A Web Hosting Review Barbara

Web hosting siphon can sustain you catch the right innkeeper

If you dispatch a scrutinize in Google for ‘Web Hosting’ or ‘Hosting’, the best annex of results that occur adulthood are surprisingly enough, not those of 18-carat web hosting companies, but tolerably interlacing hosting review sites.

These sites are an divine resource to comfort you with regulation a oracle lamp which netting landlord to assemble for your onrush note the world of the Internet.

A net hosting ride can sustain you compare the services thanks to offered by variant hosting companies. This is a heavy duty take considering you don’t have to ramble contrastive sites to obtain details. You can log on to a single site and compare services by bandwidth, by price or by disk space.

The contrary cardinal accrual that these sites instance is that abundantly of them quote a classifying abetment and the flexibility for clients to berth comments or reviews. These comments reveal a lot about a hosting company!

Do not be parlous alarmed though if you gem some reviews that are ever detrimental – it is deserved not abeyant for a hosting job to be perfect. They WILL trigger mistakes. The essential mission is to try and ascertain how well they recovered or how well they handled their customer service when the problem occurred.

To rack up the eminently out of these sites, you voracity to ken what to delve into for. Some of the newer sites have more nice ways of hand research criteria – you should be cogent to search on operating system (e.g. Linux or Windows), disk space, bandwidth, price, control panel, features etc.

You inasmuch as love to discern how intensely bandwidth you require, how incalculably uphill disk break you desire and feasibly matching have made a decision up front whether you are looking for Linux or Windows hosting.

Once you have unflinching about what you need, you can found searching for a hosting service. You can avail one of the acknowledged dig into engines, enjoy Google or Yahoo to asset a crucial lacework hosting argue site.

Log on to the plant and compare the altered packages. See which packages or bundled services aggregate your needs best. Check and compare the specifications of the hardware because offered by the hosting services. Eliminate the hosting services that don’t hoard your requirements and send the remaining hosts a register of questions. The questions you buzz are not for important, but you bequeath get an idea about how prompt the hosts are in responding to your queries. This can then become a useful benchmark. You can reject those who take too long to answer.

Finally you thirst to ultimatum connectivity. Visit a few sites hosted on the servers of companies that you have minute listed. Check the download speeds. Eliminate ones that advance drastically vast to open. You should besides pass on on the net hosting kick about site whether they have any uptime statistics. This will also give you a good idea what type of downtime your website might experience.

Be shrewd not to supreme on amount peculiar – cheapest is not always the best! Rather attending at the frequent prices and pursuit for a hosting provider that tolerably offers a middle of the entrance set of price rather than the absolute cheapest. Another important point to look out for is to see how long the company has been in business!

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.

Top 5 Things To Look For In A Web Host

A web host is a company that provides you with server space to host and control your website along with a whole lot of services such as software scripts, shopping carts, and other plug-ins.

Well, if you want to be on the Internet, you need a web host but not just any webhost – you need a quality and reliable web host to ensure that your website performs well. Thus, when you choose a web host you need to be careful; here are the top 5 things you must look for in any web host:

Reputation and experience: This should be your primary concern because if a web host does not have a reputation and experience to back him, then chances are that your website will be used as a test guinea pig. Plus, the web host must have a record that shows at least 95-97% server uptime, financial stability, and good testimonials from its existing customers.

Infrastructure & scalability: Your web host must be equipped with the latest infrastructure and he should be willing and able to scale up this infrastructure, given the rapid technological obsolescence that is happening around us. And that’s not all, your webhost to keep pace with your business too – if your website needs sophisticated web architecture, then you must look for a solid, technosavvy host.

Support: Does you web host have a 24/7/366 online and offline customer support system? If he doesn’t, don’t even consider him because if one fine day your site or ftp fails and you don’t find anyone to talk to, you will end up losing business as well as reputation.

Bandwidth: Choose a webhost who is known to provide the latest, super express deluxe network lines that make browsing and downloading a pleasure for all website visitors. Nowadays, audio and video are getting into the Internet like no one’s business and your web host must have enough redundant bandwidth to face heavy usage, if and when it occurs.

Software: Lastly, look at the scripts and software your host is supporting you with. Nowadays, even ordinary web hosts provide tools such as an easy-to-use control panel, shopping cart, blog integration, visitor tracking, and much more.

Those were the top 5 things you must look for before booking space with a web host. Remember, space and costs do not figure in the top 5 because most hosting plans are very affordable and give you ample space, and so they are not such a top consideration anymore.

So go ahead and hunt for the right host and just remember one thing: do not compromise on quality even if the costs are a little higher. Happy hunting then.

Web Hosting – a Guide for Beginners

So you’re looking to learn about web hosting and what it has to offer or you may not know much about web hosting? There is no shame in not knowing this information. Everyone has to start at the beginning at some point. On that note, let’s begin learning about web hosting.

First off, what is web hosting and how does it work?

Web hosting is the business practice of providing space and bandwidth on a high-powered computer server that is connected to the Internet at very high speeds. Hosting companies maintain large networks of high-powered web server computers in a physical location known as a data center. These computer servers are connected to a very fast, and generally redundant, Internet connection. The data centers have primary and backup power, a fast connection to the Internet, and a security monitoring staff.

The web hosting companies provide a share of disk space and available bandwidth to a customer for a monthly fee. Once the customer is signed up, they can upload files to their personal space on the web server and the information is then viewable to anyone interested on the Internet. The monthly fee the web hosting company charges is much less than what it would cost to run a server out of your own home or data center. This is the reason these companies exist. They take care of all the hardware, software, and other technical needs for you.

Types of web hosting

There are many different types of web hosting offers, but the main three are shared, reseller, and dedicated. Each type of hosting is for a different purpose.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of disk space and bandwidth provided to you by the web hosting company on a high-powered server. There are many other web sites hosted on this server, and the hosting company is likely to have quite a few of these servers in a large data center. The resources of the server are shared by as many other websites as are allocated to that computer.

Shared web hosting is the best form of web hosting if you are looking for a great price and don’t have more than a couple thousand daily visitors to your site.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller web hosting is a popular, low-cost solution to starting your own web hosting business. There are two types of reseller hosting, private-label and a reseller of services.

The private-label is the best type of reseller plan because it allows you to retain full control over your customer’s websites. A private-label plan allows the reseller to keep the full monthly payment of the web-hosting customer, but the reseller must pay a monthly fee to the larger hosting company for the reseller space. The more hosting accounts a private-label reseller can sell, the higher the profit for them. Private-label hosting allows you to host many more websites than if you were using shared hosting for each. This is a great solution for someone who has many sites they need to host in one location to save money.

The reseller of services plans resell the regular web hosting plans of a larger web hosting company, but you get a discounted price for providing the customer and earn a monthly fee for as long as they remain a customer. This plan does not allow control over customer web sites and you only keep a portion of the potentially monthly revenue.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated web hosting is the most powerful and cost effective solution of hosting a busy web site without resorting to buying your own equipment and paying hundreds of dollars per month for a fast Internet connection. Dedicated hosting consists of single server with no one else hosting on that computer. This allows for the greatest of configuration options. Anyone who has a busy website will find dedicated hosting is the necessary choice.

Web Hosting Considerations

Wondering about all the other information listed in web hosting plans? In this section, I will explain the most important considerations in choosing a good web host.

Price

The price of web hosting services is one of the most important. There are many hosting companies out there with cheap hosting packages, but they may be lacking in other areas. Don’t let the price of a hosting package fool you. There are some hosting companies out there who have great prices and the other features are just as good. Price may be one of the most important decisions of a web hosting plan, but there is much more to consider in choosing a quality web host.

Disk Space / Storage Space

Disk space is the amount of physical storage space a web host gives to you to store your web files. Hosting companies these days have plans with disk space being measured mostly in terms of gigabytes, but some are still offering plans in the megabytes for storage space. Depending on your needs for file storage space, you may need more or less. Generally the more disk space offered the better.

Bandwidth / Data Transfer

The amount of bandwidth available can make a big difference in choosing a quality hosting plan. In general, the more bandwidth a hosting company makes available to you, the better. This means you can support more traffic to your web site as your business grows. Be wary of web hosting companies that offer unlimited or unmetered bandwidth. While many of these are legitimate offers, there are some out there who are overselling their bandwidth in hopes the average user won’t use much.

Customer Support

In any business, it is very important to provide exception customer service. Web hosting is no exception to this. Many of the hosting companies are available all day and night in case you have a problem with your web site, but there are some who are just available specific hours of the day. If your web site goes down in the middle of the night when they’re not available, this means lost revenue for a business. You should make sure the web host you select is always available for support.

Money Back Guarantee

Most web hosting companies will provide a thirty-day money back guarantee. Some will provide one even long, but be wary of the ones who offer no money back guarantee. I would not purchase web hosting services from a company who does not offer at least a 30 day money back guarantee, unless they have proven themselves to be a leader in the industry and have an excellent reputation.

Operating System

An operating system is a piece of software that controls the interaction between the computer user and the physical hardware of the machine. A vast majority of all web sites on the Internet run on the Linux operation system. Linux is generally much more stable than Windows. Stability is critical in running a web site. For this reason, I prefer to host my web sites on the Linux operating system. Some sites have specific requirements that only the Windows operating system can satisfy, but there are always alternatives to those requirements.

Backup

A good web hosting company will have a regular schedule to backup the data on all the web servers. The more often the data is backed up, the better. At the very least, a web hosting company should backup web site files daily.

Control Panel

The control panel is the point of contact the web site administrator will have between the host server and their own machine connected via the Internet. It is essential to have a well organized and easy to use control panel interface. My favorite control panel is cPanel, which is one of the leading web hosting control panels out there today. Plesk is another good one, and many companies will create their own control panel for you to use. Most web hosting companies will provide a link to a demo of the control panel they use with their hosting plans. The control panel used is a matter of preference, but it should be user friendly.

Email

Email is essential part of communication on the Internet. Most web hosting companies out there will give you more email addresses and more space to hold email messages than you will ever need. What you need to watch out for are the companies that have decided to be a little strict on their email accounts and only offer a small number or a small amount of message space.

Uptime

Uptime is a term used to describe how often the average web site hosted by a company is available online. No company should be expected to provide an exact 100% uptime. This is impossible due to things such as hardware, software, and power failures. A vast majority of the companies are very good with uptime, and they guarantee it. It is still a good idea to be conscious of the uptimes posted by the company. If it is not at least 99.5%, it is probably not worth hosting with that company.

Statistics

As a webmaster, it is nice to know how many visitors you’ve had, where they came from, how long they stay on your site, and how much bandwidth they’ve used. This information is collected by the web server and is placed in a log file. A statistics software package can read this data and provide meaningful information to the webmaster. The information gathered from these logs can be very valuable in improved services to the viewers of the web site.

FTP

FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It is a way of quickly uploading or downloading many files to and from a web server. Most web hosting companies will allow their customers access to their web hosting accounts via FTP. FTP is very useful and is a great feature to have when paying for a web hosting account.

Scripting

Since the World Wide Web began, many scripting languages have been created and have evolved into the dynamic and interactive environment we enjoy today. A scripting language is a way of adding functionality to a web site, whether it is to calculate numbers or to load information from an external database. Scripting languages have made electronic commerce possible. Some of these languages include PHP, ASP, JSP, Cold fusion, VBscript, JavaScript, and Perl. I won’t go into the details of these in this article for the sake of complexity. If you know how to use these languages, you should know what to look for in a web server for them.

Databases

A database is a place to store data that can be used in a large variety of ways. Databases are used on the Internet for applications such as shopping carts, message boards, and product catalogues. The more databases the web hosting provider allows you to create, the most applications you can deploy on your web server. Databases are used by the more advanced web master, but information is freely available online should you be interested.

Conclusions

Web hosting can be a very difficult decision with the many thousands of hosting companies out there. It is critical to find a plan that fits your needs and to have a good hosting company. I hope this article was useful in making your decision about which company to host with. Happy Hosting!

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Budget hosting – Getting started guide

Budget hosting – Getting started guide

This is a quick summary of how to find a budget host, followed
by more detailed discussion for those who are interested.

This guide is meant for those who:

- Need a modest hosting plan for a site for a nonprofit / small
business / personal / etc.

- Have a budget for hosting of about $8 a month or under -
perhaps well under.

- Want a free standing hosting plan (not a reseller plan to
aggregate several such sites).

- Find a free plan or ISP web space doesn’t meet their needs.

- Don’t expect lots of extras or handholding.

THE SHORT VERSION:

Well run, reliable hosts can find it worthwhile to offer plans
for those with limited needs and budget. Some can make money
doing it. Others find that it’s a way to bring in new clients
whose needs will grow over time.

It’s good advice to avoid offers that are too good to be true -
you often won’t get what you were promised, and neither will the
rest of the horde of bargain hunters that overwhelm the host’s
servers with their sites. But that’s not what we’re talking
about here. You can get a good host on a budget.

- First, try to get some sense of the features, space, and
bandwidth you’ll need. If you can come up with even a rough
idea, it will help.

- Second, identify some good candidates for hosting. There are
enough listed in this article to save you time in coming up with
some candidates.

- Third, look for reviews of potential hosts from actual users.
As with a restaurant, the quality of a host has a lot to do with
the way it’s managed. New hosts might or might not be good; and
established hosts can go downhill if the management doesn’t
consistently stay on top of things. Service isn’t always
perfect, but what separates the good hosts from the bad is how
often there are problems, and how the host handles things when
something goes wrong.

- Search WebHostingTalk.com. Do a Search of the Web Hosting
Forum at WebHostingTalk.com, by searching on the host name.
Don’t search on “All Open Forums” – you’ll get too
many results that aren’t relevant. You might try a couple
variations to allow for different ways people spell – with or
without spaces between the words in the name, for example.

- Use FindMyHosting.com to find hosts and reviews of hosts.
Their Advanced Search page lets you specify a lot of options,
but often it’s best not to narrow it unnecessarily. Just enter
your budget and location, and use the “List By Highest
Customer Rating” option in the lower right corner. Also,
see below for more discussion of FindMyHosting.com

- Google the host’s name, and variations of it, to see what
turns up.

Neither of these approaches will find good information on every
host, or has all the info on the host – unfortunately, that site
doesn’t seem to exist. Many of the hosts mentioned below aren’t
listed on FindMyHosting.com. But these resources should help you
narrow the list to current good prospects for hosting.

Some U.S. budget hosts that seem promising so far, based on a
January 2005 search, roughly in order of price:

E-rice.net – starts at
$10/year, features should be good enough for simple sites. No
backups, though, so keep that in mind if you have content that
changes.

Doorhost.net – plans start at
$20/yr.

HostPC – Budget package
starts at $25/year.

href="http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/web-hosting-plans.html">T
otalchoice – budget plan at $4/month.

Site5

Lunarpages

href="http://www.dreamhost.com/shared/comparison.html">Dreamhost<
/a>

Efextra.net – budget
windows hosting starting from $4.95/month.

Links

As you might have discovered, most of the web hosting
directories on the web are advertising driven – there are no
real reviews there. Here are a few places to look for info:

- href="http://findmyhosting.com/AdvancedSearch.asp">FindMyHosting.
com’s Advanced Search page

- Web Hosting Reviews – not
particularly focused on inexpensive hosting, but a number of
useful articles and a list of hosts. The Related Sites page has
a number of other useful links and sites as well.

- You can sometimes find a good price on a good host or domain
registrar at href="http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/categories.php?catid=18">Fa
tWallet or the href="http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=40&enterc
at=y"> Anandtech Hot Deals forums – search for host,
hosting, domain, and so on.

If you do find a particular site valuable when choosing a host,
you might try to sign up via their links so they get the
referral credit.

DISCUSSION

Narrowing the search:

1. User Forum. A forum discussing the host’s features and any
issues that arise can be very useful. You can often find answers
to questions that aren’t in the host’s help pages, without
needing to contact support. It also gives you a sense for the
kind of people you’re dealing with.

2. A whois search on the domain name of the host might give you
a sense for whether they look reliable and established.

3. Money back guarantees. Many people recommend choosing a host
with a money back guarantee. Maybe. I’d recommend choosing a
host where you won’t need the guarantee, if you can! Often it
isn’t worth chasing, if you turn out to need it.

4. Features. It’s a little hard to say precisely which features
you’ll need for your site, but:

- You can do a nice little site with: Linux hosting, php, mySQL
databases (multiple tables or databases), htaccess control,
several email boxes, email forwarding, and webmail.

- With that, you can run quite a few things; but if you’re new
to hosting you may want some preinstalled or auto installed
scripts, too.

- Control panel. A poorly designed control panel (such as the
one at 1and1) can make it slow and unwieldy to administer a
site.

- Subdomains (help.mydomain.net, store.mydomain.net) can be nice
to have.

- Multiple domains. If you need to host more than one domain
name (mydomain.net, myotherdomain.org), be sure to check if the
plan allows that.

You probably don’t need (and can’t get, on the really
inexpensive plans) SSH, root access, or detailed DNS server
setup – though if you know what it is you can decide for
yourself!

5. Service and support. Look for a reasonable turnaround time
(depending on the problem) and basic courtesy (always). And
personally, I’d rather have them warn me in adaance about
changes and downtime, than worry about how quickly they respond
when my site goes down or some new “feature” they
installed makes something stop working. Think about what’s fair
to expect at the price of the plan you’re looking at. In any
case, don’t ask for a lot of handholding – use the forums for
that.

6. Does it feel right? This might not work for everyone, but
many people get a sense of whether it’s a company they want to
do business with. Sometimes it’s a good feeling, sometimes it’s
a bad feeling. Don’t sign on with anyone who doesn’t seem
capable and straightforward. Contrary to what some people may
think, hosting is not a commodity business. There is intense
competition, but the quality of management makes some firms a
better choice than others.

Domain names

Like others, I always register my domain names at somewhere
other than my host, even if it costs more. That allows me to
very quickly change hosts if there’s a problem with the site for
an unacceptably long time. Changing hosts can often be done in a
matter of hours, if need be – see the href="http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32
5064"> Changing hosts with Almost NO Downtime thread on
WebHostingTalk.com.

Look in the href="http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=3
5">Domain Name Discussions forum for comments on domain
registrars. As of January 2005, people seem to recommend
godaddy, namecheap or maybe domainsite for inexpensive and
reasonably reliable registrations.

The basics

For those new to hosting:

- You will get a shared hosting plan, at this budget. Your site
will be one of many on the physical server it is hosted on.

- You will have varying degrees of control and features
(depending on the plan you choose), but something less than full
control.

- Your site may be affected by the usage of other sites on your
server.

None of this is likely to be an acute or long term problem, if
you choose a good host.

You may be able to host a couple small sites on one hosting
plan, if you don’t mind administering them through one control
panel, and your plan allows multiple domains.

If you have several sites you plan to oversee, you may be better
off getting a reseller plan to host them all.

FindMyHosting.com

Note that FindMyHosting.com does not list every host. In fact,
it only lists those hosts who are currently paying it a referral
fee for new clients who find a host using FindMyHosting.com

Some people will have the knee-jerk reaction that’s inherently
bad. And, it does have some drawbacks:

- Some good hosts don’t like to pay referral fees, or would just
rather get clients by word of mouth. They won’t be in the
FindMyHosting.com listings.

- Hosts who get terrible feedback may end their arrangement. All
that useful feedback disappears.

But getting a fee if a client finds a host using the site does
not completely undermine the fundamental idea of having honest
host reviews, as long as they aren’t favoring one host over
another, and aren’t trying to make them all look good. There are
clearly some candid reviews at FindMyHosting.com. And
FindMyHosting.com has bills to pay, too – depending on how much
the fee is, it’s not unreasonable for them to get paid.

As always, you need to read the reviews with a critical eye. But
FindMyHosting.com is a good supplement to the inevitably
anecdotal evidence you often find by turning up a few forum
posts here and there about a host.

A note on web host reviews

All comments and reviews of hosts – positive and negative – need
to be looked at with a critical eye. And while they might not be
exactly reflective of the truth – that doesn’t mean they aren’t
valuable. In addition, if interpreted right, they seem to be a
useful way to judge the frequency of problems and the way a host
handles them. To the extent you can, it’s good to assess whether
somebody understands hosting; had reasonable expectations; and
took a reasonable approach to solving the problem. If so, I can
empathize with them getting “emotional” if the host
can’t fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time. That is,
maybe people get motivated to post reviews when they’ve had a
problem – but most people aren’t going to post the first time
they have a little problem, either. It’s usually a big problem
that they’ve had real trouble getting solved.

Also, there are no doubt some unreliable positive comments, too
- people that haven’t been with a host long enough to tell, and
people that are not completely independent of the hosts. So
don’t believe all the good reviews, either!

Why this article?

Some of this may seem obvious to the more experienced readers.
Sure, lots of people throw out a recommendation to search forums
- but search on what? And for how long? Similarly, just
mentioning FindMyHosting.com doesn’t really help much. This
article would have saved me several hours when I first started
looking.

And for those who can’t help but say “Price isn’t
everything” – there are decent hosts for these needs and
budget. Paying more will not necessarily get you a host that
does a better job for these needs.

This article has been adapted for publication from a href="http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36
7980"> WebHostingTalk.com thread.

How to Pick the Top Web Host?

There really is no way to find out who the top web host is. People have different needs. Certain webmasters care about costs, others care about how much bandwidth they’re getting. Everybody is different. Everybody has their own criteria for what they consider to be the top web host. That being said, there are some factors that have to be considered when choosing a web host.

First off, the price should not be the determining factor when picking a web host. You can find free web hosting all over the internet. That doesn’t mean it’s a wise decision to actually use them. Remember that there is probably a very good reason why its free. No self respecting web business uses free web hosting.

Something that is critical when picking a host is their customer service. They should offer customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; No excuses! You should also be able to contact them through multiple avenues, whether it be through the phone, email, or online chat.

It’s also important that you can rely on their service. For instance, if you are contacting them through email. They should reply to you (even if its just to let you know they are working on the issue) within 6 hours. It should be treated like if it was a phone call. There should be somebody working on the issue the moment you sent the email. There are countless stories of people waiting weeks just to get an email reply from their host. These are the kinds of things that can happen when you choose a third rate web host.

The features the web host offers should also be considered. For example shared web hosting is a perfect option for newbies. It allows you to host many or unlimited domains within one shared account. How this works is all your domains that were purchased after the first domain are considered subdomains or add-on domains. All these websites are hosted on a shared with other account holders of the respective web host. You can find top web hosts that offer this option at very affordable prices.

If you are an experienced webmaster, then a more viable option would be to get a virtual private server or get dedicated hosting. This way you don’t have to share your server space with other people. It may be more expensive than the shared hosting option, but it gives you a lot more options in you hosting.

It’s not the most important thing in the world, but its also a good idea to get hosting that offers cPanel. cPanel has may great features that can help your website. It has a tracking tool that lets you know how many visitors you are getting daily, as well as other great tracking software. cPanel also comes with Fantastico. With Fantastico, you get tons of great scripts that you can instantly load to your website. You can load forums, blogs, and e-commerce sites with a couple clicks of the mouse. Fantastico also has WordPress, which is considered by many the best blogging software that is currently available on the market.

These are just some of the important features when deciding on who the top web host is.

Christian Web Hosting Article

As a Christian minister, it seemed only natural for me to try Christian Web Hosting. How exactly are we defining this? In a nutshell it simply refers a Christian owned web hosting provider. Sounds good right? Well actually my experience as a webmaster reveals that for the most part, using a one negatively effected the quality of my website as well my pocketbook. Ouch!

In our humble view you are better off going with a large affordable company with a long track record rather than a Christian Web Hosting service. Why? Let’s get into a few of the top reasons why this may not be such a good idea for your ministry.

* Most are Simply Not Christian

* These Services Have Higher Prices Than the Most Popular Web Hosting Companies

* The Vast Majority of Have Hidden Costs or Offer Sub-Par Features compared to the Major Web Hosting Providers

* Generally Christian Web Hosting Has Poor Tech Support

* The Top Cheap Web Hosting Providers Have Greater and Better Selections of Christian Web Designs and Christians Templates

However, most of the problems with this kind of hosting stems from the fact that:

1. They are simply too small to adequately service their clients

2. They by and large use reseller hosting. In other words they purchase servers from other large secular web hosts and slap their own name on them.

However, in order to turn a profit these Christian Web Hosting services have to charge more than the original web hosting company would. Some offer free web hosting but free web hosting comes with a terrible price, and in our view is not worth it.

Additionally, important features like bandwidth and storage space are severely limited because they simply don’t have large servers as those web hosting companies servicing 100,000s of webmasters. If you do want extra features, there will be additional costs that the Christian Web Host will pass along to you.

Finally, remember it’s likely that the Christian Web Hosting firm is a reseller which means if something goes wrong with your Christian site, they are serving only as a “middleman” between you and the parent web hosting company. This often translates into a longer waiting period to get your site up and running smoothly again.

Overall, the question begs itself. Why deal with a second rate company if you can can get better and cheaper web hosting else where, with better features, a better uptime ratio and a larger variety of templates?

I know some Christians may still wish to use a Christian Web Hosting company. If you do use one we suggest the following:

1. Speak to the head of the company regarding their Christian faith and how their business vision fits in with God’s plan for their lives

2. Research whether or not they actually owns their own servers. When you do this, make sure you also find the physical location of the Christian Web Hosting servers.

3. Carefully read the Terms of Service (TOS) of the Christian Web Hosting company to make sure you will not have to incur any additional hidden fees for simple features that should come free.

Shared vs Dedicated Hosting

When you first start thinking about building your first web site you are faced with a lot of choices. You need to choose a domain name, but also somebody to register that domain name. You need to decide on whether you’ll use a CMS tool like Joomla or a blog engine like Wordpress, or maybe you’ll purchase a nice template and use that. One of the biggest choices you’ll need to make is your hosting service. The right hosting service can be the difference between spending time installing and configuring your site and spending time adding content.

Once you’ve chosen your hosting service you will be asking yourself one more important question. Do I choose shared hosting or dedicated hosting? There is not an easy one or the other answer to that question. In fact I’m having trouble even phrasing it generically so that you can size up your situation and decide, but I’ll lay down a few rules and gotcha’s and see where we end up.

On the surface shared hosting seems like a great deal. For instance from Go Daddy you can get shared hosting plan for just $3.99 a month. The plan will give you 5GB of disk space and 250GB bandwidth. For a little more, $6.99 you get 100GB disk and 1000 GB bandwidth. Now, I just used Go Daddy as an example, but Host Gator and others are similar, some with slightly higher prices and some with slightly lower, but all have the same rules.

Hidden somewhere in your shared hosting agreement there will be a clause about not hogging system resources. What that means is that even if your site is not busy 99% of the time, if you get a big spike they have the right to shut you down. You see, the factor to be concerned with is not bandwidth or disk storage, it’s CPU cycles. It’s not average CPU cycles over the month, if you spike even for a short time all hosting services will shut down your shared account.

How do I know about the shared host shutdown? It happened twice to me. I’m not complaining, that’s the price of having a successful web site while paying for bargain basement hosting. In my one case I got shut down because I had 8000 hits in about an hour. My daily average was about 500 hits. It seems that the blog engine I was using was using too much CPU time on my shared host, so they shut me down. Okay, so you’re thinking that you can go shared and when you get to around 7000 then you can switch over to dedicated. Maybe that’ll work, but in another case I was shut down with just 346 hits. Now for the 346 hit case my host sent me the log file and to my eyes it didn’t seem that I was using much CPU at all. It showed my account using 100% CPU for .2 seconds. It also showed (in another case) my process taking 29 seconds, but using 0% CPU. I believe this was a case of mistaken identity. They saw that their server was slow and looked for long running processes, but didn’t look at actual cycles taken. The long wait by the way was because of a YouTube vid running on my site.

So, after a full year on two shared hosting accounts, from two different companies, it was time to try my hand at dedicated hosting. One thing you must know about dedicated hosting is that you are running and responsible for all aspects of the box. That means that you are “root”. There is nobody else monitoring for hung processes, nobody else installing software for you, but the best part is nobody kicking you off for using too much CPU for 10 seconds of the month.

My shared hosting accounts were $6.99 and $10 (total of $17/month). My new dedicated hosting account started at $79/month, but I bumped up the memory and CPU on the box and the final price is $111/month. That’s a huge difference when you’re just starting out, and over the first year I’ve saved $1200 going that way, but now I feel to move forward with my web sites I need the freedom that dedicated hosting allows. Freedom to have a busy day, freedom to be successful.

I don’t want to make you shy away from shared hosting when you’re just starting out. It’s a great way to get your feet wet, establish a proof of concept and build your knowledge while keeping your budget low. Many small businesses or personal pages may never need more than a shared hosting account. For me, one year on shared hosting gave my little business enough time to grow enough for me to justify paying for dedicated hosting.

As a closing note, my ongoing move from my shared hosting accounts to my dedicated hosting account has taken about two weeks. The first couple of days was experimenting and learning, followed by a few days moving my best performing sites over and the last week has been spent moving the rest of my web sites over, cleaning up security and doing more learning. In the end, I chose Go Daddy as my dedicated host. I figured they deserved it, at least when they shut me down at 8000 hits it was conceivable that I was over stressing my shared account. As for the other company, the one who shut me down with the log file which proved nothing at 350 hits, sometimes you only get one mistake and in the web business when your site is having it’s best day ever and your host shuts you down without good reason, it’s time to move on.

A Hosting Review Can Help you Find the Right Web Hosting Provider

If you do a search in Google for ‘Web Hosting’ or ‘Hosting’, the first couple of results that come up are surprisingly enough, not those of actual web hosting companies, but rather web hosting review sites.

These sites are an excellent resource to assist you with making a decision regarding which web host to choose for your foray into the world of the Internet.

A web hosting guide can help you compare the services being offered by different hosting companies. This is a big advantage because you don’t have to visit different sites to obtain details. You can log on to a single site and compare services by bandwidth, by price or by disk space.

The other important advantage that these sites offer is that most of them offer a rating service and the opportunity for clients to post comments or reviews. These comments reveal a lot about a hosting company!

Do not be too alarmed though if you find some reviews that are very negative – it is just not possible for a hosting company to be perfect. They WILL make mistakes. The important thing is to try and ascertain how well they recovered or how well they handled their customer service when the problem occurred.

To get the most out of these sites, you need to know what to search for. Some of the newer sites have more refined ways of offering search criteria – you should be able to search on operating system (e.g. Linux or Windows), disk space, bandwidth, price, control panel, features etc.

You therefore need to know how much bandwidth you require, how much hard disk space you require and maybe even have made a decision up front whether you are looking for Linux or Windows hosting.

Once you have decided about what you need, you can start searching for a hosting service. You can use one of the popular search engines, like Google or Yahoo to find a suitable web hosting review site.

Log on to the site and compare the different packages. See which packages or bundled services meet your needs best. Check and compare the specifications of the hardware being offered by the hosting services. Eliminate the hosting services that don’t meet your requirements and send the remaining hosts a list of questions. The questions you ask are not so important, but you will get an idea about how prompt the hosts are in responding to your queries. This can then become a useful benchmark. You can reject those who take too long to answer.

Finally you need to test connectivity. Visit a few sites hosted on the servers of companies that you have short listed. Check the download speeds. Eliminate ones that take too long to open. You should also check on the web hosting review site whether they have any uptime statistics. This will also give you a good idea what type of downtime your website might experience.

Be careful not to select on price only – cheapest is not always the best! Rather look at the average prices and go for a hosting provider that rather offers a middle of the road type of price rather than the absolute cheapest. Another important point to look out for is to see how long the company has been in business!

Tips about Low Cost Web Hosting Services

Here are some things you should know before finding a “cheap” or
or low cost web hosting services. You should pay very careful
attention to the terms of use and the acceptable use policy of
that low cost web host. You can find a good deal because cheap
web hosting industry is very competitive but if a host is way
too cheap for the features it offers compared to others, don’t
go with them. Going with a low cost web host requires extra
research: read the reviews of that host on this site, look for
any information about them in the search engines, see how long
they have been in business. Visit the support pages and see if
you are comfortable with the level of support offered by this
host. You can’t expect to get the greatest and fastest support
for every little problem you have by paying less than /month.
Such a business would fail soon because qualified support
personnel costs money. Larger companies and Windows plans are
usually more expensive. Cheap web hosts oversell space and
bandwidth, counting on the fact that most people won’t use them
fully. This is normal and you shouldn’t be kicked out if you do
use all your allocated space and bandwidth. Low cost web hosts
often don’t fully control their servers – they might have a
dedicated server with another company to make their costs lowest
possible, so they are sometimes forced to rely on others to
perform some physical tasks like replacing some hardware on the
server.

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