The Best Web Hosting Services and Why They Are the Best

Looking for a web hosting service? The top web hosting services out there are not always at the top because they are the best out there. A lot of them spend more of their money marketing than they do providing a good service. In order to find the best web hosting service you have to look at a variety of factors.

To make it easier for yourself, consider writing a list of the top 20 or so companies out there and comparing their services by writing a chart. That will give you a visual of what some companies have that others are lacking hence assist you in the decision-making process.

The Best Web Hosting Services Offer Excellent Customer Support

It is expected to run into some problems every now and then when you are using a web hosting service. That is where customer service and tech support comes in. Ideally you would email customer support and they would answer your emails in a timely fashion, providing viable solutions to your problems.

Unfortunately for consumers, there are many companies out there that don’t make it a priority to offer good customer support. Before choosing any company, make sure to read reviews by real customers to find out whether they are responsive to their customers needs and provide good tech support. The best web hosting services will respond to your needs immediately, 24/7.

Server Performance Makes the Best Web Hosting Services Stand Out

In order to attract visitors and keep people coming back to your site, the server’s performance has to be very good. If your site has a lot of uptime, it means that it experiences minimal time in maintenance or offline. Visitors will give up on visiting your site if it always down when they try to access it and for online businesses, this could mean a bad reputation and less profits.

Most web hosting services guarantee between 99% to 99.9% uptime. 0.9% may not seem like a huge difference but it can be significant so take that into consideration when shopping around for a web host.
Trying to find the best web hosting service can be overwhelming with all the companies competing to be at the top. What is important to remember is that certain “bonuses” offered by companies are none other than that; extras.

When you get down to business, the most important aspects are server performance and good customer service. If a web hosting service lacks either, it simply cannot compete with the best. Now that you are armed with this information, it will be easier for you to narrow down your options and find the best web hosting service out there.

What Is The Best Web Hosting Service?

Is there really a magic formula to determine the best web hosting service? I’m sure thousands of people want to know the answer to this question if there was one. To be honest, there is no absolute correct answer to this. As you know, individual results will vary from person to person in terms of what they want out of a service.

If there was a way to find the “best” web host to ensure you made the right choice, would you be interested?

Hopefully the answer is yes!

I want you to understand that there is no “best” web hosting service but there are some measures or steps to help find what’s best for you.

The tips that follow should help someone new or experienced choose the best possible host the first time around. It can even help those looking to switch hosts avoid making the same mistake twice.

Here’s a checklist to help you get started in choosing a great host:

* Look at what’s in front of you
* How is the service and support?
* Testimonial test

Let’s take the first point; look at what’s in front of you. No, really. Look directly at what’s in front of you. When you visit the web host, how does it present itself visually? If it doesn’t look up to par in terms of presentation you may want to avoid them.

Low-quality graphics may indicate your typical “fly-by-night” type of company that won’t be around very long. Even though anyone can produce high-quality looking websites, this should raise a red flag if identified. While we’re on the look of the website, another turn off should be misspellings.

Misspellings can indicate a business that doesn’t take pride in how they operate. Would you trust your website in a company that doesn’t take pride in their business? There’s no excuse for misspellings when a lot of applications contain spell checkers.

Service and support

This is by far the most important thing to have no matter what type of product or service you get. After all, things do fail or break down and you may need extended support. A way to check the reliability of a web host is to put them to the test.

Find a contact number (some even provide a toll free number) or send them an email to inquire about something they offer. That way you can see how long it takes before you actually talk to someone or for them to respond to emails. A good response time for emails should be within 24 hours. Especially with the large volume of inquiries they may receive on a daily basis. Doing this will allow you to see how friendly and helpful their support staff is as well.

Testimonial test

I’m sure you’ve seen many websites post testimonials to help give credibility to their products and services. A good cross check you can do is send the person who gave the testimonial an email to find out what they like and don’t like about the web host.

You should be able to contact the individual since websites will usually include the person’s URL back to his or her site as an incentive for giving the testimonial. Doing this task will help you make a better decision whether or not to invest in the hosting service according to the feedback received from the customer.

Using these three points is a great way to gauge whether or not the host is a good choice for you. Taking the time now to research the service will save you headaches and disappointment down the road.

I know there were 3 tips mentioned above, but I wanted to throw in a fourth way to help you get the best hosting solution possible. A word of mouth recommendation is one way you can’t go wrong. Ask a few friends or colleagues if they have used a particular host and for how long.

You may want to ask if they’ve switched from another host and the reason for changing. Be sure to inquire why they continue to stay with the current host. This is a great way to gather the pros and cons of certain hosts based on the first-hand experience of others. It will also help you make a better informed decision before deciding to invest your hard earned money on a host provider.

Top 10 Web Hosts 2007

With so many web hosts it is difficult to choose which is the right one for you. I have compiled the Top 10 web hosts of 2007.

All of the hosts listed have been carefully reviewed by the following: downtime percentages, disk space allowed, bandwidth allowance, number of domains and the amount of databases allowed.

Winner

And the winner is…BlueHost. BlueHost is a great web host, providing excellent server technology, resulting in minimal downtime. They are the perfect hosting company for WordPress blogs and any type of PHP content management system. BlueHost offer 300GB of disk space, 3,000 GB of bandwidth, unlimited domains, the latest version of cPanel and the most complete version of Fantastico, to allow for easy installation of scripts such as WordPress, Drupal and others.

Runners up

2nd HostGator – another excellent hosting company, offering fantastic disk space, bandwidth and unlimited domains, making them the perfect hosting company for multisite setups.

3rd Hostmonster – offering great value hosting with their generous allowances and cheap prices.

4th FastNext – massive disk space and bandwidth allowances make FastNext the best reseller hosting package.

5th Lunarpages – a great all round package from a professional team.

6th StartLogic – Great value hosting from $5.95 per month.

7th Dot5Hosting – One of the cheapest hosting places in my top ten, from just $4.95 per month.

8th 1&1 – Another great value host, from $4.99 per month you can benefit from this great hosting package.

9th PowWeb – Great disk space and bandwith allowances at a very good price.

10th IXWebHosting – The cheapest package here, the Expert plan is just $3.95 per month.

Whichever hosting plan you choose you can rest assured that your blog or website will be running smoothly and quickly with these hosts. All of these web hosts offer great support and value for money.

Review for Shared Web Hosting in 2008

Now is only April in 2008, but so many important events have happened in web hosting industry, especially in shared web hosting market sector, that I cannot wait to give out my first review for web hosting in 2008. And below are the key words I have summarized for it.

1) Huge

It’s quite surprised that almost all the web hosting companies have changed their web hosting package and largely increased the disk space to 1500GB, bandwidth to 15000GB and upgrade their hosting environment. The features they provide now is HUGE, can you imagine before that with a fee less than $7/month, you will be provided 1500GB disk space. Some very reputed web hosting companies, such as IXWebhosting.com, even provide the unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space. In a common web hosting practice, people will not work with the hosting companies providing Unlimited features in their solution. But now, it’s still correct?

What can you react to those unbelievable cheap web hosting package? My suggestion is that you can enjoy it but don’t abuse it.

2) Overselling

As you can see from what has been described in above, overselling has become more and more common in web hosting industry. The service provider give out some very aggressive and attractive features to their customers, and try all kinds of methods to manage the overselling situation so that they will not fall into the trouble brought by the overselling and enjoy the profit it has brought. But not everyone is so lucky, iPower is in the progress of losing their customer for not being able to manage their overselling strategy well and get a lot of complaints from their customers.

3) Acquisitions

This year, in web hosting industry, begins with a big acquisition that UK2.Net bought midPhase. UK2.net is a big web hosting companies in UK, and midPhase is a very reputed company in US, this acquisitions will give UK2.Net a chance to enter the US market. Besides this, there are also many others acquisition cases happened. 2008 deem to be an unusual year in web hosting industry.

Reference:

Reliable Affordable Web Hosting Review, Guide and Awards

Top 10 Web Hosting

Webmaster Tutorials

Can You Trust "unlimited" Features in a Web Hosting Package?

“Unlimited” can be a key word for the web hosting industry in 2008. Starting from this year, there are many web hosting service providers that will give you an “Unlimited” feature such as Unlimited Disk space, unlimited bandwidth, or hosting unlimited web hosting. These features are included even from some very well respected web hosting service providers such as: lunarpages, hostmonster, or ixwebhosting.

But, there are many articles telling you don’t work with the web hosting companies who provide “Unlimited” features. So, what can you do now? Below are my suggestions.

Enjoy it

Getting a unlimited feature from web hosting service providers is not a bad thing. A feature of “Unlimited web site” will save you a lot when you have more than one web site. And IXWebhosting will give you “Unlimited disk space” so that you have no need to be too worried about the space you might use.

Don’t Abuse it

Every company need to make profit from their customers so that they potential have the capability to provide a good service for you. Now, even the very reputed web hosting service providers start giving you a unlimited feature, what the thought behind it? Let’s analyze one by one.

Can you really create unlimited web site? The answer is no, the hardest part of creating a successful web site is how to promote it, the value of unlimited web site is no more than a successful web site. A lot of people will only create 2-5 web sites so that they have time or budget to promote them.

For unlimited disk space, I host a web site in iPower and the connection speed to upload files at home is around 8kb/second, that means you have to spend one day to upload only 13M data. Let’s assume you don’t stop uploading file to the server, and in one year, you will only can assume 25G disk space.

What’s behind unlimited bandwidth? The same as unlimited disk space, a secret here is that web hosting vendor hasn’t tell you the connection speed. If you consume too much bandwidth, they can slow down your connection speed, and make your web site unavailable. They do not have any restrict the bandwidth, but the fact is that you just cannot consume too much because of the connection speed.

So, keep one word in your mind that “you pay for what you get”, when choosing a web hosting package for your web site, you need to pay more attention to the reliability, connection speed, and customer service from them.

Reference:

Reliable Affordable Web Hosting Review, Guide and Awards

Top 10 Web Hosting

Webmaster Tutorials

Affordable Web Hosting What Does it Mean to You?

Most people are often lured towards freebies and inexpensive products. But when it comes to web hosting services, you need to find out what’s the catch. Truth of the matter is, when evaluating affordable web hosting services offered by highly competitive companies , it should not just be relative to price, although most of us share the same perception. In fact, when you will consider it seriously, getting a cheap web hosting service is not so different as getting the cheapest home or car out there, which will make you end up sacrificing quality. So before you get lured into getting the lowest price web hosting service, better read on the rest of this article.

Majority of web hosting companies out there may offer their services at ridiculously low prices, such as offering an unlimited package of $5.95 per month. What’s more funny are the claims about global sales, highly trained staff and fiber optics. But you need to ask yourself, how can these cheap website hosting providers be able to afford all these at the rock-bottom rates they are asking, right? Definitely not from web hosting, which will then lead you to the conclusion that these are but one of those false and misleading marketing claims designed to entice gullible clients.

Truth be known, in the world of quality web hosting and reliable web hosting service, nothing is unlimited – especially when it comes to disk space and bandwidth. However, one of the major concerns that you need to look into when looking for top web hosting service is speed, not bandwidth and disk space as you can always get more of that later on. So when a web host offers you unlimited features at such a low rate, then you can expect that the server is overcrowded, thus, greatly affecting the speed and responsiveness of your website.

The next concern that you should look into is the quality of service offered by the web hosting provider. You need to look for web hosting companies that truly guarantee reliable client security and the assurance that all services they offer are really working. Some companies even offer product updates that turns out to be defective because of faulty configurations.

So before you consider getting the most inexpensive web hosting you can find, better know what you will actually be getting in return if you don’t want to end up wasting more money in the long run.

Know About the Web Hosting Control Panels

There are so many players in the web hosting field from individual to big corporation. Web hosting service is a highly competitive field and this drives the web hosting players to offer feature rich hosting plans at affordable cost. Web hosting is the basic thing a webmaster needs to make his website presence, to the whole world.

The competitiveness of the web hosting field compel the web hosting companies to excel each other. So almost all the top companies are giving very efficient technical support. The extra features like free domain name and site builder and the pricing are varying from company to company. But the control panel makes a difference and you have to pick up the correct service which suits your need.

The control panel is a soft ware provided by the web hosting company to control and manage your web site hosting. It is like a vital part of your body. Through control panel you can mange all your activities like email creation, opening of your FTP accounts, statistics report and many more. Though control panel alone can not be used as a yardstick to judge the quality of a web hosting service, it is important to know about the control panel as it is an vital aspect of a web hosting service.

Control panels for Windows Only platform

Helm is a Windows only web hosting control panel. Helm control panel has many customer friendly features and the most striking feature is the billing information. Except the H-sphere, all most all the commonly used control panels do not provide billing information inside the control panel. Helm is easy to operate and has a good standard interface.

Hosting Accelerator is another windows only web hosting control panel. It seems to make a best impression by showing more stuff, but showing too much won’t make a best impression. It makes an impression that the interface is not planned properly and it lacks in extra feature. It suits the seasoned players.

Control Panels For Linux Only Platform

cPanel occupies the number one place among the control panels, because of its many features with easy operation and inexpensive aspect. It is based on Linux platform and serves for over ten flavors of Linux. Many hosting companies prefer it, as it costs only $20 per month/server.

Interworx has many features and deserves to be ranked at the top of Linux only platform web hosting control panels. Considering the fact that there are more Linux based web hosting providers, Inteworx has dedicated to the Linux platform. It has a feature to see the up streams and sown streams. Interworx has a clean interface.

DirectAdmin is another control panel serving Linux platform. DirectAdmin provides low hosting cost at $10 per month. It is the easiest control panel to use. Though it claims to have more features, needs lot of improvements to match the other Linux only control panels.

The disadvantage of both Linux only and Windows only control panels is that they lose the hosting customers of the other platform.

Control Panels For Both Linux And Windows

Plesk, because of its availability for both Linux and Windows platforms, has little advantage over the panel control panel. Many web hosting providers who serves both Linux and Windows hosting customers prefer Plesk. Plesk interface looks like Windows XP and it is expensive as it serves both the platforms. The website builder tool and other features integrate well with Plesk.

H-Sphere is another control panel for both Linux and Windows. Through H-Sphere is widely used by the web hosting sites, it lacks some features when compared to Plesk and cPanel. But it offers many features from key functionalities to complete automation.

Ensim, another control panel for both Windows and Linux, has to cover more grounds when compared to other web hosting control panels serving both Linux and Windows.

As per the ratings, cPanel is preferred for Linux platform and Helm control panel is for Windows platform.

Author Information: After deciding on the control panel, choose the web hosting service which offers extra features, apart from good technical support, at a reasonable price. The extra features you can look for are, free domain name, website builder, unlimited sub domain and many more.

Web Hosting Control Panels

http://www.domainwebhostingproviders.com/web-hosting-control-panel-softwares.htm

The author’s web site presents top ranking web hosting services offering affordable web hosting with extra features. Visit his site to get details of web hosting companies offering free domain name, free site builder, cheap domain names for any number of sites and many more.

Affordable Web Hosting

http://www.domainwebhostingproviders.com

Top Web Hosting Problems

Many years in web hosting industry, and I had come across few control panel that is faulty due to wrong configuration, or some custom control panel that is not functioning for certain features. Another thing that you need to make sure are the database version and php version. Make sure its compatible with the script that you want to run. For example wordpress script wont run completely in mysql 4.0 and below, although you can setup blog successfully, some features will be missing. You will need a version 4.1 and above to fully support the features.When you bump to hosting that ignore to fix the small problem. Its time to pack your website and ready to move to next web hosting. Ask them to honour you the full money back refund. And as long you are asking for refund within 30 days, you are able to get back 100% of what you paid.

There is always better web hosting out there, and its very easy to look for the best web hosting as well. Visit my blog of topwebhostingreviews.org for most details.

Top Web Hosting Services for the Budget-Minded

Paying for a web hosting service doesn’t necessarily have to burn a hole in your pocket. When looking for the best budget web hosting service, you might be inclined to choose the company with the lowest monthly payment but that isn’t always the best idea.

The top web hosting services for customers on a budget sometimes offer different services or features and by comparing those first instead of merely deciding based on the price tag, you will get the most bang for your buck.

The Basic Offerings of the Top Budget Web Hosting Services

If you look at a simple chart that compares the top budget web hosting sites, you will find that they all offer a domain name, disk space, and transfer. Some offer free domain names along with unlimited disk space and transfer while others charge for domain names and have limited services.

Your first job is to sift through information about the top budget web hosting services and narrow down your choices based on monthly payment and these basic offerings.

All of the top budget web hosting services offer customer/tech support 24/7 for 365 days of the year via chat, email, or telephone. Unfortunately, not all of the companies offer reliable and prompt customer support thus it is necessary to read reviews written by real customers who can tell you whether or not their customer service/tech support team is up to par.

Bonuses Offered by Top Budget Web Hosting Services

Due to rising competition, nowadays even the top budget web hosting services offer coupons and bonuses along with their typical services and features. It might sound too good to be true but depending on what plan you buy, some companies may even offer a few months (usually up to six months) of service for free!

Some other bonuses include the capability to host a larger number of sites or even an unlimited number, depending on the company. This is important to consider when weighing your options because some of the top budget web hosting services only allow you to host a handful of websites while others allow you to host an unlimited quantity for a lower price. Reading the fine print is essential in this case.

Many of the top budget web hosting services offer Yahoo/Google PPC (pay-per-click) credits starting from $25 up to $100 in total. Some of the top budget web hosting services also offer free setup and software.
Initially, it may seem overwhelming to choose a web hosting service because even if you are on a budget, there are plenty of companies out there competing to be your service provider. Thanks to that competition, there are lots of freebies and features that would otherwise come with a heftier price tag.

The key is to shop smart by comparing the prices, services, and bonuses offered by the top web hosting services while being careful to read between the lines and make sure there aren’t any charges or fees they aren’t telling you about in their sales pitch. With that in mind, you will certainly have no trouble narrowing down your choice amongst the top web hosting services and finding the best that is out there.

Web Hosts: The Basics

Before you start searching for a web host, you must familiarize yourself with the terminology used in this field. The following terms are also considered key factors in deciding the suitable hosting plan that meets your requirements. You can start learning what does each term mean and how does it affect your selection.

Web Host
A web host, also known as web server, is a computer connected to the internet. This computer is more powerful than normal PCs and is set up to serve up websites. Your website content will reside on this computer, which will give people who surf the internet a way to access your website.

Web hosts can be categorized into three main categories based on the price range and common features for each category:

1. Free Hosts: limited in space, bandwidth and other features. Suitable for personal websites or for temporary usage. Usually enforce pop-up, text or banner ads. They do not provide the best performance and/or reliability. They provide minimum or no customer support. If you register for a free host, your domain will be something like yourname.freehost.com or www.freehost.com/yourname.

2. Shared Hosts: most websites are using this type of hosting. Suitable for personal, small and medium businesses. Prices range from $1 to about $25 a month. Features also range from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. Your website has its own top level domain (e.g. www.website-hostings.net) The number of websites on a server affects its performance and availability, more websites usually means less performance. Servers hosting less number of shared websites are more expensive, but more reliable. Some companies allow customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account.

3. Dedicated Hosts: A full server dedicated to a single customer. Usually used by large businesses and very active websites with thousands of daily visitors. The customer will have full control over the server, and can create as many websites as he likes. Customer can have his own hosting company run on a rented dedicated server. Prices depend on the specifications and services provided with the server, starting from about $100 up to about $800 dollars a month.

4. Colocated Hosts: very similar to dedicated hosts, but the customer owns the server hardware instead of renting it. The server will be housed in provider’s data center. Prices are a bit higher than dedicated servers.

5. Reseller Hosts: providers offer web server storage to customers, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Providers usually offer resellers a discount price.

6. Other Hosts: there are few other types of hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these are out of the scope of this article.

Domain Name
http://www.website-hostings.net/ is an example of a domain name. It’s a name that points to where your website is physically located. The actual address of your website is a set of numbers that looks like (70.86.135.242). This address is unique for every web server. Domain names are just pointers to the real addresses. It’s easier to remember the domain names than the IP addresses.

Space / Storage
The amount of web server’s disk space available for customer’s website files, images and databases. It can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Space prices reduced significantly during the last few years. Customer can find hosting plans offering 3GB of space for less than $10 a month.

Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from web server to clients’ internet browsers. Each time a person view a page data is transmitted from the server to that person’s PC. Audio, video and images contents consume much more bandwidth than text. Bandwidth can be as low as 100MB a month in some free web hosts and as high as 2000GB a month in some dedicated servers. Customer can find hosting plans offering 75GB of monthly data transfer for less than $10.

Server Type
Usually means the operating system than runs the web server. Common types are Windows, Linux and UNIX. Server type determines the server side scripting and database types. Windows usually runs ASP and ASP.NET with Access or SQL Server databases. Linux/UNIX servers usually runs CGI, PHP or JSP with mySQL or Oracle databases. Windows servers are usually more expensive than Linux/UNIX servers.

Databases
As you have seen in server types, there are different types of databases. The most commonly used is mySQL because its an open source GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications’ requirements such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, however, has some limitations in its features. Complicated large business sites will need more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.

Server Side Scripting
Most new users prefer to use PHP as server side scripting. The reason is that there are hundreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that can meet a lot of webmaster’s requirements. Similar to mySQL, PHP has some limitations in features required by advanced websites, which makes some senior web developers prefer to use ASP.NET or JSP. Other developers still prefer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL.

Email
Most hosting plans include the feature of having some email accounts with customer’s domain (e.g. admin@website-hostings.net). The number and size of email accounts depends on the hosting plan. Free plans do not usually have this feature, small plans give about 10 accounts where big plans do not limited the number. Those email accounts are usually web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
A standard way of transferring files across the Internet. Most webmasters upload and download their websites contents using FTP. The upload or download processes are usually performed using FTP client software. To access their web servers, webmasters need FTP username and password. Some hosts give more than one FTP account to their customers. FTP can by anonymous as well, but its not recommended for security reasons.

Control Panel
Most web hosting companies provide their customers with a control panel, a web based application that helps in managing websites. Common functions in control panels are: managing email accounts, providing statistics, managing FTP accounts, managing domains and subdomains and managing databases. The most commonly used control panel application is cPanel. Some companies develop their own control panel application.

Uptime
An important feature of web hosts is their uptime, which is usually measured in percentage. A server that goes down for an average of 30 minutes a day will have an uptime percentage of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most small to medium business websites. Anything less than this percentage 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
With the wide range of options available for customers, the price is also ranges from 0 to $1000 a month. Most personal, small and medium websites shouldn’t cost more than $15 a month. It’s not recommended for business website owners to go for very cheap plans (less than $5) because this price usually means a compromise in the quality of support and reliability of the server.

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