Our top web hosting company recommendation is HostGator.

HostGator Web Hosting

Friday, July 17, 2009

Web Hosting with a Dedicated Server

Does your website run on a dedicated server or a shared server? Is your web hosting service truly reliable? Does your hosting company give you the support you need? If you aren't very internet-savvy, it may be the case that your website lacks basic protection against viruses, bugs, and hackers.

Don't panic. You can learn all about web hosting with a dedicated server. Learning will make your work a little easier. To begin with, here's some information that may lead you in the right direction.

Introduction:

There are many top web hosting companies doing business in the U.S. and elsewhere. They often give you a choice of shared web hosting or a dedicated server. The majority of web hosting companies give you excellent tools for communication. They offer many e-mail options, which give you easy access to manage your data files.

Web hosting companies that provide dedicated servers give you complete control over your DNS management. This lets you manage your Internet addresses and your domains. You'll get a variety of services when you open an account at with any of the web hosting companies, What you pick should depend on the needs of your online business.

Hosting Service Features:

As mentioned, you have DNS management. You'll also get IMAP and POP3 mail accounts. If you remember the Outlook Express Mailbox, then you will probably remember the IMAP and POP3 options. Some web hosting companies all offer you scripts for sending and receiving from web-enabled computers.

U.S. web hosting companies and services tend to offer advanced solutions in hosting your websites. Additional features include site statistics, which displays information about your site's visitors. Other web hosting company features include e-mail marketing tools. This allows you to advertise your site effectively and create newsletters.

When you open a dedicated server hosting account, you'll be able to choose from a standard set of features and services, and you'll also be able to install any additional services you wish. This is one of the biggest advantages of dedicated server web hosting. You have ultimate flexibility, but you also have the responsibility to configure your server correctly and keep it running efficiently. This is where it's helpful to have some technical knowledge about web servers and hosting services.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Manage Your Web Hosting With cPanel

Web Hosting Made Easy

Our top web hosting recommendation is HostGator. They're incredibly reliable and the offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth with complete cPanel access to your account for only $4.95 per month.

CPanel is an easy user-interface site that lets you control your host account environment. The main peculiarity of this operating system is that it so simple to use that your below average computer user can’t mess it up. It’s got great features embedded into its panel and some of the features are listed below.

Site Tools

There are such tools available for your use, which are Web Protect (.htaccess editor), Custom error pages, Redirects, Ability to edit MIME types, Ability to edit Apache handlers, Install/Uninstall FrontPage Extensions, Search engine tool submitting and File Manager.

Email

The email program provides you with the possibility to add, remove, and change passwords while managing email accounts. CPanel is also provided by Webmail for the accounts, Auto responders, Forwarders, Mailing Lists, Spam filtering and some more.

Backup

Backup allows you to create copies of account files and databases. The backup menu also allows you to download any automatic backups that were downloaded by your CPanel administrator.

Stats

Here are different tools to survey your site popularity and efficiency. Those are Webalizer web stats, Webalizer FTP stats, Analog stats, AWStats, View latest visitors, View bandwidth usage and View error log modules.

FTP

There is a module that controls FTP accounts (add, remove, change password for its access), Anonymous FTP controls; Ability to change FTP login message and Ability to kill FTP sessions.

Monday, July 13, 2009

How To Get The Best Web Hosting Plan

If and when you’re interested in starting an online business, there are a lot of things that you have to study first before you can rightfully expect a high return on investment.

First, make sure that your company website has a user friendly interface which basically means links are visible, easily located and properly labeled and that the content provided in the website is complete, interesting, effective and grammatically correct.

There’s the matter of search engine optimization or SEO which requires you to employ a number of strategies that your company website is heard and seen by the right people. Common search engine optimization strategies would be keyword listing, site code optimization and top search engine placement.

Optimize your plan by understanding web hosting. No matter how great your website looks or how effective your SEO strategies are, if you don’t have the right web hosting plan, none of those would see the light of the day because your web hosting plan simply prevents them from being properly uploaded and viewed.

Web hosting is important to your plans if you want your website to have its own niche in the Internet. That's why I recommend only the well known, reliable web host, HostGator.

Web Server Hosting Types

There are different types of hosting services that you can choose from depending on what type of web development and web site that you want to host.

Dial-Up Access Hosting – This is the most basic access/hosting service and these providers also provides a web page for hosting your site. Dial-up access hosting was the first hosting available and is still around. Most ISP’s specialize in just internet access and it’s rare that you will see an ISP do both. These companies make their money off of providing access to the Internet.

Development Hosting - Web site developers are buying their own servers and offering independent hosting services for their clients. This is called development hosting in which they provide web development services along with a host server located at their place of business. The consumer gets charged for the development and the maintenance of the web-site.

Web-Hosting ISP’s. – These are companies that specialize in hosting business web sites. There is no dial up access needed and site owners access their pages via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This is what the majority of small businesses use to put their site information on the internet. Other services are also included in the Web Hosting ISP package depending on their service plans.

These types of hosting plans are usually for corporations that need a lot of bandwidth to run their web applications. These companies run T1 access lines for big packets of internet data and have multiple connections to an internet backbone. They have fully staffed data processing facilities and the prices are substantial for using these types of services.

Corporate/Industrial Hosting - Companies like Hewlett Packard, Dell or IBM, run the server infrastructure for most of these host companies.

The SOHO business owner will usually need the Web-Hosting ISP services. It is the middle ground between the basic and advanced services.

How To Find a Web Host

A customer needs to evaluate the requirements of the application to choose what kind of hosting to use. Such considerations include database server software, scripting software, and operating system. Most hosting providers provide Linux-based web hosting which offers a wide range of different software. A typical configuration for a Linux server is the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python. The webhosting client may want to have other services, such as email for their business domain, databases or multi-media services for streaming media. A customer may also choose Windows as the hosting platform. The customer still can choose from PHP, Perl, and Python but may also use ASP .Net or Classic ASP.

Web hosting packages often include a Web Content Management System, so the end-user doesn't have to worry about the more technical aspects. These Web Content Management systems are great for the average user, but for those who want more control over their website design, this feature may not be adequate.

Most modern desktop operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) are also capable of running web server software, and thus can be used to host basic websites.

One may also search the Internet to find active webhosting message boards and forums that may provide feedback on what type of webhosting company may suit his/her needs. However some of these message boards and forums will require not only registration, but a paid subscription to be able to access the sections and sub forums with such information.

Web Hosting Services

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center, called colocation.

The scope of hosting services varies widely. The most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web "as is" or with little processing. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to their subscribers. People can also obtain Web page hosting from other, alternative service providers. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or cheap. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense.

We recommend just one web hosting service as being the most reliable, best to work with, and most affordable: HostGator.