Here, we have compiled a list of various articles we found while doing our homework. We thought they were either interesting, relevant or informative, so we decided to put them all here.

Cheap Web Hosting and Other Stupidities

It seems that nowadays everybody and their grandma sells Web hosting services. Don't get me wrong, I'm the first one to believe in good competition and I defend this principle firmly. Nevertheless, there are people who think that they can start a web hosting business without knowing the first thing about developing and maintaining a business. Those who surprise me the most are the ones that offer hosting services at ridiculous prices. You can find people offering web hosting for $1 a year. Yes, you read right: one dollar for an entire year of service. If you consider that the prices of established providers go from $60 to $100 a year for a basic service, this will sound very attractive. But is it really? Let's do some simple calculations. Lets say a provider gets 1,000 clients, a reasonable number for a small web hosting business. If this provider sells his services at $1 each, then he will have the fabulous amount of $1,000 in a year. Do you think that he will be able to offer quality services, support and upgrades at this amount? I am hard pressed to think he will have enough for food alone! "It can still be a good business if you get enough clients," some will say. Ok, just because I'm in a good mood, let's continue with this example. Imagine this provider-for-a-dollar can get 10,000 customers (a very ambitious goal). Then it's $10,000 dollars of income. Sounds better, doesn't it? However, do you think a business can make it with this income for a year? Just imagine the cost associated with servicing 10,000 clients. Just the cost of rent, phone lines and power would be enough to deplete this small income. As ever, the human mind is marvelous and searches for a solution. Clients that buy these services reason that if they get the deal for a year, it doesn't matter if the provider goes out of business next year (which is most likely). They already got the service almost for free. Again I ask, is this true? If your provider suddenly goes out of business, you will no longer have access to your services, and you will lose your email addresses and your web site. Even if you have your domain registered with another provider, you will not be able to get a new service for at least a couple of days in the best case scenario. That's only if you didn't make the mistake of getting your domain name with the same provider. In that case, you may even lose your domain name and will have to get a new one. Imagine the time wasted just notifying all your clients about your new email address. What if you lost important emails and documents too? Do you think this is worth the risk? When you buy your next web hosting service, consider the support services, the promptness in answering your emails and phone calls and the time the provider has been in the market. Yes, do check the price too, but if it sounds too good to be true, it may be a good idea to look somewhere else. But if you insist on getting one of these services for a dollar, we will be happy to help you when your provider disappears. Let's hope the damage isn't too bad. By: Ricardo d Argence Article Directory: http://www.wreckramblin.com

 

How to Find Affordable Webhosting With the World Wide Web being the main portion of the internet people are utilizing today many people find themselves wanting either personal or business websites. In order to have a website you must have a web host. Web hosting can be costly at times and if you are a novice to the internet you could be paying too much to host your website. How does one find affordable web hosting? First you must consider the services being offered for the cost. How much web space are you given? Does the company offer any extras such as low cost domain registry, or additional email addresses? Do they offer cool add-ons such as visitor tracking information or bulk mailing capabilities; if so at what additional costs? How can you find affordable web hosting? Well, you can start by using your search engines. Nowadays search engines offer web hosting of their own. Such as Yahoo, this in cooperation with geocities offers their users web hosting at affordable cost. For a small monthly fee you can upgrade your geocities free hosted account to something more professional. Services offered include a domain name for an annual fee and additional hosting space for a monthly charge to be paid annually. Other avenues of seeking affordable web hosting are to go with a service that specializes in low cost, affordable web hosting. Companies such as godaddy.com offer their users affordable web hosting as well as many of the services I mentioned above. You can get your domain name, hosting space, email accounts, bandwidth limitations, as well as bulk mailing programs, data tracking, and even anti-virus programs to filter any viruses out of your email box. Make sure you know what is included in the package you are looking into paying for. Are there any hidden costs? Are there any setup fees you need to know of. Many affordable web hosting providers offer discounts for people who pay in advance, instead of paying month to month, they give you a discount if you pay annually. This ensures your business and also gives you more benefit of having a hosted website at an affordable cost, in the long run. Make sure that when choosing a web hosting service, you also know what types of content you are allowed and not allowed to publish on their servers. This can save you a lot of struggle and prevent a breech in the TOS (terms of service). Before settling on one single web hosting service you must consider shopping around, Comparing each provider's prices, services available for the cost, terms of service and ease of use. Affordable web hosting is easy to find if you know what you want in web hosting and you compare the prices of a service provider and many of their competitors. If you are looking for a personal website to be hosted, a smaller not so well known company may be able to suit your needs at an affordable cost. If you are a business owner that wants the exposure the internet has to offer with E-commerce going strong, then you may want to choose a more well known web hosting provider. By: Sandra Stammberger Article Directory: http://www.wreckramblin.com

 

Web Hosting Company Web hosting is an essential component of any web site, without the right web hosting service to back up your website you could end up loosing valuable time and money. Today there are so many web hosting companies online that it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest developments and also figure out how to choose the right web hosting company for your web site. In fact with server storage costs plummeting, the cost of web hosting has come down considerably, and sites like http://www.5shadeshosting.com are actually offering quality web hosting for as little as $6 a month! When it comes to web hosting, there are few things that you as a webmaster have to keep in mind before you actually choose a web hosting company. The first thing to do is to determine your requirements, how much space do you need? For how long do you need the web hosting? Do you want to enter into a long term agreement or one that is for a limited duration of time? How many email ids do you need? Once you have the answers to all these questions you should then start looking for website hosting services. The first factor that should influence your decision in choosing a web hosting company is flexibility, most web hosting companies usually have 3 or 5 different plans designed for various users, some offer unlimited space, while others offer limited transfer of data. If you have a regular website that does not have any databases or other similar e-commerce functions then 5GB of web space should be sufficient. Make sure you shop around and find a web hosting company that is offering web space that is close to your requirements. Another fact to keep in mind is that there are limitations on the amount of data you can upload and download, the minimum amount is close to around 250GB, if you are thinking of frequently making changes to your site, and are not sure how much data you will need, then choose a web hosting plan that offers large amounts of data transfer without charging the earth. The final fact that will definitely influence your decision in choosing a web hosting server is the kind of operating system you require, sometimes e-commerce sites require dedicated operating systems, for example if your site is using .NET then you will need a windows based server, as Linux does not support .NET hosting. It is therefore essential for you as the webmaster to understand your site’s requirements clearly and then choose a web server that meets all your requirements. There are other important features that usually influence the decision of choosing a web hosting service, but the essential factors by and large are space, operating system and data transfer, if you have these three factors catered for then the chances are that you have picked the right web hosting company to host your site. Also make sure you shop around before you make your decision, the more you shop around the better the chances of you finding the ideal web hosting company for your needs. Importance of customer support There is no denying that a website needs to be online as much as possible, this fact holds true more so if you are running an online business. Whenever a site goes down there are various factors that can cause downtime, it is therefore essential that your web hosting company offer 24x7x365 customer support. There is no denying that the web hosting company is not always to blame, however once you have eliminated the most obvious problem area, the rest is much simpler. Make sure the web hosting company you choose is available as much as possible, usually web hosting companies are available by phone, email or chat and are very quick to respond to any customer queries. A majority of web hosting companies have 24x7 phone supports and you should look for such a company. By: Braydon DAguiar Article Directory: http://www.wreckramblin.com

Top Ten Reasons to Choose a Web Hosting Provider Choosing a web hosting provider is different for everyone. Every website has a specific set of needs and you have to find a web host that provides the needs that are specific to your website. However, there are certain things to look for when choosing a web-hosting service. In this article I will give you the ten most common things people should be looking for. These are not necessarily in the order of priority, because as I said every website has different needs and your priorities might not be the same as the next website owner.

1. Tech Support: Tech support in any business venture is always important. As a website owner though, the tech support that your web-hosting service provides is going to be crucial to your business. If your website is offline or not working properly it will cost you sales. If you have been buying traffic to your website and it goes offline, you are still being charged for all of those visits to your website, which they never saw. The money you are spending on your ad campaign, AdWords program or other traffic sources is going right down the drain. You cannot afford to choose a web host that does not respond quickly when you have a problem.

2. Feedback Forums: A web host that provides a forum, message board, or chat room to discuss hosting issues or to get help in is more likely to get a user to use their web-hosting services. The reason behind this is people feel more comfortable with a web host that gives a personal touch and one that cares enough to provide a higher level of service.

3. Room to Grow: If your web-hosting service only offers one package, it’s a bad sign in most cases. What happens as your web business grows and so do your web hosting needs? If they offer upgrades to dedicated servers, larger storage and bandwidth plans, and a lot of other options, then you can feel confident choosing them as your web hosting provider. You don’t plan to stay small and your web host shouldn’t plan for you to stay small either.

4. Storage Space: This is usually only an issue with websites that will be offering users a lot of downloads such as music or software. The average website can get by with about 10 megabytes of storage, but again you want room to grow, plus you can actually use your storage to back up files from your computer. Don’t backup secure documents there, but a lot of your files can be backed up online. You have storage so use it. The more storage space they offer, the better.

5. Bandwidth or Transfer: This is the size of every file visitors to your website download automatically to their computers each time they visit. The average webpage is around 30k and then you add the graphics and other files that are displayed to the user and you get your bandwidth or transfer usage. The average website can get by on less than 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. However if you are offering downloads like software, music, and movies, or you are going to be driving a lot of traffic to your website, you may want to choose a plan that offers you more bandwidth. Make sure your webhosting provider has options that give you room to grow here as well.

6. Easy to use Control Panel: Cpanel is one of the most popular control panels for web hosts to offer, but there are others. Ask what type of control panel your web host is offering to provide you with. Again, this need is different for everyone and this is based on your level of expertise. Some advanced users would rather not have or don’t care about control panels because they know how to configure everything in the server by themselves. Less advanced users need to be sure they pick a web hosting service that provides an easier interface so they can feel comfortable making the alterations they need to their website.

7. FrontPage extensions: A lot of people that do not know HTML still use FrontPage or other programs to design their websites with. If you use FrontPage, you need to make sure your web host is set up for FrontPage extensions.

8. Type of Servers: An example of this is websites that will be built using the .NET framework or ASP. For your website you will need to make sure your web host has a windows based server. Most web hosting providers are on Linux or Apache and ASP websites will not function on them. A better choice is to stay away from building a website that requires a windows server in the first place.

9. Added Features: Instant Install is a feature offered by most web hosts these days even if they call it another name. It’s an automated process for installing databases and database driven features you can add to your website like photo galleries, forums, blogs, content management systems, calendars, guestbooks, and more. It’s just as easy to choose a web-hosting provider that gives you these features in case you need them as it is to choose one that doesn’t. Again, room to grow is important.

10. Is your web host a good neighborhood: This one is a little more difficult to explain and find out about but it is important. Some search engines punish websites who are in a bad neighborhood. They do this by banning websites that come from a particular set of IP addresses due to previous problems with websites on those IP addresses. You need to see samples of other websites that are hosted by your web hosting service. If a lot of them are warez websites, porn websites, file sharing websites, or other websites whose activities do not seem to savory, then you may be looking at a bad neighborhood and may want to find another web host.

That’s my top 10 tips for choosing a web hosting service. I hope you find these tips helpful when you look for where to host your next website! D. David Dugan