Why Cheap Dedicated Servers Are Not THAT Inexpensive
Many web hosting businesses these days tend to use the cruel strategy of attracting customers to their dedicated servers by offering what appears to be a very low and virtually unbeatable price.
However many clients soon end up with a string of nasty surprises when they realize that there are many other necessities, obviously not included in the low price, that they require for the smooth and efficient running of their dedicated servers. The result is that a client who signs the dotted line quickly finds out that what they have done is to actually tie themselves down to a rather expensive dedicated server solution. Their total bill runs sky high when they finally finish paying for all the other stuff, without which the dedicated server service will not run.
So before you commit yourself to that low price dedicated server, here are a few things you should take a closer look at.
One of the most common tricks is to give you hardware configuration and specifications that are inadequate and will require an upgrade to run your dedicated server. For example you can get offered an Intel Pentium 4 server that only has 256 MB of RAM. When you realize this later, you will find that the web host has priced the necessary upgrades on the high side.
Then there is the control panel issue. One can hardly run a dedicated server without a control panel. You will definitely require it for yourself and for the clients whom you will resell hosting services to. In most cases you will find that the license fee for this control panel will not be included in your low priced dedicated server offer. Different hosts have their different prices for the same control panels. For instance the Cpanel license will cost you $15/m at one host and a staggering $50/m at another.
The backup solution is yet another nasty surprise that most folks purchasing cheap dedicated servers soon encounter. Cheap hosts will tend to do one of two things. Either tie you to a high cost per GB back up solution or alternatively offer backup in volume slabs that you will hardly require, especially as a start-up enterprise. You will need to know what your back-up options are before you go for the low cost dedicated server you have in mind.
It would also be prudent for you to find out, before committing yourself, what your web host charges per hour for emergency system administration tasks and other technical services. It is impossible to run a dedicated server without adequate technical support and services and this is therefore a very crucial issue to settle long before you make your move.
Then there are the many small but important details that will enable you to quickly understand what folks usually mean when they say that you will often get exactly what you pay for. Some of these factors can end up being very expensive to you in more ways than one. For instance how will your web host react when there is hardware failure or serious network connection issues? This is a critical question because you can easily lose lots of potential clients gained at great cost, if your server goes down for more than a few hours.
In fact the key to your success revolves around the back-up technical service behind your dedicated server.
These are the issues you really need top look at closely before considering a low cost supplier for your dedicated server.
Sabir Rizvi is a seasoned IT professional who writes for Hosting Reviews, an informative guide for hosting buyers. Visit the website to read more of his expert articles and reviews at http://hosting.alwaiz-arts.com
Why Free Web Hosting May not be a Bad Thing
There is paid web hosting and there is free web hosting. Most people tend to steer clear of free web hosting as they tend to believe that “there is no free lunch”. Free web hosting must have its catches?
Well, that really depends on your purposes and your position.
Why purpose?
If your web hosting is for your website which is for commercial purposes, such as an ecommerce web-store, you need absolute reliability and uptime. Every second of downtime is lost revenue. While some free web hosting providers guarantee uptime, you cannot hold it against them if their services do not meet expectations and cause your business to lose hundreds of dollars of revenue. Why? Because most free web hosts will have a clause in their terms that state that they do not guarantee uptime at all because they are a free service. Now, most free hosts will not even guarantee any uptime and those free web hosting services are provided on a best effort basis. You cannot risk hosting your crucial business website on such a free hosting plan.
However, for most individuals who are experimenting with building websites, free web hosting is the ideal choice as there is no monetary commitment and no lost for both parties. Everyone deserves a chance to learn and what better way to learn than to do it? Free web hosting plans from free hosts are the ideal platform for aspiring webmasters to start their web-building careers. Of course these free hosts may require something in return: visiting sponsors, displaying ads on hosted pages, reading emails, and lately, participating in online communities of the free web-host. This last option may not be a bad thing as online communities allow the users to interact and learn from each other.
There is also a last category of users who just want free web hosting for a personal site which they do not find the need to be up all the time and do not see the need to pay for it and do not see the need to do anything for it. There are some free web hosts out there who offer free hosting for nothing – just a simple sign up. Therefore, a clear purpose for using free web hosting is important. If the purpose is critical and there is no tolerance for problems, then free webhosting is not suitable. Other than that, free web hosting is not a bad thing.
Why position?
Web hosting plans are relatively affordable these days (some plans as low as $1 a month) that almost any working person can afford it for their websites. Therefore, paying for web hosting should not be a problem for those who have an income, or some savings to spend on developing their websites further. Also, any working adult should be able to afford using a Paypal account that most web hosts will accept as a form of payment. On the other hand, students and young people do not have much to spend, much less a Paypal or Credit Card with which to pay for hosting. For this group of people, free web hosting plans are the obvious alternatives if they wish to set up websites without paying anything for them.
To conclude, free web hosting may not be a bad thing for selected groups of people who have a specific purpose. For students and people looking to learn about developing websites, free web hosting is a good thing.
Dax Christopher maintains a two year old webmaster community at http://www.Buildtolearn.com, a forum community that provides free web hosting to members discusses web-hosting and webmaster related issues such as web-design, page coding, SEO and many others.
Choosing a Web Hosting Company
Web hosting is a big business on the internet nowadays…so big, in fact, that it can be difficult to choose from amongst the myriad of options.
How do you know you’re going to get reliable service and customer support at reasonable prices? And how do you compare what one company offers versus another?
A web hosting review site can help you sift through the multiple options by showing you the good, the bad and the ugly of web hosts. A good review site like http://www.hosting-review.com basically does the homework for you – you can compare prices and packages easily in one place, as well as read detailed information about various web hosts, as written by webmasters who have both user experience and customer feedback on the different hosting companies.
Still not sure what to do? Let’s go through some of the different criteria you should consider when evaluating the best web host for your needs:
Space & Bandwidth
Your needs for space and bandwidth will depend on how large and/or graphics-heavy your site is, as well as your expected volume of traffic. Most plans typically offer at least 50 MB. However, make sure that you are not going to get charged extra for features such as mail, system programs, and other elements of your web site as these may or may not be included in disk space limit provided. The same goes for bandwidth – 500 MB is typical for many average-sized sites, but you may need more or substantially less.
Price
How much does the hosting package cost? (remember, the lowest price is not necessarily the way to go here). Is payment monthly or annual? Is a contract required? Some hosting companies offer substantial discounts when you sign up for a multi-year contract. What price implications are there if you go over your bandwidth limit? Read the fine print!
Scalability
If you run out of space or use up all your bandwidth and need to upgrade to a more robust package, what are the implications? Are you able to upgrade packages easily if required?
Technical Support
What types of help are offered, what are support hours, and is support free? You’d be surprised – web hosts range from offering virtually no support all the way up to free phone, fax, email and chat support 24 hours, 7 days a week. Also, beware that some hosts charge for certain types of support. This is more info you’ll get from those hosting reviews.
Domain Registration
Does the web host supply domain registration services or must you register your domain yourself? How portable is your domain name? You will want to be able to take it with you if you ever change hosting providers.
Additional Services
What additional services are offered with your package? This can include free scripts, web traffic statistics tools, shopping carts, design help, and many other features and functions. Many of these can be very useful and are worth checking out. On the flip side, try not to pay for what you won’t use.
Speed & Uptime
Above all, you want a reliable site that does not bog down or go down. It is a nightmare to have visitors leave your site because it is not working or it is so slow that they lose interest. A good web host will have an uptime guarantee and will notify you of any scheduled downtime.
Email Addresses
Ensure that your chosen web host package gives you enough email addresses for your needs. Remember, too, that if you’re a one-man show, it can’t hurt to have multiple email addresses (eg. sales@mysite .com, customerservice@mysite .com, etc) – even if they all go to your inbox, you look like a bigger company, which can add to your credibility.
Choosing that hosting company can be time-consuming and complicated, so use hosting reviews to your advantage – after all, these are webmasters who have used different hosts themselves!
Hosting-Review.com is an independent source for finding the best web host to match your needs. Find out the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to web hosts. Our professional webmasters regularly review web hosting companies and their packages to help make your web hosting choice easy!
Wow, I Have Unlimited Bandwidth
Chances are you have already seen hosting offers like this: unlimited bandwidth for $3 a month. If you haven’t, you’ll probably see it soon somewhere. It may be unlimited bandwidth, mailboxes, space or whatever; I titled this tutorial “unlimited bandwidth” because it’s the most common option.
Now you would be stupid not to sign up for this service, wouldn’t you? Imagine that: UNLIMITED bandwidth. No matter how many visitors your site has, how popular it might become, you don’t need to worry about your bandwidth because you can have as much of it as you want.
If you think that way, I don’t blame you. I used to think the same. However, when I tried few of these “unlimited” offers, read and thought about them a while, I came to some conclusions. The most important one is: don’t get lured!
There is never unlimited amount of anything. For example, typical hard disks are now 80 or 120 gigabytes. They will become bigger and bigger, but there is no “unlimited disk”. If you run out of space, you simply need to buy another disk, that’s it. With bandwidth it is about the same: an Internet connection for your host can have 10MB/s or higher throughput, but it is never an “unlimited” one. There is a point when you just can’t push it further. So the truth about these offers is that they are talking about UNMETERED bandwidth. Unmetered means simply “we don’t measure exactly how much you use it”. And that’s all.
Well, you might think: “Okay, it is unmetered then. Still good: they don’t measure it so I can use plenty of it. They won’t notice since they do not check it.”
Wrong again. Think again about resource limits of the server machine your site is on. The computer probably cost $2000 or so (if it cost less, it will be slow as a cow), and the Internet connection may be something about $500 a month. Now there’s the cost of electricity, technical support, collocation facility rental, and so on, and so on. So to make decent profit from your $3 per month, the company is about to put 500, 1000 or even 2000 people on the same computer. Other way it will simply not be worth it.
So there you are, hosted on a $3/month host with 1000 other people. Imagine that your site is becoming popular (or maybe you have big files for downloading), and you get more and more visitors. The same happens to other websites on your server. What’s the result? Simply, the server is working more and more slowly. So does your website. Remember, the Internet connection, server CPU power, disk etc are not unlimited; the same amount of them must be divided between more and more page requests. Even if your site worked great when it had 10 visitors a day, you cannot expect that it will continue to do the same with 10.000 visitors. It simply will not.
So what is the hosting company going to do? They will select websites which eat up the most bandwidth (or CPU power), and tell them to go away. Don’t believe it? Read carefully terms of service you agreed to when buying the host. Buried in fine print, there is a clause saying: “we reserve the right to cancel your account if it uses too much server resources”. They will make good use of it, you can be sure. And don’t expect a refund when they close your account. You will not get your money back, because you violated their TOS – by using too much of your “unlimited” bandwidth! That’s how it looks like in reality. I didn’t invent all this – it happened to me many times.
Of course, there are some real unmetered bandwidth hosts. They don’t cost $2 or $3, but rather $100-$300 per month. If you buy them, you are usually the only person utilizing the server, and then you can really use its full processing power and bandwidth. For $5 or less don’t expect anything even close to that.
Michal Pleban is a webmaster with many years of experience. His latest site is 11send: http://www.11send.com/ – a free website for transferring, sending & emailing large files easily.
How to Find the Right Web Hosting and Avoid Costly Mistakes
One of the most important decisions you’ll make as a Web site owner, Internet marketer or Webmaster, is choosing a reliable Web hosting service. Sorting through a multitude of hosting companies and making sense of the various service plans offered, can certainly be intimidating.
Knowing what to look for and the kinds of questions to ask, will help you to make an informed decision that ultimately saves you money and grief. The aim is to find the provider that best serves your particular needs. And there lies the key — your particular needs.
You should have a clear vision of your Web site’s purpose.
- How is it going to be used?
- What do you intend to accomplish with it?
- Will you be selling products, or simply providing information?
- Will there be interactive forms on your site for subscriptions, referrals, surveys and so on?
These answers will be useful in helping you decide on the best hosting package for your type and size Web site.
A smart way to begin your search is by soliciting feedback from friends and associates who already have a Web presence. Their responses will usually be candid and insightful, and you could then followup on your own.
Another approach is to visit discussion boards and online forums like WebHostingTalk, where you’ll find informative posts and discussions complimenting reputable providers and griping about unsavory ones.
Host directories are another resource you could utilize. Simply typing “host directory” (with quotation marks) into your favorite search engine query box, will return thousands of pages for you to investigate.
The next step is to compare service plans, features and tools. Here are areas you need to look at closely:
Technical Support. This ranks at the top of my list of priorities. You must have help when you need it. Support should be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and should be accessible by telephone, email, online forum or even live chat. The size of the support staff and the number of customers they service is also good information to have.
Customer Service. It should be prompt, professional, courteous and effective. The quality of this service will play a major role in developing (or destroying) a mutually beneficial business relationship. Test this yourself by calling or e-mailing the company and making note of how they handle your query.
Storage Capacity. You will need to know how much hard drive space you get and how much it will cost if you need to increase it. The amount of space you need depends on the size and type of your site. Generally 25 to 35 MB is more than enough for a small site. If your site is an art gallery or music site, for example, with lots of image and mp3 files, this area will be particularly important to you.
Bandwidth. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred per month. Pay attention to the limits allowed under the different plans. Recognize that as your site gets busier, your bandwith requirements will increase. Most hosts charge additional fees for usage that exceeds the normal allocations, so be sure to read the fine print.
FTP and Telnet Access. File Transfer Protocol (FTP ) is used to transfer files to and from servers on the Internet and allows you to manage your web site. If your site permits visitors to download software, see whether you can set up an FTP site exclusively for downloads. If you have large files for download, find out if the FTP site permits the resumption of interrupted downloads. Most FTP programs can accomodate this today.
The Telnet protocol is one with which many users are not at all familiar, but it is still used extensively. It’s useful for troubleshooting CGI scripts and changing server configurations. Not all servers allow Telnet access.
Platforms: UNIX / NT. UNIX is the most popular platform in use today on web servers. It is reliable, easy to configure and flexible. Setting your own file permissions is a snap. It supports scripting languages like Perl and PHP. Most of the free scripts available for download are from the UNIX platform.
Microsoft’s NT is favored by the next largest number of hosting providers. Scripts that work on this platform are not as readily available as with UNIX, and NT users often require assistance from their Web Host Administrators to set file permissions. NT supports MS applications such as ASP, Access, Front Page and scripting languages such as Perl and Cold Fusion.
e-Commerce. A robust Web hosting company should be facilitating your e-commerce needs with shopping cart software, merchant account setup support, secure real-time credit card processing and so on. They should have a library of scripts to accomodate forms, statistics and guestbooks on your site. Support for Real Audio, Real Video, VRML, Java, Shockwave, Cybercash, secure transactions and other utilities should also be available.
Some Other Considerations
- e-Mail Boxes & POP Aliases – Are you permitted a limited or unlimited number of e-mail addresses?
- Autoresponders – A powerful on-line marketing tool for putting your promotions, sales letters, brochures or catalogs on autoreply. How many are you permitted and are they sequential?
- E-mail Forwarding – Self-explanatory and convenient.
- Mailing Lists – You must have the ability to develop your own mailing lists. This feature is essential to successful Internet marketing.
- Web Mail Access – Allows you to retrieve e-mail from any computer connected to the Internet.
As you can see, several factors ought to be seriously considered when selecting a company to host your Web site. This is an important decision. Be diligent. Do your homework and be prepared to be flexible.
Choose a host that has been in business at least a few years, and who offers features that can be upgraded as your Web site expands. Your company image hinges on the reliability and service of your Web host.
Hermas Haynes is an Internet marketer and Webmaster of http://SixFigureProfits.net. He offers an informative blueprint on how to create and manage your own profitable online business in six simple steps. Visit his site today and get your free preview.