Setting up Your Personal Server

There are many things to consider when setting up your own server. We wouln't encourage a novice for the job. Seek help from web professionals if you have any queries. Here are some web hosting factors to consider when setting up your personal server:

- A server license is needed and they are not cheap

- Virus, bugs and spam attacks

- 24-hour maintenance and support

Your website doesn't sleep but you do need your sleep! Who is going to take care of your website that is hosted in your personal computer while you are sleeping? Getting 24 hour up- time and support is necessary for your website; especially if it is a business website! The main advantage Internet Service Providers have over personal servers is: having web professional maintenance crew working 24/7 to ensure that web hosting is running smooth for websites.

Many people will think setting up server hosting is cheaper than getting a web hosting package. Buying hosting equipment is not cheap for an individual and just like any other computer equipment, it becomes outdated after a while. Server companies spend hundreds of thousands on equipment and keeping up with technology. They buy in bulk, hence having bulk savings. Hence, web hosting packages are competitive and affordable.

If you are genuinely interested in setting up your own server, do it out of interest's sake. Otherwise, you will be financially better off getting hosting packages off bulk- buying server companies.

Choosing Your Web Hosting Package

General rule of thumb is not to sign up for yearly web hosting plans. Instead, get monthly plan where you can unsubscribe from on the second month when you are not happy with the service. That is, if you ended up with an unreliable web hosting company in the first place.

Here is a simple guide that can be easily applied to typical web sites:

--Web Space--

Expect a small website to take up 10 and 100 MB. Considering that you may want to expand your website in the near future, it is advisable to get a web hosting plan with ample web space.

Make sure that you know your needs before you start looking for your web host. Not every web hosting plan can be upgraded or customised. More than often, webmasters do not get the features they need and are not able to customise their web hosting features.

--Monthly Traffic--

Data transfer per month are typically referred to as bandwidth. It is the amount of data transfer that occurs between your website and visitors. A small or medium web site will consume between 1 and 5GB of data transfer per month. Larger, commercial or popular websites often consume more than 5GB of monthly data transfer and sometimes, exceeding 100GB of monthly data transfer.

Before you decide on a web hosting plan, be sure to check this:

- What is the monthly data transfer/ bandwidth allowed?

- Will you be charged if your website exceeds its limit?

- Are you able to upgrade/add on your bandwidth?

--Connection Speed--

Visitors to your web site will often connect via 56K modems or ADSL modems but your web host provider should have a much faster connection. Your website should have high web site connections that are approximately 1000 high speed (56 Kilobytes per second) modems combined- T3 fiber optic connections.

In the early days of the Internet, T1- connections was considered a fast connection. The fastest connections available are T3 connections that are used by Internet Service Providers and major corps.

Effectiveness of Web Hosting Directories (WHDs)

John is very happy today, for the first time in his life he has created his very own website. Now he is looking for a web host so that he can put his identity on the net. Casually he asks his friend Mac about it. Mac tells him that web-hosting directories are the best place to look for a web host. Getting curious John then asks Mac what exactly a Web Hosting Directory is. Mac responds that web hosting directories are a web hosting marketplace where prospective hosts list their products, plans, prices and other important information so that according to their requirements, customers can choose a suitable plan. Along with the details, it also contains web hosts’ rankings. John is now extremely happy as his dream is finally going to come to fruition. Like John, there are many beginners who are in search of a reliable web host and come across web hosting directories. Here a new question arises: Are these web hosting directories really trustworthy sources for novices like John? To find an answer it’s very important to understand the working of WHDs.

Basically web-hosting directories are of two types: paid WHDs and free WHDs. For paid directories, either web hosts pay a set amount for placing their banners on the site, or they pay commission if they get customers via that medium. On the other hand, free WHDs like www.askwebhosting.com and www.hostbyte.com etc. web hosts list their services without paying any fees.

Some people believe that paid WHDs are very easy to manipulate as the ranking of web hosts can be changed in unfair ways. Others have the view that WHDs that are actually free reflect the true ranking of web hosts companies. Whatever the case may be, paid or free, people should believe the web hosts rankings only if they are based completely on votes of customers who have actually given their remarks and have left their website address as well.

It is not possible for any web hosting company to have 100% positive reviews. It is also observed that at times customers who are satisfied with their web host forget to express their opinion about that host. However, a biased customer who is not satisfied with their web host does not forget to mention their opinion of that web host. This implies that a negative review doesn’t always reflect the true picture of a web host company.

No doubt web hosting directories are very useful if the newbie like John wants to compare prices and features of different companies. But, when it comes to choosing a web host he/she should make an intelligent choice by referring to other resource sites (forums etc.) as well.

Finding a Home for Your Internet Enterprise - A Point by Point List

After much Net surfing and looking at all the offers you've
decided to take the plunge! You've investigated a good name
for your idea. You've decided it's time to start searching for
a home for your Internet vision. By golly, it's time to start
your own enterprise! You're tired of all the reading and
research! You're ready to go mano-a-mano!

But,there are a million and one providers available!
How do you choose? What should a first time entrepreneur
get? Thankfully, there is a way to come upon a good choice!
Read on and I'll explain what you should examine when making
your selection.

The main thing to consider is what kind and how many
different services are you going to need. What do you think
are the most basic things you want your website to do?
Those are practical considerations since you don't want to
leave out some essential service; all the same, you don't
want to buy more than what you really have to.

The general trend appears to be in favor of providers that
offer many integrated services (built-in); it makes perfect
sense getting all the services you'll need from one
location.
As an added bonus, it does make administration easier since
you don't have separate accounts to deal with. You'll also
save money because the packages are less expensive than
buying extra services piecemeal.

You do have to be careful when choosing packages because you
could pay a high price for things your startup can't use or
won't need!
The trick is to get all that you need and provide a little
room for future expansion. When it comes to this buying
decision, pricing - though always important - should be your
last consideration.

Services, room for growth and price are the basic elements
of your purchase decision. Let's take a look at each one:

Services:

You don't want to skimp on this one! Think about all that
you'll need and get it. Mainly, you'll need a way to bill
your customers, track their interests and stay in touch with
them.

You have to make sure your provider offers all the
services you're going to need to process Credit Cards and
email. In particular, services related to initial customer
contact and follow up with sequential emails. Another item
to consider is the ability to track your visitors and learn
what their interests are!

You should look to get as many integrated services as you can.
That's so important because it's VERY expensive to order them
after the fact.

Room for Growth:

If you think you'll ever branch out, this is something to
consider: Will you be able to create additional Internet
addresses linked to your main account, at no extra cost?
Some providers allow you to take advantage of that feature;
a point well worth considering for future expansion.

Pricing:

When considering how much to spend, you have to take into
account all of the above plus your financial situation.
Only you know how much you can afford to pay.

Extra Considerations

Since only you know what kind of enterprise is going to
anchor your initial Internet adventure, you should consider
all aspects related to it. As an example, if you're going to
offer sound and streaming video to your customers, your
needs should be met by a provider that has all the specific
requirements needed for those services.

Hosting AND a source of Income

There are some providers that will offer you discounts or
financial incentives to bring in subscribers. A point to
consider because you get two birds with one stone: A home
for your enterprise and a way to make a steady monthly
income from your referrals. I've heard some folks are making
a very good living doing that!

Hunting for a place to host your Internet venture is a big
decision that will affect your entire Web operation.
You should take your time and consider all the angles.
It's something so basic! Making the right choices will make
your first Internet presence a streamlined and productive
affair.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - How to use it to Fight Email Forgery

Spam is a real problem today. Forged email is a big part of the spam problem. Have you ever received a spam email from yourself? How many times have you received an email you know to be spam from someone only to find out it came from an invalid email address? When you try to block the email by choosing block sender, the spammer simply changes the email address to another variation and gets through the block. Until recently, there wasn't much you could do about it. Now there is.

What is Sender Policy Framework (SPF)?

SPF makes it easy for a domain, whether it's an ISP, a business, or a school to say that they only send mail from certain machines. If any other machine is claiming to send mail, they are lying. SPF aims to prevent spammers from ruining other people's reputation. When your machine receives an email from another server that has implemented SPF, your machine can easily tell if the incoming email really comes from the server it says it belongs to. More information about SPF can be found at http://spf.pobox.com/

By implementing SPF in your favorite application or on your server, you can be sure that a spammer will never be able to impersonate you when spamming others. Most well known domains and email applications have already implemented SPF on their servers and products. Some examples of vendors that are already implementing SPF into their products include Sophos, Symantec, Declude Junkmail, Brightmail, IronPort, Ciphertrust, MailArmory, MailFrontier, Roaring Penguin Software, Communigate Pro, and others.

Ready to fight email forgery? Install applications that support SPF today and get protected from email forgery!

Web Hosting and Development

If you’ve ever browsed the World Wide Web and wondered how you could stake your claim on the Internet, like the millions of others that have done so already, then web hosting can provide you with the services to do just that. The Internet is a great way of sharing information and it is possible for you to take a portion of the web and make it your own. This article introduces the term “web hosting” and provides some useful tips for web development once you’ve obtained some web space.

What is the World Wide Web?
The “World Wide Web” is the network of computers from all over the world that communicate with each other using the HTTP protocol, a language that allows the transmission of web documents. Be careful as this term is not synonymous with the “Internet” because it is defined as a network of networks, where the computers communicate with protocols other than HTTP. The web is what you see on your Internet browser, the web pages complete with graphics, sound and other information. All this has got to come from somewhere, and this is where web hosting comes in.

Web Hosting
The information that you see from your web browser is contained in web pages. These web pages are kept on computers called web servers. Web hosting is about the storage of the web pages so that people can access them. It is possible to host your own websites yourself but the reasons stopping most people doing this is that there are issues to consider with having the right hardware and software to successfully host your web pages. Your web pages will take a certain amount of space, users will need to download each page to view them and your Internet connection needs to be fast to offer good performance to your viewers. Using specialised companies that offer web hosting capabilities on their web servers will take most of these worries away from you but you will need to choose wisely and weigh up the costs and your needs. In addition to having access to a web server, you will also need to register a domain name (for a cost) that uniquely identifies your website.

What Web Hosting Can Do For You
The most basic service that web hosting offers is that it exposes your web pages for others to see. The other services are: email capabilities that allow for email to be received and sent from your server; database capabilities that allow for large amounts of information to be updated and accessed on the web; and dynamic content which allows for users to interact with the web pages you’ve made.

Website Development
Poorly designed websites will most likely turn away users and harm the credibility of the information it contains. Thought should be put in on the way it looks and the way you intend your users to interact with the content. It is also recommended for more complex websites, a structured development process should be followed. Here is a guide to the logical steps of web development:
· Requirements Analysis: What is the purpose of the website? What content should it contain?
· Design: How should the pages be linked? What structure should they take? How should the pages interact with the user?
· Implementation: This step is the actual coding of the websites in accordance to the previous websites.
· Testing: Does the website do what it should?
· Maintenance: Is the information on the website up-to-date?

Some useful hints for web development below are taken from software quality aspects but they apply to the development of websites as well. They are described in terms of web development:

Reliability: Is the website reliable? Do faults allow for the system to continue running?
Robustness: How does the website respond to incorrect input?
Performance: How fast does the web page respond to user’s actions? Is it efficient in processing requests and inputs?
Usability: Is the website easy to navigate and understand?
Maintainability: Is the website easy to change? Can new functionality be added?
Portability: What software requirements does the website require? Will this limit the amount of potential users?
Understandability: How well do you understand the website you’ve developed?

When designing your website, keep these quality aspects in mind as they will help you develop pages worth visiting. How to choose the way to host your website is half of the problem, the other half is to create a website that people would want to visit and come back to. Knowledge of producing a good design can help you get the most out of your creations.

Web Hosting: Which Is The Host With The Most?

So you want to publish a web site do you? Welcome to the club. These days it seems that almost everyone has a web site of some kind, and thousands more continue to be launched every day. It's challenging enough to design a site and fill it with interesting content, but when all is said and done another challenge still remains - where to host it?

A popular choice for newbie webmasters, and even experienced ones, is to secure a free hosting plan with a company such as Yahoo! Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire. While these are easy to setup and free of charge, they do have limitations. Most free hosts don't offer all the nice features that paid hosts do such as FTP access, CGI-BIN, or your own personal domain name. Instead you're stuck with minimal features and a generic URL such as www.freewebhost.com/marcswebsite. This somewhat limits your web site‘s potential. Most free hosts also require you to run banners or pop-up ads on your web site to make it worth their while - these banners and pop-ups can obstruct the view of your web page and ultimately annoy visitors and drive them away. Lastly, most free hosts have a daily bandwidth limit that is very small, so if you do get a lot of traffic you'll most likely exceed the allotted bandwidth and your site will be temporarily disabled. Overall I would recommend free web hosts for people that are new to web hosting and want to get a feel for how it works. I'd also recommend them for web sites that are personal in nature (such as an online journal) as well as web sites that don't plan to generate any revenue. Free web hosts are a great stepping stone to paid web hosts - I myself starting building web sites 4 years ago using free hosts, and today I run several high traffic web sites that are hosted on paid web hosting plans.

Now it's time to get into the good stuff - paid web hosting. Web hosting companies that charge money for their services are plentiful on the Internet, and feature a wide array of hosting packages at various price points. First we begin with so called "budget" web hosts, who claim to offer you the world for only $1 per month. Having used numerous such companies I feel I must tell you to proceed with caution here, as these companies aren't all that they are cracked up to be. Many claim to offer 24/7 e-mail support, which in my experience turned out to be 0/0 e-mail support. My e-mails were either never answered or answered a week after I sent them. Even when I got a response it was generic in nature and completely unhelpful. Also, expect frequent outages with these budget web hosts as they rarely even have their own web servers - often they are reselling space on someone else's web servers over which they have no control. One budget web host I used went down unexpectedly for 6 days, and they didn‘t even bother to notify their customers. As a result, my web site was down for 6 days and I lost most of my visitors as well as my hard-earned search engine rankings. Lesson learned: if the reliability and success of your web site is important to you, budget web hosting might not be the answer. However, this is not to say that all budget web hosts are bad - 1dollarhosting.com is one of the leaders in the budget web hosting arena and has quite a good reputation.

The next type of paid web host is what I refer to as a "mid-range" web host, meaning that they offer prices and service that will satisfy the majority of web sites out there. Mid-range web hosts like PowWeb, Your-Site.com and iPowerWeb offer packages ranging from $5 to $8 per month and provide the tools that most webmasters will need to run a web site, such as: CGI-BIN, tons of e-mail addresses, FTP support, visitor statistics and more. These hosts do have monthly bandwidth limits, but the limits are quite high, and most web sites will never reach them. However, if your web site features hundreds of file downloads and gets decent traffic you may be shocked at how soon you'll reach those bandwidth limits. When you do, your site may be temporarily shut down or you'll have to pay bandwidth overage charges, which can get pricey. Overall though, mid-range web hosts will be satisfactory for 90% of the web sites out there, and generally offer excellent uptime/reliability. In fact, many web-based businesses are successfully run using a mid-range web host. However, as mentioned previously, web sites that offer large files for download or sites that get a huge amount of traffic may find that a mid-range host doesn't quite suit their needs. These types of web sites may require "high-end" web hosting solutions, the next topic in our discussion.

High-end web hosts typically service web sites that are extremely popular, have a high amount of traffic, and/or require pretty much 100% uptime. Most businesses rely on high-end web hosts to host their web sites. Rackspace.com is an example of a well known high-end web hosting company. Pricing for high-end hosts varies, but typically runs from about $50 per month to several hundred dollars per month. Many high-end hosts give you your own dedicated server (which they support) that is reserved just for you and your web site. The mid-range hosts I discussed earlier typically host many different web sites on the same server - this is known as "shared" hosting. High-end web hosts offer stellar reliability, bandwidth, and just about every tool you'll ever need to run a successful web site. Another feature that some high-end web hosts provide is "co-location" hosting. In this scenario, YOU configure and provide the web server, but you get to plug it into their data center/network. This can be very nice because their data center usually has a fiber-optic connection directly to the Internet, offering blazing bandwidth and stellar reliability. People who run web-based businesses or extremely popular, high traffic web sites are good candidates for high-end web hosting.

Hopefully this brief overview gives you a good picture of the various types of web hosts that exist, and which one might be right for you. When you begin your search for a web host, always keep in mind the old adage "You get what you pay for" because it really does hold true in this case. Before you make the commitment to host a web site be sure to take some time and analyze what you want out of the web site, and decide which factors are most important to its success. Answering these questions will get you many steps closer to choosing the web host that's right for you.

A Simple Guide to Web Hosting

Personal Computers, Servers Or ISP?

You need a server to host your site so that it can be viewed over the internet. This server can either be an Internet Service Provider or of your own. Most websites are hosted by an Internet Service Provider because they can provide powerful server hardware, high speed connections and reliable server support.

Most providers have very fast connections to the Internet such as a full T3 fiber-optic (45 Megabytes per second) connections which is about 1000 high speed (56 Kilobytes per second) modems combined.

For those who are looking to set up their own servers and host their own websites, a personal computer is often not powerful enough to do the job. As the name suggests, a personal computer can hardly handle multiple visitors to your website- servers are needed to handle these visitors simultaneously.

Getting Your Web Hosting

There are thousands of companies that offer web hosting for your website. Which to choose and what to look out for? With the multitude of features and terms in each hosting plan, it can be puzzling for those who are just starting out. The golden rule in choosing your website: Nothing beats reliable web hosting. Many web hosting plans offer more space, more benefits than others. The decision to your web hosting should be based on reliability. We have seen too many disappointed website owners who chose benefits and space over reliability.

Criteria of Choosing an Ideal Web Hosting Company

Before we talk about what it takes to be a cheap and good quality web host, let’s get to the fundamental first.

What is a Web Host?

A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. The term for this ‘computer’ is called a server.

A web hosting provider will typically have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web.

With a well-managed web host, you can free yourself from worrying the up-keep of complicated server technology and proper technical maintenance. That’s the whole purpose of the web hosting companies. You should leave the technical work to web hosting professional while you focus on your own internet business.

Let’s begin...

Feature Offered

The features that web hosting companies are offering are getting quite standard nowadays.
The followings are some of the common features you'll see in most web hosting plans:

• Control Panel
  Control Panel is an interface where you can access your site on the web server, allowing you to set-up and subsequently update and customize your web site. Though cPanel is by far the most popular control panel, some hosting providers customize their own so that they can up-grade and expand it at will.
• Diskspace
  A vast majority of sites that don't have tons of graphics, sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit in 50 MB of disk space. You should always leave yourself some room for growth or check if the host has a bigger plan in case you need to upgrade.
• Bandwidth
  Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted or received through a unit of time. In web hosting, bandwidth is consumed when visitors make requests for files on your web site and download them to their personal computers.
• Email Account
  With POP3 email accounts you can check email from Outlook, Netscape Mail, Eudora or any other Email software.
• Scripting language
  As all our top 10 listings are using Unix and Linux platform, php, perl and CGI are the languages we are talking about here. It is best to choose a host that supports the latest version to maximize the latest web technologies for the fee that you pay.
• Database
  If your web site is going to store a lot of data that should be dynamically accessible (like user accounts, stock prices, maps, Interactive news, message boards and forum etc.), you'll need to look for an account that offers a database. MySQL is a powerful and most popular database program that runs on the Linux operation system. It is able to handle million of entries all at once. Its flexibility and speed allow you to also store logs and pictures. MySQL is designed to scale well under heavy traffic conditions and is ideal for database-intensive or e-commerce-enabled Web sites.

 
Customer Service/Support

No matter if you are an expert or a novice in web hosting, you need a web host with good customer support system. What is the criteria of an excellent customer support? Let us explain.

• How big is the knowledge base?
  This is particularly important for those who want to search for quick answer without seeking direct assistance from customer support staff. Due to the huge database, normally it’s searchable. Some web hosting providers will even make your life easier by making a video tutorial guiding you step by step in setting up your new account. Very useful for beginner.

• Responsive customer service staff.
  If you are too lazy to find the answer out of a big pool of database, get the direct answer from someone who knows it. Direct customer support comes in a few forms.
  a. Email support
  
  b. Phone support: Normally, sales and technical support uses separate phone line. A good phone support staff knows what your problem is and answers with relevance.
  
  c.Web Host like Lunarpages and Globat even have live chat support. However, it’s not how many support channels that are available but how responsive it is of the staff. You can find out the hosting reviews and ratings of each of our Top 10 Cheap Web Host.

Price to Disk Space / Price to Bandwidth Ratio

Are you paying too much for your Web Hosting Plan?
Having done the research on hundreds of web hosting companies, in general, we’ve come to this conclusion: the more disk space and bandwidth you are getting, the more expensive is the monthly price.

To help you understand which price is competitive enough for you to take up the offer, we have categorized 5 different price range. For each price range, a score of maximum of 10 is assigned.

Popularity

A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer support and reliability in place but without an effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let’s face it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady growth of new members, it’s very difficult to survive in this highly competitive industry.

We judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider by looking at the number of awards won, the reviews of other websites and the Alexa traffic ranking.

All the hosting providers listed on our Top 10 Cheap Web Hosting Directory are among the top 40,000 most visited websites in the world.

Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee

Nothing can hurt you more than this: your visitors come to your web site only to find that it’s not accessible. You lose credibility and possibly even a sale. If your web host does not guarantee at least a 99% uptime, leave the web host now!

To ensure maximum uptime, installation of redundant back-up systems is essential. Each web host has their own management systems to minimize downtime. "Redundant" means that if any of the Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet connection will take over.

We use Alertra software to monitor the uptime of each of our top 10 web hosts.

As for speed, even though routing, web server set up and local area networks play a part in determining the speed of a site, the main concern of how fast your site is depends very much on the types of network connections.

Many hosting providers still connect to the Internet through T1, or T3 connections. This is not the case for our top 10 hosts- they are using OC (Optical Carrier) lines.

A T1 line will offer data transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second), while a T3 line can supply data transfer rates of 43Mbps. OC-1 refers to a circuit that transmits 51.85Mbps. Higher levels are multiples of that speed. Ultra-High Speed OC3 and OC12 lines offers 155Mbps and 622Mbps respectively. Some hosting providers have connections to major internet backbones at the speed of OC48 (2488Mbps) and OC96 (4976Mbps).

Web Hosting Data Transfer: How Much Is Too Much?

Bandwidth in its simplest terms refers to the amount of data that flows across a network wire in a given time period. For most web hosting providers, that time period is measured in a month. Web hosting providers are charged a certain amount per month or per year for an allocated amount of bandwidth from backbone providers and wholesale data centers. That cost is then passed on to the consumer in the form of web hosting plans.

How much bandwidth will my website use?

With so much variation among web hosting companies, it can sometimes be difficult to know how much bandwidth your website will need. So, how much is a gigabyte of bandwidth anyway? Let's put it in perspective. If an average web page, images and all is 50 kilobytes in size, your website could be viewed 20,000 times! For the average hobby website, that is more than enough. Let's further put that 20,000 in perspective. If each visitor to your website viewed an average of 4 pages per month, it would still represent over 5,000 unique visitors to your website every month.

Beware of bandwidth usage when offering file downloads

While offering simple web pages doesn't use up much bandwidth, the same can't be said about downloading files. If you plan on allowing people to download music files, pdf files, flash files, or video files, you can eat up bandwidth in a hurry even with a relatively small number of people visiting your website. If your website offers an adobe .pdf file that is 1 megabyte in size, with one gigabyte of bandwidth, you will only be able to serve up one thousand downloads. This does not including the html needed to get people to download the pdf in the first place.

Video files eat up even more space. A one megabyte video file represents only seconds of video. For a half hour presentation, your video file could easily be over two hundred megabytes in size! At that size, one gigabyte would only allow you to offer five downloads to your visitors. What you plan to do with your website most definitely will affect how much monthly bandwidth you anticipate needing.

Overselling bandwidth is common in the web hosting industry

Because more people use only a fraction of their allotted bandwidth per month, most web hosting providers price their plans knowing that most people will only use a fraction of the resources available to them. In fact, with most companies, if you did use the maximum bandwidth available to you each month, you would most likely be shut down. If you go with a shared hosting account, your website can be hosted with hundreds or thousands of other websites. If your website starts to use a significant portion of the server's resources, you may find them pulling the plug on your website. If you know your website is going to need significant resources, you should probably consider getting yourself a dedicated server.

Knowing what you plan to do will allow you to know how much you need

By knowing what you plan to do with your hosting account, you can have a pretty good idea of how much bandwidth you're going to need. If you anticipate that you will be needing to serve lots of multimedia including video, music and large amounts of flash powered pages, you may need to consider going with a dedicated server. If your website is just starting out and you have little money and no real idea of how much bandwidth you're going to need, pick a company that gives you more than you think you'll need at a reasonable price. Make sure you also find out how much they will charge you for any bandwidth you use above and beyond what comes in your hosting package. If it is one dollar per megabyte and you've already exceeded a twenty gigabyte bandwidth limit, changes are, you'll get one hefty bill at the end of the month. When shopping around and looking at bandwidth, keep the overage cost in mind as well and you'll do fine.

Unlimited Wealth Creation Through Reseller Hosting

Web hosting can be an exciting business start up for aspiring entrepreneurs. All you have to do to set up your business is become a hosting reseller, i.e., provide hosting facilities to website owners. Here as a business owner, you are buying space from a big hosting company, and redistributing the hosting space to other website owners.

Resellers are nothing but entrepreneurs acting as middlemen, offering you hosting services by leasing time and space from another Web host's server rather than owning their own. Most of the times, the quality of services offered by resellers are so good that consumers do not even have the idea that they are dealing with resellers who do not have servers of their own. Resellers, since they can pick and choose their servers, are basically in a position to provide the customers with the best of services.

Reseller hosting business can be quite a profit making venture once you understand the figures and profit margins involved. Let us go through them. One can buy around 1000 MB space from a major web host at a cost of $25 per month. This 1000 MB space that you now own can in turn be redistributed to site owners who need space for uploading their site. Here you can give about 25 MB space for around $5 per month. Which means your monthly income comes to around $200 when you sell 40 hosting packages. Want more. some hosts allow you to oversell the space and do not charge you extra unless the actual usage of your account exceeds 1000MB. It is seen that a typical user uses less than half of the allotted web space. which means you can double or even triple sell your quota and make unlimited wealth.

And mind well, this income is residual income. It will keep coming to you month after month, year after year. You do the work once. and get paid for it over and over. All you are doing is buying space from a major web hosting company and becoming a reseller host. Your efforts are focused towards selling hosting space and the rest is handled by your web host. Some of them even handle customer service to your customers for a nominal fee. which makes it even easier for you.

If this is not enough. you can earn additional residual incomes by adding recruiting more resellers through you. By doing this you will earn regular commissions on their monthly sales. isn't this smart business. The profit margins in the business of reseller hosting is quite good and you can start on this exciting business venture even if you do not have the required expertise and access to funds for setting up the required infrastructure. Strange as it might sound, there are also times where a reseller can also be more scalable than a typical hosting firm. A true Web host is limited by its hardware; if a client suddenly requires an upgrade the host is not prepared for, the only way the host will be able to satisfy the customer is by upgrading its hardware - expensive and time consuming for both sides. The reseller host, however, can simply choose to locate with a different Web host that will better suit the customer's needs.

Happy Wealth Creation!!!

A Beginner's Guide to Web Hosting

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, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 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, HVAC temperature control, 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:

Shared Hosting

In shared hosting (also known as virtual web 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. You may wonder if a physical web server is shared by so many websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.

However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. 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.

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 extremely important website.

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 provider’s 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.

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 reseller’s 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 don’t 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 reseller’s customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the reseller’s name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, don’t 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 (here is just an example out of thousands out there). 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 cheap web hosting companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Don’t 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.

Budget Web Hosting - Are They All Created Equal?

Choosing a budget web hosting company can be overwhelming. In fact, choosing any web hosting company can be a challenge due, in large part, to the fact that there are so many of them. Do a search for "web hosting" with the quotes around the keywords on Google, and it'll return over 5 million documents! That doesn't mean there are 5 million web hosting providers but there very well could be at least 1 million! That's a lot of web hosts. How can you choose one that meets your need?

What is Budget web hosting anyway?

Budget web hosting is generally defined as any hosting service that is below $10 per month. The budget comes from the low price. Now, most companies in the budget web hosting category only offer one year plans. Most budget web hosting companies however, will quote you the monthly fee you would pay if you divided the annual fee by 12 months. Keep that in mind when you are comparing one company with another. The other thing to look out for is the setup fee. Do they charge you a setup fee to get started?

Evaluate your general impression of the company.

The first place to start evaluating budget web hosting companies is their front page. Does their website give you a sense that they are professional? Is it easy to find all of the information you need? Take a look at their contact information. Do they list a physical address, an email address and a phone number to contact them? If they don't provide any contact details, that has to throw up a red flag. If you run into problems setting up your website, and you have no proper contact information, how are you going to get service from that company?

Do they have a toll free support number?

Does the budget web hosting company provide a toll free number for you to contact them? If they are based in Atlanta, Georgia and you are in Seattle, Washington, you don't want to be paying long distance to them if you need to get them on the phone about a concern you have. A toll free number also speaks to their willingness to deal openly and honestly with their customers.

What kind of guarantee do they offer?

Choose a budget web hosting company that offers a good guarantee. Most budget web hosting companies don't openly publish their satisfaction guarantees. If you have to look in their terms and services agreement to find out where they stand with regard to giving you back your money if you are not satisfied, you should look elsewhere.

What is the uptime guarantee of the site in question?

Uptime guarantee refers to the amount of time the server is live and serving your web pages. An uptime guarantee of 99% means that the host guarantees that their servers will be up and operational 99% of the time. Over the course of one year, 99% uptime would represent a downtime (the one percent) of around 87 hours in a year or an average of 7 hours per month. An uptime of 99.9% would involve only 8 hours of downtime for the entire year.

What kind of after sale support can you expect?

While there are many other factors you could consider, the final one I will deal with is after sale support. What kind of resources do they make available for you. Find out if the budget web hosting company offers free scripts. Do they have any marketing tools they can make available to you? What kind of support for setting up your account can you expect from the budget web hosting company? All of these factors must be taken into consideration.

Just because a company offers a budget web hosting service, doesn't mean you necessarily have to compromise on features, quality or service. All three will only be found, however, if you make sure to do your homework to find a budget web hosting company that is a good fit for you.

Choosing a Quality Web Host

If you are anything like me, you’d probably like to have a website on the Internet but you just have no idea how to go about it. All this talk of web hosting, bandwidth, disc space, and other jargon can cause one to say, “This is too complicated and technical, I just wanted to have a place to put all of my favorite skateboarding photos, cool information on ramp designs, and the best places to skate!” To get a website on the Web you have to go through a web host. The question is how do you find the web host for you?

If you type ‘web host’ into your search engine like Google you will get thousands of sites. Hit on one of these and like any product on the market you will see all sorts of persuasive propaganda to incite you to use their company; that is if you can decipher any of the technical jargon that only computer-heads can comprehend. Some web hosts offer free business cards with an account; some probably offer free watches…like all consumer industries you the buyer must beware.

I’m a writer so I’ll use the analogy of a writer’s journal. The journal I like must not be too big or small in book size. It also must have a good amount of space allocated to each day, again not a whole page but not just a few lines. Of course I also want it to be cheap but of a good quality that won’t fall apart while I’m using it, and I hope it would last for posterity. I just want the diary, some nice pictures in it are O.K. but unnecessary especially if it adds to the price.

It’s the same with a web host and web site scenario. You want to get the right deal for you, enough space and enough access to the public that you wish to associate with. As a novice who doesn’t understand all the jargon this can pose a problem. Are you an individual, small business, blog, or a big time corporation? What do you need and how do you get it?

As far as I can tell the web hosting business is a lot like the fast food business. The big corporations have strict guidelines, will offer you special deals, and have monthly ‘cheeseburger specials’. But, I’ve always been more interested in the ‘Mom and Pop’ small time diners who have that real caring human approach. You know you are a customer and a person, not just a number on a sales receipt. I believe the hosting companies are the same.

A smaller hosting company will probably treat its users with more honest integrity as well as having more flexibility in dealing with your individual situation. They can often tailor web site packages to accommodate exactly what you are looking for as well as the ability to update them quickly when your needs change.

My advice is to contact a few of the smaller companies. Look for ones with good reputations or just arbitrarily email them and compare results from different places. Which one do you feel most comfortable with? Go for it; ask as many questions as you can, see how the different hosts differ in their answers. Try one; if it doesn’t work out try another, it’s really easy to move around. Don’t be afraid, you’ve got nothing to lose except the fear itself!

Why Dedicated Hosting?

If you’re reading this article, you might be interested in getting a dedicated server, or simply learning more about dedicated hosting services.

First of all, please note, that a dedicated server is rather expensive service, and you shouldn’t waste your money if you don’t plan to use it in full measure.

But if you really have a serious website, and want to run a successful business - you cannot do it without a dedicated server.

Of course it’s just mere words, so let’s enumerate the facts!

Freedom and security

Dedicated server will give you a freedom. You will not need to share it with other websites. It will also give you additional 3rd party security for your site and emails. A dedicated server will allow you deep access to your server to configure and optimize your server anyway you need.
You’re able to choose the software to install.

Power and functionality

With a dedicated server you get on average 50-100 Gb of hard drive, plus about 1,000 Gb of data transfer. You may customize the configuration and choose any CPU, RAM, or whatever you need. A dedicated server reduces your dependency on the web host; and bypasses time delays and possible expenses incurred from these.

Respectability

You simply CAN NOT run a popular website on a shared hosting. It’s not serious.

Summary

If your website turned into a popular and reliable resource; if you have tons of daily visitors; if you work B2B; if you need additional security and functionality, power and freedom - go ahead and buy a dedicated server. Don’t be sorry about the money you spent! Think about the future!