlook a page the data is transmitted from the server to that person’ PC. If any one is having audio, video and images in his/her website then the bandwidth consumed is more in comparison of the website having only text contents. The bandwidth available in free hosting can be as low as 100MB per month where as in some dedicated servers the bandwidth available is as high as 2000GB a month. The customers who don’t want to pay more for bandwidth can easily find hosting plans offering 75GB of monthly data transfer for less than $10.

Server Type

Generally server means the operating system than runs the web server. Some common types are Windows, Linux and UNIX. Server type refers the server side scripting and database types. The difference between Windows server and Linux/UNIX is that Windows runs ASP and ASP.NET with Access or SQL Server databases where as Linux/UNIX servers usually runs CGI, PHP or JSP with MySQL or Oracle databases. The other difference is that Windows servers are more expensive than Linux/UNIX servers.

Databases

As server type is discussed earlier also, we are able to know that there are different types of databases available. The mostly used is MySQL as it is open source GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications’ requirements such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, rather its features are limited. MySQL is sufficient for small concern but it is not powerful for the complicated large business sites. Large business requires more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.

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Server Side Scripting

Usually the new comers prefer to use PHP as server side scripting. The reason behind this is that there are hundreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that are able to fulfill the webmaster’s requirements. However PHP also has some limitations in features required by advanced websites same as in the case of MySQL, due to this limitation some professional web developers prefer to use ASP.NET or JSP. Some other developers still prefer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL.

Email

Now the next very important aspect to be talked about is Email. At present no one can move further in this computer world with having his/her Email account. The one who is planning to do any kind of activity through computer such as to run a business or to provide any kind of service, then the first thing he/she need to do is to open an Email account. There are many hosting plans that include the feature of having some email accounts with customer’s domain. The availability of number and size of email accounts totally depends on the hosting plan one opted. Generally this feature is not included in free hosting. Small plans provide only about 10 accounts where as big plans do not have the limited number. Usually those email accounts are web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

The other service is FTP. File Transfer Protocol is a usual way of transferring files across the Internet. Most of the webmasters used to upload and download their websites contents through FTP. The process of uploading or downloading is performed by using FTP client software. Webmasters require FTP username and password so as to access their web server. There are any hosts who use to provide more than one FTP account to their customers as per their requirement. Rather FTP is unspecified; it is not advisable as per the security reasons.

Control Panel

Control panel is the service available by many of the web hosting companies to their customers. It is a web based application that helps in managing websites. Some important functions performed by the control panel are that it used to manage email accounts, providing statistics, managing FTP accounts, managing domains and sub-domains and managing databases. The control panel application that is mostly used by the user is cPanel. There are many companies who use to develop their own control panel application.

Uptime

Now after having all the services, the thing of concern which remains is how the user keeps his/her website uptime most of the time. If anyone is having a website with excellent features but it remains down most of the time it will be of no use, as when ever the visitors visit his/her website and found it down then later on they will think twice before visiting it. In result he/she will suffer the loss of visitors. Uptime is very important feature of web hosts and that is usually measured in percentage. If a server remains down near about 30 minutes a day will have an uptime percentage of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most small to medium business websites. If any of the business website is not having at least this percentage of uptime then that website is not suitable for a business website. Mission critical sites cannot tolerate frequent outages, thus they may use web monitoring services to notify web administrators immediately when an outage happens.

Price

Finally the factor left is price. In this option also there is a great variability found like for example customer is having option to choose between the prices ranging from 0 to $1000 per month. For most personal, small and medium websites the total amount of cost involved is just $15 per month. Thus its not at all advisable for business website owners to select very cheap plans let say less than $5 because this price can lead to huge cost indirectly afterwards.

Domain registration has always be the critical first step to any type of internet presence that you or your company wants to develop. On the web, the domain is equivalent to your address. But, do remember that until you put a house on that piece of property, it is still only an address. The same is true with a domain. Domain registration gives you your first step in establishing your digital place of business.

The word domain itself has several meanings, but the one that is most suited to gaining a full understanding of this is a realm or range of personal knowledge, responsibility, etc. There are also definitions that are more detailed that address the area of computers, such as this: The top level in a domain name, indicating the type of organization, geographical location, or both, and officially designated in the suffix, as .com for commercial enterprises in the US.

Thus, a person’s domain becomes their realm and their range of personal knowledge. That is what you see on the internet today. Thousands upon thousands of domains have been registered and websites created and maintained all showing that person’s or company’s realm and range of personal knowledge.

Domain registration is where it all begins. The goal is to locate some good registrars, find a domain name that is perfect for your company or yourself, and then register that name. Now that you have registered your domain, you can get it hosted and you can get your website development under way.

Some commonly asked question about domain registrars are, What is the best place to register my domain? Or Where can I find a good registrar? Also, How do I know if this is the right registrar for me?

To gain an answer to these questions, it is a good idea to determine what you will actually need from the registrar. For example, is it going to be a simple domain registration and nothing more? Will you need the registrar to also be able to provide hosting for your domain? Does the registrar offer special services such as DNS, name servers, and domain forwarding? Do you need these services as a part of your long term domain registration. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, it would be a good idea to interview the person or people who will be developing your website. In most cases, they will know what precisely you need out of a domain registrar and the best place to go for domain registration.

However, it is advisable for you to also do your own internet searches using words like domains, domain registrations, and domain registrars. You will find that hundreds of companies exist, which can be daunting at first, but just check out a few of the registrars, and even talk with your programmer or website designer to get a feel for what they like or dislike about the domain registrars you have looked into.

The most important thing to remember is that your domain is your realm. You want to start out with the right domain name, registered at the domain registrar service that will work best for you in the long run.

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The user can try the given below guidelines to make the process of finding “cheap” hosting service a lot easier.

1. Act smart:

The user should keep his/her mind sharp while dealing for a use or rather acceptable use policy of that particular cheap web host. One can easily locate fair deal, due to immense competition prevailing in the cheap web hosting industry however if the user find a host offering features at an extremely cheap amount as compare to other hosts, then, BEWARE, user should never deal with such people.

2. Perform additional research:

A user should confirm about the host from several sources like reviews, related details from search engines, and even by verifying their experience in this particular sector. One should go to the support pages and see whether their provided support level matches one’s requirement or not. One cannot expect to receive best ever support for every mere little trouble which user receive through payment less than per month.

3. Check support:

These types of businesses would not survive as capable support personnel demands money. If one talks about larger companies and Windows plans then they are generally quite costly. It is a matter of fact that, cheap web hosts sell additional amount of space and bandwidth, predicting not total exploitation of it by the user. It is quite usual and there will be no negative impact on the user if he/she utilizes all the owed space and bandwidth. The user should be aware of the fact that, cheap web hosts often do not have full command over their servers and it is possible that they might have a dedicated server with another company in order to save their cost. Due to this reason only they are sometimes forced to depend on others to perform some physical tasks like replacing some hardware on the server or other sort of technical problem which they are unable to handle.

In an ever-changing world it is important to have some stability. To this end you should look into registering your domain name because:

• Your domain name becomes a point of association for you. Clients remember your site and services by the domain name.

• Even if you change your web host the domain name would go with you and clients will be re-directed to your web site.

• Since brand recall is the basis to good marketing a permanent domain name will become the “brand” that represents your company.

Registering a domain is cheap. It only costs between US$ 1 and US$ 3 per month. Many registrars also offer free parking for the domain names. The registration can be done by the web host or you as an individual.

• Make a list of domain names you are using in your business and are likely to use.

• Write down the DNS IP addresses and the names of the primary and secondary servers.

• Choose a method of payment. Using a credit card is highly recommended as the registration is immediate.

• Select a registrar from the many available like, Yahoo, GoDaddy.com, Dotster.com, or Register.com. Read the terms and conditions carefully and do not hesitate to ask any relevant questions.

You must:

• Consider seriously the costs of re-registering the domains owned by you.

• Whether you will be in a position to sell any of the domains.

• If you should purchase other permutations of your domain to prevent cyber squatting. Think about dot.net; dot.biz; dot.co and so on.

• InterNic at http://www.internic.net/ provides information on Internet domain name registration services. It has an accredited registrar directory as well as an FAQ section.

• Network Solutions at http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml has a WHOIS database where one can find out which domains are registered and by whom along with website data. The search spans multiple registrar databases and throws up registration information on millions of domain names with different extensions.

• Yahoo Small Business Directory at http://dir.yahoo.com/BusinessandEconomy/BusinesstoBusiness/CommunicationsandNetworking/InternetandWorldWideWeb/DomainNameRegistration/ is a comprehensive directory of 334 domain registration sites along with a brief description.

Valuable Insights:

• Make a list of domain names as well as extensions that you want to register. Ask yourself why you need these domains and what you plan doing with them. Of all the extensions dot.com is the most popular.

• It is not advisable to register the domain names with the web host . If you decide to use a new host you will save yourself immense trouble of moving the domain name as well. Always register with reputable and accredited companies.

• Choose the keywords carefully. Search engines favor keyword rich domain names. This will help in the marketing of the site.

• Coin a short domain name. Short names are remembered and are know to have better recall in memories of clients and casual browsers.

• Ensure that the domain name has topical relevance. It must convey a definite meaning and represent your business.

• Keep in mind applicable laws while choosing a domain name. Pay special attention to trademark and copyright laws.

Register your domain and gain peace of mind. It is inexpensive and protects your website and intellectual property.

If one is looking for a cheap UK web hosting service, there are certain important points which one should keep in mind while searching for a reliable and cost effective web host. Given below are some questions which one needs to know while searching for a cheap UK web hosting service:

Q1. How is the technical support of cheap UK web hosting?

Q2. What are the working hours of the company?

Q3. What is the response time of the company?

Q4. What are the type of support methods provided by the company i.e. toll free phone, email, IM or live person?

Q5. How much the web hosting plans of the company cost?

Q6. To check whether the web hosting service offered is dependable and stable or not?

Q7. What is the uptime or reliability of the provider?

Q8. Is the provider providing backup of one’s web site and allows easy recovery or not? What type of web site monitoring will the cheap UK web hosting service provide?

Q9. Is the company having premium hardware and fast servers with good quality?

Q10. What is the amount of traffic that the cheap UK web hosting service can handle?

Q11. Is the location of cheap UK web hosting service favorable or not?

Thus the above are very important questions which one should consider before finalizing with a cheap UK web hosting service. It is advisable that the user must take his/her time to get the answer of all above questions and then should take decision accordingly. The user must keep in mind to think twice in advance as afterwards it’s really very complicated to change to new provider when the site is quite popular.

Cheap UK Web Hosting

Most of the cheap UK web hosting services plans and packages offers variety of operating systems such as Linux and Windows. Along with this one is offered different disk space/storage in MB sizes. In addition one is offered data transfer in GB rates for the amounts of traffic that user will receive any time. Following are some of the most important options that user will get with cheap UK web hosting service. They are email, POP3, auto forwarding, databases, scripting languages such as (ASP, PHP, JSP) CGI-Bin access, FrontPage access, an IP Address, log files, reporting stats, secure server ( SSL) for commerce, shopping carts and web based control panel. Thus in additions to above there are many other good advantages for selecting a cheap UK web hosting services.

Thus after carefully studying the above questions and doing proper research one can get a good provider at less cost. It is always better to educate one as the user himself/herself can know better what are his/her business or personal needs.

If one is spending too much money at ones current hosting provider then probably multiple domains or websites are being hosted. By asking or forcing to create an additional hosting account every time one wants to host a new domain or website, hosting companies are increasing their profits. Supposing a website costs $10 a month and one has 10 website this means that one is spending $100 a month to host those 10 websites, is one aware of the fact that he/she is being ripped off?

Full advantage is taken by webhosting companies of its existing customer as they are aware of the fact that one will be spending extra $10 a month to host a new website. They make their customer unaware of the fact that they are being ripped off.

Apart from spending that extra amount aren’t the customers fed up:-

• Of signing up a new account every time one wants to host an additional website or domain?

• Tired of keeping up the login information for multiple accounts?

• And above all, spending that extra $5, $10 and even $20 or more a month just to host a new website?

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Remember one should be spending ones time in the growth of the business and not having to administer multiple accounts. One should be saving ones money to promote the growth of ones business or company. Getting a good deal with ones hosting provider and not getting ripped off should be known by everybody in the business.

To conclude getting ripped off by a hosting company can be avoided easily.

Webhosting is a service that enables you to upload and store a site’s HTML documents and related files on a Web server that can be accessed through the internet. Another term for webhosting is site hosting.

With a number of webhosting companies on the internet, it is sometimes hard to find the one that offers true cheap and quality webhosting. Before, you began to search for companies that offer cheap webhosting, it is important to know what exactly you are looking for. This includes your site features, internet programming languages, database connectivity features, email addresses, domain name, traffic you expect and many other considerations.

Some cheap webhosting services offer ‘unlimited bandwith’. This is a false claim since ‘bandwith’ refers to the amount of information between the hosting servers and the end user. Another important consideration in choosing a cheap webhosting is its support services. You must know how prompt the cheap webhosting company can address the problems you encountered. Do some research on the webhosting company’s website. Know how long they have been in operation. Then know if the company offers the service you are looking for.

If you purchase your own domain name, make sure that the cheap webhosting company supports them and they give you 1 email address. A number of companies offer 10 or more custom pop email accounts with unlimited forwarding address with sometimes no additional costs.

Linux based cheap webhosting services are usually cheaper that Windows, offers PHP and MySQL and telnet accounts. Linux is often used by cheap webhosting companies because Linux based languages and databases are free to install. Windows are usually more expensive that Linux, should support ASP, could have Cold Fusion, Access, SQL Server at additional cost.

It is hard to find cheap webhosting using Windows since it is expensive for a hosting company to purchase. Cold Fusion, Allair, SQL Server need to be purchased at quite a high price. Access is sold at a very minimal price. If you are looking for extra features in your Windows host then you should be ready to pay extra. If you are looking for a cheap webhosting service, then a Linux based service would be the one for you. However, if you are using Microsoft Access databases, a Windows based hosting service with Access support is a requirement.

When choosing a cheap webhosting company, you must check their support services, do some research from others and compare your requirements with that of the cheap webhosting company’s offerings before you take the plunge.

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