Web Hosting

When choosing the best website hosting company, it is important to consider several things before making your choice. As they say ” You never get a second chance at a first impression.” This is true when we are talking about your website!

Web hosting is a service that allows users to post Web pages to the Internet. A Web host, or hosting service provider (HSP), is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for Web sites to be viewed on the Web.

When you choose hosting for your website consider the following things.

Price: Don’t simply look for the lowest price. Your website is your lively hood and you need reliablity that you may not get with cheap hosting.

Technical Support: Is it available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? If you have a question you need an answer.

Features: Various internet hosting companies offer a variety of services. Make a list of what you know you want your website to do. Here are a few services you will want to consider. Set up fees, transfer fees, email aliases, site stats, contol panel, site creation tool, front page extensions, submit to search engines, sub domains, multiple domain discounts.

Disk Space: The amount of disk space that will be allotted to your web site is another of the key elements in a good web host package. While it might seem that 30 megabytes is plenty of room, the potential for growth of your company means that you could easily need more space later. If you choose a web hosting provider that simply can’t offer more space, you might find that your growth will be severely limited.

E-mail accounts How many e-mail accounts do you need? You’ll probably need one for each employee and one for each department (sales, accounts, support). Make sure you purchase a hosting plan that has enough e-mail accounts. Also, do you want full POPS access, Web-based e- mail, or both?

E-commerce Will you be selling goods or services through your site? If not, there’s no need to sign up for an e-commerce web hosting service. If you are, e-commerce web hosting services such as shopping cart software, SSL support and a merchant account will be vital.

Speed: You need to know how fast your internet hosting provider can provide access to your visitors.

Uptime: This may be the most important thing when choosing the best web hosting company. You can not make money if your web site is down.

It is reasonsable to expect to spend $20-$30 a month for a good hosting company. I personally use Host4Profit for my hosting needs. I have found them to be reliable, fast, offer top customer service, and reasonably priced. They have a web hosting affiliate program that allows you to make $10 a month for every person you refer to them. Refer 3 and yours is free

In the recent era you might have often experienced the worth of an Internet service where you can get and know almost everything happening in the world. You yourself are so aware and updated about the current events taking place around you that you feel proud to share the information amongst your friends and colleagues, not only this, you are satisfied within and it really helps you. Well after knowing the world around you have you ever thought about owning your own website, where thousands of people would log in and get to know more about you and your services through your own website, doesn’t that sound wonderful? Of course you can have your own website and to get to know more about this, Internet is available at the tip of your finger, just one click and so many hosting services are ready to help you. To choose a hosting plan with great benefits it offers, it all depends on your smart choice. An individual or a company can easily create its own website with the help of web hosting services that is obviously obtainable via World Wide Web-www. You can come across several website that offer you free or cheap hosting plans for which you have to wisely make a choice be considering all its limitations. You must be well aware of limitations which are mentioned under: – Cheap hosting plans or free hosting plans are usually support by personal advertisements. – These services set their limitations in regards to disk space they provide, means limitation on the file-dimension. – Limitation on bandwidth, a comparatively smaller bandwidth. – MP3, ZIP files are restricted. – Up-time guarantee is not available. – Their personal ads in every pop-up and banner ads in each link. – Custom URL in not allowed. – No pornography – Hotlinks of file are blocked. – No personal advertisements on their website. Thus, after knowing the pros and cons of the cheap hosting plans you should smartly choose the one that has minimum limitations and the one which offers some useful features. A paid website as well, has some limitations and if you want something on you website of your choice or an added feature you obviously need to pay something extra. There are some cheap hosting plans that offer some extra features and may charge you low compared to other hosting plans, thus you need to sincerely study what every hosting plan is offering and limiting you in order to get your website done at reasonable charges with great benefits and least limitations. Cheap hosting plans often attract their customers by giving the maximum additional features, like a increased storage capacity, web-based control panel, large email account and free templates and sign-ups, advantages of MySQL, PHP, Perl, guestbooks, free database of airports, hotels, city guides, Web Directories, Article directories, installing scripts at a click etc… these are the attractive features that might be offered by a cheap hosting plan. It is a tendency of human nature to attain a product with maximum benefits. Now, the question arises that how will these cheap hosting plans benefit themselves as they give most of the benefits to their customer at cheap rates? But then they are smart enough to recover their costs by passing on the advertisement of their services on the customer website or through referrals, or simply by selling off their hosting services by inviting the interested community. Hence, a person or a company who has planned for his own website needs to consider all the limitations and the benefits and opt one such Cheap Hosting Plan that allows him to enjoy maximum benefits at least costs.

One should consider the given below web hosting mistakes and should restrict them from having a seriously negative impact on his/her website.

Mistakes and solutions:

1. Contact Information

One should make sure that his/her web host has contact information available to user 24 hours / day and 7 days / week. This facility provided to the user should be in the form of phone numbers plus e-mail addresses that correspond to the web host domain name. The user should make sure that he/she is dealing with a real company that not only concern about there own business but also of user’s.

2. Excess Bandwidth

It is a serious problem faced by the user that while using a free or cheap quality web host there are more chances that he/she do not possess sufficient amount of bandwidth which could cause problems with user’s website in the later time. Even in the condition when user has to pay a little bit more amount of bucks, it is worth to gain further bandwidth. The user should inquire about this before signing up with a web host.

3. Liberal Disk Space

Several times it happens that user is in false happiness for finding a cheap or free web host and just signs up without even inquiring about the quantity of disk space they provide. A user should ask just one question to him/her, what he/she will do in circumstance when the disk space fills up? One should confirm that his/her host provides him/her liberal amount of disk space or not, if not one should look for an alternative (web host).

4. Web Host Domain Name

One should confirm that the company domain name that it matches with the web host company name or not prior to disclosing his/her credit card information or rather say hosting his/her website with them. On the Internet it is up to the user to choose whether a company is genuine or not, one should verify the domain and company name to locate a combination between them to sustain.

5. Protection

Inspite of the web host and website design, the user must ensure that he/she have secure websites for purchases where people will enter the banking or credit card information. There is no argument on the fact that, if one’s site does not appear to be secure, customers will definitely leave. One must get rid of such circumstances and must go to an extent of the limit to make customers feel secure and convinced buying from his/her own site.

6. Strategy Ahead

One should be prepared for the future and should give a thought in his/her mind about the websites growth. In absence of proper strategy one has to face some severe challenges if one outgrow his/her website, shopping cart, bandwidth etc too quickly. One should adopt a systematic plan for slow, medium, as well as fast growth so that one can remain aware about how to tackle challenges in every sort of situation.

7. Sluggish Server

One should confirm that his/her web page loads within 10 sec. for a 56 k modem. If not, then people will prefer to desert one’s site before the page ever opens rather than waiting. The reason behind it is that, people are looking for instant gratification on the Internet. How to provide information is user’s headache, if cannot the people (customer) will leave on the spot. There is no matter to compromise.

8. Blueprint

One should confirm that his/her host should permit him/her to design the site for ultimate success. Presence of too many policies or regulations regarding the site design will probably influence the sales and the way customers perceive one’s site then should look for another host. There is no scarcity of choices.

9. Checkout

One should prevent several formalities in the checkout process and should ensure that it should be in clear, simple, and to the point format. People prefer to buy their products without giving one a lump of private information. Let the customer do that or plainly make certain fields optional if one is attempting to carry out market research.

10. URL

If one wishes for an ideal reflection of one’s business and services he/she should possess own personal URL. One should not use a free host that provides him/her some kind of space using their URL with some further information at the end of the URL that directs it to him/her. There is no harm in loosing some of the bucks and getting one’s own URL that is unique, simple to process, and says something about one’s company. No doubt, it is going to be most crucial.

Even for a layman , its important to know the concept of web hosting. Visiting any website shows a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto the user’s web browser. Generally, web site is made up of many web pages and web page is made up of texts and graphic images. Now these pages are then stored and made available for the visitors on web servers.

So for a layman if his intention is to have is own web site, then the first step would be owing a host provider so as to host the website on web server. As soon as the website is online on the server, online users can browse that website through Internet. All this job of providing host facility is with the providers called web-hosting providers.

Any established web hosting provider can host even thousands of websites example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts websites in amounts of lakhs i.e. 3 lakhs. Due to this reason only these hosting companies needs large number of web servers for storing the website. Thereafter all these web servers are connected to Internet and are kept in a physical center ‘data center’. As these web servers needs to be fully operational all the time so data centers are made fully secure having 24/7 environment and given protection from fire, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

Now after knowing what is web hosting it is also important to know the different types of web host which are summarized below:

Shared Hosting

As the name suggests, in shared hosting several websites share space on the common physical web servers. A physical web server can host thousands of websites at one time depending upon the web host. With so much pressure on web servers it tends to make one think that due to over burden perhaps the performance of web server gets affected. But that thinking is totally wrong as for this reason only web servers are equipped with high-end powerful computer so as to support large number of websites to some extent without any problem. However but it is even possible at time of over burden on web servers that the response is badly effected.

In order to get rid of this problem reputed and experienced host providers constantly keep on monitoring the performance of web servers and keeps on adding new web servers when and where required. As many websites share a same physical web server the cost is generally low with start from mere $5-$20 per month and they also have to accept slower server response time.

Dedicated Hosting

As against shared hosting, in dedicated hosting a specific web server is allotted to one customer only. Due to one server the customer is having option to host his single/multiple web sites, can modify the configuration of software, can handle greater site traffic and can even scale the bandwidth when it is taken as necessary. It is because of this facility that dedicated hosting charges good amount which starts from $50 and can range even upto$200 to $500 monthly. So dedicated hosting is regularly used by extremely important web sites having high traffic.

Co-location hosting

The only difference between dedicated hosting and co-location hosting is that here in this case customers can own the web server hardware whereas in case of dedicated hosting customers can just rent the web server during the hosting period. So Co-location hosting provides more flexibility to its customers in respect of control and maintainence. Here in this case 24/7 server monitoring is also possible which can evade the problem of slow response. Because of all above benefits co-location hosting charges good amount depending upon monthly bandwidth and rack space required which is as high as $500 – $1000 monthly.

Reseller hosting

The third type of hosting is reseller hosting where the provider offers web server storage space to third party at a discounted price, who again resell it to his own customer. Normally resellers include web consultants like web designers, developers or system Integration Company who after charging commission which is even upto 50%(taken as discount) can resell the web hosting. Resellers can set up their own hosting company and can decide for their own pricing structure with establishing their own branding.

In case of reseller hosting for reseller’s customers, the reseller is the web host provider. When some technical problem arises like down server or any access problem then in that case the resellers have to settle all with actual web host provider. However this is not the effective way as it leads to unnecessary waste of time due to various channels involved in the communication process like first customer contacts reseller and then reseller contacts actual web host provider and same is with the response it also comes back from the same process, so the problems pertains for a long time. Thus reseller hosting is not considered a good option unless user is having his own personal website or he is having an alternative for poor support from reseller.

Now with growing competition market is having abundant of resellers who are selling their services at a very low price. Due to this and other factors like even some web-hosting providers provide their own toll free numbers to their resellers for co-branded technical support, this makes the decision more difficult to choose which is the right choice.

Thus it is more important to act wisely and to not get attracted with marketing techniques employed by resellers like professional outlook of their website and other strategies like proving technical support in their own name which is actually provided by the provider and not by them but they tend to present it in such a way that they are providing that support.

The general distinguishing feature between resellers and hosting company is firstly the hosting price and secondly the company’s information including their balance sheet example iPowerWeb.com get their company’s information published where they mention their financial strength, their offices and highly equipped data centers. As against this resellers lack these assets and for price what they quote is generally below $5 per month whereas providers charge between $7 and $10.

Thus considering all these facts it can be concluded easily that due to a minute difference of several dollars one must not get struck in the web of resellers and must go for best facilities instead of getting harassment afterwards.

What can be the relation between internet and different web-hosting services? Talking in scientific language one can say that, demand for different web-hosting services is directly proportional to expansion of internet. Persons related to business or organization increases by the day on the internet. There are several people who do not bear to spend much money on their web site, however, if the site is meant for important purpose, then ignorance of quality can be harmful.

Taking an example, dealing with a cheap web host can lead to slow assess of site. It happens with several surfers on broadband connections who get irritated with such sort of problem. If a site does not offer fast access and downloads, it is a waste for the visitors. It not only leads to financial loss but also delivers an undesirable publicity of worthless site.

One cannot deny the fact that, a well-established web host can demand extra money but the services would be worth it. There are also few high quality hosts in the market which even proposes free add-ones and promotions to the users. Features like free web site builder or support for MySQL databases which user enjoy ensures him/her that he/she is not at the loosing side in terms of cost. A cheap host cannot provides a user these facilities and if yes then not without extra money.

It is also a universal truth that cheapest web hosts may not have a good repute every time, either. It is not a mere play, to start a web hosting business. It requires proper network, well-established infrastructure for guaranteed satisfaction to client. There is less probability of frequent down times in server and quitting the business at any time!!

Hence, host’s status, quality and price all three are important for a successful search. However, few web hosts offer the client both outstanding services as well as nominal prices due to stiff competition in the market. Thus, user should know that he/she is precious and ultimate in the market.