Web Hosting Tips

Friday, 1 January 2016

Tips on Budget Hosting

Budget hosting is a viable option for small businesses and personal use websites. If your website is a static one, budget hosting will be a good option for you. You can get a hosting plan for $10-20 per month.

So, budget hosting does not entail paying hefty hosting fee which you need to pay for some of the other hosting options such as dedicated web hosting.

Here are some key tips on budget hosting.

1. Don’t go for budget hosting if your website is going to be a big one.

2. You must know that budget hosting usually requires a one year contract.

3. You must know you won’t get any special services and features in budget hosting.

4. Budget hosting cannot be a good option if you think you will be expanding your website gradually.

5. Be clear about the bandwidth, space, and access rights that you will get in your budget hosting plan.

6. You must run through the website of your host to gauge whether or not it’s a genuine one.

7. You must check the feedback of your host’s existing clients to know what they feel about the services.

8. Be sure about the uptime you will get. Although, you might not need some of the other hosting features; you must get a guaranteed uptime.

9. Read your web host’s terms and conditions. You must check the service cancellation clause.

10. Ensure that you get the right technical support.

11. For example, will you be able to add, update, or delete your email accounts. Interact with your host’s technical staff and try to ascertain whether or not you can trust them. Will you be allowed to update site free of cost, if and when required? Are the charges, if any, part of the signed contract? Clarify on all these critical points before proceeding any further with a Budget Hosting service provider.

Understanding Ecommerce Web Hosting Templates

Having basic HTML knowledge may seem to be enough for creating a simple website but it is inadequate to make a professional, sophisticated website. For ecommerce websites, the design incorporates many complex features such as navigation, content, colors, logo, interactive applications, etc.

With web hosting companies offering web design templates as part of their hosting packages, it has become much easier to create a well-designed, impressive website. Simple website templates will cost upto $20 but business-oriented, ecommerce websites are more costly, ranging from $100 – $1000 or even more for high-end websites.

Apart from design templates, ecommerce websites require other features like shopping cart, security system like SSL encryption and online payment processing. All these are offered by reputable web hosting companies at reasonable prices, which vary according to the volume of transactions of the website.

Selecting an Ecommerce web hosting plan involves the analysis of various factors like:

Multiple payment options
The customers should be able to pay through various modes such as credit card, smart card, PayPal accounts, online check, etc.

Product restrictions
some web hosting packages may restrict the number of products and categories which can be put in a website. This reduces your website’s flexibility and variety available to the customers. You must also enquire about additional charges to setup new categories or add new products.

Emails
ecommerce websites use email accounts for marketing as well as communication purposes. There should be automatic notification to the customers about the order placement, status, processing, etc.

Costs involved
ask about the fees charged for the ecommerce hosting and design plan and the system for payment; monthly, quarterly or annually. Also, check whether there is any additional cost for setting up a new online store under the same account.

Analyze the transaction volume of your website before selecting a web hosting plan. Keep all the above stated factors in mind and make a smart choice for hosting your online business.

Tips on Searching the Best Free Web Host

1. Search sagaciously. There is no pint running through the useless deals of some devious web hosts.

2. Know your web hosting requirements. Your website might need something more that free web hosting.

3. Look for a free web hosting service provider that can offer the right hosting services to suit your requirements.

4. A free web space directory website is a good place to search for a good free web hosting service provider.

5. Look for the latest web hosting service providers just added in the free web space website directories. You can get better deals from the new entrants.

6. http://www.free-webhosts.com/ – is one of the most preferred and reliable free web host directories.

7. Look for a free web space directory that gives you searchable database, right ratings, correct user reviews, and forums.

8. Use the advanced free web hosting search options to get the best free web hosting packages that are suitable for your web hosting requirements.

9. Look for the features such as 100 MB web space, domain or sub-domain hosting, PHP, MySQL database, FTP or browser upload, FrontPage Extensions, a bandwidth limit of 6 GB/month, and a CPanel 7 control panel.

Monday, 21 December 2015

How to avoid Downtime for your Website?

Imagine that your website gives three days to its users to avail special discount for one of the services of your company, and the server where the site is hosted loses connection dues to a technical error. Such situations can wreck your business.

Even a best quality dedicated server hosted by a good service provider may encounter a technical problem. If you can’t afford your site to be unavailable even for a few hours, you should seek an alternative.

A few good web hosting service providers offer an alternative solution – where you can ensure that your site is never down, not even for a few hours. An excellent DNS feature – Round Robin takes care of this issue where a particular IP address is fetched from a pool of IP addresses. This feature uses a technology where your domain name is mapped to more than one IP address on different servers.

The site is hosted at multiple servers and a Failover Monitor keeps a track on your web servers by sending data to a URL. When one of your IP addresses returns an error, the system pulls that IP address out of the list and the DNS adjusts your domain name to another working IP address.

As soon as the faulty IP address comes back online, the system restores it back to IP pool. This ensures that your site is always online, even if there is some problem in one of your web servers.

This system results in the downtime time of as low as fifteen minutes. This is the time taken in caching the IP information from different servers. A couple of factors that determine this caching time are – the connection speed of your site and the reason behind the failure. To ensure best results, your service provider can set the caching time for DNS information.

There is another option where even the time required to fetch the IP address from cache is also not consumed. A failure monitor that is based on an expensive hardware system can point a virtual IP address to other IP address on different servers. This technology ensures almost 99.99995% uptime, and is available only with reputed hosting service providers.

Sunday, 20 December 2015

Web Hosting Dos and Don’ts

Searching and researching for a web hosting service provider can be a grueling task. However, if you have the right knowledge with regard to what you want and what you don’t want, this grueling task would becomes a simple one. And moreover, understanding your own requirements and comprehending the various aspects of web hosting is not a difficult task.

Here are a few web hosting Dos and Don’ts.

Dos

Have the right knowledge

Before you start looking for a web hosting service provider, you must have the right knowledge of the web hosting processes. Apart from knowing the web hosting processes, you should be clear about your requirements and budget.

Do some research

Once you know what you want, just get online to do some research as to what kind of web hosting services and packages are on offer. Also, look out for the costs attached to the various services and packages.

Check for resources and customer support

While carrying out your research, keep an eye on the resources different web hosts have, and the quality of customer support they offer.

Don’ts

Choose the services, not the price

While zeroing in on a web hosting service provider, just ensure that you don’t fall prey to fake, enticing web hosting offers. Of course, price is the key factor, but let the quality of services decide the web host for you.

Don’t purchase from an auction site

You should never purchase web hosting services from an auction site. Not that all the auction deals are sham; but there is no point taking a needless risk that can ruin your web hosting plans.

Don’t trust customer testimonials
Most of the testimonials are rigged. However, if a web hosting service provider has given the clients’ contact information along with their testimonials, you can trust that buy communicating with the clients.

5 Ways To Prop Up Your Web Hosting Business

1. Know web hosting inside out

You cannot succeed in you0 if you don’t know web hosting inside out. You must be aware of all the technicalities and resources involved in the web hosting business. Besides, you need to keep close tabs on the latest hosting trends and advancements.

2. Promotion

Internet industry is all about promotion and marketing. So, you must spend some time and money inpromoting your web h0osting business. This will help you get the desired results. You have to promote your business smartly. Remember, blatant attempts to gain publicity hardly yields good results.

3. Give quality services

With so much competition around, the only thing that can help you get business is quality. If you deliver quality web hosting services, you will stay in the business for a long time. On the contrary, if your web hosting services lack quality, you will see yourself out of the market very soon.

4. Referral Programs

Referral program can really help you promote your web hosting business. Referral program will help you fetch more and more clients. Besides, you need to create a tracking system that enables you to get more and more clients.

5. Forum Discussions

Forum discussions can boost your 0ss by equipping yo00with more information and knowledge about web hosting. Furthermore, you get to interact with lots of people via forum discussions.

The customers who refer new people get certain commission from you. All you need to do is to ask your existing customers to sign-up for your referral program. You create an account for them that enables them to keep track of their details and referral earnings. Over the years, referral program has proved itself to be an effective way of promoting web hosting business. However, you must ensure that the tracking system works well for you as well as your customers. All your customers who help you increase your customer base are provided with the best of services.

Low Cost Web Hosting

Giving out space on a web server to individuals and corporate for purpose of creating websites can be termed as web hosting. The biggest task for any individual is to choose the right host. While looking for a web server, a usual consideration is the cost.

Usually the cost factor depends on the type of hosting you are choosing. If you choose shared hosting it will be cheaper than dedicated hosting. Also the quality of server i.e. speed reliability and back up factors etc also plays a major role in cost factor.

Now taking a look just a few years back, web hosting could only be afforded by big companies which have expensive Internet budgets. It was quite expensive. In the face of the increasing competition in the market, the prices of web hosting have really come down. All this has made web hosting services affordable to everyone who wishes to have their identities on the net.

There are some factors that you will need to consider when you decide to opt for low cost web hosting. Firstly you need to make a correct analysis of how much disk space and bandwidth you will require. When you do this, you will end up saving from having to pay any extra money. Another way of cutting down on costs, is to go for shared web hosting. This is where you have many organizations using the same server. Shared web hosting comes with one major drawback; it can create problems with identity and secrecy and hold limitations on the nature and volume of data that is usually stored on the website. By reducing or avoiding the number of streaming images or videos that you use, you can cut down on the cost of your web hosting services. These images or videos always end up taking a lot of space on the server. You can avoid them since they are not always necessary.

When looking for a web host, price is always a key concern. But this doesn’t mean that you have to settle for the lowest price. One factor that you must consider is the business potential that your website can create. To do this you must check on how much traffic the web server will generate. That is to say, how many clicks your website will have per day. Another important thing is that you will need to verify if the web server is restricting some areas or countries from having access your website.

There are those web hosting providers that claim to be able to provide unlimited web hosting. This means that they will allow unlimited domain registries on their web server which will slow down the website. This will affect the running of your business. So my opinion is a big no for them.