Untangling the Mystery of Web Hosting

May 6, 2008

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There are a large variety of web hosting services available on the internet. It can be very confusing to decide the best option for you. If you need more features than are provided by free website hosting, then you may consider an upgrade to a free service. Many of the free sites offer more memory space and traffic allotment for a monthly fee. Compare prices between servers before you make a decision.

Once you’ve done the research and discover that an upgrade simply doesn’t meet your needs, you might consider the next step of registering a domain name and getting a bigger web hosting package. There are many sites where you can purchase a domain name. Some sites simply sell you a domain name, but provide no hosting. Other sites provide a domain name for a low fee, and then you can pay per month for hosting. And other sites allow you to buy a domain name and offer free basic hosting, with upgrades available.

If you are using it for a business, you need to decide how much traffic you expect before you can decide what service you will need. It’s best to start out small, and then upgrade as needed. Many offer more than one package to choose from.

You can also buy a domain from one site and then transfer hosting to another for the server space. Most of the sites have a transfer fee, so you need to decide if the cheaper domain cost is worth the difference in just registering the domain through the hosting site to begin with. Some of the companies also have affiliate programs, where you can refer people to their hosting service and receive anything from a free domain transfer to cash.

Here are some of the more poplar sites that offer domains and web hosting:

www.godaddy.com - Godaddy.com has very reasonable domain registry and transfer rates. It even has domain names up for auction. They have monthly hosting from around $4.00 a month up to $15.00 a month.

www.register.com - Register.com has a 30-day money back guarantee, and a subscription to Fortune Magazine and 24/7 tech support. It also has bulk domain registration as well as discounts for registering domain names for longer than a year (up to 150 years).

www.networksolutions.com - NetworkSolutions offers many features in addition to domain registration and hosting. It also has things to help enhance your site, like e-commerce, search engine optimization and online marketing for additional monthly fees.

www.doteasy.com - Doteasy offers free basic web hosting with domain registration, with annual renewal of the domain. Additional web space features can be added for monthly fees. Doteasy also has a nice comparison chart for various web hosting services.


About the Author

John Layton is the author of What Do You Really Want and can provide additional tips and advise at his websites http://www.stormhosting.info http://www.hostingnow.info http://www.yourhostingnow.info he also publishes a daily blog at http://www.internetsighting.info

Hosting A Website - What Do You Need To Know

May 2, 2008

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Web hosting is especially useful for personal and small business, and e-commerce sites. It simply involves building your site, setting up an online store and promoting it in the search engines to get traffic to your website.

Definition of web hosting

The term web hosting is used to describe a variety of services that are necessary to make a website and then support that particular website. Hosting website is a service that promotes the websites to reside in the computer in a way that it can be accessible from the Internet 24 hours a day. This computer that host the services is called the host computer and the associated services are called website hosting.

How to get started?

What you need to know about hosting website is the way to get started. To begin with you should select proper hosting service plans. Make a plan that will best suit your needs. If you are getting started with a website, then consider first to have a proper domain name. A domain name is used to locate your website in the Internet. Make it short and easy. The best domain name would include that which has your company name in it like www.yourcompany.com. The next step is building your website. You can create your own website by using any of the page builders like Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, or Microsoft FrontPage.

Your next step for hosting website would be to sign up for affordable web hosting services. Prepare a web hosting account like Business account or Corporate account that can be accessed in exchange of a certain amount of money. Simply fill up a form stating your details and you can get the required account name.

The last step of hosting website involves your promoting the website. Almost all the website traffic comes from search engines. So be sure to design your website with search engine optimization factors in your mind. Submit your website to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. to get traffic to your site.

If you are having a Broadband or ADSL connection, then you can use it to host your own website. Make sure that while hosting website, you choose a company that will best suit your budgetary needs and provide you with a username and password to allow you to FTP [File Transfer Protocol] your website to the hosting space.

Categories of website hosting services

Hosting website services can be divided into four different categories like shared, co-location, dedicated and In House. Shared hosting website put multiple websites on one server and all of tem use the same network connection, the same software and the same hardware sources. You can only design and manage the content of the website. Dedicated hosting website means you can rent your own dedicated server from a hosting provider. Although you may customize the server with remote server access, the hosting provider remains responsible for buying hardware, installing software and maintaining the server.

The collocated web host allows your company with space that stores your own server hardware and a high-speed connection to the Internet for that server. The In House server hosting website system offers you to set up a server on your own premises. You can buy the connectivity, hardware and software, configure and maintain the system.

Hosting website is the most secure, affordable and reliable way to get your website up and running in only 10 minutes. So get success in your business by hosting website and receiving traffic for it.

Find more about Web Hosting on http://www.LeanderNet.com/Web_hosting/Web_hosting.php . More useful content on LeanderNet - http://www.LeanderNet.com

Web Hosting 101

April 18, 2008

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The Internet is probably one of the most valuable tools of communication that man has ever invented in the last decade. Since time immemorial, man has been constantly in communication with the world around him. From his dear relatives, to his favored peers, and even with the environment that he lives in. And this would not be possible without the people equipped with the knowledge of web hosting.

Because of this, man is in perpetual communication. Since then communication has always been associated with the words time and urgency. This was true because the time element in delivering the post was crucial especially during the great American Civil War. Responses were held at a minimum of two weeks for the replenishment of arms and men, and the element of time was always taken into consideration.

And because of this need, man further developed and pushed forward with the ultimate goal of delivering messages at the fastest time possible. Through the hardened effort of the people inside and outside the field of communication various ways of reaching people and places were invented and discovered throughout the development of the modern society.

Telegrams and telegraphs, Morse code messages, short wave radio frequency, and eventually the telephone, the mobile phone, the computer and of course the Internet. Throughout the ages, the internet was the most real time form of letter delivery system man has ever invented. Emails or electronic mails can circumnavigate the world over a hundred times in just one day. And the number of people being connected by the World Wide Web is truly enormous.

Because of this, there are certain times of the day when the internet service providers here and around the world are forced into disallowing some people access to the connection because of the massive traffic the information superhighway has to carry on a single line. This technology has reached far more people than what was originally thought of. Since a lot of people regularly go online to surf the net, shop, research, meet people and just plain hang out and chill, the idea of putting your business online is a very practical idea. On a regular day almost half of waking world go online at the almost the same time. What this could possibly mean to a business person is that the market they are after can be reached at a bigger scope at one time. And that being the case putting a SALE sign on the information superhighway would make lots and lots of waves for your business. The key there is to go online and find a company that can do web hosting for your business.

Web hosting by the way, is the way of uploading your web site or webpage to the internet. This is done by looking for a web hosting service and having your webpage uploaded through their server. The server will carry your webpage just like putting up a store or a house on a vacant lot. Web hosting is the lot. To have your webpage web hosted instead of putting up your own is the most practical way to do it.

One because, maintaining a running server for your website alone can cost more than what you really want to spend. But to look at the brighter side of things, having a web hosting firm do this for you can transform those internet surfers into potential sales. The advantages of having your business hooked up online through web hosting companies are numerous; one is that web hosting is actually much more practical than to launch an all out advertising campaign through conventional and traditional means.

Just try to remember some of the important things when trying to look for a good web hosting company. Look closely at the web hosting contract because some of these offer a trial period so make sure you take advantage of the free web hosting period.

Wayne Haines makes it easy to find and understand web hosting, quickly & easily. To learn the essential keys to web hosting that you must know visit web site hosting plan then further your knowledge at advanced web hosting provider


About the Author

Wayne Haines is an award winning computer programmer, author and well known speaker. He makes it easy to understand web hosting. Learn the essential keys to web hosting and get free weekly tips and how-to advice by visiting http://www.best-hosting-resources.info

Beginner Guide to Web Hosting

April 12, 2008

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Beginner Guide to Web Hosting

by: Andrew Loh

What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.

Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, the Best Web Host of the Year 2003 award winner, iPowerWeb, is a web hosting company that hosts more than 200,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to store the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called data center. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

What are the different types of web hosting?

There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:

a. Shared Hosting

In shared hosting (or virtual hosting), many websites are sharing the space on the same physical web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web server can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different websites at one time. Since a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting would have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $5 - $20 per month.

b. Dedicated Hosting

-In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 - $500 per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and important website.

c. Co-location hosting

In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web hosting providers and customers only rent the web server during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed their web server within the web hosting providers secure data center. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location hosting range from $500 - $1000 per month.

d. Reseller hosting

In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, or system integration company who resell the web hosting as a add-on service to complement their other range of services.

Commonly, resellers can receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the Internet and start selling web hosting plans under its brand).

To the resellers customers, the reseller is the web host provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the communication process taken place between customer to reseller and from reseller to actual web host provider and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer time to resolve. Unless you are running your own personal website or non-profit website and willing to take the risks of poor support from the reseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.

However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You dont judge by the availability of toll-free number alone because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the resellers customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the resellers name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, dont be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.

In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web hosting provider has solid company information such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background such as TinyHost.com . Moreover, the hosting price by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 - $10.

Therefore, you should not strive to find the lowest price web hosting companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Dont expect to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your web hosting plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly more for your hosting plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web hosting plans to host your important website. You can look at our high quality and lowest price web hosting review and recommendation at http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com

About The Author

Andrew Loh is the owner of the Lowest-Price-Web-Hosting.com that provides complete and detail lowest price web hosting review.


andrew@lowest-price-web-hosting.com

Web Hosting Guide for Beginner

April 10, 2008

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First and foremost, for non-IT savvy, it might be a little tough for them to comprehend the meaning of web hosting. I believe if you search it on any search engine, of course there will be answer and explanation for them. But, how far do you really understand? Honestly, when I first get to know this term few years back, I had problem understanding myself. Then, I found one simple explanation that might be easy for people to understand. So, today, if anyone were to ask me what is “web hosting”, i’d explain as follows…

Imagine you are homeless and you want to rent a room or buy a house. In order to get a shelter for yourself, you need a room. So, you imagine yourself as the website and the room as the hosting that you need to place yourself in. That means your website need a web hosting. Then, that’s the time you start finding yourself a web hosting provider. Here, web hosting provider would be the house owner who rents you the room. So, in order for your website to be available and browsed by Internet users, you need to make sure your website is hosted in a web server provided by a web hosting provider.

So, when you finally understand what web hosting is, next will be the time to find out more about the different types of web hosting available. You have shared hosting, dedicated hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and colocation hosting. You name it, the Internet has it! So many to remember and differentiate..so, let’s get the ball rolling with…

Shared Hosting
Shared hosting means that a web server has its resources shared by many other websites. Or you can put it as, in a house, there are many tenants. Usually small or normal e-commerce businesses will choose this type of hosting. Websites with high traffic might not be able to choose this type of hosting due to insufficient webspace.

Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting refers to hosting in which you rent a server from your web hosting provider and will be placed at your web hosting provider’s datacentre. They will provide software installation and connection to Internet. This will indicates that the website owner has control over the server as they don’t share it with other websites. In short, dedicated hosting is where only 1 user hosted on the server machine and have a full privilege over the server to manage it by themself. The server machine will be still belongs to the web hosting provider.

Colocation Hosting
Well, this hosting has the features which are almost the same as dedicated hosting EXCEPT that you provide your own server and web hosting provider just help you to plug it into their datacentre. You need to install own software and hardwares. Everything is DIY.

Reseller Hosting
Reseller Hosting is a hosting where the account owner has the priviledge to allocate the webspace and bandwidth access and resell them to his clients. This shows that reseller hosts act like a middleman and is usually not responsible for any software or hardware intallation. They only buy webspace and resell to clients.

VPS Hosting
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It is almost the same as dedicated server. Hence, it’s sometimes called Virtual Dedicated Server. Generally, it means that the account owner has the feeling as though his owns a dedicated server. In real sense, it’s actually separating a physical server into several independent hosting spaces or VPS-es, each isolated from the other. This will allow you to create and manage multiple sites and domains and take full control of your VPS with root/administrator access which allows you to access the virtual hard disk, RAM and to reboot your private server independently from other VPS-es.

Domain Name
After we are done with the different types of hosting, there is something else which I want to touch on. It is none other than the “domain name”. So, ever wonder what is domain name? Wow, sounds technical? Not really actually. Don’t be scared. Last time, when I saw the words domain name, it freaked me out too. Now, when I got used to it, it’s not that nerve-wracking after all. So, domain name is just the normal web address or url (Uniform Resource Locator) you type in the “address” area when you open a browser. Examples of domain name are “exabytes.com”. You know? Just the normal web address. Well, since it’s a web address, it’s a unique name. Hence, there will be no other same domain name. In fact, domain name is actually corresponding with numeric IP address. So, every domain name will have its numeric IP address. For example, the IP address for exabytes.com is 72.18.131.206

When you see exabytes.com, ever wonder “.com” stands for what? It actually stands for commercial. Whenever you see .com, .org, .net or others which ends after the final dot or period (.) of a url, it is known as top-level domain. It actually tells you what kind of website it is, indirectly. And the commonly used domain name extension nowadays will be .org, .net, .com. However, there are a lot of new domain extension up for grab lately such as .aero, .info, .museum, and .name. Next in the list that I shall explain is, Country Level Domain Name. Examples of country level domain name is exabytes.com.my. It has “.my” as its country code top-level domain (ccTLD). .my here represents the country “Malaysia”. Of course, different country will have different ccTLD. For example, .jp stands for Japan, .au for Australia, .ca for Canada.

There are more to learn in order to excel in web hosting industry. Hopefully this simple guide will help all those novice out there. There are other things you need to know as well. But, it will be in my next article. Cheers!


About the Author

SY Ho is an Online Marketing Executive for http://www.exabytes.com

Web Hosting - A Guide for Beginners

March 28, 2008

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Web Hosting - A Guide for Beginners

So you’re looking to learn about web hosting and what it has to offer or you may not know much about web hosting? There is no shame in not knowing this information. Everyone has to start at the beginning at some point. On that note, lets begin learning about web hosting.

First off, what is web hosting and how does it work?

Web hosting is the business practice of providing space and bandwidth on a high-powered computer server that is connected to the Internet at very high speeds. Hosting companies maintain large networks of high-powered web server computers in a physical location known as a data center. These computer servers are connected to a very fast, and generally redundant, Internet connection. The data centers have primary and backup power, a fast connection to the Internet, and a security monitoring staff.

The web hosting companies provide a share of disk space and available bandwidth to a customer for a monthly fee. Once the customer is signed up, they can upload files to their personal space on the web server and the information is then viewable to anyone interested on the Internet. The monthly fee the web hosting company charges is much less than what it would cost to run a server out of your own home or data center. This is the reason these companies exist. They take care of all the hardware, software, and other technical needs for you.

Types of web hosting

There are many different types of web hosting offers, but the main three are shared, reseller, and dedicated. Each type of hosting is for a different purpose.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared web hosting is the most popular form of hosting. Shared hosting is a portion of disk space and bandwidth provided to you by the web hosting company on a high-powered server. There are many other web sites hosted on this server, and the hosting company is likely to have quite a few of these servers in a large data center. The resources of the server are shared by as many other websites as are allocated to that computer.

Shared web hosting is the best form of web hosting if you are looking for a great price and don’t have more than a couple thousand daily visitors to your site.

Reseller Web Hosting

Reseller web hosting is a popular, low-cost solution to starting your own web hosting business. There are two types of reseller hosting, private-label and a reseller of services.

The private-label is the best type of reseller plan because it allows you to retain full control over your customer’s websites. A private-label plan allows the reseller to keep the full monthly payment of the web-hosting customer, but the reseller must pay a monthly fee to the larger hosting company for the reseller space. The more hosting accounts a private-label reseller can sell, the higher the profit for them. Private-label hosting allows you to host many more websites than if you were using shared hosting for each. This is a great solution for someone who has many sites they need to host in one location to save money.

The reseller of services plans resell the regular web hosting plans of a larger web hosting company, but you get a discounted price for providing the customer and earn a monthly fee for as long as they remain a customer. This plan does not allow control over customer web sites and you only keep a portion of the potentially monthly revenue.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated web hosting is the most powerful and cost effective solution of hosting a busy web site without resorting to buying your own equipment and paying hundreds of dollars per month for a fast Internet connection. Dedicated hosting consists of single server with no one else hosting on that computer. This allows for the greatest of configuration options. Anyone who has a busy website will find dedicated hosting is the necessary choice.

Web Hosting Considerations

Wondering about all the other information listed in web hosting plans? In this section, I will explain the most important considerations in choosing a good web host.

Price

The price of web hosting services is one of the most important. There are many hosting companies out there with cheap hosting packages, but they may be lacking in other areas. Don’t let the price of a hosting package fool you. There are some hosting companies out there who have great prices and the other features are just as good. Price may be one of the most important decisions of a web hosting plan, but there is much more to consider in choosing a quality web host.

Disk Space / Storage Space

Disk space is the amount of physical storage space a web host gives to you to store your web files. Hosting companies these days have plans with disk space being measured mostly in terms of gigabytes, but some are still offering plans in the megabytes for storage space. Depending on your needs for file storage space, you may need more or less. Generally the more disk space offered, the better.

Bandwidth / Data Transfer

The amount of bandwidth available can make a big difference in choosing a quality hosting plan. In general, the more bandwidth a hosting company makes available to you, the better. This means you can support more traffic to your web site as your business grows. Be wary of web hosting companies that offer unlimited or unmetered bandwidth. While many of these are legitimate offers, there are some out there who are overselling their bandwidth in hopes the average user won’t use much.

Customer Support

In any business, it is very important to provide exception customer service. Web hosting is no exception to this. Many of the hosting companies are available all day and night in case you have a problem with your web site, but there are some who are just available specific hours of the day. If your web site goes down in the middle of the night when they’re not available, this means lost revenue for a business. You should make sure the web host you select is always available for support.

Money Back Guarantee

Most web hosting companies will provide a thirty-day money back guarantee. Some will provide one even long, but be wary of the ones who offer no money back guarantee. I would not purchase web hosting services from a company who does not offer at least a 30 day money back guarantee, unless they have proven themselves to be a leader in the industry and have an excellent reputation.

Operating System

An operating system is a piece of software that controls the interaction between the computer user and the physical hardware of the machine. A vast majority of all web sites on the Internet run on the Linux operation system. Linux is generally much more stable than Windows. Stability is critical in running a web site. For this reason, I prefer to host my web sites on the Linux operating system. Some sites have specific requirements that only the Windows operating system can satisfy, but there are always alternatives to those requirements.

Backup

A good web hosting company will have a regular schedule to backup the data on all the web servers. The more often the data is backed up, the better. At the very least, a web hosting company should backup web site files daily.

Control Panel

The control panel is the point of contact the web site administrator will have between the host server and their own machine connected via the Internet. It is essential to have a well organized and easy to use control panel interface. My favorite control panel is cPanel, which is one of the leading web hosting control panels out there today. Plesk is another good one, and many companies will create their own control panel for you to use. Most web hosting companies will provide a link to a demo of the control panel they use with their hosting plans. The control panel used is a matter of preference, but it should be user friendly.

Email

Email is essential part of communication on the Internet. Most web hosting companies out there will give you more email addresses and more space to hold email messages than you will ever need. What you need to watch out for is the companies that have decided to be a little strict on their email accounts and only offer a small number or a small amount of message space.

Uptime

Uptime is a term used to describe how often the average web site hosted by a company is available online. No company should be expected to provide an exact 100% uptime. This is impossible due to things such as hardware, software, and power failures. A vast majority of the companies are very good with uptime, and they guarantee it. It is still a good idea to be conscious of the uptimes posted by the company. If it is not at least 99.5%, it is probably not worth hosting with that company.

Statistics

As a webmaster, it is nice to know how many visitors you’ve had, where they came from, how long they stay on your site, and how much bandwidth they’ve used. This information is collected by the web server and is placed in a log file. A statistics software package can read this data and provide meaningful information to the webmaster. The information gathered from these logs can be very valuable in improved services to the viewers of the web site.

FTP

FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It is a way of quickly uploading or downloading many files to and from a web server. Most web hosting companies will allow their customers access to their web hosting accounts via FTP. FTP is very useful and is a great feature to have when paying for a web hosting account.

Scripting

Since the World Wide Web began, many scripting languages have been created and have evolved into the dynamic and interactive environment we enjoy today. A scripting language is a way of adding functionality to a web site, whether it be to calculate numbers or to load information from an external database. Scripting languages have made electronic commerce possible. Some of these languages include PHP, ASP, JSP, Coldfusion, VBscript, Javascript, and Perl. I won’t go into the details of these in this article for the sake of complexity. If you know how to use these languages, you should know what to look for in a web server for them.

Databases

A database is a place to store data that can be used in a large variety of ways. Databases are used on the Internet for applications such as shopping carts, message boards, and product catalogues. The more databases the web hosting provider allows you to create, the most applications you can deploy on your web server. Databases are used by the more advanced web master, but information is freely available online should you be interested.

Conclusions

Web hosting can be a very difficult decision with the many thousands of hosting companies out there. It is critical to find a plan that fits your needs and to have a good hosting company. I hope this article was useful in making your decision about which company to host with. Happy Hosting!


About the Author

James has extensive experience with web hosting and has created a site for the purpose of conveying this information. For more information about web hosting Click Here .

Ecommerce Hosting for Beginners

March 25, 2008

83557_server_networking_4.jpgWhen you are first starting out in ecommerce, it can be confusing, trying to choose a host for your website. There are so many options out there, and such varying prices, anywhere from free to hundreds of dollars per year, that it can be downright hard to pick the right one. If you know what you are looking for, you can narrow your search down rapidly and make the best choice for you and your business. This article will cover the basics that you need to keep in mind in order to make the best decision in web hosting.First, you need to decide what it is that you need. Are you looking at a one page site to sell your new ebook? Or will you be setting up a veritable catalog of products? This will determine the amount of space that you will require.

You will also need to ask yourself how much service you need. Will you be designing from scratch (or hiring someone to do so) or do you prefer to have a preset template that you can customize to your business? Will you want extras like hit counters and guestbooks? A blog, perhaps? Decide what services you need ahead of time and write them down so you can refer to your list each time you check out an ecommerce hosting site.

There are thousands of free hosts online and you might be tempted to go with one of them. This can be a good way to get started, but only if you find the right one. You don’t want lots of popup ads that will cause your visitors to get annoyed and leave, and it is usually a good idea to find a host that allows you to add your own Google Adsense or other monetizing methods to the site. A free site that offers domain name hosting is a must for a real business, as well. You will want to read the fine print in the Terms and Conditions, as well, since many free hosts don’t allow selling on their sites.

When trying to select a paid ecommerce hosting site, you will want to check the amount of space that they allow you. Make sure that it is enough to host all the photos of your current products, plus double that. You want room to expand in the future. Perhaps one of the best ways to go is with a host that offers upgrades. This allows you to start off paying a low amount for a small website and lets you upgrade to more space and benefits as you need them.

There is no need to pay extravagant prices for an ecommerce hosting website, but you will usually get better service and more reliable servers if you pay something. Often, a paid web host will include a variety of free web mastering tools and they also tend to be more flexible which allows you to use templates or create your own design from scratch. You can also expect better customer service with these hosts and some even include the domain name for free!

Finding the right webhost can be a challenge, but with these tips in mind, you should be fine. There are so many to choose from that if you have your list of needs at hand, you will be sure to find just the right host.

Michael D. Copper Your Online Business Coach http://www.course-internet-marketing.com

P.S. Jumpline.com is offering free web hosting if you purchase a URL name from them. I use them for one of my businesses and they do well.

I’ve been involved with online and offline business since 1990, my expertise is in marketing and sales, and now offering an online business coaching program associated with David Vallieres. The name of the online course is ?Think and Succeed Training Program,? in other words; if you want to make money online, or desire to succeed in a full time online business, then we are here to help you think it through to a successful venture. If you want to succeed in your online business then consider our course, to receive more informatin go our web site. http://www.course-internet-marketing.com/

What Is Web Hosting??

March 8, 2008

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Web hosting is an online program for people to store information, videos, pictures, etc. Web hosts provide space for customers on the internet in order for them to create web pages. Generally, web hosts are only adequate for personal home pages, as larger, more intricate sites require more complex packages with database support and development platforms. Most people get there start using free hosting however, free web hosting is very limited when compared to paid hosting, since they have a small disk space, and require you to have your own ads on your site. Shared hosting is paid hosting where your site is on the same server as many other sites. Some problems with shared hosting is that if something goes wrong with one site, it effects all of the other sites as well. There are also a few restrictions with shared hosting, although these are not even close to how limited free hosting is.

Dedicated hosting is paid hosting which can be quite expensive. You will have your own server withdedicated hosting , and there are virtually no restrictions. Dedicated hosting is more expensive than shared hosting because there is a never ending supply of addresses for dedicated hosting. However,dedicated hosting requires you to have an http server certificate, FTP access, and a domain server name. If you are just starting out with creating web pages, most people would recommend using free hosting at first. After upgrading to shared hosting, you can then decide if dedicated hosting is for you.


About the Author

Joanne Mackenzie writes about various topics. This article is free to re-print as long as nothing is changed, all links remained intacked, the bio remains in full and the rel=”nofollow” tag is not added to any of the links. Thank-you

A Guide To Web Hosting For The Beginner

March 4, 2008

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What exactly is web hosting? What features will you need from a web host? Questions like these often overwhelm would-be web publishers that are just starting out. But we are here to help. After reading this article you will not know everything there is to know about web hosting, but you will understand enough to get you started.

To start off with - what is web hosting? A web host is a company that manage computers that are part of the Internet, and web hosting is leasing disk space on those computers to store the files that make up your website. This means that there is a computer in a data center on which your files are stored, and the computer will present the web pages of your website to visitors. It should be clear to you that if you want to have a website, you will need web hosting.

What are the most important features to look for in a web host? Different web hosting companies offer different sets of features, and usually at various price points. Two of the most important things for you to look at is the amount of disk space you get and the amount of bandwidth they offer you. The more disk space you have the larger you can make your website. Some web hosts will even let you host more than one website on a single web hosting account, and in this case the amount of disk space will play a large role. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that is transferred to and from your website. You want to make sure you have enough bandwidth to display your website to all the visitors you expect to get. Sometime a web hosting company will offer unlimited bandwidth, but read the fine print carefully because there is usually a catch, often the terms of service restricts the kind of data you transfer. For example you may not be allowed to use audio or video on your website.

Other features to look for in a web hosting account include: is the web host Windows, Unix or Linux based, script compatibility, the number and type of databases, the type of control panel and number and type of email accounts. The operating system of the server will determine what software you can use on your website. The software programs you use on your website is often referred to as scripts. Not all web hosts are compatible to all scripting languages, like Perl, PHP and others. The scripts you want to use on your website often needs a database to manage the operation of the script, so you will need a compatible database. You will usually be able to create one or more email addresses using your own domain name.

Before choosing a web hosting company, decide what you want to accomplish with your website and choose a company that offers you the features and options you need.


About the Author

Evert DuToit is a writer and website publisher from Pittsburgh, PA. To learn more aboutweb hosting , andWhat is Web Hosting? , please visit us at webhostingpages.info.

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