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Not sure yet? Read useful articles about choosing hosting providers and decide what is really important for your web site. Currently presented articles are coming originaly from www.articlecity.com

Index:
Select a Web Hosting Provider before Launching a Website by Amit Kothiyal
The Negatives Associated with Companies that Offer Lifetime Hosting Plans by Jeffrey A. Solochek
5 Tips When Choosing Multiple Domain Hosting by Ricky Lim
Managaed Hosting: Do We Really Need It? by Robert Michael
How to choose a Right Web Hosting Service? by Andrew Webb
Web Hosting - Are You Getting Your Moneys Worth? by D. David Dugan

Select a Web Hosting Provider before Launching a Website by: Amit Kothiyal

Select a Web Hosting Provider before Launching a Website

Now that you have completed the website and are launch it on the internet, you need to consider two main questions. First - where you will host your new site and what will be your domain name?

To start with the first thing- the Web Hosts. A Web Hosting Provider is a group that provides you with server space on the web for your web site. The space that is allotted to your website includes all your web pages, graphics, scripts and files, databases etc. The web host is the link between the browser and your website. When your web address is typed into a browser, the web host is the first to be contacted and requested to locate and display the requested page.

You can find a number of free web hosting providers and services on the internet. However, if in case you are planning to create a website with a business purpose in mind, then go for professionals web hosting providers instead of the free web hosting services. These professional web hosting providers ensure more credibility since web sites hosted on free servers are not taken seriously and suffer a serious loss of business due to varied reasons. Unfortunately, for those of us who are on shoe-string budgets that rely on free servers are not taken seriously and can lose business. In order to establish credibility, you must be willing to invest in a professional web hosting service.

While selecting your web hosting provider, do some research about the web hosting company as to how many customers do they serve, their uptime percentage visitors, set up fees, do they offer secure servers etc. Make sure you do your homework efficiently and ensure that the web hosting provider you select for your self offer exactly what you need for your website.

Apart from selecting your web hosting provider, a domain name is as important to select. It is used to relate the particular web site on the web and is that part of the URL that basically instructs the web browser to find a particular page from the search engine content. It is important in the sense that it has to create a brand among the consumers, and it should signify what your business is all about. A good domain name is one that will be easily remembered by the visitors, as it relates to something they are interested in.

Each of them has the same data base that contains all the domain names that have been already registered. You can register your domain name with any one of them. There are many companies available online that will help you out to register a domain name for your website and are efficient web hosting provider.

Amit Kothiyal is operating a web hosting provider directory http://www.betahosts.com/ Here you can find a wide range of web hosting providers. Browse our website to find the best web hosting packages and the lowest prize.

The Negatives Associated with Companies that Offer Lifetime Hosting Plansby: Jeffrey A. Solochek

Yes, I pay a set amount each and every month for my hosting and some of the additional services cost extra but these companies that offer Lifetime Hosting sound like a great money saver. What I don't understand is where is their incentive to perform each and every month. What if I pay this $100 plus fee and they just shut their company down and I can never find them again.

What about the fact that all they have is a sales page? Nothing deeper than that sales page, no support page, no FAQ page, nothing, nada, zip. With my present host, one of the things that I like, is whenever I call them there is somebody there to answer my call. Their support can be the ticket system, live chat, or phone support which is the one I prefer when I want an answer right then and there.

Just recently, I bought a software product via the WWW using my credit card. The software never came so I disputed the charge. After a month my credit card company sent me an email saying that they found in favor of the merchant because the sale was an intangible product and that I knew the risk before purchasing. So now I am out my $43 what happens when the hosting company takes off with my $100 plus, if I find them will I be able to get my money back?

I try to never buy a product where there is only a sales pages. Sites that don't have an email address or a phone number very rarely will get my business. I especially hate it when you do a Whois lookup and the registrar comes up as private or a bogus name and info.

I also see that these companies offering lifetime hosting usually offer great disk space and I've even seen some of unlimited bandwidth but 2 problems I see here is what if you need more space then what they give you and how many sites out there in the world are using any descent amount of bandwidth. I have 20 different sites and even though it is unfortunate but only 1 of them will ever exceed the use of more than 1Gig of bandwidth. What do I need unlimited bandwidht for?

Jeffrey Solochek is the Purple Cow of todays writers always adding his own unique wit and humor to everything. http://www.nosugarcoating.info

5 Tips When Choosing Multiple Domain Hosting by: Ricky Lim

If you have or are planning to have several domains running on the web, then you should consider getting a multiple domain hosting. Multiple domain hosting allows you to host several domains under a single hosting plan. Most web hosting companies call it shared hosting.

The main advantage of multiple domain hosting is it helps to consolidate all your domains under one hosting plan. It makes domain management a breeze. It also makes it easier to modify any settings since you are doing it from the same control panel.

Here are a few tips you might want to bear in mind when looking a shared hosting service.

Hard Disk Space

Nowadays most shared web hosting plans provide more than enough disk space to satisfy your needs. It is important you know before hand how much disk space your web site will be using not just currently but projected 6 months, 1 year and 2 years down the road.

Some web applications requires more disk space than others. One example are file hosting sites. Also remember to check the cost of upgrading your disk space in case you need one. Most web hosting providers charge on a per GB basis.

Bandwidth

Most web hosting providers cap a limit on each hosting plan’s bandwidth. Check to make sure it provides sufficient bandwidth for your current websites and also room for growth. Most web hosting providers will charge you on a per GB basis for exceeded bandwidth.

The speed is also important for websites. No one wants to visit a website that loads slowly. File hosting and video sites for example requires an acceptable speed in order to deliver file download or streaming video.

Number of Domains Allowed

Some web hosting limit the number of domains for each hosting plan. It is best to get one with unlimited domains so you have to worry about the limit.

Emails/FTP accounts

You probably will need separate email accounts for each domain you have. Most web hosting services provide webbased or as well outlook based email accounts. Preferably try to get one that has unlimited email/ftp accounts.

Ease of control panel

With many domains, emails, ftp accounts etc to manage, it is important that the control panel is easy to use and all information can be accessed easily. Most web hosting services provide cpanel. Some web hosting services do use their own customised control panel. A good example is godaddy.

Whichever control panel you are using, familiarize yourself with the interface and get used to it as fast as possible.

Ricky Lim runs a cheap web hosting reviews site. Visit his site http://www.epromote.info for more information on free web hosting services and cheap web hosting services

Managaed Hosting: Do We Really Need It?by: Robert Michael

Managed hosting may best be described as the premium version of Web hosting. Managed hosting takes a lot of the guesswork and administration out of the hands of the client and on to the hands of the managed hosting provider. Managed hosting is much more a customized solution than other pre-packaged basic Web hosting solutions. The price, of course, reflects that.

With managed hosting firms you’ll generally get dedicated servers that are custom built to your firm’s specifications, or configurations with multiple servers. You’ll get top notch 24 hour seven day a week Level three Internet hosting support and a datacenter that has state of the art technology and services.

Managed hosting should offer close to 100 percent uptime guarantee of its network services, and 24 hour security for its datacenter. Included in the standard managed hosting services are managed disaster recovery and backup, security and network services, database services, and administration and monitoring of all your firm’s computer systems.

If a firm has a large volume of online traffic, it may need the load balancing solution that is offered by most managed hosting vendors. This load balancing will improve the performance of the network by efficiently distributing the site traffic. This keeps each server from being overwhelmed by unexpected activity fluctuations. Having this balance on the server load is crucial to a high degree of availability, to fault tolerance and to clustering. All of these provide reliable Internet and corporate network infrastructures.

Firewalls are part of managed hosting, and a crucial security requirement. They prevent unauthorized access to the server as well as from it. Managed hosting vendors can place firewalls in both software and hardware or both. All messages that leave or enter the server or the business network would have to pass through this managed hosting firewall, and those that don’t pass security would be blocked.

Regular managed hosting backup is a must have to prevent catastrophic business consequences to national or other disaster or outage. Managed hosting vendors offer such backup are able to provide reliable and consistent data protection, as well as recovery. Managed hosting firms can also help businesses change their network and systems, upgrading, adding options and extending solutions.

The best managed hosting vendor will include port monitoring as part of its hosting package. This port monitoring services lets business clients configure the host system so that they monitor the client’s server as well as its ports. This configuration and its maintenance are client responsibilities, and the alerts would be sent directly to the client firm.

Should a firm wish to enhance this port monitoring service, the managed hosting package upgrade would provide a greater level of such monitoring. If technicians at the managed hosting firm’s site were to see a system failure they would restart the failed portion of the equipment. The vendor’s staff maintains and configures the port monitoring as part of this enhanced package.

The managed hosting administrator for the host server lets the administrator setup the servers, and manage and control them. Administrators can create their domains, set up e-mail accounts, create file transfer protocol (FTP) accounts, select interface languages, limit the site traffic, create directories chosen for protection, manage SSL certificates, view the statistics for graphics, and manage multiples of both users and databases.

Managed hosting Web site statistics are typically very detailed, configured easily and delivered in HTML format so that they can be viewed with any standard Internet browser. Site statistics are generally flexible and quickly available with a good managed hosting vendor.

Domain licenses are inexpensive managed hosting add-ons, which start at 30 domain licenses, and have no ceiling on the number available.

Robert Michael is a writer for Managed Hosting which is an excellent place to find Pmanaged hosting links, resources and articles. For more information go to: Managed Hosting

How to choose a Right Web Hostnig Service? by: Andrew Webb

Indeed, choosing a right web hosting service for your website is not an easy task especially when there are thousands of web hosting providers all offering almost identical web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before you start your web hosting search. Below are three major criteria for web host seeker:

Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important consideration to start finding a host for your site. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) Server platform and hardware requirements
If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.

Likewise, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any web hosting plans that support Unix/Linux platform should be sufficient to meet your hosting requirements. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best web hosting plans for your need. For more information, you can read "How to select a web server and server platform?"

b) Disk space & Bandwidth requirement
Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before selecting a web hosting plan, i.e. disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), then the disk space requirement may not be a big concern to you. In general, a disk space with 200MB to 500MB should be enough to meet your hosting requirement. In contrast, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, mp3 or video files, then you should consider a web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB to 1,000 MB.

Similarly, the bandwidth requirement will depend on your site traffic estimation. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly bandwidth allowance very fast. If so, you will need to find one web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with 40 GB to 100 GB per month. Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the monthly disk space and bandwidth allowance.

c) Other hosting features
While the above requirements are utmost important, there are other hosting features that you have to consider too. Can web hosting provider support video clips on your website, if you have? Is the web hosting service compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? Can the host support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? On top of that, you may also want to find out the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistic software (analyze your web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your web hosting account), database and scripting languages supported and etc.

Reliability and scalability

A first-class web hosting provider offers reliable server uptime and fast Internet connection. You should only choose a web hosting service that guarantee at least 99% server uptime with high-speed Internet backbones using at least OC3 (Optical Carrier) lines (155 Megabits per second) or above instead of T1 or T3 lines. A reliable web hosting provider usually invests heavily on their data center infrastructure with high performance servers, high speed multiple backbones providers with fail-over redundancy, backup power generators and firewall software protection in place to ensure they meet the uptime guarantee specified in the terms of service.

Similarly, you should choose a web hosting service with hardware facilities that designed for scalability, so that they can grow with your business. For example, if you need to increase more disk space, bandwidth or number of mySQL databases, you should be able to upgrade as needed without any problems.

Customer service and support

The last major consideration in choosing a web hosting service is to find a web hosting providers that offers excellent customer service and support. You should always search for a web hosting provider that offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week technical support that fielded with highly experience technicians, so that any web hosting problems will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time. You may also want to consider to test how responsive is their customer support by sending few inquiry emails to the web hosting provider. In general, any response in less than 24 hours is considered acceptable. It is a sign of poor customer support if they take more than one day to response.

In addition, a web hosting provider with excellent support should also provide multiple support channels, such as toll-free phone support, 24/7 email support, live chat, online knowledgebase, Interactive flash tutorials and FAQ.

Above are few major considerations before you choose your web hosting service. In addition, how long has the web hosting provider in business and the number of customers that they currently have are also a good indication of the quality of their hosting products as well as the stability of the company. Even though cost of the web hosting service is also important but it should not be your major consideration. Because the price of a web hosting service has been declining over the years due to competition, as a result, the price of most of the web hosting services offering quality hosting features has been converging to less than US$10 per month. If you can't afford less than $10 per month, you probably isn't in the online business for the long haul. Therefore, price should not be a major deciding factor.

On the other hand, it is more important to ensure the web hosting service that you choose is able to meet your website hosting requirements, guarantee your website is always accessible with satisfying speed, provide scalability to grow and expand your website as well as offer excellent customer supports. Depending on your web hosting requirement, you can take advantage of our site, Cheap Web Hosting Review to find the recommended web hosting services that can match the three major criteria above. Good luck to your search.

Andrew is the owner of Web Hosting Services, a website that provides complete and detail reviews on web hosting services. You can visit his website at:http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com/

Web Hosting - Are You Getting Your Moneys Worth?by: D. David Dugan

Web hosting. If the term means anything to you at all then you either already have a hosting provider or are looking for one. Either way I hope to educate you on some of the basics to look for in a hosting company. Personal, business, free, ecommerce or discount an educated consumer makes all the difference.

When reviewing hosting providers most people wouldn't put this point first, but I do. Support. Yes, most companies have some type of support, but not all are equal. First and foremost is availability. Support staff should be available 24/7 by phone and email. Response time should also be quick and wait times should be announced and published on the web site. Technicians should be friendly, educated and speak your language.

After support the next most important set of things to look for in a hosting company are features. If the company can't provide what you need then you might as well look elsewhere. Some basics are of course capacity and bandwidth, but more importantly is the ability to do what you need to with your site. Ecommerce, blogging, forums, scripting and databases are much more important anymore then the amount of space you get.

Last but not least is price. When I say price I don't mean to suggest you get the cheapest plan out there. You should find the plan that has the features you need and is affordable. Don't get more than you need simply because you can. There are many hosting companies out there with bargain basement pricing. They can do this because your server is in their basement next to their washer and dryer. Be careful who you do business with and remember you get what you pay for.

In summary I just want to point out that the hosting environment is changing. With blogs and the like becoming more prevalent hosting companies need to adapt to stay in business. You as the consumer need to be educated in what you need and don't be afraid to make a switch if you have to.

D. David Dugan recommends hosting.dugancom.com for all of your web hosting, email, domain name and blogging needs.

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