Picking a webhost is a lot like picking apples. On the outside, an apple may look delicious, but be rotten inside. Or reversely, a webhost service may look unprofessional on the outside, but be a great webhost on the inside. The key is in user experiences, and I have compiled my own and other’s experiences to help determine which webhosts deliver the best services.
First, we will list the contenders who have made it into my top five: 1&1 Hosting, Yahoo Hosting, iPowerWeb, LunarPages, and DreamHost. In order to make the list, the companies had to be competitively priced, provide 24/7 support, and have atleast a 99% uptime. Any webhosting company that doesn’t have those three things doesn’t deserve a look. That said, this list has been significantly reduced for your convenience, highlighting five companies that I believe deserve a look for different reasons.
Our first webhost review involves 1&1 Hosting, the largest webhost by customers, and for a long time with number of domains as well. The 1&1 hosting price is what is so lucrative: .99 a month for webhosting is amazing then to top it off the .99 1&1 hosting plan offers 1 free domain name, 5 GB space with 250 GB bandwidth. For budget webhosting, 1&1 hosting is definitely the way to go.
Next up, Yahoo Hosting, a company that was conceived for the Internet is now hosting it. Yahoo has many smart features including one that will install WordPress for you! WordPress it the most famous blogging software, and Yahoo Hosting will setup the process for you. Yahoo Hosting also comes with a free Akismet license, which is an anti-spam filter for your blog. If you host with someone else you’ll have to pay the /mo fee! That’s just the tip of the iceberg, my favorite feature is the “site snapshots” which backup the changes to your website every 4 hours. You can restore back to any of the site snapshots easily.
Our third webhost, iPowerWeb, is a large small webhost. By that, we mean they haven’t received quite the large publicity of the other webhosting companies, but are a relatively large in the webhosting industry, and certainly deserving of big-name recognition. iPowerweb offers one of the best domain name deals around. At .99 for the first year, domains have never been so inexpensive. iPowerWeb is also very personal with their customers; you will have an account executive assigned to you, who will take care of your every need, just like a good waiter.
LunarPages won my attention in 2001, with the Los Angeles blackout during which they maintained operability. While perhaps server uptime during a national disaster may not be a high priority for you; for many, including myself it’s an insurance policy all into itself. That said, it speaks well for uptime when there isn’t a blackout or disaster. LunarPages also has been one of the first of the support-driven smaller companies to take a price dive, from the industry standard of .95 to .95 a month.
Then finally there is DreamHost, who while lacking a competitive price makes the list because of their offering VPN service, and Ruby on Rails support. Those two services are a must for many small businesses, and the DreamHost webhosting plans are still a fraction of the normal cost for those webhost services.
Conclusion: For those on a budget 1&1 defeats all. 6-month pay cycles, free domains, and no setup fees at incredible rates, can’t be beat. For VPN, DreamHost delivers a great service. For those looking for great service with powerful hosting: Yahoo, iPowerweb, and LunarPages are the way to go.
www.ishowyoo.com In this lesson I show yoo some hosting companies I have worked with and the benefits and downfalls of those companies. Companies talked about include ipowerweb, dot5hosting, yahoo hosting, network solutions, go daddy, mydware. [ host gator ] bit.ly [ mydware ] bit.ly
To conduct a successful marketing campaign on the Internet, your website must be hosted by a reliable web hosting company. Selecting the ‘wrong’ provider can prove very costly along the line.
Below I detail a few important aspects of the selection process based purely on my own experiences over the last six years.
Since there are thousands of hosting companies in the web hosting market, naturally during your research you will encounter hundreds of web hosting resource sites loaded with numerous and sometimes bogus reviews and recommendations, consequently your research process must be very thorough.
First and foremost do searches in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Simply enter terms like “Complaints about ‘Your Potential Host’s Name’” ‘Hosting Reviews’, etc…..You will find a lot of stuff regarding your potential host. Search for ‘web hosting forums’; there are numerous such forums on the web that contain all kinds of information.
If you consistently find too many complaints about your potential web hosting company…. beware!
A company that offers too many features for too little is also suspect. If they are offering huge amounts of bandwidth and disk space for a very low price, be careful. Here is why: The company will most likely be forced to host numerous websites per server, resulting in congestion and server overload. The result: Your site may be too slow and may experience lots of downtime.
Where is your web host’s datacenter located?
A datacenter located in a natural disaster prone and/or a politically unstable region is undesirable. I wouldn’t host my website in a Kabul, Afghanistan or Kinsasha, Congo based datacenter – these two and many others around the world are politically unstable regions. On the other hand a datacenter based in the state of California, a major earthquake zone may be undesirable, but the fact that California is more than well equipped to handle such disasters and is the world’s nerve center for all that is computer, far outweighs any existing dis-advantages.
A foreign based hosting company may be too far away from your customers. It won’t serve you well if your host is based in Australia and your targeted customers are based in The United States. On the contrary, if your are marketing to customers exclusively in Australia from The United States, a web hosting company in Australia would be OK. If you are marketing worldwide, your choice becomes a little bit more complicated….unless of course you are Google, Yahoo or MSN, big companies who host their websites almost everywhere worldwide. Generally, I prefer web hosting companies located in The United States.
How is your web host connected to the internet?
Your potential host’s data infrastructure – regional and local is of utmost importance.
- How is your potential host connected to the Internet…Do they have multiple connections to the internet backbone, and enough bandwidth to accommodate surges in web traffic?
- What kind of computer equipment is deployed within the datacenter?
- Is the latest network security technologies incorporated?
- Are the hosting servers protected behind firewalls and intrusion monitoring software
- Is the datacenter monitored via CCTV and supervised 24/7
How fast is your web host?
Find a couple of sites that are hosted by your potential web hosting company and test how fast their pages load on your computer. You also may execute the PING and TRACEROUTE commands on these websites to determine their suitability. Executing the ping command is called pinging a website and it determines how quickly a server can receive and send back a piece of data through your connection. When you run ping it sends a small packet of data and calculates the time it takes to get a response from the server. It is executed four times by default and a small report of average, minimum, and maximum response times will be displayed. A ping output typically consists of the packet size used, the host queried, the ICMP sequence number, the time to live, and the latency. All times are given in milliseconds. A ping output indicating large values and/or lost packets consistently over a period of time ….is a red flag! Please note that if you have a bad or restrictive connection (Your ISP), the results may be skewed. Firewalls and proxy servers installed in your system or network can sometimes interfere with the ping operation. Also, some web hosting companies do not allow pinging of their servers, in which case you will get a ‘Request Timed Out message’.
The Traceroute utility displays the connection [path] through the Internet between your computer and the potential web hosting company’s server(s). The path between these two locations has many routers, computers and other devices along it which help move Internet information. Each movement from one device to the other is called a hop. Too many hops is cause for concern ….do several Traceroutes for comparison!
Based on my experiences with different hosting companies over the years, I regard the following Web Hosting companies as the most reliable. I am sure there are many other good hosting companies out there, but it would be unfair to comment about a company that I have never dealt with.
One my websites, TheCertificationHub.com has been hosted by Ipowerweb since 2000. There were problems at first, typical when a web hosting company is experiencing a spurt in growth. In the year 2000, they had a customer base of 15,000. Six years later this number has grown to almost 300,000 and their service level has improved tremendously over these six years. Ipowerweb is one of the best web hosting companies on the Internet. A first class hosting company which I highly recommend.
I moved my other website, ClubAfrika.com from Globat to iPowerWeb beginning April 25, 2005. With Ipowerweb I have experienced much less frequent downtimes, few email delays and failures. The customer service is superb and well coordinated as expected. The only problem we had at the beginning was their inability to transfer our database from Globat. Club Afrika is targeted at users in Africa, most of who are still on dial-up. It therefore makes no sense that these users have to wait for 5 minutes for pages to load up. In this respect Ipowerweb has delivered. My site is no longer ‘snail slow’ and in spite of a few incompetent TIER 1 Techs here and there, overally I am satisfied with their service. Globat may improve in future….I suspect that they are having ‘growth problems’ just like Ipowerweb had when I first started hosting with them. If they do, then they might be worth considering for they offer the most ‘humongous’ features in the web-hosting business. But be cautious, ‘Greed’ almost always translates into poor website performance….some of their offerings are just too good to be true, for lack of appropriate words.
I have been hosting another website, ApondoSystems.com on Lunar Pages servers since 2000. Lunar Pages web hosting plans start at 5000MB of storage and 400GB of transfer for only .95. It is my opinion that Lunar Pages is a great web hosting company. Great website uptime and customer service! Very few websites require more than 1000MB of disk space (Apondo Systems has over 300 pages and I haven’t even used one half of the allocated space), so if what you are looking for is quality first, Lunar pages is a good bet. If you are looking for extra databases, humongous disk space and bandwidth, then take a look at iPowerWeb which is a topnotch company too, or even Globat.
StartLogic is a relatively new web hosting company, a reseller of IPowerweb Web Hosting Services. Naturally, you will expect them to follow in the great footsteps of Ipowerweb. Being the #1 reseller of Ipowerweb, StartLogic’s hosting infrastructure is most probably maintained by Ipowerweb, a large and reputable web hosting company. They offer both Windows and Unix Hosting. Due to the ‘newness’ of the company and the fact that I have not used their services, I cannot judge them authoritatively, but based on the comments I have seen so far, all over the Internet and by virtue of their relationship with Ipowerweb, I think this is a good low cost web hosting company.
GoDaddy currently offers one of the cheapest prices for Domain Names and Hosting Services. The pricing on packages is very competitive. With Godaddy website templates you can get a nice-looking Web site with ample storage. Reports indicate that their performance is above average. One thing you may not like is that they do not have an 800 number for Technical Support. They prefer local numbers. I think their pricing especially for Domain Names is very reasonable and is worth giving a shot. Also, if you are looking for just a handful of features, Godaddy offers very flexible packages….they even allow you to pay for your hosting services on a monthly basis! The control panel is kind of ‘tight’, scripting Gurus may not like some of the restrictions but I think Godaddy hosting is worth a try. We hosted AfroArticles.com briefly at GoDaddy but quickly moved it to Hostgator for one and only one reason: Godaddy does not support CRON JOBS, a server feature vital to AfroArticles.com.
Our website, AfroArticles.com is hosted at Hostgator. We were initially attracted by two things: Unlimited Databases and the option of paying monthly and not the usual year long contract. This means that if we are to disapprove of their services during our self imposed trial period, we will be able to opt out with ease. Well, we haven’t because we love the friendly and professional customer service support offered by hostgator and our website has been running exceptionally well. We have yet to experience any unscheduled downtimes. If you are looking to re-sell hosting, then consider Hostgator. Although the pricing is slightly above the average in comparison to other top hosting companies, we feel that the reliability of their services, the bandwidth, storage, unlimited databases and numerous other features included with their packages are well worth it. Hostgator is a topnotch hosting company, at the same level as iPowerweb and Lunar Pages.
James Opiko is a Co-owner/Administrator of Afro Articles – Article Marketing Directory. Detailed info regarding the above captioned Web Hosting companies can be found here: http://www.clubafrika.com/web-hosting/.
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If you are looking for an Internet web hosting provider for your business, non-profit organization, or even family, you gotta put iPowerWeb.com on your list.
To start with, iPowerWeb offers the rock solid services of Free Berkeley System Distribution (FreeBSD) UNIX. FreeBSD has been used by backbone Internet providers for dozens of years because of its incredible network and applications stability. If, however, you can’t appreciate the joy of working in a FreeBSD operating system environment, fear not, iPowerWeb provides customers with a vDeck graphical user interface that hides all of the underlying complexities of UNIX.
The vDeck interface has everything you need to upload files to the web server, create and manage directory structures, create and manage electronic mail, market your website, and operate awstats, which provides complete statistical reporting services for your web server. vDeck also supports configuration and use of mySQL databases, content management systems such as PHP-Nuke, eCommerce applications like Agora Cart, chat, bulletin boards, and other services.
iPowerWeb consistently delivers Internet speed performance that is among the top web hosting providers on the Internet. You can find the report “Hosting Providers Network Performance” on-line at Netcraft and it is updated every few minutes. Having a fast web hosting provider is a critical factor for the success of any web site on the Internet and this is especially true for business websites.
The monthly price for a virtual web hosting account starts at .95. When you consider the speed and stability performance provided by iPowerWeb this is indeed a true bargain. And iPowerWeb offers a full 30 day money back guarantee. How do I really know that iPowerWeb delivers outstanding performance and value? I’ve been one of their very satisfied customers for many years now. You can learn more about how to select outstanding web hosting companies by signing-up for my FREE e-book “Web Hosting 101.” Just fill out the FREE subscription form at iTechGuide
Jason Canon has authored numerous technical papers including: “Photonic Switching, Gigabit Networking, VoIP Phone Home?” and others. He is an expert author for EzineArticles.com. Email Jason Canon: jmc (at) canon dot org.
When it comes to choosing a domain name for your website it is quite important that you find the one that is relevant to the theme of your website. It is advised by many SEO professionals that your domain name should be based on your primary keyword. In order to find a domain name that is available and is based on your main keyword, you need to perform domain search and try to locate a cheap domain name registrar.
For domain search, you can visit the website of any of the leading domain selling companies and enter the name desired by you in the form provided on their sites. You will get the results of your query within few seconds based upon its availability across many popular domain extensions. Along with you search are other alternatives of your request in case the domain is taken across.
After your domain search is complete and have selected the domain name you want to register, it is time for searching for a cheap domain name registration. The cost of getting your name registered varies a lot from one provider to another. Therefore, it is important that you should review their services and determine if they suit your needs or not.
Some domain search and cheap domain name services also provide other services like website hosting, website creation and many others. If you are new to the web based business then these services could be of great help. However, these services require additional fees and could be quite expensive. So, if you already have or don’t need such services it is better to avoid them.
Many cheap domain name providers offer their services for registering domains only. Most of these providers will perform the domain search to make sure it is not taken by anyone else, but there are some that don’t do proper domain search. Therefore, it is important for you to make certain that domain name is freely available and not owned by someone else.
Normally, cheap domain name providers charge the price for registering your domain name for a whole year and additional fees if you want to get extra features like SSL certificate and domain hide. So, make sure that they don’t charge high prices on backend services before using their services. Additionally, you will have to pay extra fees if you want to extend the use of the domain name after the end of the first year. Some of the registeration companies charge high fees for doing so. Therefore, it is highly recommended the cost of renewal before you buy your cheap domain name from a company and compare it with others.
Technical support is another important thing that you need to keep in mind. The online support by reputable cheap domain name service providers not only help you in configuring your domain name correctly but also assist you on several related topics like script installation and database management.
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