Showing posts with label Paid Web Hosting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paid Web Hosting. Show all posts

What To Ask For At Your Web Hosting Service

by: Ricardo D Argence

Web hosting is the backbone of your online business and it is one of the most crucial services that ensures your online presence. There are thousands of web-hosting service providers and all of them claim to be the best. Therefore, it is a difficult process to identify the right web hosting service provider.

There are a few important questions that you must ask your web-hosting service provider before you sign up. Normally, the first question people ask is about the cost involved. Though it is an important factor that will help you make your decision, cost should not be treated as the primary factor. There are other crucial factors that need to be addressed.

You must first ask your web host about their average server uptime. Most of the hosting service providers advertise 99.9% uptime, but, in reality, it may not be so. There are a number of server related problems that can keep the visitors off from your website.

Second, you must ask your web host about the connection speed. You must have fast connections to give your website users an enhanced visitor experience. If the connections are slow, your website will take a long time to load and server connection will get disconnected before people can see your website, leading to annoying "The page cannot be displayed error."

Third, you must know how much web space you get for the package you are signing up for. Most web hosts offer flexible packages. You should be able to advise your web host on the web space depending on the nature of your requirements. There are web hosting packages that range from 10mb or less to several GBs. The greater the space the greater the price.

Along with the allotted web space, you must also be clear about the data transfer bandwidth that is allowed for your package. If you anticipate high traffic, it is better to go with packages that have higher bandwidth capabilities.

The next question will be on the number of email addresses you can configure. There are many web hosting companies that offer unlimited email addresses. If you choose a lower end package, the number of email addresses may be limited to 5 or 10 or 25, depending on the web-hosting package you choose.

You must also be clear about the nature of the database tools that are available and the database types supported by your web-hosting service provider.

If your website is intended to sell your products online, it is important that you have a reliable shopping cart. Make sure you check with your web host whether you have any built-in shopping carts installed and the procedure to customize them to your specific need.

With the advent of the open source technology, web hosting service providers offer a number of free yet useful scripts for their customers bundled with the web hosting package. Check with your web host on the available free scripts, such as forums, blogs, chat support, web statistic tools, etc.

The control panel should be highly user friendly. Your list of questions to your web host must have a question about the control panel features.

Above all, the customer support capabilities of your web host and the turn-around time to resolve server related issues and other complaints is very crucial. To stand the competition, most web hosting service providers offer 24x7 customer support service to their clients. Make sure that your complaints will be addressed during weekends as well.


About The Author

Founder and actual CEO, Ricardo d'Argence has been in the field for more than ten years. http://Alojate.com is now one of the biggest web hosting providers in Mexico. http://www.alojate.com http://www.alojateextra.com.

Small Business Web Hosting, How To Choose

by: Ove Nordkvist

The best choice of small business web hosting is not only about a storage space for your content, it has to include a comprehensive tool kit to allow you to build your own web site. It must also include the tools and services You need to maintain a small business web site.

The best web hosting providers give you easy to use web site builders and user friendly interfaces. This kind of service providers are targeting small business owners for whom a high standard web site is essential. Since you pay your host for their services, it saves you workforce for your web site maintenance and upkeep.

You don't need to worry about server crashes and technical issues. You can relay on your web hosting provider to make sure your visitors has easy access to your web site.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you choose web site host for your small business. This will help you to get efficient services. The main thing, will be to choose a reliable web hosting service that provides you with enough server space to host your web site.

You want to see that the technical support are top notch. And the web site builder have to be user friendly. What kind of special features are included? and what features do you need at your website? Your web site host should also offer you some flexibility to move around and grow with your business and the traffic at your site.

Some of the best web hosting providers also offers web design services. Professional web hosting designs are user friendly, ready made templates that give your web site a professional look and feel. These are custom made by the provider and you can choose from a variety of templates. there are different templates for specific business purposes.

Once you choose a design template, all you need to do is upload your content. Sit back and enjoy the effect of an eye catching web site.

To create your web site with a template, is a good way to avoid falling in the trap of create a flashy site with a lot of graphics and slow navigation. People don't like to wait, keep your site lean and mean.


About The Author

Ove Nordkvist is the Founder of the web site http://small-biz-ideas.net, where you can get help with ideas, tools and resources to start a small business. You can download free Masters Courses for a variety of small business ideas at http://www.small-biz-ideas.net.

Visit http://www.small-biz-ideas.net/web-hosting.html to learn more about web hosting.

Why Should I Pay for Web Hosting?

by: Nate Landerman

The advent of blogging and free blog space has brought about a revolution in web publishing that pushes the boundaries of terms like “webmaster” and “website.” In today’s brave new world of Internet publishing for the masses, the traditional means of building and hosting a personal website has fallen out of favor for many new webmasters.

If you count yourself among the many bloggers who use a free subdomain blog account, you’ll have to think about web hosting sooner or later. Unfortunately, most don’t consider the ramifications until it’s too late. In the beginning, a free blog account or ad-supported web hosting seems like the obvious choice for a personal site. Unfortunately, this decision – or lack thereof - can cause problems down the road. Issues with free hosting and subdomain hosting range from SEO complications to ownership and control issues. Both free and paid hosting have their own merits and drawbacks, of course, so the ultimate decision is yours to make. But understanding these pros and cons is the first step in making a good decision for your site.

Free Hosting

Pros:

• It’s free. This is obviously the single most important advantage of free web hosting.

• It’s easy. Anyone can open an account on Blogger or any number of other free services and instantly get a free website requiring no more effort to publish than writing an email.

• No experience necessary. Anyone can create a site using one of these free services, with no programming, technical, or even HTML knowledge required.

Cons:

• Branding. As your blog or website grows, a subdomain hosting account offers little in the way of branding, and may adversely affect your credibility.

• SEO. If you move away from a subdomain account to your own domain, you will have to start over building links to your new domain.

• No control over ad content. With free hosting, you are at the mercy of your hosting company’s discretion as to what type of ads will be displayed on your site. Pop-ups and ads for adult sites are not uncommon.

• Limited or no accountability for site outages and other problems. When you’re getting something for nothing, it’s all too easy to become the victim of corporate apathy.

Paid Hosting

Pros:

• You can host your own domain. With paid hosting, you can brand your site with your own domain name (e.g. MySite.com) and add legitimacy to your content.

• Control. With paid hosting, you control every aspect of your site, including design and advertising content.

• SEO advantages. With a paid hosting account and domain name, you can build links to your site safely without worrying about whether or not you’ll be changing domain names. In addition, a hosting account allows you programmatic and scripting abilities not usually found in free, pre-built websites.

• Custom site development. Unlike free blogs, a hosted website can typically run a variety of CGI and scripting applications, and can be built any way you choose.

• Accountability and Portability: When you pay for hosting, you hold more leverage over your hosting company in the event of problems. Additionally, by retaining control of your source code and data, you can easily move your site to a new host.

Cons:

• Expense. Though you can get hosting plans as cheap as $2-$3 per month, it’s still a cost that free hosting does not incur.

• Some assembly required. Though many paid hosts offer site builders and blog software as part of the package, it still requires more technical work than signing up for a Blogger account.

• Maintenance. When you create a site yourself, you become responsible for the upkeep of your own code. In fact, you become responsible for just about everything involved with the site except for the server and connectivity.

So in summary, making the right choice between free or blog site hosting and paid hosting is heavily dependent on both you and your site. Though I’ve focused heavily on hosting for blog sites, much of the same information applies to free hosting vs. paid hosting for other types of sites as well. The important thing is to take a good hard look at what you want your site to eventually be, how much effort you’re willing to put into it, and then make your decision.

If you do decide on paid hosting, make sure you look at all options available. Use a web hosting review website such as www.inetpublication.com to compare available options. Not all web hosting is alike, and many hosting companies offer free tools to ease the pain of migration as well as other perks you may not have realized you were missing.


About The Author
Nate Landerman is the owner of www.inetpublication.com, a web hosting review website. This article may be reprinted freely, provided that all links to iNetpublication remain intact.
n.landerman@inetpublication.com

Free Web Hosting or Paid? Here's How to Decide

by: Anthony Hamill

Have you wondered if free web hosting is any good? More importantly, is it a viable option for someone who wants to set up an online business presence without a significant cash commitment?. It may be but only if you take the time to understand what it will and will not provide.

Free web hosting usually comes with significantly limited capacity and services. And while free web hosts may not charge you anything for hosting your web site, they still have to generate revenue to stay in business.

The Price of “Free”

The way most of them do this (there are exceptions as you’ll see below) is by inserting paid ads on your web site. And since you won’t be able to control what kind of ads are posted on your site, there’s a good chance you’ll have ads from competitors (if you’re trying to run a business) or ads that may not be on a topic you want to be associated with. Unfortunately, that's often the price you’ll pay for "free" web hosting.

To limit the amount of resources you can use, free web hosting plans come with very limited disk space and bandwidth and may even impose restrictions on the types of content you can upload to your site. For example, you may not be allowed to sell anything on your web site.

What do you really want to do?

If you intend to start a business on the cheap then this obviously isn’t going to be satisfactory. Some free web hosting plans prevent you from uploading videos or music files because they take up a lot of storage space and use a great deal of bandwidth when your visitors try to access them.

The Big Risk

Finally, and of greatest concern, is that you may wake up one day and find that your web site has simply vanished without warning. Companies that provide free web hosting pop up practically every day, but they also disappear with alarming regularity.

So if you plan on putting any real effort into developing a web site for personal or business use, you'll be better served by selecting an established, reliable web host.

Professional Image

There are a number of companies that provide free web hosting under your own unique domain name (not a subdomain under them). All you have to do register your domain through them and pay the annual renewal fee of around $15-25. This way you’ll be able to have free hosting under your own domain and the credibility that comes with it.

The Bottom Line

You should look for a free hosting provider that provides a simple upgrade path. This way you can can enjoy free web hosting now and have your own unique domain name (plus the credibility it brings) for nothing more than the cost of a domain registration fee. You should later be able to upgrade with no disruption when and if you decide you’re ready to move up to a paid plan.


About The Author
Anthony Hamill is the founder of http://www.Web-Host-Watch.Com which is devoted to helping new webmasters learn the basics of web hosting. It provides tutorials, tips on avoiding common mistakes, a glossary of web hosting terms, and a list of Top Web Hosts.