Nowadays, anybody can afford to order a feature-packed web hosting
plan for next to nothing; however, affordable price is not the only
criterion which should be considered when purchasing web hosting
services. In this article, I'll explain the basics of what you
should look for in choosing a web hosting company, not just
concentrating on the best price and features, but also on
reliability and honesty. You're investing your money and effort
into finding paying customers and you wouldn't like to lose them in
order to save a few dollars per month on a web hosting service.
Laptop Battery When looking for a web hosting company, it doesn't matter if
this is just for the inception of a web or the move of an
established site; you need to consider a large selection of
criteria to determine which company to go with:
> Choosing a Web Hosting Plan Choosing a Web Hosting Plan Overview There are approximately 100 million Web sites on the Internet. They are "hosted" on computers (called web servers) all over the world. The web server (computer) where your Web site's information, photos, etc. reside, may be located in a home or office, but ideally, in a secure data center, and maintained by a "web host" (like WestHost). Web hosting clients simply upload their Web sites to either a shared web server (where many other clients are also hosting), or a dedicated web server (where the entire server is their own), which the web host maintains to ensure the Web site is always available, and can be accessed quickly (a fast download).
Thinkpad
Customer support
How many customers are they serving per server Depending on the Web hosting plan or the Web hosting company the server that your hosted on might be a little more packed than you might think. A responsible Web hosting company will not overstuff the servers they own or collocate. Most of the time, sharing a server with several different companies is not a bad thing though. However, you do need to ask your Web hosting company about the numbers. If you are shopping around for Web hosting, you need to ask each company about the client per server ratio. Go with the company that fits your other needs, and has the least amount of clients per Web hosting server.
Microsoft Website hosting service isn't just storage or bandwidth. Based
on personal experience and that of others, even a top-notch service
is worthless without customer support. If you own a business
website, your hosting provider needs to be there for you 24/7 and
give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your
problem; otherwise, you may end up losing customers and money.
established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to store the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called data center In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, 7 environment with fire protection, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.
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Downtime guarantee and service monitoring
Aplus.Net, a leading web hosting company and Internet solutions provider, new promotions created to give consumers an advantage in the competitive world of eCommerce in the new year. Reflecting Aplus.Net's concern with the growing fraud and security risks throughout today's Internet landscape, the company has chosen to offer consumers an incentive to bolster their dedicated servers with secure firewall services. Under this promotion, Aplus. up fee (a value of $99) when customers choose to add a firewall service to their dedicated hosting plan.
Laptop Computer Having a personal website go down is a minor inconvenience;
having a business website go down is a serious matter. What amount
of profit would you lose if your site had been down for a week?
Long downtime may be very harmful to today's companies which spend
large amounts of money on advertising their websites. Essentially,
there are two rules regarding reliability that one should look
at:
Dedicated Server An advanced form of web hosting where the customer generally has complete control over the server. Dedicated Servers are typically housed in data centers. Dedicated servers may be compared to shared web hosting servers; where in shared hosting you find the web hosting company administering and control the server, a dedicated server is typically controlled by the server's owner and he or she controls which websites are hosted on the server.
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Desktop Computer 1. You should check if there is an uptime guarantee
offered. A truly service-oriented provider will also give a
money-back guarantee, offering a discount or free service as
compensation for downtime. Any company which avoids taking
responsibility won't put much effort into the service.
Notebooks 2. I definitely wouldn't go with a company claiming 100%
uptime, as there is no such thing as a server with 100% uptime. If
anyone ever claims their server has a 100% uptime they are either
lying or they don't perform the necessary upgrades that prevent a
machine from being compromised.
Lenovo Reputable web hosts will post statistics on their site: What is
the frequency of interruption? How about the average percentage of
downtime? If these aren't posted, ask; if the answer isn't
forthcoming, that should be a warning sign. If you still go with a
host which doesn't monitor servers, you'll have to do the
monitoring yourself. I recommend http://www.siteuptime.com, as it's
one of the best monitoring services available for free in the
market today.
Hard Drive
Backups
Travelstar There is no host which is safe against different types of
technical and programical failures, so make sure that the company
runs scheduled backups. The other advice would be always having a
backup of your website yourself, as you never know what might
happen. cPanel, which is the most popular web hosting management
software at this time, has a very comfortable backup-making tool.
It allows you to backup files and databases quickly and easily, so
backups are no longer a problem.
Gateway
Acceptable use policy
Laptop Parts Web hosts may have 200-300 or more clients per server; there is
no exact number, as companies have different hardware and each
hosted website has different resource usage. There always is a
possibility that a few of those customers host illegal content.
There are web hosts who have had their servers unplugged, resulting
in their clients' websites going down. I'm sure you don't want to
put your business at risk and have your website hosted on the same
server together with illegal pornography and software sites, so
check host's acceptable use policy to find out, if the host takes
care of what's hosted on their servers.
Software Hosting your site on an uncared-for server will also result in a
low speed. If somebody on the same server sends spam, the server's
IP address will be blacklisted and you'll have serious problems as
recipients stop receiving your emails. Use the "Spam database
lookup" feature on www.DNSstuff.com to check if a web hosting
company is blacklisted. Spam is being sent almost everywhere, so
having one or two red records isn't that bad; but, if there are
more, it may become a problem later on.
Hard Drives
Unlimited bandwidth and web space
Electronics In web hosting industry, the adage "you get what you pay for" is
almost universally applicable. Do not fall for hosts offering
unlimited allowances, as there is no unlimited bandwidth, nor
unlimited web space. Host's pay for each GB of bandwidth
themselves. Hard drives also aren't free, so how can they say it's
unlimited? They simply are performing false advertising in order to
attract customers. The average website doesn't use more than 1GB of
bandwidth per month; the customer is happy as he bought something
"unlimited" and the host gets a new customer, which won't cost them
any more than $1-2 USD per month. But imagine what would happen if
I had a website, burning much more bandwidth than an average site
does, and I signed up with a hosting company offering unlimited
traffic? The host would simply suspend my account and tell me, that
it was using too much bandwidth. There even are companies which
offer unlimited bandwidth and have a statement on their terms of
service, explaining that unlimited bandwidth means 40GB, for
example.
Canon
Will you really own your domain name?
Desktop Pc When you buy a domain name together with a website hosting
package, make sure the host will register the domain name under
your name. It usually should be written in their FAQ, but, if there
is no such information, simply contact them. This will also give
you an opportunity to check how fast their customer support team
replies to inquiries. If the hosting company registers domains
under someone else's name, you may have problems switching hosting
providers later. If you were in such situation, you would have to
file for a Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which costs
much more than both domain name and web hosting service
together.
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Control Panel
Think Pad For ease of maintenance, a feature called a Control Panel is a
necessity; this tool will normally allow for regular maintenance,
be it email mailbox additions/deletions, password resets, web
additions, web count reports, statistics and so on. If the site is
for any sort of business, this is an absolute must. The most
popular web hosting management software currently available is
cPanel. It's a next-generation web hosting control panel system
that allows you to manage your domain through a web interface. The
idea is to transfer as much of the control of managing your web
site to you; you have the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail,
files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.
Repair
Value-added services
Data Recovery Hosting companies offer different value-added services in order
to set themselves apart from the competition. Of course, these are
an advantage, but a common mistake customers make is choosing a
host just because it offers many value-added services which won't
be used anyway. Some of the really useful features are:
Cisco 1. Auto-installer script - Auto-installers will save you
time if you are going to install a forum, image gallery, content
management system, etc. Installation procedures on an
auto-installer script take seconds and can be performed by novices
without the need of doing difficult tasks usually associated with
installations.
Keyboard 2. Online website builder - It lets you design a website
in a few minutes without having any creation software and
knowledge. One very powerful website builder on the market is Site
Studio; this editor allows for ease of use, full control of color
schemes and themes, one-click publishing, and an array of templates
to use.
Monitor
The last tip
Desktop In this article, I've mentioned only a few warning signs which
are worth considering. You should know yourself that price and
allocations aren't as important as the quality of service; if the
budget is absolutely limited, then the price can be a valid
criterion, but otherwise it shouldn't receive much credence.
Infosys By going through this article and asking questions, you can
narrow down the list of web hosts to the point where a good, sound
decision can be easily made.
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About the author
Wipro Karolis Petreikis is the CEO of
UPHosted, a
company that provides reliable hosting services for both
individuals and businesses.
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