Web Hosts: The Basics
Before you start searching for a web host, you must familiarize yourself with the terminology used in this field. The following terms are also considered key factors in deciding the suitable hosting plan that meets your requirements. You can start learning what does each term mean and how does it affect your selection.
Web Host
A web host, also known as web server, is a computer connected to the internet. This computer is more powerful than normal PCs and is set up to serve up websites. Your website content will reside on this computer, which will give people who surf the internet a way to access your website.
Web hosts can be categorized into three main categories based on the price range and common features for each category:
1. Free Hosts: limited in space, bandwidth and other features. Suitable for personal websites or for temporary usage. Usually enforce pop-up, text or banner ads. They do not provide the best performance and/or reliability. They provide minimum or no customer support. If you register for a free host, your domain will be something like yourname.freehost.com or www.freehost.com/yourname.
2. Shared Hosts: most websites are using this type of hosting. Suitable for personal, small and medium businesses. Prices range from $1 to about $25 a month. Features also range from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. Your website has its own top level domain (e.g. www.website-hostings.net) The number of websites on a server affects its performance and availability, more websites usually means less performance. Servers hosting less number of shared websites are more expensive, but more reliable. Some companies allow customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account.
3. Dedicated Hosts: A full server dedicated to a single customer. Usually used by large businesses and very active websites with thousands of daily visitors. The customer will have full control over the server, and can create as many websites as he likes. Customer can have his own hosting company run on a rented dedicated server. Prices depend on the specifications and services provided with the server, starting from about $100 up to about $800 dollars a month.
4. Colocated Hosts: very similar to dedicated hosts, but the customer owns the server hardware instead of renting it. The server will be housed in provider’s data center. Prices are a bit higher than dedicated servers.
5. Reseller Hosts: providers offer web server storage to customers, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Providers usually offer resellers a discount price.
6. Other Hosts: there are few other types of hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these are out of the scope of this article.
Domain Name
www.website-hostings.net is an example of a domain name. It’s a name that points to where your website is physically located. The actual address of your website is a set of numbers that looks like (70.86.135.242). This address is unique for every web server. Domain names are just pointers to the real addresses. It’s easier to remember the domain names than the IP addresses.
Space / Storage
The amount of web server’s disk space available for customer’s website files, images and databases. It can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Space prices reduced significantly during the last few years. Customer can find hosting plans offering 3GB of space for less than $10 a month.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from web server to clients’ internet browsers. Each time a person view a page data is transmitted from the server to that person’s PC. Audio, video and images contents consume much more bandwidth than text. Bandwidth can be as low as 100MB a month in some free web hosts and as high as 2000GB a month in some dedicated servers. Customer can find hosting plans offering 75GB of monthly data transfer for less than $10.
Server Type
Usually means the operating system than runs the web server. Common types are Windows, Linux and UNIX. Server type determines the server side scripting and database types. Windows usually runs ASP and ASP.NET with Access or SQL Server databases. Linux/UNIX servers usually runs CGI, PHP or JSP with mySQL or Oracle databases. Windows servers are usually more expensive than Linux/UNIX servers.
Databases
As you have seen in server types, there are different types of databases. The most commonly used is mySQL because its an open source GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications’ requirements such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, however, has some limitations in its features. Complicated large business sites will need more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.
Server Side Scripting
Most new users prefer to use PHP as server side scripting. The reason is that there are hundreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that can meet a lot of webmaster’s requirements. Similar to mySQL, PHP has some limitations in features required by advanced websites, which makes some senior web developers prefer to use ASP.NET or JSP. Other developers still prefer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL.
Most hosting plans include the feature of having some email accounts with customer’s domain (e.g. admin@website-hostings.net). The number and size of email accounts depends on the hosting plan. Free plans do not usually have this feature, small plans give about 10 accounts where big plans do not limited the number. Those email accounts are usually web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
A standard way of transferring files across the Internet. Most webmasters upload and download their websites contents using FTP. The upload or download processes are usually performed using FTP client software. To access their web servers, webmasters need FTP username and password. Some hosts give more than one FTP account to their customers. FTP can by anonymous as well, but its not recommended for security reasons.
Control Panel
Most web hosting companies provide their customers with a control panel, a web based application that helps in managing websites. Common functions in control panels are: managing email accounts, providing statistics, managing FTP accounts, managing domains and subdomains and managing databases. The most commonly used control panel application is cPanel. Some companies develop their own control panel application.
Uptime
An important feature of web hosts is their uptime, which is usually measured in percentage. A server that goes down for an average of 30 minutes a day will have an uptime percentage of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most small to medium business websites. Anything less than this percentage is not suitable for a business website. Mission critical sites cannot tolerate frequent outages, thus they may use web monitoring services to notify web administrators immediately when an outage happens.
Price
With the wide range of options available for customers, the price is also ranges from 0 to $1000 a month. Most personal, small and medium websites shouldn’t cost more than $15 a month. It’s not recommended for business website owners to go for very cheap plans (less than $5) because this price usually means a compromise in the quality of support and reliability of the server.
Abbas Alafoo is the creator of http://www.website-hostings.net, a collection of articles and tutorials about web hosting, design, development, promotion and administration.
Three Reasons Why You Should Spend Some Time Choosing a Good Website Host
Most people spend their energies looking for a great website designer, but often neglect to choose a good website host. For most people they start examining their web host carefully only when their website goes offline because their web host goes down. While we cannot prevent such an occurance totally, it will help if you choose a good website host. This article covers three reasons why you should spend some time looking for a good website host.
This article covers three reasons why you should spend some time looking for a good website host.
1. Lost of sales
Any business owner knows that when your website is down, you lose sales. It’s that simple. Spending time looking for a good website host with minimum downtime is important as it can allow you a good rest at night knowing that your internet sales websites is running like it should.
Mary an internet business owner had a problem with her web host and true enough the web site server went down and her ecommerce website also went down with it. To add to her troubles, she was running a Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign with several Pay Per Click Search Engines like Google Adsense, Overture, Findwhat and she had to quickly disable all her ads until her website came online again. She later realized that she should have spent some time looking for a website host that was not only value for money but had a good reputation.
2. Lost of Advertising Revenue
Another business model online involves advertising and content related websites. These websites provide lots of free content but make money when people click on contextual and banner advertising on these websites. Some popular websites have many visitors a day and the loss of advertising revenue can be staggering.
Yahoo.com in a celebrated case was down one day after a massive Denial of Service Attack. Although it had nothing to do with a web host, we can all learn a lesson from this. If your website is advertising supported and advertising is your main monetization income stream then, you need to choose a website host that can ensure that it stays up and has a reliable connection to the internet.
3. Inability to grow your website
Another reason to choose a website host is that when most of us first startout online, we know nothing about web hosting features and choose the cheapest deal around. The problem with this is that the cheapest deal may not be the best deal and when you have a huge content website later and want to grow your website, you may find that your current web host is unable to provide the support for certain scripts.
John was one such internet business owner. He wanted to add a sql database for this new script that he was to get then the reality of the cost factor hit him. The web hosting company that he was using had only two plans and the difference in one extra website was to be $50. He later spent some time looking online for a better website host and migrated his entire network of websites to that web host. You may not be so fortunate, if your website is too large, sometimes it may be very difficult to migrate it to another web host. Thus you want to spend some time thinking about the long term growth of your website before you choose a web host.
In conclusion, choosing a web host requires some serious thinking as it can limit the growth of your internet commerce business. Hopefully the three points above have highlighted the importance of choosing a good web host and provided some examples of web hosts to avoid.
Best-web-host-directory.com is a full featured web host directory with articles and directory listings of the best web hosting and website building companies online.
Care For Some Cheap Web Hosting?
No, ‘cheap’ is not necessarily a bad thing (well, not always), but when it comes to a services industry as competitive and with as thin margins as the web hosting industry, customers better watch out. Hosts offering ‘low-cost’ services tend to offer the world for Rs. 900 per year but, usually fail to deliver even the most basic of services. Surprised? I’m not. Let me explain some basics for the benefit of the vast majority who would still be unsure as to what I’m rambling about.
A “web host” is a company (well, most like to think of themselves as such but that’s a whole new article) that is in the business of procuring bandwidth (internet connectivity) and servers (glorified computers) with the intent to re-sell the same, in smaller bits, to people who need storage space for their e-mails and websites. This is usually (read always) accomplished by renting out dedicated servers with a decent hard drive and bandwidth quota and then using a hosting automation suite (control panel) to divide the server resources up into smaller chunks called ‘hosting plans’. The goal is to price these plans in a way that they remain affordable for the client while helping the host maximize profit from the resources it has.
Now comes the fun part…
Since there are almost no barriers to entry in this particular industry, new web hosts keep popping up every day. This helps keep the price for hosting services sane and should also mean better service for the customers since there are many hosts competing for their business. What really happens is that one Johnny-come-lately decides that the only way he can grab some market-share is by offering the lowest prices. Once customers start quoting his price to the host struggling for their business, the host decides to match it. Before you know it, everyone has slashed their prices by half! This, in Pakistan, can be seen every 10 – 12 months.
“Good”, you say? Read on…
What does this mean for the web host? Suddenly, all their existing clients are paying them half of what they used to. This means that in the coming year, they would have to generate twice as much new business just to make the same amount as last year! Is this considered growth? I think not!
Sadly, the number of clients does not magically increase with every price shave. So, the web hosts are left with little choice other than to cut costs just to make ends meet. Where there were 3 support people, they decide to make do with just one. Where there were 2 servers earlier, they decide that they can load all of the clients onto just one server resulting in lower operating costs. These measures, needless to say, do have a positive impact on the host’s bottom-line but deteriorate the services resulting in un-answered support queries and long periods of downtime (website/email inaccessibility) or extremely slow server response due to excessive loads on the server.
Now, if the host were to put their existing clients first, they would price their service fairly so that every client not only feels good in his wallet, but can also rely on the service being offered. I guess, all it boils down to is; whether a web host is in this business to provide a top-notch service with a long-term business goal or is just there to make a quick while competing with all the fly-by-night hosts who happen to come along.
Recently, I have come across at least three such hosting companies that are now in financial peril because they could not resist the urge to slash prices in order to try and capture some new business. Sadly enough, these are not people who are ‘new’ to the industry. Such an impact on the market is magnified 10 fold when an older host decides they would be better off by just slashing prices rather than improving on service. As a result, the younger companies follow suit and create a mess for themselves and more importantly their clients. The ultimate outcome is that frustrated clients decide to switch to foreign web hosts that provide a better service at a saner price.
From experience, I have learnt that providing a good service is what really matters. The rest falls into place when clients realise that they can only run their online business if the service they get is of good quality. After all, you get what you pay for. What good is a cheap service when you will eventually stop getting any?
Zahid N. Sindhu is an editor at the Article Street. For quality content to place on your website and ezine, visit http://www.ArticleStreet.com.
Reseller Web Hosting: Right Choice For You?
What is reseller hosting anyway? It is a type of web hosting that is designed with some quirks. In this type of hosting, the account owner may actually split up their hard drive space and sell it to someone else. There are many reasons for doing this from simplistic ones of just not needing the space and wanting to make some money off of it to many others. But, the bottom line is that this is an exciting market and one that has a lot of competition.
Reseller hosting is set up in such a way that resellers can provide this extra space to someone else without having to worry about all the maintenance of the hosting they are selling. There is no need to worry about maintaining the web hosting services at all because this is the job of the owner of the dedicated server.
So, how does this affect you? GUI control panels make it so easy to take advantage of reseller hosting. Whether you are buying or selling, these panels can help you to get it done right and often times fast. Some of the most popular choices in commercial control panels include the following web hosting resellers:
• Plesk
• Direct Admin
• CPanel
• H-Sphere
• Ensim
But, you will also find a few other options to consider as well. In Open Source control panels you can choose such web hosting resellers as Webmin, web-cp, and Domain Technologie Control.
As we said, there is a large market out there when it comes to web hosting as well. You’ll find a wide range of information on these options available to you throughout the web. Its easy to find web hosting options in reseller markets. This affordable way to own or sell hosting services is something many are taking advantage of and making money off of.
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Do You Go With A Dedicated Server Or Not?
For many businesses, finding solutions in dedicated server options is difficult. This is mainly the case because individuals do not know what they are looking at or looking for. What is a dedicated server and do you need one? If you are not sure, then you may want to keep reading! It can make a large difference in your website’s performance.
The dedicated server is a web hosting solution that is advanced in that it allows you to own the complete server. It is not shared yet it belongs to you and your needs. You will get a connection to the internet and the necessary things that you need and off you go. There are several different types of dedicated servers but what you should consider is whether or not you need this level of service or not.
You can understand your need for a dedicated server by analyzing your daily use of the web. For example, does you website have about 3000 daily web users? If so, you will want to consider moving to a dedicated server. Also, if your website seems to be moving slower now than it did when you first began putting it up, you may also have a need for a dedicated server.
Unmanaged or managed, that is the question! In unmanaged dedicated servers, you will get the server and the equipment that you need to run it. But in a managed dedicated server, you will get the help you need in getting all of it done and maintaining it. You will have nothing to worry about besides the website’s content.
Whether or not you use a dedicated server is up to you. But, if you need to move to this level of hosting, it is wise to consider several options and to get it all together well. You will want to insure that you have the right specifications. To understand further what you need, look for options in purchasing a dedicated server right here on the web.
for more information please see http://www.dedicated-server-shack.co.uk