Web Hosting: Price Vs. Quality
As the Internet expands, demand for different web-hosting services increases proportionally. Additional numbers of people are joining the web world every day with personal sites for their business or organization. Many people choose low-cost solutions to host their web site, but it if your web site is important to you, you should consider quality as much as price.
For instance, putting your site on a low costs web host can affect the speed at which customers access it. Many surfers on broadband connections get annoyed when site’s server does not keep up with their connection. If it does not offer fast access and downloads, people will be reluctant to revisit the site. They would leave the place with a negative impression about you result in long term economic loss.
A well-established web host may charge more for the facilities but in the long run they may offer better and latest services complying with the trends in the market. Some high quality hosts even offers free add-ones and promotions. The features like free web site builder or support for MySQL databases ensure that the ultimate cost involved in building a productive website are a lesser amount. These facilities may not be available when one goes for a cheaper web host – or you may have to pay extra for them!
The cheapest web hosts may not always have a good reputation, either. Reputable companies in the web hosting business have a well-established infrastructure that ensures better services. Their servers tend to be down less frequently and they are less likely to go out of business (and take your data with them!).
Thus it is advisable to check out a host’s reputation and quality as well as its price. The good news is, there are some web hosts that offer both outstanding service as well as competitive prices. Don’t sell yourself short with anything else!
Paul Herbert recommends Net Explorers ( http://www.hosting-netexplorers.co.uk/ ) for high quality UK web hosting.
Why Linux Hosting is Gaining More Presence than Windows Hosting?
Any person interested in publishing any data on the Internet requires Web Hosting. Web hosting has been around for several years now and has evolved from simple HTML pages hosting, small simple sites with a few images into full blown web based hosted applications where end users can visit a site, interact with the web site owner, and even purchase goods and services all over the internet.
The use of Internet as a medium for integrating business across the globe with the help of Web Based software applications has produced wide range of web based technologies like ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, and others. This choice has forced various options for web hosting now as HTML based sites work equally well on both Linux and Windows platforms.
Web hosting platforms vary from different types of operating systems. Microsoft Windows Server and Redhat Linux are just two examples and probably the most well known web hosting platforms. So, what is Windows or Linux web hosting and what are the advantages and disadvantages to hosting your web site on either Server. And why now Linux is gaining more popularity. Well, that’s just the answer isn’t it?
Linux platform has been developed by Community based efforts and it has been rendered for professional use with the efforts of many IT companies like Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, and like. This background of Community development and open source nature of Linux Server and backup of professional IT companies has made Linux platform more powerful, inexpensive and secured.
The cost effectiveness in this competitive era is a major boost that the companies required without compromising on the quality and security of the product. Apart from ASP, ASP.NET, all other major web based technologies work well with Linux. The virtually free distribution of PHP, MySQL, PERL has reduced the costs of the website hosting tremendously on Linux Server. At Sakshay, we provide both kind of hosting services but the advice to companies requiring Hosting for HTML based websites, small applications like Recipe site is to use Linux Hosting.
The menace of viruses, spamming and hacking is also quite less with Linux Hosting. Firstly, this is due to the robust architecture of Linux Server and Secondly, due to many cost effective softwares available for protection on Linux Platform.
The following are the advantages of using Linux based web server compared to Windows based web server:
Stable and Robust: Linux/Unix operating systems has traditionally been believed to be very stable and robust. A web site housed on a Linux operating system will have very high up-time (of the order of 99.9%). Of course, other factors such as power supply, network admin skills, and network load etc. also matter when it comes to maintaining the system uptime.
Low cost of ownership: The Linux OS comes free of cost (or at very insignificant cost, usually cost of distribution). Also, it has full fledged server, and desk top applications that comes free along with the OS. These server applications (such as FTP, Web Server, DNS Server, File Server etc.) being free, are also very stable.
User Friendly: When it comes to web hosting, it is easy to host on Linux web servers. The process of uploading and hosting is almost same for both Linux and Windows web servers. If you want to use a Windows based tool such as Front Page for uploading a web site on to a Linux based web server, make sure that the Front Page extensions are enabled. This is only required if you are uploading using HTTP feature (http://www.yourwebsite.com) of Front Page. Front Page also makes it possible to upload a web site using FTP. You need to select ftp://www.yourwebsite.com for up loading using front page FTP option. Note that if you select “Front Page Extensions”; during web site design, you must enable Front Page extensions on a Linux web server also. These days, all Linux web servers are coming with installable Front Page extensions, and this should pose no problem for hosting on a Linux platform. You can use almost all types of file extensions (or scripts) when using Linux web server. Commonly, the following extensions are supported: .cgi, .html, .htm, .pl, .php, .shtml, .xml, and others. Basically it means that you can host web sites that use different types of server side scripts including .cgi, .pl, .php, and .asp (with plug-in).
Easy to move between hosts: A web site designed to be hosted on a Linux based web server can be hosted on a Windows web server easily, where as the reverse is not always true.
Most widely used: Linux/Unix based web hosting is most widely used compared to Windows based web hosting.
Scalability: Scalability and future expansion are other major criteria to consider while hosting an application. A web site is dynamic. Usually, a web site starts with a few pages of html and grows over a period of time to suit the customers requirements. It is preferable to design a web site keeping this requirements in mind. A web site designed for compatibility with a Linux/Unix based web server meets the scalability requirement easily without making any site wide design changes.
Self Management of your website on a Linux Web Hosting Plan with Sakshay hosting is made very easy with our Implementation of the Award Winning Control Panel software by Sw-Soft called Plesk. Plesk is a web based interface to your Linux web hosting account that allows you to create e-mail addresses and mailboxes, view your web site traffic statistics, set permissions on your HTML, PHP pages, MySQL, and more. We also provide Windows Hosting with Plesk Panel.
So, all kudos to Linux and open source technologies for making the technology affordable and within the reach of common man. More Articles – http://www.articlesworld.com
Dr Ravi Chamria is the CEO, Sakshay Infosystems Pvt Ltd. He can be contacted at ravi@sakshay.net or you may visit http://www.articlesworld.com
Part 1: Web Hosting Fine Print Exposed: 3 Tips for a Better Hosting Experience
This series of articles reveals 14 points about web hosting fine print–things you should know and be aware of when looking for a web host.
Part 1 of the guide gives you 3 practical points, complete with explanations, under which you can evaluate your potential web host.
Be patient in finding your web host: there are thousands of web hosting companies and gazillion offers, so you better take the time to evaluate them and find the one most suitable for your needs.
Please do let us know if your opinion differs, or you have additional things to say. We want this guide to be the most comprehensive, ever-expanding tool in determining your new web hosting partner.
To leave comments, please go to the Best Web Hosting Provider web site.
Let’s get started!
Preparation
First, get clear what you need and want, and write everything down.
Here are the main things to consider:
* Price: put down your maximum price. Don’t expect great service for a dollar a month.
* Scripting: what scripting technology needs to be supported?
* Database: what database your web site requires?
* Disk space.
* Bandwidth: the amount of data transfer.
Second, is there any web host that you like/prefer? If there is, then go with them. If you have any doubts, though, keep reading.
Now, find 3-4 hosts that meet your basic criteria that you just wrote down. Write down the names of the web hosts in the first column.
We’re now going to look at each one of them and see how well they compare.
Price Freeze Guarantee
Ever heard of these? With a price freeze guarantee your price won’t go up if the web hosts pricing changes.
Well, the catch is that your price won’t go down either…
You should know that for the last several years the prices of webhosting services have gone down steadily giving an additional incentive for the web hosts to advertise this guarantee.
What you should find out from the web host is this: if the web host lowers or increases the prices on your package, will they lower/increase your price as well? Does it still hold if you pre-paid for the whole year? Email them and ask. And note the time it takes for them to respond.
In Business Since?
How long have they been in business?
This a very simple piece of information to find out about a web host. You’ll notice that web hosting companies that have been in business for long will have the date prominently displayed on their website. Whereas, a new company can even hide this information.
Why is this important? Because you don’t want your web host to go out of business. Generally, one can assume that the longer the web hosting company is in the business, the lower the chance of them quitting.
Now, any web host can go belly up anytime but if they’ve been in the web hosting business for 3 years or more, you can assume they are making some money, because, one may assume again, most hosts are small businesses and don’t have a lot of capital to keep running unprofitably for a long period of time.
Get Web Host Feedback
What are others saying?
Check the web hosting message boards. There’s plenty of information and feedback on most hosts.
And if you can’t find your host mentioned anywhere, simply ask! Registration is usually free and so many people read the web hosting boards that you should get an answer quickly.
Once you find feedback on your hosts, check the date the feedback was left–old feedback is…well, old.
Also, see the severity of the complaints. Not all sins are equal. And always find more than one post about a particular web host before you make any decisions.
Alright, now search for the feedback on your web hosts. Make sure to find at least 4 posts about each of them. For each positive feedback put + in your evaluation sheet after the web host’s name and for each negative put a -.
In the Part 2 & 3 we will cover these topics:
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
Jim has put this article into action at the Best Web Hosting Provider site. Here each web host is evaluated under the ever-evolving criteria that were discussed in this article.
Finding Good Web Hosting Services
Many people in this internet-era are having great difficulty finding hosting services for there internet business that are both cheap and reliable. They have questions like: How to choose one? How do I know one is good?
It is not as easy task finding the right hosting, but there are some general guides on what a good service is like. For example:
* General professionalism on their website
* Help is available within 30 minutes 24/7
* Their Team Size? Remember, bigger might not be better.
* Also, you must remember that cheaper is not necessarily better either, as there is a lot of scamming going on hosting business and competition is very fierce.
Someone offering unlimited bandwidth, a huge hard drive quota or something similar which has a clear cost for the provider, is more likely offering you an unstable, or even a scam service. Look for those who tell you that they allocate resources, so that they never oversell even if their all customers would be using everything offered to them. These kind of providers are more likely to be very high quality, thus usually the price is a little bit higher, but you can expect more from them in terms of support, stability & performance. And not to mention REAL value-for-money.
The 3 most important factors you must look for in a hosting service, if your website is to succeed, are: Stability, Support response time & how they respond, and the performance of the service.
Performance is tertiary. Why, you ask? Because stability is the most important factor. You don’t want to be loosing business because your site is not available most of the time, do you? Support comes second because crashes do happen, problems DO occur, and response time of support team is VERY important here.
And, you may value such things as one-man companies, because you know that they are very likely to be able to provide 24/7 help and support, and will also offer a higher quality service, because they can put more time into their customers. They value all their customers because they know who is paying, and who deserves what they are paying for, instead of some half-baked scam service that is wasting both the customers time and money.
Think about how good it would be if he or she support technician even gave you their personal phone number for you to contact them if problems occur, and never charge a dime for using it! Talk about service! This will both reduce your down-time, and any business losses incurred because of this. In fact, artichost.net provides 24/7 LIVE support for all its customers, and will surely be in the running this year to win awards for Best-Service or the like!!
© Aleksi Ursin – ArticHost.net
(Article spell checked & formatted by: Joshua D’Alton)
Aleksi Ursin is CEO of ArticHost and author of Life of a webhost
What Every Marketer Needs To Know About Web Hosting
Choosing your web hosting provider is the next logical step after you have registered your domain name. However, it is not easy to find the right web hosting deal. There are many companies that offer web hosting services. If you make a search on Google for the keyword web hosting you will get more than 100 million results!
If you want to have a successful online presence you need to have reliable web hosting. Your web site has to be always online and accessible. Otherwise, you will loose clients and prospects. Let’s compare this with a traditional business. If you have a shop in “offline” business name of the shop is your domain name and business space and infrastructure is your web hosting. Imagine a cafe that don’t have electricity once a day for one hour or a fast food service where there is only one employee instead of four!
WEB HOSTING TYPES
You have to choose your web hosting deal depending on type of your site. You won’t choose the same web hosting deal if you have a personal web site, web site for email newsletter subscription and archives, e-commerce site or web forum. There are 4 main web hosting: virtual (shared) hosting, dedicated server, collocation server and reseller hosting. The two most used are virtual (shared) hosting and dedicated server.
Virtual (shared) hosting is the situation where many web sites reside on one web server. This is the cheapest web hosting because many users split the cost for web server. You can find quality virtual hosting from $100 per year.
Dedicated server represents a hosting where company lease the whole web server from web hosting company. That web server is located in the web hosting company. Dedicated server is the right choice for company that doesn’t want to share there server with other users. Dedicated server can be managed and un-managed. In the first case web hosting company will take care about setting up and constant updates and upgrades of your web server while you will have to do that in the second case. Advantage of this type of web hosting is that you can completely accommodate your web hosting to your needs. Also, dedicated server is the only logical choice for web sites with lots of visitors. Because of costs for a dedicated server that start from $100 per month, usually this hosting is chosen only by companies which take their Internet business very seriously.
Collocation server is similar to dedicated server. Difference is that company doesn’t lease a web server. They place their own web server in the web hosting company. Also, company has physical access to their web server while it is not the case in using a dedicated server.
Reseller hosting is targeted to companies that want to start their own web hosting business.
Useful web site where you can find a web hosting that will fit your needs is http://www.webhost.thelist.com
FACTORS YOU HAVE TO CONSIDER
You have to take several factors in consideration in order to be satisfied with your web hosting.
Web space
Web space is determined by the type of your site. Certainly, if you want to have a web site with basic information about yourself and your work without using web applications that 50 MB of web space will be enough. On the other hand, if you want to have complex e-commerce site with several thousand products in your database or web site with members, you don’t have to take anything less than 1 GB.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth represents data that has been transferred from your web site and that include graphic details, images, banners, files for download etc. Content is very important for planning your bandwidth. For most sites, 10 GB monthly bandwidth is more than enough while for some other sites like desktop wallpapers sites bandwidth can be often even several hundred GB per month.
Up-time or visibility
Up-time or visibility represents time expressed in percents that show how much is one site online. Don’t be fooled because someone guarantees for example 98% up-time because it is not enough. You don’t have to take anything les than 99.7%. Believe us, that difference is very big. Useful site checking your up-time is http://www.netmechanic.com
Email accounts
It is important to know what you will get in your web hosting package regarding email accounts. Will you get only a so called catch –all forwarding which means that all emails sent to anything@yourdomain.com will arrive to your email address or you can set-up email accounts for several users? For how many? Is it for 5, 10, 100 or unlimited email accounts? Also, it doesn’t hurt to check do you get a so called POP3 email address (“real” email address), web mail or both? Having a POP3 email address you will be able to check your emails using your favourite email client and web mail enables you to check your emails at any place that has computer and Internet connection.
Server type, tools and control panel
The two most often used hosting are on Unix-based or Windows platform. That fact has for the result program languages, databases and scripts that you will be able to use. On Unix-based platform, usual choice is PHP language in combination with MySQL while on Windows platform ASP or ASP.NET language in combination with SQL Server. You have to check do you get a database in your package and how many. Today, modern web site has to be database-driven.
Also, it is recommended to be informed about tools that you get in your web hosting package, no matter if they are applications for web statistics, file manager and things like that. Best solution is if you get a cPanel along with Fantastico. Using Fantastico, marketers without technical knowledge can install most popular web applications within 2-3 clicks.
Technical support
Technical support is one of the most important things in choosing your web hosting, especially if you are a marketer without technical knowledge. You have to be sure that your technical support will answer your emails within 24 hours. This is not only important for choosing your web hosting company, it is important to literally any company that sells products and services, for example software company.
Some companies are so well organized that you will receive response from them within 1 hour! You can get an image about your future technical support about the way they can be contacted. Is it only via email or they have a support phone, too? Do they have a toll-free number? Do they have trouble-ticket system? Also, very important thing is their working hours. Do they provide technical support only during their working hours from 9 to 17 or they offer 24×7 technical support? The best way to see how professional they are is to make a list of questions, contact them and – wait to get the answer.
Testimonials
It is a common practice that web hosting and software companies have Testimonials section where you can read recommendations from their happy customers. Don’t rely only on that section. Many web hosting companies offer you to see their portfolio of web sites that they host. Contact several webmasters and ask them about what they think about their web hosting provider. Very useful thing in finding best web hosting deals and recommendations is to visit popular web forums like http://www.webhostingtalk.com and http://www.sitepointforums.com
You see that there are several factors that influence in choosing your web hosting package. You have to be aware that like with everything else, when we come to web hosting you usually get what you pay for.
Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com