Thursday, July 31, 2008

Web Hosting Companies - Look Before You Leap

Of course you do know! That - Web hosting companies are in the business of providing space, bandwidth and the internet connection of their servers to small internet business. Larger corporations may have their own network infrastructure and therefore in most cases do not require these services. But for most of us who want a piece of the web, I guess we have no choice but instead to "rent" web hosting for our sites.
Hosting plans vary widely. There are some which are free; and others which charge as much as $100 and up each month. There are those who offer a very small amount of disk space on their servers and very little bandwidth. Some offer a full complement of services including backup services, administration, design help and much more. In short the choices presented to you by web hosting companies can vary as much as you can possibly think of.
Web hosting companies often provide a choice of shared or dedicated hosting, shared hosting means that you will share server space with other sites, starting anywhere from a few to a few thousand other sites. This lets the web hosting firm to keep its overhead low. A lot of sites are simple enough not to require anything more than this. However, if your site is one which plans to grow, dedicated hosting is something you may want to consider.
As you may have guessed from its name, a dedicated server is one which hosts only one website or domain name. You can put as many sites as you want on this server and you have control and access to the server. If you choose to do so, you may also take over the administration duties of the server. This can save money on the cost of hiring an administrator, but can also take up a lot of your time. Unless you are an expert, you may want to leave the administration to the pros like me...(just playing)
Even thought some web hosting companies promise to provide a little help to help you manage and administer your dedicated server, you'll need a little expertise of your own in order to take care of administration and technical side of managing a dedicated server. You should at the least be aware of how to use FTP, set up email accounts, perform backups and some other common tasks.
If your site is growing rapidly in size and complexity, it may be a good idea to start using a database to keep track of all of the information on your site. This requires even more expertise, both technical and creative. Setting up a database can be fairly simple. However, designing a database which will meet your needs and provide good performance will require careful advance planning. Not everyone is cut out for database development, especially those who are more artistically minded. Of course, not everyone possesses the temperament for any sort of website duties, count me out!
There are plenty of other administrative tasks which need to be done as well. These include maintaining domain names, handling registration, managing disk space and a lot of other duties which are not really to the taste of many people. In order to tackle this work, you will need a basic understanding of the workings of the internet, including knowing how DNS operates. This provides a solid background in how these tasks fit into the broader picture of website administration.
When you are looking for good web hosting companies to get your website going, give consideration to all of these factors and determine what your capabilities and willingness are with regards to the work of administering the site. Be sure to investigate all possibilities, benefits and features of most Web hosting companies before you sign on to any web hosting company.

Online Small Business Tips

If you are serious about your online small business, there is some good online stuff about small business web hosting that can truly benefit any body new to using the internet to help their business.
Many companies offer small business web hosting. Some packages are free of charge, while some can run you up 1,000 dollars. Some come with a pre-designed website built by a professional while some come with only hosting. To ensure that you get the package that meets all of your needs, make sure you do your research before purchasing a package.
Reliability of the affordable web hosting service that you purchase is the most important thing when looking for small business web hosting. You could be losing lots of money if your website is always going off line. When you research the small business web hosting companies, make sure to check how much downtime the company has had in the past.
For my money, I make my own small business sites using Wordpress blogging software from inexpensive web hosting plans that include it for free. Just make sure to make a budget for small business web hosting. The package that you chose has to be well within your budget. Many of the web hosting reviews on this site are perfect for small businesses, and can be had for less than 7 dollars per month. With a set budget, you will be prepared to make the best decision when it comes time to purchase a small business web hosting package.
But will eventually need to make the decision to either build a whole separate site, or build one that partners with the small business web hosting company. It will cost more money to have one that partners with the small business host. However, there is a wide range of prices so keep that in mind while you look for the right option for your business.Quality of the service is one of the most important things. As a business, you don't want to waste money on cheap service that will let you down. Bear this in mind also as you are looking at small company web hosting companies.Remember all of these things as you research small business web hosts and you will make the best choice.
Remember to really get an idea of how reliable the service is or you will lose profit fixing all the problems that come along with cheap web hosting. The quality of the small business web hosting company is the most important thing.

How To Decide Between Free Web Hosting And Paid Web Hosting For Your Blog

There are many choices for web hosting companies available and for blogging there are many free choices offered as well. The question that comes to mind to me is, "Is free webhosting cheap?" What I mean by that is what is it going to cost me in terms of functionality and accessibility. Let's take a look at some of the comparisons between free web hosting and paid web hosting.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of years then you know that blogging has become a formidable force on the internet and has allowed many people to get an online presence that may otherwise have been unable to do so. Many of these people are making their living by blogging and some like Jason Calcanis have become wealthy from it. Jason built a network of blogs over about eighteen months and sold them to AOL for nearly $30 million! That's a pretty good ROI. Anyway, I digress, back to our discussion on web hosting.

If you have decided that you want to operate a blog your next choice will probably be what blogging platform or software you want to use to accomplish you blogging. Relax, it's easy. Most of the blogging software out there today is open source which means it's, you guessed it, free! In this instance free is not a bad thing, I use Wordpress almost exclusively, it is free and has more options that I care to learn or use. There are other blogging software options available, but I won't go into them here because this article is about web hosting.

As far as web hosting for your blog you can choose free web hosting or paid so let's take a closer look at our choices. First off, you can choose Blogger which is owned by Google. Blogger is a good program especially for beginning bloggers because it is easy to use, it is web based, and the price is right. It's free. With that said however, if your intention is to blog professionally and possibly run a large number of blogs with automated content then Blogger is not for you. I have seen Google shut down many blogs because they considered them to be spam. If you want control over your own destiny then you want to use paid web hosting and have your blogs on your own server, or at least a shared server.

Still in the realm of free web hosting you also have a fairly new option from Wordpress who now offers a free web hosting for Wordpress blogs at their .com site as opposed to the .org site where you get the software and plug ins. The problem is that like Google, they are very restrictive with what you can put on your blogs and how you update them.

Another big issue with free web hosting is that you will usually have to display advertising of some sort which "pays" for your web hosting. This is great for the web hosting companies because it gives them tons of virtual real estate out there with their name on it, not so great for you. If you are blogging professionally, and if you are trying to make money for it then you are blogging professionally, you do not want any distractions on your site that leads visitors away from your site unless you are being paid for it like you do when someone clicks on an Adsense ad or affiliate banner.

My recommendation is that you pay for your own hosting because it gives you a wealth of choices, much more storage space, and takes almost all restrictions off of you within reason. There are still some web hosting companies that will not allow you to host gambling or porno blogs but other than that you are pretty open. Paid web hosting is not that expensive. You can get an account that will host as many blogs as most people will want to deal with a few bucks a month. So for the cost of a domain name and your hosting you will probably be around $100 a year. That is a pretty cheap investment for something that enables you to plug into all the ways of earning money on the net.

5 Tips to Find a Good Blog Hosting

There are many reason people starting a Blog, it might be for the personal interest or the online business, and it has been extremely popular in the current world. A Blog hosting will offer the exceptional power together with some great free utilities to help you setup a blog easily and make it experience first rate.

But how to find a Blog hosting? Below are 5 tips for you.

1) Using Linux as Operation System if Possible

The best operation system for a WordPress blog hosting is Linux, which is cheap, reliable and also very fast. You have no need to pay more to host your blog in an Windows environment.

2) 99.9% Up time Guarantee

It would be good to find a web hosting company which can promise you with 99.9% up time. No matter you blog for personal interests or business, a reliable blog hosting is always very important to you.

3) cPanel

cPanel is the most popular web hosting control panel. This icon-based interface is so simple to use that the learning curve is practically a straight line. cPanel will save you a lot of time to use your web host.

4) One click to Setup WordPress

You can download WordPress installation scripts, follow the guide, and get your blog setup by yourself. But if the web hosting company can integrate the installation of WordPress into their control panel, this will somehow save your time, and it also indicate that this web hosting company has well configured their web hosting environment to support WordPress.

5) Support

A courteous and professional support definitely will be very helpful in your blog hosting. As my experience, I would like to choose a web hosting company with live chat support. This is much better than email support or even toll-free phone support.

Web Hosting – Strategies for a Successful Website!

Getting a website on the internet is as important as making one. To make a website live, you need to take the right steps and it becomes even more vital when a web owner is new to the industry. In such cases, it is always suitable to get the right website hosting result which is on offer, from many web hosting companies. There are few factors that can be helpful in choosing the right web hosting company. As a beginner, there should be certain methods to be applied when making that tough call on the web hosting service provider. It is always good to chalk out your requirements before starting your hunt for a hosting solution.

The first and the foremost concern of any web owner is the cost of getting the site live. There are a number of companies which offer good web hosting services at an affordable rate, which can prove really beneficial. There are companies that provide shared as well as dedicated servers depending upon a web owner’s choice. Shared web hosting gets the upper hand when the funds are limited or the business is small.

Once a hosting service provider is found who matches all the technical specifications such as FrontPage, DreamWeaver, Flash, Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarders, SMTP, IMAP, PHP, Perl, CGI-BIN access, Cron Jobs as well the funds, the next part is to do a check on customer feedback to see how reliable the provider is. Most of the information on uptime, technical assistance of the web hosting company is easily available on major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Choose a company that provides 24/7 technical assistance because it will be required once the website goes public.

Disk space, bandwidth and uptime are as important as any other technical feature. Disk space and bandwidth should be of good amount and there should be an option of increasing the bandwidth as per the demand of a web owner. Any company providing all these specifications is indeed a good deal for any starter. At the end of the day being a website owner you should be satisfied with the services provided by your web hosting services provider – whether you are getting all you need to grow, expand and sustain your business venture.