The number of web hosting
providers has exploded in recent years, and while there are
now more good providers, there are, unfortunately, also more
bad providers. It is an industry where there are few
regulations or official standards, so you may have to look at
the industry as a whole as a sort of free for all, where
everyone craves your business. If you choose a Web host that
has a poor service then it can do more damage to your site
than good. If your sites host goes down often then your site
will also go down and your visitors will get annoyed and will
go elsewhere. Your sites earnings will decline and many people
online will ignore your site, as people will start to think
that your site is down more than what it’s up.
You will find many different types of web hosting companies.
Choosing a web hosting provider depends on what type of
website you have. The main website hosting types are: shared,
free, managed dedicated and unmanaged dedicated web hosting.
Free web hosting services place ads on web pages and can
cumbersome and annoying for visitors. The other web hosting
types usually offer great support and bandwidth but charge a
monthly fee.
Shared Web Hosting
Shared webhosting is the most widely used web hosting service.
Shared website hosting permits more than one site to be hosted
on the same server. Here, the web hosts provide system
administration. Most web hosts provide the user with features
such as ASP, PHP, MySQL, large bandwidth, and multiple e-mail
addresses. There are many other services available in shared
web hosting, including the ability to have your own domain
name. Shared web hosting is furthermore a way for the hosting
business to offer affordable web hosting to their clients when
more server users equals less expenses and server maintainance
Free Web Hosting
Free web hosting is the simplest kind of webhosting service.
Ads on hosted web sites generally support this type of website
hosting. We have not found any free webhosting that we could
recommend. Most of them are of low quality. They do not
provide the user with MySQL, multiple e-mail accounts or the
ability to run any scripting language. The type of domain one
receives in free web hosting is typically a sub-domain
(yoursite.webhost.com) or a directory
(www.webhost.com/~yoursite). Our recommendation is to avoid
these kinds of web host services. Choose a cheap web host
instead.
Dedicated Web Hosting
Dedicated hosting is a good option for someone who wants more
storage and bandwidth, and also wants certain characteristics
that are not available with shared web hosting. Here the user
is not limited to a certain number of databases and e-mail
addresses, and also gets a very large amount of bandwidth.
Generally a dedicated server plan offers the user with a
monthly bandwidth of 500 GB to 1 TB. In unmanaged dedicated
web hosting, the user is the server administrator, permitting
the user the greatest amount of control and flexibility. You
need a lot more knowledge if you want an unmanaged server
because it is not easy to be a server administrator. The
function of the website usually determines the type of web
host. Features, support, reliability, and security decide the
pricing of webhosting providers.
Because there is such an overwhelming amount of information on
the Internet concerning web hosting, you may wonder where to
start. Here are 10 guidelines that will help you narrow down
your selection. Once you have a short list, you can explore
the candidates further.
Do research on all the web hosts you are considering. Ask
around. Read online reviews, but remember not to believe all
you read. An unhappy customer who didn't do his homework
before choosing a hosting service may be using the Internet to
vent his frustrations. In an industry as new and rapidly
evolving as web hosting, you can expect misunderstandings
between customers and providers. Consistent bad reviews should
be a red flag, but keep in mind that the biggest web hosts
with the biggest customer base is bound to have some
dissatisfied customers.
Also, keep in mind that there are different interpretations of
what 24/7/365 support means. You should be able to get live
help whether by phone, through email, or through live chat.
Good customer service is one way great web hosts separate
themselves from the rest of the pack.
Speaking of reliability and technical support, you need to
demand uptime of 99.9%. Most companies that are confident
enough to claim 99.9% uptime are smart enough to know they
have to back that up. If a company wavers, or sounds uncertain
about their uptime statistics, you should probably look
elsewhere.
While the cost of web hosting ranges from next to nothing to
hundreds of dollars per month, keep in mind that while cheap
may seem good in the short term, if your web host doesn't live
up to its promises, or if technical support is lacking, or if
you don't get the features you need, you're better off in the
long run choosing a more reliable, but more expensive
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Hosted Email -
Your Web hosting account may also include the use of a hosted
email server. Be sure that the web host you choose is prepared
for your needs to change. When you first start out with a
business website, you may have no idea how much disk space or
bandwidth you will need. It is not an easy thing to quantify
up front. However, the best providers understand that your
needs will change as your business grows, and they have
options to help you upgrade your services when that happens.
Even though combing through mountains of information on
different providers may seem daunting, doing so at the outset
is far better than making a hasty choice and repenting at
leisure. There are free hosting companies out there, but these
are best used for small, personal sites or blogs. Their
capabilities are not likely to be robust enough for hosting a
serious business site.
Keep in mind that many companies work through referral
programs to get their name out there. This is not necessarily
a bad thing. Web hosting is a very competitive industry, and
referral programs help legitimate companies keep costs down.
Additionally, if you make a well informed choice for a company
that has an referral program and you join it, you could end up
with a few extra coins in your piggy bank every month to help
offset your own hosting costs.
Some web hosts cater to specific niches in the online world.
For example, there are hosts for adult websites, and there are
hosts who want to avoid hosting adult sites. Specialist
hosting may be worth looking into if you have an unusual
product or business.
All of these pointers can be summed up by the sentence, "Do
your homework first." The normal caveats apply, such as, "You
get what you pay for," and "If it seems too good to be true,
it probably is." Web hosting providers will compete mightily
for a share of the market, and some may make claims they
cannot back up. This very important choice in the
establishment of your business presence on the web requires
common sense and due diligence
Hosted email tools typically allow you to manage your list,
create emails. Advantages to Hosted EmailIn an increasingly
virtual world, both online and offline businesses are relying
more and more on using email as their primary source of
communication within the company as well as externally.
Service providers claim that when small and medium-size
businesses move from POP3 and Web-based email to enhanced
solutions that provide rich email services, mobile support and
collaboration technologies, they gain new revenue
opportunities while reducing the cost of operations. Experts
say SMBs shouldn't have to deal with deploying complex
in-house messaging systems and worry about the cost of spam
management, virus prevention, storage and archiving and
business compliance requirements.
One of the main advantages to a solution like hosted Microsoft
Exchange, the hosted email service most often offered by
service providers, is its mobile syncing capabilities, making
Outlook email messages and attachments accessible from
anywhere. The messaging solution also offers personal and
shared calendars making it easy to locate co-workers, more
efficiently plan meetings and create calendars for resources
like conference rooms and audio-visual equipment.
Hosted email solutions also usually provide personal and
shared address books to create global contact lists the entire
organization can refer to and public folders to help with
collaborative projects, standardization of formats or styles
across the organization and save system storage capacity as
well as reduce duplication of work.
The main advantages of hosted email versus an in-house email
solution is that it offers a huge mailbox capacity, the cost
per user gets more and more attractive when applied to
economies of scale, it offers a much faster rate of innovation
and change, which means staying up-to-date with recent
security measures and constantly evolving anti-spam technology
and it guarantees higher-levels of uptime, all going towards
making your business run more efficiently and cost-effectively
overall.
While many hosting providers offer Hosted Exchange, there are
alternatives such as the Open-Xchange Hosting Edition
(open-xchange.com), which is Linux-based and provides an open
source groupware solution offering email, calendar, contacts,
tasks, bookmarks, knowledge base articles and shared documents
via an AJAX user interface.
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