A Beginners 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.

By Andrew Loh

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. To understand the concept behind this, please refer to the details here.

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).

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!

By Olga Rose

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.

By Leslie Boey

How to Transfer Your Web Site to a New Web Hosting Service?

There are various reasons why an online business owner like you has decided to switch to a new web hosting providers. Your old web hosting provider probably has very poor technical support, or their web server is always down, or may be your old web hosting provider cannot meet your hosting requirements anymore or you could have discovered a cheaper web hosting service?and etc. Regardless of the reasons, now you have found a new web hosting service and you need to transfer your website from your current web host to the new web host. Below is the step-by-step guide that you can follow in order to achieve a painless and error free of moving to a new web hosting provider.

Transfer Schedule
Ideally, you should plan the transfer one month before you terminate your old web hosting plan in order to have sufficient time to perform a smooth transfer. Doing the transfer in less than one month time frame will put your website in risk of inaccessible.

New web hosting service registration
Now, sign-up your new web hosting service once you have decided the termination date mentioned above. Depending on your new web hosting provider, your new web hosting account usually will be set up within 24 hours.

Files Backup
While waiting for your new web hosting account to be created, it is time to backup all your web files on the old web hosting provider. In most cases, you already have all the files of your website on your local computer. However, it is still a good idea to backup all your files from the old web server. In addition to the normal HTML files, you may need to backup any script files, databases files, and even server logs files if it is necessary. You should create a directory structure that is similar to the directory structure on your web server and download the files into the respective directory.

Files uploading
Once you are notified that your new web hosting account has been created, you will receive a notification email from your new web hosting provider. In that email, it contains all the information required to set up website, this including the FTP server information. With that FTP information, you can now FTP to your new web hosting server and upload all your files. You should start by first creating the directory structures on the web server, and then upload all the files to the respective directory.

It is the time to install any script files or databases if there are used in your website. Likewise, it is a good time to set up all the email accounts through the administration panel.

Once you have finished uploading all the files and installed the script files or databases, you can now use the temporary URL to test your site. The temporary URL can be found in the notification email from your new web hosting provider. The temporary URL could be in the following format: http://viola.lunarpages.com/~your-webaccountname

Testing
Using the temporary URL directory, you can now test your web site online. Due to the fact that different web hosting server may require different server environment to execute. Therefore, you need to verify all the scripts (such as CGI, Perl) are working accordingly. In addition, you should test all the hyperlinks in the normal web pages if possible to ensure no broken links. While you are testing through the temporary URL directory, your website hosted on the old web hosting provider is continue operating.

Transfer domain name
Once you have finished testing your new website on the temporary URL and verified it is working perfectly. The next step is to contact your current domain name registrar (i.e. the company where you register your domain name) to change the old DNS (Domain Name Server) to point to the new DNS of your new web hosting provider. Usually, the DNS information is sent to you through email after you register successful with the new web hosting provider. Alternatively, you will be able to find the DNS information from the website of your new hosting provider.

Domain name servers control how a domain name is resolved. Typically, the domain name servers are in following format:

NS1.YOUR-NEW-WEB-HOSTING.COM

NS2.YOUR-NEW-WEB-HOSTING.COM

Some domain name registrar requires the IP addresses of the DNS. In this case you have to provide the IP addresses of your new DNS. For example:

NS1: 216.193.194.212

NS2: 216.193.207.106

Typically, it will take about 24-72 hours to get the DNS record to change and propagate through all the WHOIS servers. You can use Whois tools on the Internet such as whois.com to monitor the status of the DNS transfer. Once the transfer is completed, you will notice the change to your new DNS. Alternatively, you can make a minor modification to your home page (for example, adding a new image or symbol) and upload to the new web hosting server. When you access your home page through the normal domain name (www.your-website.com) and you notice the new home page, then you are sure that the DNS has been transferred successfully.

Final Testing
Now, your website on the new web hosting provider is officially transferred and online. You should repeat all the tests to ensure it is fully functional. Once you are confirmed the new website is working correctly, you can go ahead to terminate your old web hosting account.

By Andrew Loh

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.

This article was written by Joe Duchesne

How to Choose a Right Web Hosting Service?

Indeed, choosing a right web hosting service for your website is not an easy task especially when there are thousands of web hosting providers all offering almost identical web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before you start your web hosting search. Below are three major criteria for web host seeker:

Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important consideration to start finding a host for your site. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) Server platform and hardware requirements
If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.

Likewise, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any web hosting plans that support Unix/Linux platform should be sufficient to meet your hosting requirements. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best web hosting plans for your need. For more information, you can read "How to select a web server and server platform?"

b) Disk space & Bandwidth requirement
Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before selecting a web hosting plan, i.e. disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), then the disk space requirement may not be a big concern to you. In general, a disk space with 200MB to 500MB should be enough to meet your hosting requirement. In contrast, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, mp3 or video files, then you should consider a web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB to 1,000 MB.

Similarly, the bandwidth requirement will depend on your site traffic estimation. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly bandwidth allowance very fast. If so, you will need to find one web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with 40 GB to 100 GB per month. Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the monthly disk space and bandwidth allowance.

c) Other hosting features
While the above requirements are utmost important, there are other hosting features that you have to consider too. Can web hosting provider support video clips on your website, if you have? Is the web hosting service compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? Can the host support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? On top of that, you may also want to find out the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistic software (analyze your web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your web hosting account), database and scripting languages supported and etc.

Reliability and scalability

A first-class web hosting provider offers reliable server uptime and fast Internet connection. You should only choose a web hosting service that guarantee at least 99% server uptime with high-speed Internet backbones using at least OC3 (Optical Carrier) lines (155 Megabits per second) or above instead of T1 or T3 lines. A reliable web hosting provider usually invests heavily on their data center infrastructure with high performance servers, high speed multiple backbones providers with fail-over redundancy, backup power generators and firewall software protection in place to ensure they meet the uptime guarantee specified in the terms of service.

Similarly, you should choose a web hosting service with hardware facilities that designed for scalability, so that they can grow with your business. For example, if you need to increase more disk space, bandwidth or number of mySQL databases, you should be able to upgrade as needed without any problems.

Customer service and support

The last major consideration in choosing a web hosting service is to find a web hosting providers that offers excellent customer service and support. You should always search for a web hosting provider that offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week technical support that fielded with highly experience technicians, so that any web hosting problems will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time. You may also want to consider to test how responsive is their customer support by sending few inquiry emails to the web hosting provider. In general, any response in less than 24 hours is considered acceptable. It is a sign of poor customer support if they take more than one day to response.

In addition, a web hosting provider with excellent support should also provide multiple support channels, such as toll-free phone support, 24/7 email support, live chat, online knowledgebase, Interactive flash tutorials and FAQ.

Above are few major considerations before you choose your web hosting service. In addition, how long has the web hosting provider in business and the number of customers that they currently have are also a good indication of the quality of their hosting products as well as the stability of the company. Even though cost of the web hosting service is also important but it should not be your major consideration. Because the price of a web hosting service has been declining over the years due to competition, as a result, the price of most of the web hosting services offering quality hosting features has been converging to less than US$10 per month. If you can't afford less than $10 per month, you probably isn't in the online business for the long haul. Therefore, price should not be a major deciding factor.

On the other hand, it is more important to ensure the web hosting service that you choose is able to meet your website hosting requirements, guarantee your website is always accessible with satisfying speed, provide scalability to grow and expand your website as well as offer excellent customer supports. Depending on your web hosting requirement, you can take advantage of our site, Cheap Web Hosting Review to find the recommended web hosting services that can match the three major criteria above. Good luck to your search.

By Andrew Loh