Web Hosting Geeks' Blog » bandwidth

Dedicated Server Options: Which Are Worth Considering

Art — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:17:30 +0000

No matter what new technologies get incorporated into the hosting world, there will always be a place for the dedicated server hosting account. It doesn’t necessarily make the host the most money: squeezing a few hundred accounts on a shared server does that. But it’s a market need that will never go away.

Web hosting companies to this day respond to this demand by loading up their dedicated server plans with as many goodies as they can to lure in more fish. But which ones should you bite at, and which ones should you swim by? Here is a list of some common dedicated server options, and how much they actually give you.

Bandwidth

A lot of at-home users have been hit with throttling or bandwidth usage charges for playing their World of Warcraft or downloading just a few too many Transformers movies. The reason your ISP doesn’t let you slide on this is that they are just as crunched on costs for it as you are. Bandwidth costs are one of the most inelastic of all services that any host can offer.

So if one host is giving you a much better deal on it than another, and you think there’s a good chance that you might actually need that much, you can strongly consider going with them on the basis of that alone. The chances that a host will let you “slide” for going over are slim, no matter how good your reputation with them is.

Advertising credits

The important thing to remember with advertising credits that come with a hosting account is that the dollar values that you receive aren’t “real” values in any way. They are just the cost of a certain type of advertising block on that site. If, say FaceBook, were to double all their ad rates tomorrow, many hosting companies would likely follow suit by doubling, or at least increasing their offerings. You would still be getting about the same advertising placement…mostly.

Saying this does neglect the fact that if FaceBook did do this, less people would be able to afford it, and you’d wind up with a higher listing by attrition. That does highlight the ambiguity with this service, though. Major web sites seldom release the algorithms they use for how someone gets a higher page rank or ad frequency rate. Worse, these algorithms can often change without notice. Your $50 might get you page 1 with Google today, and page 42 tomorrow.

This should not imply that advertising credits are worthless. A lot of webmasters plan on advertising on these sites anyway: for them, these credits can’t hurt. How much it will help, though, is the great unknown. If you do want one good rule of thumb, it’s better to have your advertising credits spread out.

Uptime Guarantees

We’ve covered this one before but it bears repeating: this is all shine. It’s not that most hosts won’t actually achieve this, assuming that they haven’t set the bar ludicrously high with a parade of 9′s. It’s that life is simply too chaotic. As the old proverb goes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

No host would survive long if your site went down much as it is. Customers don’t need a calculator in front of them to know that their host is reliable. On the other hand if a comet struck a web host, few would blame them for taking just a second to get your site back up while they looked for a broom.

Backup recovery

This, on the other hand, is one that you want to place a high value upon. If you would believe it, there are still plenty of hosts that take the view that your backups are your responsibility. If your machine dies, oh well.

Then there are also hosts who realize the kind of business that the above hosts are losing and want to claim them for their own. There are a wide variety of ways that hosts will guarantee this. They are all good. Look especially for speed of recovery, redundant data centers, and manual recovery options as things that are worth the extra buck.

24/7 support

This one is only worthless because no host at this stage would be without it. True, there won’t be someone staring at a process chart for your server all night, and you may not be able to necessarily get a hold of a tech support worker for basic questions.

But what goes on with your machine could be going on with the rest of the network. Furthermore, even if they are not guaranteeing support, if they see your server down, your host knows full well that taking 30 seconds to walk over and hit the reboot switch because they “just happened to see it was down” is a great way to keep your loyalty.

Root access

We’ll close our list with one that you will not see often. If you do, take it, but with a grain of salt.

Root access is great for you. You don’t need to be told the functionality that this gives you. If you find out about a serious software bug or need some kernel recompiled fast, you don’t have to wait for a tech worker, and you don’t have to hope that they do it right. The back and forth that you get from this kind of a problem as you quote error messages to each other can be a true pain and time waster.

However, if your host does offer it, step back and take a look at them. Do they look like a fly-by-night host, or are they around for the long term? When a company allows this they are opening themselves up to danger if the customer doesn’t know what they are doing. If they look like they are established enough and organized enough to handle it when a customer does something that makes the network hiccup, then this is a good thing. If they look like someone who will be chasing their tail trying to find the problem, this means that this service could negatively affect you even if it’s not you who used it recklessly. Not being affected by other users was the whole point of getting a dedicated server in the first place.

Fastest WordPress Hosting in Town

Art — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 09:45:54 +0000

In case you were unaware, services like Google and Yahoo are built around the concept of search engine optimization—they are search engines, after all. The basic idea here is that you want your website to rank highly with all of the various search engines, as most viewers aren’t likely to scan through fifteen pages of links just to find your article. No, you want your media to appear right at the top, optimally at the number one spot. How is this accomplished? Through a variety of methods, Young Grasshopper, and if you’ll stick with us, we’ll go ahead and give you the wax-on-wax-off.

To begin with, we’re going to assume you’re using a WordPress based site. Why? Because if you aren’t, and your top priority is search engine optimization, you really should be. WordPress makes it quick, painless, and relatively cheap to SEO streamline your site. This is accomplished thorugh a variety of essential plug-ins which do such various tasks as change your URL codes, add meta-tags, create keyword line-ups for search engines to crawl, etc. It’s a brilliant way to go about maximizing your site’s potential, but if you’re looking to get the most out of your WordPress site, you should know it’s not all sunshine and chuckles. In fact, WordPress has one noticeable drawback, which we’ll be attending to with the rest of this article, so stay tuned!

Speed Demons in our Closets

You see, WordPress is what we in the business call a content management software. It takes all of the various articles, images, posts, etc. that you create, and displays it in a pre-set fashion that jives will with themes. This makes it blazingly fast and efficient to create new content, and all without having to write a single line of code. Obviously, this is a tremendous boon for the runoff the mill blogger, who would rather not learn a real skill like HTML coding.

However, there’s one downside to all this ease-of-creation stuff: WordPress is a real bandwidth hog. Sure, it makes it a breeze to add new media, but all of that coded forefront comes with a price tag. Typically, users will experience slightly more load time with a WordPress powered site than with a non-WordPress branded one. Why is this a problem? you might be asking. Usually, it’s not at all: We’re really talking a difference of perhaps half a second to maybe a full second. However, when it comes to search engine optimization, those bare few seconds could be all it takes to put your site in the tank. Don’t believe us? Consider this.

Search engines collect data using software “spiders.” These little critters are designed to do one thing, and do it well: Poll web pages and collect data about them. Typically, they accomplish this through peeping at site text, meta-tags, etc. to gather up a gist that can be used to create a ranking. However, speed is also very heavily considered in a site’s automatic rank. Spiders are busy little buggers, and if your site takes until Christmas to return the data they need, they’ll hike it up out of town and disappear. You heard us right: If your site is too slow, search engines are likely to skip it entirely, or at the very least, file it much further down the line than you’d like. You shouldn’t let this get you down, though. There are steps you can take to prevent this, especially if you’re using a WordPress-powered site—and they all begin with the hosting itself!

Top Hosting Providers for WordPress

To secure the best possible search engine ranking for your data, you’re going to need a good host. The hosting provider, after all, is the source of your bandwidth, disc space, and net presence. Without it, you’re sunk. If you’re looking for a speedy and efficient way to host your WordPress site, we’ve even got a few suggestions lined-up and ready to roll. Firstly, consider—

Web Hosting Hub

Customer Ratings & Reviews

We like these guys for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they’re a tremendous bang for your dollar, as all of their plans come with unlimited support for disk space, bandwidth, and websites. They also offer one of the best technical support services in the business, guaranteeing they’ll be able to solve any WordPress problems that may arise. On the subject of WordPress, they also offer such amenities as one-click transfer of existing WordPress data, a free domain name with a new WordPress plan, and a wealth of themes to choose from. All in all, they’re a solid option for the speed concerned WordPress blogger.

Visit www.webhostinghub.com or read our WebHostingHub review.

InMotion Hosting

Customer Ratings & Reviews

These guys offer a similar bevy of features that we greatly appreciate, including a comparable amount of unlimited support for both bandwidth and disc space. They also offer a wealth of WordPress friendly features, including a similar one-click transfer and a solid mountain of support files to help get you up to speed on how to operate the CMS.

Visit www.inmotionhosting.com or read our Inmotion Hosting review.

HostGator

Customer Ratings & Reviews

If you haven’t heard of HostGator yet, we’re guessing you haven’t been in the business long. They’re legends in the field, and as such, the offer a near perfect storm of WordPress performance and features. With plans beginning under four dollars with an heap of benefits, they’re a tremendous value for anyone looking to quickly set-up and even more quickly manage a WordPress site.

Visit www.hostgator.com or read our HostGator review.

However, when it comes to WordPress, we really can’t recommend anyone higher than WebHostingHub WordPress Hosting. They’ve consistently ranked the highest in our user polls, and offer the most advanced level of WordPress support. This includes servers that run suPHP, which allows for speedier and more secure connections, PHP5, MySQL5, and PHP caching. All in all, they’re an unbelievably fast offering that’s guaranteed to up your website rankings!

How Much RAM / Bandwidth / Disk Space Do I Really Need?

Art — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:32:17 +0000

If you’ve ever been shopping for a server or a web host, then you know exactly how often this question comes up. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for the perfect dedicated host, or just a shared provider that will snuggle up well with your personal blog: At some point, you’ll start to worry about the amount of available RAM, bandwidth, and disc space. If you take a look around, you’ll very quickly come to realize that most providers offer a wealth of plans, each with diverging selling points where these hardware pieces are concerned. In essence, it’s a jungle out there.

Before you panic and purchase too much—or worse, too little—of each, though, let us guide you through the questioning process. We know a bit about server load, and considering we’ve put them together below, you might as well use our server statistics tips to guide you through the shopping blues.

What Does Your Five Year Look Like?

Right off the bat, it’s worth considering what you actually want to do with your website. Are you using your chunk of the Web to hock product, or are you posting daily content to a news bog about kittens? Will you be hosting information about your multimillion dollar corporation, or are you just creating a personal portfolio for your design gig?

Consider the Scalability

Once you’ve got the exact five year plan of your project in mind, consider how hard it would be to compensate for unexpected growth within your target market. In other words, the question is not so much how much RAM, bandwidth, and disk space you need, but how hard it will be to get more later. If your business takes off in a massive way, will you be able to upgrade quickly to match pace? If not, starting out large may be a better course of action. If your personal blog is not likely to garner much attention, and smaller specifications will match your initial need, it’s a safe bet that going budget will be an ideal solution.

Remember too that it’s easier to scale up when using shared hosting than it is with dedicated hosting. You can always bump your plan up a tier at HostGator, but adding more disk space to your dedicated server may be much more costly. Always keep the budget in mind, but don’t short change yourself in the future by staying cheap.

Guarantees – Separating Fact from Fiction

Art — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:59:05 +0000

As web hosting companies continue to try to get a leg up on one another, many of them include in their offerings different types of “guarantees”. This is the point at which we remember that, like any other, these are businesses, and the “guarantee” is a marketing tactic.

We also remember, though, that this word does still mean something: it bounds the web host to certain types of behavior, with potential consequences if they don’t follow through. What do guarantees mean then, and what can you expect if your host can’t meet them?

Disk space and bandwidth – Not so much

One of the most popular is the guarantee of “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth. It shouldn’t take too much of a technical expert to be suspicious of this one. Of course, disk space and bandwidth can’t possibly be unlimited. Walk into any one web host right now, and you can calculate the precise amount of data they can hold and data transfer they can handle. Granted, those numbers will boggle you if you think about them too long.

To run afoul of this guarantee, though, won’t require you to go that high. It will only require you to go high enough that you are long past using what you pay for. It’s impossible to say how high this is, and maybe some hosts will bite the bullet and not say anything no matter how bad you abuse their systems. Likely, though, what will happen is beyond some very egregious point, your host will ask you to either upgrade your account or (politely) take a hike. Since they are free to do business with you or not they aren’t technically breaking their pledge. So just don’t host the entire EMI back collection on your $3.99 account.

Uptime – Possibly more true

Since uptime is one of the most critical features a web host can provide, providers attempt to guarantee percentages of time your web site will be accessible. This is another one to take with a grain of salt. There is clearly only so much a web host can control, especially outside of its own facility.

99.9% uptime is the industry minimum standard, and is the only one you should really put much stock into: at a minute and a half a day, it’s a reasonable expectation. Just adding one more 9 to that brings it to questionable enforceability. 99.99% uptime means that your site is down no more than one minute per week. 99.999% gives them 26 seconds a month to get your site back up.

Now granted, web hosts are doing more real work to back up these guarantees, such as the increasing use of multiple data centers in different cities. Just make sure that your host gives you some indication that you will be compensated if your site goes down for longer than 26 seconds.

24/7 support

Finally there are support guarantees, and these you should keep them to. Given the chaos that can go on in any business, let alone a web host, these can be brazen claims depending on the specifics and one you might need to rely on. Hold their feet to the fire on this one.

Guarantees from any company many not be completely reliable, but that doesn’t change your need for reliability. Know what you’re getting into with them, and know what your options are if they fail.

Pros and Cons of Shared Hosting

Art — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 04:58:18 +0000

A business cannot run on its own, be it online or offline. It needs a number of helping hands. When considering online business, web hosting plays an important role in deciding its fate. A reliable web hosting server provides you with a stable and solid platform on which you can run your online business. However, you need to take note of a number of factors when considering web hosting services. This includes your budget, your preferences and a host of several other elements. With this in mind, there are a number of options of web hosting available within the market. Shared hosting is one of them. In fact, shared hosting has been of prime importance for the facilitation of affordable web hosting from Internet marketing experts and website owners alike.

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is especially meant for small-scale online businesses as it is a type of web hosting that allows more than one client to share a portion of a web server. Although there are a number of reputable shared hosting providers, such as Web Hosting Hub, Host Gator, and iPage, the fact that your website is not run on an independent server, and thus shares its bandwidth, bandwith intensive websites, or highly trafficked websites often outgrow shared hosting promptly.

Benefits of Shared Hosting

The one obvious benefits associated with shared hosting is its low cost. The cost of web hosting is equally divided among various website owners and hence you pay a lesser amount. This is important for small and middle scale businesses, as budding businesses often need to save money, and shared hosting is certainly affordable.

Drawbacks of Shared Hosting

Website owners who opt for shared hosting often face the issue of security. Your website is not as secure on shared hosting as VPS or dedicated hosting. This makes it prone to hackers. Nevertheless, you can always take a set of precautions to help offset this drawback. Moreover, shared hosting is not as reliable. Your website may suffer downtime at any point. Thus, quality is an important factor that gives VPS or dedicated web hosting an edge over shared web hosting.

Overall, if you are running a big online business, shared hosting is not your cup of tea. It is only meant for relatively less prominent businesses. If you are looking for a reliable hosting company to run your online business you should consider more powerful web hosting solutions.

Don’t forget to check our web hosting awards for the best web hosts!

Budget Web Hosting: Is It Worth the Buck?

troyedmunds — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 04:19:58 +0000

Today there are plenty of companies offering budget web hosting. These are the ones whose rates usually don’t go beyond $6, making them super-affordable especially by small and home-based business owners. The price also makes them extremely attractive too for any Internet user to start his or her own online business.

But then again, no matter how cheap it is, you’re still shelling out moolah, and there’s no money tree growing anywhere in the world. You must then want to know if you’re going to make the most out of every penny with budget web hosting.

It may be worth it because

You can already run your website for, well, a few bucks.

Sure, business owners can stick with generic domains such as wordpress.com, posterous.com, or blogspot.com. They can also choose to build a fan page in Facebook or sell their wares in Multiply and eBay, but if they want to build credibility and are planning to be doing online marketing forever, they have to learn how to invest.
A domain is often viewed by search engines, which Internet users usually utilize to look for information as well as products and services, as a testament of your commitment, professionalism, relevance, and even to your legitimacy. That’s why domain-hosted sites rank better, especially in Google, than public-hosted ones.

It’s so easy to set up.

One of the most common attributes of budget hosting options is they’re so convenient to set up. This is because they normally market them to first-time small and home-based business owners. A lot of them are actually very apprehensive to wet their feet into any more complicated than a blog, which is, of course, a full-blown website.
But how easy is easy? It’s not uncommon to across a budget web host you can set up in less than 30 minutes—that fast!

You don’t end up spending more than you should.

Budget hosting packages have very limited bandwidth. Though it’s way smaller than those offered by these options’ relatives, you really don’t need much when you’re starting out. You cannot consume a lot of storage or even bandwidth during the early days of your website, unless you’re going to pepper the pages with plenty of photos and videos. (This is not highly recommended, though, as these types of files can definitely slow down the loading times of your web pages.)

You aren’t really short changed with other services and features.

Unless you’ve chosen your web hosting company so badly, you don’t end up getting crappy customer service just because you decide to go for a budget web host. You may even find many of them offering free domain, server monitoring, multiple domain hosting, SSL technology, and even a money-back guarantee up to 3 months.

They can provide scalability.

This simply means you can expand your website with great ease. You’ll discover that the more you spend time online and sell your products and services, the more your website grows. You add a few more pages, a number of videos and audio, a Contact Us page and other content-specific web pages, as well as a shopping cart.
Not all budget hosting packages have a lot of room for hundreds to thousands of pages, but a number allow you to host several domains, including international ones.
But it’s not the most perfect setup either . . .

You can expect to share your bandwidth with not just one but several other websites.

If you’re opting for budget web hosting, then you should be very much aware that you’re not going to have any dedicated server. You’ll share one with several others. That would have been fine—if these sites don’t eat up majority of the space and bandwidth. Worse, these may be sites that gain a lot of traffic, which may mean plenty of downtimes for you.

You may be dealing with an incompetent reseller.

A common reason why there are so many web hosting packages online is the growth of resellers in the industry. In order to generate more income and expand their market, big-time hosting firms offer some of their web hosting products to resellers, who, in turn, sell them to small or home-based business owners. Resellers do manage their clients’ accounts, but they don’t own the equipment themselves.
It becomes a huge hassle and headache for you once these pieces of equipment start to bog down. There are not a lot of things they can do for you, except perhaps to offer you advice once the fix has already been done. But that’s not the worse. The worst thing is your reseller doesn’t do anything at all on your behalf. They don’t pressure the main web hosting company or they don’t inform you of the real problems. They may not even answer your call.

Their scalability has limits.

Again, they’re budget web hosting packages. As mentioned, thousands of web pages may be close to impossible since you’ll be sharing your space to several other website owners, who may also have a gazillion pages.
But how do you make it worth the buck?
We do believe that a budget web hosting package is an excellent investment, mainly for small and home-based business owners. Their needs are pretty basic, so there’s no need to spend $10 for almost the same features.
But that doesn’t mean all budget web hosting companies are great. They are not created equal. Some of them should be out of business ASAP. So you don’t end up wasting your money, choose those that

Are reliable

Their uptimes are around 97 to 99 percent. Otherwise, you’re bound to lose a lot of potential clients or customers for your business. It’s not enough they offer contact details. They should be accessible.

Secure

The last thing you want to happen is for someone to steal all your website information and content, including your customers’.

Are well reviewed

You can visit Geeks best Budget Hosting page to find out which budget hosting options come highly recommended by users.

Technique of Web Hosting

Dmitry — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:16:48 +0000

The technique that allows computers or servers to host web sites is known as web hosting. The facility of web hosting is provided by various service providers. Web hosting is important as it enables a user to access any site in the world. Also, it allows one to store textual and visual information, apart from other Internet matter on the website mediums.

There are various kinds of website hosting services from which you can choose from. Some companies provide you web hosting services for free, while some charge the user. There are certain drawbacks of using free web hosts. This is because there are certain limitations regarding the services they provide. Moreover, a user is not provided with customer service, and is not provided uptime guarantee. The limitations on bandwidth, advertising and edit sites may hamper the growth plans of a company.

Thus, it is advisable that you pay for the web hosting service. However, a user should take into consideration his needs before selecting a web hosting service provider. Depending on a users data transfer, disk space and other necessities, the service can cost him anything between $1 to $5000 per month according to his usage is extensive. Also, the payment can be done on monthly, annually or semi-annually basis.

In addition to your needs, web hosting reviews must also be taken into account before selecting a web hosting service provider. The reviews or ratings of the service providers are available on the Internet. Various service providers can be compared on the basis of price, traffic and space. One should also take into account the bonus or additional features provided by the web hosting providers. It is advisable that one should read the blogs regarding the web hosting service providers. They help you get a realistic feedback and thereby help you in selecting the best web hosting service provider.

Some of the other points that must be considered while choosing a top web hosting service are,

1. Bandwidth
2. Server Space
3. Control Panel
4. Support
5. Script access

The bandwidth capacity should be more than of 10 GB. However, it does not make sense to pay for capacity which you will not use. For people who run small businesses, bandwidth of one gigabyte is enough. The same holds true for server space. For personal use, 50 megabyte capacity is sufficient. Select the web hosting service provider that offers a user 24/7 customer service. This is because, in case of a problem, the customer centers will solve your problem. One can also visit their site and read the FAQ’s, since they add to the knowledge of a person.

The control panel provided by the service providers should be a simple version as will be easy to use. Make sure that the web hosting service providers facilitate you with script access. It may not be required at that moment but, may be useful for future purposes.

Since the best web hosting service adds efficiency and success to the business, due consideration must be given in selecting a service provider.

Know How to Choose the Best Web Hosting Company

Dmitry — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:52:42 +0000

Before actually beginning your quest to find the top web hosting company, it will be a good idea to first know and understand what a good web host is so that you can make the right choice. The web host is really a service provider who will place your website on a server that connects to the Internet. Thus, when you think about finding the best web hosting company you need to be sure that its server is fast and that the company provides near total uptime since you don’t want your website to be inaccessible to visitors because the server is down.

The web host usually has thousands of websites and may use more than one web server for that purpose, and so you will need to rent out space on the server to have your website have a presence on the World Wide Web. Thus, the key to choosing the best web hosting service is to find the web host who manages things well so that you are not taken up with bothering about what the latest server technology is and how to maintain your website. So, before you go reading up on all the different web hosting reviews, you should be clear that it is the web host who will deal with the technical side of things and you only need to focus on building your online business.

Today, you will find that the top web hosting companies are more or less having standardized features and among the more common ones are Control Panel, Diskspace, Bandwidth, Email Account, Scripting language and the ability to directly have customer support either through phone, email or through the web.

Next, you will need to consider what price you are paying for disk space and also the price to Bandwidth ratio. The best web hosting companies are those that will not over charge you for their Web Hosting Plans and a rule of thumb in this regard is that the greater the disk space as well as bandwidth that the web hosting company offers, the more you will end up paying per month to them.

Therefore, you need to know which the most competitive priced is for you which will depend on popularity which can be judged by looking at awards won by the web host, good web hosting reviews about it and whether it gets a lot of traffic or not. Next, you should look at reliability, speed as well as guarantee of uptime which means that the web host must guarantee a minimum of 99% uptime. Thus, you should enquire whether the web hosting company has redundant back up systems or not, which if it is affirmative, will allow alternative internet connections to kick in should the main connection get interrupted.

Furthermore, you need to look at the speed at which your site functions and this will depend on the different network connection types used. It is quite usual for service providers to choose to connect through T1 or even T3 lines. However, the better option is to use Optical Carrier lines because T1 lines give speeds of 1.5 mega bits per second, while T3 lines have speeds of 43 mega bits per second. In the case of Optical Carrier lines the minimum speed would be 51.85 mega bits per second and top speeds can touch as much as 155 to even 622 mega bits per second and this can go up to nearly five thousand mega bits per second.

So, the parameters you need to look for in the best web hosting company are proper management and reliable equipment and speedy service, which should help you decide on choosing one service provider over the other.

Web Hosting Guide

Dmitry — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:26:18 +0000

Looking for and buying a reliable web hosting solution is an imperative decision. Whether you are doing online business, providing important information or sharing views online on a common interest, you need a reliable web hosting service that will allow online visitors to browse through your site effortlessly. It is only powerful web hosting that allows your website to be downloaded, browsed and updated in minimal time.

Trying to identify a web host can be a very daunting task especially when there are so many available nowadays and all of them promise one thing or another. Hence, it is crucial that before you jump in, you do your own homework or research for selecting the most appropriate web hosting company for your website.

With the changing trend of technology, web hosts are also changing. Most of them provide various services in addition to their basic ones. Say if you are running an e-commerce website, then of course you need high end security and a medium through which you can manage your web content efficiently. There are many tools that facilitate this, however if your web hosting service is not reliable then you can miss out on serious revenues and prospective clients.

Once you have determined and identified what web hosting services you require for your online business, it is then time to enlist certain web hosting features and options you must consider. You can find below some of the most important aspects of web hosting:

Disk space and bandwidth

You should know how much space your website would need and approximate data it will generate. When we talk about disk space, well, it’s actually the amount of storage assigned to you by the web hosting provider. The bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to access and leave your website. In case your website has a lot of graphics then you would require higher storage area and greater bandwidth.

Programming tools and the OS

You need to be sure that your website is uploaded through secure servers using the latest Operating System. Most web hosts run on a UNIX based operating system, usually Linux or BSD. For the running of various web applications you would require ASP, .NET, MS SQL, SBS and for these you need a Window based host.

Pricing Aspect

You need to compare pricing before you finalize a web hosting service. Some may provide you better services but at low pricing. It’s not always true that the best hosting services are always the most expensive. Do your research and then finalize.

Support, Security, Guaranteed uptime and Backups

Security and backups are two very important aspects that you need to consider. You should always choose a web hosting service with reliable telephone support. Some also offer 24/7 support through local or toll-free numbers. In case you are running an ecommerce website then security is one aspect that you just cannot discard. Your web hosting service provider should be such that they can monitor things round the clock and ensure no unwanted intruder can hack your site. After all it’s your website and it is really worth looking into this aspect of web hosting.

Web Hosting Instructions

Dmitry — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:21:07 +0000

Web domains. Hosting. Content. These are the three top priorities for any webmaster, regardless of how experienced they are. Unfortunately, these three essentials often leave people in the dark, as there are dozens of companies offering the “same” packages for different prices. With an overflow of routes you could take, it can get mind boggling to figure out the appropriate steps. For this reason, instructions are essential if you are looking for a smooth path.

The first thing you should do is make a list of what your current goals are. If you are making a professional site, you’ll need a secure and reliable host. For instance, if you know that your website will reach thousands of people within a few months, perhaps you should find a web hosting package that includes extra bandwidth. You need additional space, especially if visitors are constantly going to be accessing your website. On the other hand, if you are just experimenting, you should stick to the free hosting packages. Geocities or Angel Fire certainly provides a basic package, which will leave you satisfied. After all, you do not need bells and whistles if you aren’t serious about the website in the long run. If you do end up changing your mind, you can always switch services and transfer your website.

Once you have made your decision, you need to find a reputable service. While searching for hosting companies on Google may seem appropriate, it often stems bad results. It is important to remember that just because it is listed on a search engine, doesn’t mean it is 100% safe and legit. Therefore, if you do find a potential company, you should get a second opinion. It is usually smart to join a webmaster related forum like SitePoint to discuss such matters. This way you can hear about other people’s experiences and what companies to avoid. Additional references from friends or family would also be ideal.

After picking a host, you will need to provide your credit card information. For many users, 3ix.org is a favorite, as it rarely charges you much. Surprisingly, there are discount coupon codes you can acquire through the internet, to also help you with your initial fee. Due to the fact that you have to include your private information, it is absolutely crucial to make sure you find a legit business. The last thing you want is to lose any money. Therefore, you should google their name and check out the reviews from fellow users. This will most definitely make all of the difference, especially if you find out that they are a fraud.

For website beginners, web hosting doesn’t have to be difficult or even too time consuming. As long as you find reputable sources, second opinions, and a great easy to use package, you are well on your way to website success. With these instructions in mind, there should be no frustrations or year long debates on what company to use. It is quite simple, once you get in the webmaster’s frame of mind.

Web Hosting Geeks' Blog » bandwidth

Dedicated Server Options: Which Are Worth Considering

Bandwidth

Advertising credits

Uptime Guarantees

Backup recovery

24/7 support

Root access

Related posts:

Fastest WordPress Hosting in Town

Speed Demons in our Closets

Top Hosting Providers for WordPress

Web Hosting Hub

InMotion Hosting

HostGator

Related posts:

How Much RAM / Bandwidth / Disk Space Do I Really Need?

Related posts:

Guarantees – Separating Fact from Fiction

Related posts:

Pros and Cons of Shared Hosting

What is Shared Hosting?

Benefits of Shared Hosting

Drawbacks of Shared Hosting

Related posts:

Budget Web Hosting: Is It Worth the Buck?

Related posts:

Technique of Web Hosting

Related posts:

Know How to Choose the Best Web Hosting Company

Related posts:

Web Hosting Guide

Related posts:

Web Hosting Instructions

Related posts: