Good Quality & Cheap Web Hosting
November 26, 2009 by Web Hosting Watch
Filed under Top 10 WebHosts
If you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.
A web hosting provider will typically have a fast connection to the Internet housed in a physical building called ‘data center’ and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web.
With a well-managed web host, you can free yourself from worrying the up-keep of complicated server technology and proper technical maintenance. That’s the whole purpose of the web hosting companies. You should leave the technical work to web hosting professional while you focus on your own internet business.
There are thousands of web hosting providers on the internet and how do you decide which one you should use? Sites like betahosts.com can help you by comparing all best hosting providers.
The features that web hosting companies are offering are getting quite standard nowadays. There are basic features that you’ll need in a web host. You can find out more here.
To give a web host a competitive edge over others, more attractive features are very necessary. You’ll find that many hosts are willing to give away free stuff that used to cost over $10 per month.
These are some of the advanced features that our top hosts are offering.
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Web Buider Many of our top 10 hosts offer powerful web builder program called SiteStudio. SiteStudio allows you to make sites without any html, FTP and HTTP knowledge. You can also build site on the fly while at home, school or even at work. Hostgator’s SiteStudio has over 500 ready-made templates for you to choose from.
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Ecommerce Enabled If you are selling products on your site, you need a merchant account. A shopping cart is a useful tool if you have more than 1 product in different categories. SSL(Secured Sockets Layer) is a must-have if you need to receive valuable information such as your customers’ credit card information. PowWeb, Hostgator and Lunarpages provide osCommerce shopping cart and shared SSL for your ecommerce needs.
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Marketing Package Most marketing package including search engine submission software, keyword generator and link checker. Some hosting companies like iPower have established partnership with Yahoo! Search (previously known as Overture) and Google Adwords to offer you pay-per-click credit to jump start your business.
Popularity
The best marketing method is by far from word of mouth. If you sign up for a web host and are satisfied with the performance, most likely you’ll recommend to anyone who is looking for a good host. Big web hosting companies know about this concept so well that they would go all out to retain their existing customer. The more satisfied customers they have, the more popularity they’ll get. We take this as an important indicator of how good a host is. # There are a few factors that we judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider.Number of existing customers. # The satisfaction level of their existing customers: We manage to get hold of their existing customers from the positive reviews they submitted through our host comment form, their comment in the 3rd party web hosting and inhouse forums and the customers’ comment found on other hosting directories. # The amount of pretigious hosting awards they won # Their sites Alexa traffic ranking
Netfirms top the popularity among our top 10 hosts. Network Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee
In terms of reliability, we are looking at how redundant is the server, how often the companies backup the server and how well they handle emergency. “Redundant” means that if any of the Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet connection will take over. PowWeb Load Balancing Technology is one of the best that we found to ensure your site is up 99.9% all the time.
Budget hosting – Getting started guide
November 6, 2009 by Web Hosting Watch
Filed under Windows Hosting
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.
otalchoice – budget plan at $4/month.
/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:
-
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
tWallet or the
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
5064"> Changing hosts with Almost NO Downtime thread on
WebHostingTalk.com.
Look in the
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
7980"> WebHostingTalk.com thread.
Why is Vps Better Than Shared Hosting?
August 31, 2009 by Web Hosting Watch
Filed under Setting Up Accounts
If you’re planning to start an on-line enterprise, or if you’ve already got one, you’ll know that there are many different web hosting plans out there – each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The least expensive is very popular shared hosting with hundreds of web sites all sharing a single, very large hard drive. However this type of Hosting is not always well suited for all sites, especially for high traffic sites, because it is not always possible to isolate each website from other sites that share the server. The really big sites employ dedicated servers. One company. One server.
In between these two options is virtual private server, or VPS. VPS is less expensive (much less) than a dedicated or private server, and offers more freedom and many more options to a growing on-line business than shared hosting. With a Virtual Private Server, each web hosting account receives their own operating system. Users can configure these components without affecting other users on the same physical machine because they are working within their own virtual server. Moreover a VPS hosting environment can be smoothly scaled to even more powerful physical hosts as demand increases. In the long run, hosting on a VPS can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership.
VPS isn’t suitable for every site owner. Some people wish to host a low-to-moderate traffic website and are happy with the level of control offered by a web hosting control panel like cPanel or Plesk. These individuals will prefer Shared Hosting for its perceived simplicity and ease of use: they generally do not have linux system administration experience and they are not interested in picking up any. Other have outgrown their shared hosting account or aren’t happy with site performance (30-second download times) then it’s definitely time to move up to a VPS account. A good web hosting company will help you migrate from your shared account to a VPS account without any breakdowns or hassles.
Do I Need VPS? If you plan to expand, offering more products and services, then consider a VPS plan even as a start-up. The difference in price between a good shared hosting plan and a good VPS plan is negligible in the whole bang-buck equation.
These are the main advantages:
PERFORMANCE
Shared server accounts are always dependent on the performance and good behavior of neighboring accounts. If one account violates their terms of service and sends out a mass-mailing of spam, this will load the server and negatively impact the performance of all accounts on that server.
VPS have guaranteed resources. One customer can not run away with a large share of the resources. You service will run reliably and predictably. If you have a bad VPS neighbor, they will tend to impact only their own account, as each account appears like a separate server to the Internet. They will not be able to grab your memory when you need it, get your server blacklisted, etc.
HIGH CUSTOMIZABILITY
Virtual Private Servers are very feature rich. They are functionally equivalent to a dedicated server. Some applications require that certain ports and/or protocols be opened or closed in the firewall. With Shared hosting, custom firewall configurations are not advisable for security reasons. Under the VPS, custom firewall configurations are feasible because of the partitioning between customers.
With a VPS, you can close ports using the IPTables feature.
You have your own IP Address.
You have Root Access.
Freedom to reboot your VPS at any time.
You can customize services such as web, mail, database, panels, domains
and much more…
The only limitation is you are not able to install your own kernel. This is due to the nature of how a VPS work.
SECURITY
Shared hosting is inherently difficult to secure completely. If an account on a shared server is broken into, the criminal may cause damage to the entire server, causing extended outages. If a spammer causes the server to get blacklisted with Spam organizations, this may impact other accounts that produce legitimate mailings until the server is whitelisted again.
VPS accounts are insulated from each other, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access from hackers as well as other customers. The isolation of your account also minimizes the risk of being impacted by a DoS attack that was intended for someone else.
SCALABILITY
Virtual private servers are inherently scalable – whether you need a minimal allocation to run a simple e-mail server or virtual private network end-point or a webserver with enough resources to support extensive database applications and heavy traffic, there is always a VPS hosting plan to meet your needs. Moreover you can anytime easily downgrade or upgrade your service with very little or no downtime!
UNLIMITED WEBSITES
Another advantage to VPS is the ability to manage numerous web sites. You won’t run into problems with hardware sharing even if you run a dozen different sites. Your access to server assets is assured through the use of server-side software such as Apache Virtual Hosts and similar VPS packages. VPS hosting plans are a bit pricier than shared hosting. But with more and more sites coming on-line (approximately 6,000 a day!) VPS offers better value for your server dollars when you can host as many sites as you want. When considering VPS plans, amortize the monthly costs over the number of sites you anticipate creating. You’ll quickly see that VPS monthly costs are consistently lower than shared hosting on a per site basis.
There may be a little downside to VPS for some people. VPS = more responsibility. That means you are responsible for many of the software installations, site maintenance, site security and many of the other responsibilities that come with on-line business ownership. If you don’t know much about server side administration, VPS may be a bit more than you want to take on yourself. This is something to farm out to an expert if you’re not familiar with maintaining a VPS, but you still need the power and control of VPS.
The solution – get a managed vps, the hosting provider will take care of those things for you and you can pay full attention to your websites content.