Web Hosting and Dedicated Servers

Best Web Hosting 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.

Dedicated Server An advanced form of web hosting where the customer generally has complete control over the server. Dedicated Servers are typically housed in data centers. Dedicated servers may be compared to shared web hosting servers; where in shared hosting you find the web hosting company administering and control the server, a dedicated server is typically controlled by the server's owner and he or she controls which websites are hosted on the server.

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Top Web Hosting Below I detail a few important aspects of the selection process based purely on my own experiences over the last six years.

What is Dedicated Web Hosting Dedicated web hosting can alleviate the need to share hardware or software with any other sites or web pages. Webmasters are given the autonomy to decide on applications that are installed on the server to create specific configurations for their web needs, and have the ability to provide a secure environment for their site. server environment, dedicated web hosting offers a peace of mind that a site will be delivered in a reliable and secure manner.

Web Hosting Companies 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.

If you are looking for a more powerful and reliable alternative to the shared hosting environment, but are not ready to get your own dedicated server, then VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is for you. It is less expensive than Dedicated Server hosting but has many of the same features including dedicated CPU, dedicated storage and dedicated memory. With a VPS environment you even get your own Sendmail Client which allows for a much more reliable email environment than the shared Sendmail Client used in the shared hosting environment.

Web Site Design And Hosting 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.

- The list of chosen the most reliable and cheapest PHP 5 hosting providers that offer the best web hosting with PHP5 support and MySQL 5 database support. Best Web Hosting. your cheap internet solution. Complete resource about web hosting companies providing business hosting services, cheap web hosting. Review of web development and web design companies.

Email Web Hosting If you consistently find too many complaints about your potential web hosting company.... beware!

Managed Hosting What s it all about A new trend, appearing in the Web Hosting industry, is the concept of Managed Web Hosting. Web hosts have been offering dedicated servers for a while now, however, because dedicated servers can be difficult to operate technically, reporting and monitoring; managed load balancing; managed security; managed storage; and, managed databases. These extra services are referred to as managed hosting

Web Hosting Plans 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.

Web And Email Hosting Where is your web host's datacenter located?

Web Hosting Compare 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.

Dedicated Server Web Hosting 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.

Web Hosting Reviews How is your web host connected to the internet?

Web Domain Names Your potential host's data infrastructure - regional and local is of utmost importance.

Web Site Builder - 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

Web Server Hosting How fast is your web host?

Web Hosting Account 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'.

Web Hosting Company 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!

Virtual Web Hosting 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.

Network Solutions Web Hosting 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.

Cheapest Web Host 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.

Web Hosting Domain 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 $7.95. 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.

Web Server Director 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.

Web Hosting Service 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.

Comcast Web Hosting 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.

Catalogue: Internet Business | Web Hosting
Title: How To Select A Reliable Web Hosting Company By: James Opiko

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