Finding The Best Web Hosting Service

Finding the best hosting service for your Web site can be really difficult if you don't know what to look for. These tips from June Carroll will help you winnow out the chaff and choose a web hosting service that will meet your business Web site needs now and in the future.
1. Be cautious of free web hosting services. Not all offer server side support which is needed if you require guest books, polls, counters, etc.
2. Free or very inexpensive web hosting can result in experiencing frequent "down-times" (inability to access your web site) or poor technical support.
3. When shopping for a web hosting service, ensure that there is a technical support phone number which is either local or toll-free. Long distance calls may be costly and e-mail only support may in some cases, cause confusion and not resolve the issue promptly.
4. Shop around. Price differences are common in the web hosting service industry and some are needlessly high.
5. Ask yourself the following:
Can this web hosting company accommodate potential future needs?
Will I have to look for a new host in the event I want to add e-commerce or wireless capabilities?
If I need a database, can the web hosting service accommodate it?
How much does the hosting service company charge in the event that I need extra web space, e-mail, or bandwidth?
If the web host service offers different packages, what do I have to do to upgrade my existing package and do I have to pay an extra setup fee?
How fast will my account be activated?
Does this web hosting service company claim to have few down-times? Be cautious of companies that claims to have 0% down-time.
If I need a domain name, can this host get me one free of charge?
Are there any specials or discounts?
How much bandwidth am I allowed? Each person that visits your web site will use a portion of bandwidth to access each page. (Example: It takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second.) If you're expecting a very large volume of visitors, please account for this and enquire about how much bandwidth you're allotted and how much the web hosting service charges for extra bandwidth.

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Reasons for Not Using a Free Web Host

Contrary to popular belief, paid web hosting is not very expensive. Every paid web hosting service except maybe the very worst of the lot give you more value than you pay for. The superior service and features of a paid host far outweigh the expenditure.

Your website requires a dependable web host if you value your time and content. With a commercial website, you could lose even more if your free or inexpensive webhost deserts you. Think about it - what would you lose?

Assuming that you have backed up your website content yourself, religiously, then you will only lose visitors, customers, trust and money if you have to scramble for a new webhost. Without your own backup of your web content, everything can disappear.

Many web hosting companies have come and gone, leaving their customers without a site until the customer can find a new service. Believe it or not, this happens every day. One reason for this is obvious. Your free or cheap web host service can be just breaking even thanks to advertising. Have you thought about this: customers need help?

A free or cheap webhost, by its very nature, caters to new webmasters, who by their very nature often require more time than those willing and able to pay for services. Just crunch the numbers. Your webhost charges you $4-$10 a month. You require maybe 20 minutes of a customer service rep's time in a month.

The webhost loses money unless they pay their customer service reps a very low wage, which in turn is reflected in the service you get. A webhost like this has two choices in order to survive - cut their costs or raise their prices.

When you use a cheap or free hosting company, consider who else may be using that same company - spammers, webmasters of adult sites, etc. These are people whose activities, when reported to the proper authorities, can get a webhosting service blocked or shut down.

Either way, you have to realize that you are affected by how other people use the same service that you are using.

Remember, just like with any other purchase you make, you get what you pay for. Don't be fooled by web hosting services that offer you huge database storage capabilities for cheap. This is because data base storage is indeed inexpensive, but the service you won't be getting is what has real value - technical expertise; guaranteed uninterrupted, high-speed internet access; and quality customer support.

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Top 10 : Web Hosting Service Providers

Web Hosting Service Providers

Detailed review of Top web hosting services and done lot of research by various professionals in summing up these top 10 web hosting ratings.

These Ratings are determined on

1.How many people use this services and how happy they are with it.

2.The Rates and Services included

3.Server up time and Maintenance Problems

4.Reviews from websites such as top10webhosting.com, web-hosting-top.com, webhostinggeeks.com, top-10-web-hosting.com

5.The past Records of the service providers counts too

6.Free services like free domain name schemes to just sell the hosting are NOT counted

#1.Hostmonster

#2.BlueHost

#3.LunarPages

#4.Yahoo Web Hosting

#5.GoDaddy

#6.IX WebHosting

#7.StartLogic

#8.PowWeb

#9.Dot5Hosting

#10.HostGator

Note - We have selected / reviewed 10 best web hosting companies from some of the world top webhosting companies. All the hosting services we reviewed are reliable web hosting company supporting Apache, Python, PHP 4 or 5, MySQL 4, Microsoft FrontPage extension and email (including webmail). Most runs on Linux and Windows. Web Hosting services is a very competitive industry, some hosts are giving very cheap web hosting rate (as low as $4.95! ), including reduced first year fee, free months, discount coupon, free fist year, rebate and etc. You can easily find a very cheap hosting from $4~$10 per month. Listing below are the best web hosting services support PHP, MySQL, Python, FrontPage web hosting and almost all of it are linux web hosting. Web hosting companies has been selected based on popularity, performance, feature, support quality and price. Higher rating hosting are usually has better feature over price ratio. All hosting plan below can host any domain name including .com, .org, .net, .co.uk, .co.jp, .tv, .ws , .com.au, .com.sg, .it and etc. and etc.

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Guidelines to Choosing a Reliable Hosting Service for Your Business

Do you want to be a here-today, gone five minutes later kind of company? Discover the web hosting service that's going to be with you for the long haul!

When it comes to operating a business on the Internet modern technology has made it fairly idiot proof. You buy a space, you build your page, upload some information, install a shopping cart feature and presto! You have a webpage ready to go for your business. Not everything about operating on the Internet is intended for ages six to twelve, however. When it comes to choosing a reliable hosting service for your business you're going to have to approach with caution, survey the area and proceed with care.

Why is choosing a reliable hosting service such a big deal?

You can't make money on the Internet if no one can get to your site. You may as well sit home and burn your dollars as spend them to promote a site that's going to be constantly crashing, with applications that refuse to load and pages that grab hold of the processor and don't let go until the computer is shut down. (Want to guess what site WON'T be getting repeat visitors?)

What should you look for when choosing a hosting service for you web site?

The first thing you want to keep in mind is that while free doesn't necessarily mean better, it certainly helps when you're trying to keep your start-up overhead low. Many companies will offer to host and establish your webpage for thousands of dollars, something you can do for absolutely nothing if you have the right tools-and nothing sounds pretty good when you're starting out.

Many free hosting services exist on the web, and if you make a few phone calls you may find that your personal ISP (Internet Service Provider) offers a small amount of web space to their clients to establish their own webpage. This is great for small businesses who don't intend to have a great deal of traffic to their site, or who are starting out with a basic model. ISP hosting isn't going to provide all of the bells and whistles you'd get with a larger hosting service, but it will get the job done until you have the resources to move to a bigger server.

Don't let price be your only considering factor when choosing a hosting service, however. Reliability is going to count too, and sometimes you want all those bells and whistles! Check with numerous different hosting services to see what they have to offer. If you're one of those ambitious marketers who plans on making lots and lots of money from your website you're going to need to choose a hosting service that's going to offer you the ability to receive an unlimited amount of traffic, which is something you're not likely to find with a free hosting service.

Also take the time to use the power of the web and check out a hosting service's reputation. While happy customers might not always tell everyone about their experiences, you can bet that a dissatisfied one won't hesitate to do so! Check and see how many negative reviews a company you are considering working with has received. There's no honesty like an unhappy customer!

Choosing a good web hosting service is vital for the success of your business, so take the time to consider your options carefully. The last thing you want to do is be a here-today, gone five minutes later kind of company, so be sure you choose a hosting service that's going to be with you for the long haul.

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Why one-man-basement-operations will not do for your hosting service.

A proliferation of hosting setups run by kids out of their dorms or by hobbyists from their basements, as cash cow part-time operations, have had the effect giving the hosting industry a bad name mainly because of the poor service that has been on offer.

Nightmare stories abound from web site owners who made the mistake of casually signing off their e-commerce operations to the mercies of poor hosting services.
Still the proliferation of hosting services has had the good effect of dramatically bringing down prices.

Still, the obvious disadvantage of low prices on the other hand has been that it has kept away many real professional companies from entering the industry. This has meant that services from many companies have remained poor and below acceptable standards.

In some cases this has cost some e-commerce entrepreneurs dearly in terms of lost revenues. For example how do you recover traffic that you spent dearly to generate only to have them miss your site simply because the site was down for one reason or another? Or even worse, because it took too long to load and they clicked on to somewhere else?

This is the reason why smart web site entrepreneurs are taking a closer look at their web host or web hosting provider these days, realizing that it is a very critical area of their operations that they cannot afford to be casual about. The host impacts directly on their success and ultimate profitability.

But this is not to say that all small operations are bad. To be fair there are some dedicated web hosts who’ve offered excellent hosting facilities that would rival those of any bigger player. Many successful e-commerce web sites owe their online success to them.

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Determine Your Needs Before Choosing A Hosting Service

Choosing a hosting company for your web site can be very confusing given the multitude of companies available on the Internet today. Do not choose a service by price alone. The very cheapest is not necessarily the best. You can get a good hosting service for under $10.00, but first determine your requirements.

Before going into any more detail, let’s look at some definitions:

Hosting service - A hosting service or company is an Internet company that provides hundreds or even thousands of computers like yours with service by “renting” you space. With this service your web site is now on the Internet and can be viewed by millions of others.

Sure you could be your own host, but it would be very expensive because you would need to buy a server, house it in the proper environment, maintain it 24 hours a day, and put up with all the other headaches that come with hosting. Wouldn’t you rather concentrate on selling your product?

Server
A server is a large computer, which can service many other computers. Sometimes a large software package on a host’s server (like a mail software package) is also referred to as a server.

Have you seen scenes on TV which show rooms wall-to-wall with big computers busily working and flashing their lights? These are servers.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. If you started your web site from scratch, you will need to upload your web pages to the host you selected. To do this you use a FTP software package.

There are some excellent tutorials on FTP at http://www.pageresource.com/putweb/ftptut1.htm

CGI
CGI means Common Gateway Interface. While CGI primarily refers to the way a server communicates with other software on the server, CGI scripts are a popular way programmers install counters, forms, and other interactive items on a web site.

If you see cgi-bin, the “bin” refers to binary from a time long ago when most programs were referred to as binary. Now cgi-bin refers to the location in the server where cgi scripts are stored.

Now, let’s go back to the hosting service. When you surf the net and “go” to a particular site, you are not actually going to that site. The hosting company’s server (in this case your ISP) receives your request, searches the web, finds your requested site, and downloads it to your computer. So you see, you don’t go to a site, the site comes to you, courtesy of a server.

How do you go about choosing a hosting service?

It is pretty much up to you based on the size of your website, the number of visitors you expect, and, of course, the state of your wallet.

If you are just starting out, a free or low cost service is all you will need, but as your business grows you might want to consider a service that gives you more storage and more transfer room.

Storage is the amount of room your web site takes up on the hosting company’s server, “Transfer” refers to network transfer space. If you have a large web site and a lot of visitors you will need more storage or disc space and more network transfer space. The more people accessing your site; the higher the volume of data being transferred.

How to calculate your disk space:

1.Count the number of pages in your web site and add a buffer for future expansion.
2.Determine the average number of characters per page – not the number of words. The number of characters includes everything, letters, spaces, and, punctuation. Most word processing programs such as MS Word will count the number of characters for you.
3.Multiply the average number of characters times the number of pages in step 1.
4.Now: one character = 1 Byte, and 8 Bytes = 1 bit, so divide the total number of characters determined in step 3 by 8. This gives you the total number of bits.
5.1000 bits = 1 KB; 1000 KB = 1 MB, and 1000 MB = 1 GB. Note: For the technical minded 1 GB actually equals 1024 MB, but there is really no necessity to get that picky in this case.
6.Divide the total number of bits by 1,000,000 and your answer will be the number of MB of disk space you need to rent from the hosting service.

Determining the amount of transfer space you will require is largely an approximation based on the number of visitors you expect per day. Most of the better hosting services provide you with about 3 GB, which is ample for the average web site. If you expect more than a thousand visitors a day, you will, of course, need more transfer space.

The top ten hosting companies are listed conveniently at http://www.webhostinginspector.com/index.php?from=1 along with their rankings, disk space offered, bandwidth (transfer space), and reviews.

About the author: Nancy Casseur is a Team Leader with Strong Future International Marketing Group (SFI Marketing Group). SFI is considered to be the largest and most successful affiliate program in the world. To find out more about SFI go to http://www.moreinfo247.com/8459751.35/FREE. Nancy is also the Webmaster of two websites; http://www.newsiteinfo.net and http://www.notreallyretired.com
Copyright 2005 by Nancy Casseur.

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Server Load Effect on Web Hosting Services

Cambridge web hosting provides offering value-for-money hosting, domain names and clients can feel confident in receiving quality web hosting with the customer service you expect and deserve.

When server goes into red in CPanel, many times users think as server is down but load often in peak range but return to normal range within a few minutes. Many times servers down, reasons with unsecured configuration that allows cracker IRC scripts and spamming could be.

Some times problem may be in client’s web site and to avoid this we need to optimize source code, style sheets and client side scripts those also having influence on request/response cycle. A well-written cache control headers help to retrieves a fresh resource when necessary and convey to browser how long the cache can be valid. This can dramatically eliminating superfluous validations and help clean the ways for essential trips of requests and dynamic responses or other files.

Servers with multiple processors, load is calculated by the following equation.

Actual load = Total load (as shown in uptime) / no. of CPUs

Our advanced web hosting services includes Load Balancing, Highly configured Fire Walls and we are offering server monitoring options those can be customized to your business. Our hosting servers have options with remote monitoring of more complex resource issues like data base availability or disc failure at any down time and ability to monitor up to 10 ports or URLS at a time. We provide 24X7 FTP access to your backup data and you can specify which data can be secured and we notify through emails about secured data, you can recover the data from us in the event of data loss at free of cost.

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