Archive for web hosting provider

Mar
01

What to Consider When Selecting a Web Hosting Provider

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Trying to choose a web hosting provider can be a confusing process. There are so many companies out there offering similar packages and promoting excellent service.  It’s important to know what to look for when trying to decide the provider that best meets your needs.  Each of the must-have essentials can easily be confirmed by researching the web hosting company thoroughly through their respected websites and through user reviews.

When examining different web hosting options, there are many things to consider.  Security, reliability, pricing, and customer service are among the most important things to take into consideration.  When deciding on a web hosting provider, it’s crucial to examine the security features offered in order to protect your site. The provider should offer at least basic data protection for your website.  It’s also imperative that the provider offers features that protect your site from hackers.

Security Measures

Some methods in which a web host provider can help protect your site are to make available firewalls as well as security patches.  The more protection the provider offers the potential for any stored data being stolen and breaches of security are significantly reduced.  Taking proactive security measures also reduces other risks that can lead to many problems including the loss of revenue and unnecessary expenses trying to resolve security breaches.

Reliability

Reliability is equally as important as security.  If the web hosting provider is unreliable, you as a client risk gaining access to your site.  Without being able to access your website and maintain it as you need, the web hosting provider you have chosen to support your site will be useless. Without a reliable web host provider, your site loses its effectiveness.  It’s also important to be aware of the providers’ server performance and compatibility with specific software applications. It’s also recommended to know the speed of the server and also allocated bandwidth.  Processor speed affects the ability of video and audio streaming, as well as many other animated web page elements.

Pricing

Another thing to consider when purchasing a web host provider is pricing.  While most users will be looking for the cheapest web hosting provider readily available, it’s important to remember that many web host plans are cheaper for a reason.  In many scenarios, the cheapest providers offer the least reliability as they often don’t primarily focus on the service that they are offer.  On the other end of the spectrum, there are web hosting providers that are specialists offering the best web hosting service available on the market today.  Unfortunately, however, these providers typically exceed most consumers’ spending capacity.  Therefore, consider it a wise marketing decision to shop around and compare prices; opt for the best affordable service and proven reliability at a reasonable price within your price range.

Customer Service

Customer service is also imperative to inquire about when opting for a web host provider.  This is especially important if you are going for a fully managed web hosting package, especially since such packages can be quite expensive and demand a high level of communication with the provider.  It’s important to know upfront what kind of customer service a web host provider offer:  Do they offer 24/7 customer service?  Do they offer support on chats, by phone, or via e-mail?  Is the number toll free if you must contact by phone?  One easy way to test a company’s customer service ability is by testing it; something that can generally be done for free by finding their contact information.  Simply give them a call or send them an e-mail inquiring about their customer service.  Doing so grants you insight to the web host provider’s efficiency and effectiveness.

Jan
07

Website Makeover for HostWay

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HostWay is one of the world’s largest web hosting and web-service providers who recently released a new website showcasing their cloud offerings. The site also details their new hosting plans for small businesses. The new website presents numerous changes including:

  • New products
  • Product categories
  • Easy navigation
  • New design scheme

The new website presents fresh products and services offered by HostWay. These products are grouped into specific categories for easy navigation so customers will be able to quickly identify features and make a purchasing decision. Finally, the new design scheme presents HostWay’s focus on a more mature and professional customer base that demands flexibility, reliability and value.

Hostway was founded in 1998 and has worked its way to being the world’s largest web hosting provider. With a presence in 14 countries and more than 700 employees, HostWay offers many services including, domain name registration, ecommerce solutions, shared hosting solutions and colocation hosting. The company serves 1.4 million websites consisting of 600,000 customers across the globe.

HostWay recently also recreated their portfolio of products with the most impressive being FlexCloud sites. FlexCloud sites offer scalable, flexible and reliable services for small businesses and ecommerce stores. Furthermore, FlexCloud Servers provide clients with a higher level of service with enterprise-grade solutions that utilize a global infrastructure mixed with cloud technology.

In the future, the company will continue to be dedicated to innovation and product alignment with customer needs. With the recent emergence and advancement in cloud technology, the company is keeping stride with customer necessity and the competition. This technology should allow them to grad an additional large chunk of the internet market.

The FlexCloud Sites and Servers are going to be scalable and on-demand for customers anywhere at any time. Add reliability, performance and the flexibility of a public cloud and you have a winner. Furthermore, this technology offers resource availability and optimal allocation while customizing all solutions to that specific business. These excellent features will be paired with state of the art data centers.

HostWay has not only greatly improved their website, but they have added next generation products that will be utilized by customers for many years to come. The addition of flexibility, performance, reliability and expansion will result in many more clients choosing HostWay as their primary provider. In the future other web hosting providers will add this technology to keep pace with HostWay’ fantastic technological advancements.

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Sep
11

How to Classify Web Hosting

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There are many metrics for which to classify a web hosting provider. These are commonly used to determine the costs and benefits of starting a website from the ground up. With so many web hosting providers to choose from, it can be difficult to know which companies are the best. The most common aspects of classifying web hosting include:

  • Cost
  • Programming languages
  • Operating systems
  • Web servers
  • Features

The first question most new owners ask is regarding the costs of running a site in order to set a budget. Over the past 10 years, web hosting has become inexpensive due to budget hosting. Many of the inexpensive hosts cost less than $5 per month. For only a few dollars more per month, you can acquire some excellent features.

Another inquiry by website owners is the programming languages used on the server. This will allow them to customize the site by increasing interactive features. Commonly used languages include, ASP, JSP, PHP and Perl. These are all web-based programming languages that provide full user’s command.

The third classification is the operating system used on the server. The choices are usually Windows or Linux. The above programming languages only work on one operating system or the other. Therefore, you must choose which operating system based on your specific needs. There are equal advantages and disadvantages of both.

The next classification is the features of the web servers. These commonly include performance and connection speed as well as the type of hosting. The choices are, shared hosting, dedicated hosting and Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. Each option has a different cost for monthly service.

The last classification is the features offered by the web hosting provider. These are typically the extras you receive after signing up. For instance, many web hosting providers are now offering simple WordPress setup from the control panel which makes it much easier for users to create a blog or storefront.

Due to the number of web hosting providers currently available on the internet, it can be difficult to classify them all. Using these five categories can help you make a more informed decision and discover what you really want your website to be and what tools you need to achieve that goal. As more providers are added to the internet offering additional features to have an edge on their competition, more categories will develop to differentiate the good from the bad.

The success and sustenance of every website begins with the server on which it is hosted, and the performance of that web server relies entirely upon the competence, reliability and capabilities of the web hosting provider. Perhaps even more essential to the success of a website is it’s ranking in the search engines. Without traffic a site may as well not exist, and it is a well known fact that having a high page ranking search engines is the bet way to get constant traffic automatically. Many people do not see the correlation between their web hosting plan and their search engine optimization efforts, but I assure there is a valid connection. Every web hosting plan comes with certain features and options, some of which can directly impact your site’s ranking in the search engines.

Geographic Targeting

Many people seem to overlook the importance of targeted traffic. Getting traffic to your web page can be easy, especially if you accept any kind of traffic. However, getting traffic that is actually going to convert into sales is another story. Therefore, it is absolutely imperative to go after traffic that will be beneficial to your business. One of the ways you can do this is by targeting your traffic geographically. If you are trying to sell a product or service that is going to be popular in the UK, then you wouldn’t want a lot of your traffic coming from China. For this reason it is important to choose a web a hosting provider that is located in the area you would like to target. I.E. -  If you are in the US, then try to pick a web hosting provider in the United States.

IP Addresses

Another important aspect to consider is the IP address of your web site. Search engines often look at the IP address of a website to determine it’s relation to other websites, which may directly impact it’s rankings in the search engines. In other words, choosing a web hosting plan that offers only shared IP addresses may not be the best decision. You may find it too expensive to purchase a dedicated hosting plan, however you can still get a dedicated IP address with your shared hosting account. If you share your IP address with other websites then you are risking the search engine ranking of your site, since the actions of those websites could be directly connected with your site’s behavior by the search engines. When you have a dedicated IP address you will not have to worry about such occurrences, as your IP address will only be used by your website.

Site Building Tools

You’ll also want to make sure you have access to all of the website building tools and languages that are standard in today’s technology. For example, you’ll need to be able to use PHP, MySQL databases, FTP clients and other standard tools. You’ll also need access to your .htaaccess file and PERL if you want to have a fully functional and reliable website. These tools are also extremely important in the search engine optimization efforts of your website. If your web hosting provider does not offer these tools then you may want to consider a different web hosting company.

Dec
28

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Host

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With so many hosting services available online today, it can be very difficult to decide on one. Even worse than the sheer number of hosting providers is the fact that all of them promise to be the best, making the process daunting and confusing. With that said, it is obviously not very easy to choose a web hosting provider, however it can be with the right guide by your side. Here we will discuss the most important features of a web hosting service, giving you something to base your decision on other than propaganda.

Stability

Professionalism and stability are extremely important attributes for a web hosting service to have. You want to make sure you are giving your money to a company that is going to be reliable and offer you all of the services you need without a hassle. The fist step in determining the stability and professionalism of a web hosting service is by contacting their customer support. If it takes longer than 24 hours for you to receive a response email then you know you are dealing with a company that doe snot pride themselves on their reliability.

Try calling your prospective hosting services one at a time and inquire about features such as bandwidth, uptime, and quality assurance. Ask them questions like: “What is done to ensure the security of my website?” Or “ Do you offer a money back guarantee?” If a company does not offer a money back guarantee then you can rest assured that their service is not really the “best.”  Also it is a good idea to find out how many employees they have and also if their customer support center is available 24 hours out of the day.

Performance

Performance is also an extremely important factor when considering a potential web hosting provider, especially if you run a large business website. Find out what kind of bandwidth they offer, how many domains you are allowed to register with them, what kind of server disk space are you allocated, how many email accounts you can have, and anything else that you think would be crucial to the success of your business. If you are going to be running an e-commerce then you may want to consider web hosting services that specialize in this field. Make sure they offer basic features such as shopping carts, SSL certificates, PayPal integration and merchant accounts. Without these essential features, your e-commerce site will be a complete failure and you will be susceptible to hacker attacks.

Popularity and Price

They say that the most popular services are not always the best, however in the web hosting industry this is not necessarily true. The more popular a web hosting company is, the more you can be assured of it’s ability to satisfy it’s customers. Signing up with new web hosting companies is very risky, and doing so should be done with caution. Most of the time, the most popular web hosting services will offer the best prices for the most feature-rich packages. The reason why this is possible should be obvious, as they are making a lot more money then the smaller web hosting companies and so therefore they can afford to offer lower priced packages for their users.