Common Web Hosting Features
If that you’ve decided to create your own website, then you need a quality web hosting server to host the site. There are many web hosting companies out there and finding a best hosting provider doesn’t have to be hard. When you’re looking for a hosting provider here are some points to consider. What platform will I use – Linux or windows? Do I need e-commerce features? Do I need any CMS? Do I have lot of images, music or videos? After gathering your requirements, you just need to find one that meets your needs and budget. You can read the web host reviews available on internet and compare web hosting based on their features, price,customer service support staff, traffic, and space.
The following are the common feature that you should expect to get with any web hosting service.
- Unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth
- Control Panel with one click script installer
- The File Manager to add, edit, move and remove files to your website
- Unlimited FTP Accounts
- Unlimited Email Account, Secure IMAP & POP3, auto responders, Spam Assassin
- Phone and Email Customer/Technical Support
- Support PHP, Perl, Python ect
- MySQL Database Support and phpMyAdmin to handle the administration of MySQL
- Shared SSL & SSH Shell Access
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- Dreamweaver & FrontPage Ready
The additional features that differ from one provider to another
- Unlimited Websites or Domains hosting on a single account
- Free Domain Name 4 Life
- Free Website Transfer
- Free SiteBuilder w/ templates
- Free marketing/ Google Credit
- Free Search Engine Submission
10 Useful Webhost Analytics Tools
For a personal website or small and medium size businesses, shared web hosting is the best option.In a shared hosting, since many different sites are hosted on the same hardware, every site owner wishes to know whether their web hosts are performing good. Fortunately there are many excellent tools available to monitor the performance of any best web hosting.
- Who is Hosting This?
Using this you will be able to find out a domain name owner’s information such as who is hosting the domain name and on which datacenter, the IP address and the type of the web server, if the domain name is blacklisted and what’s the domain status, Domain Name IP and DNS history, as well as the registrant history ect. - myIPneighbours – Using this tool you will be able to find out who else is sharing the web server with you.
- Check Your UptimeUsing the following tools, you will get your site’s uptime report. Montastic, Dotcom Monitor, SiteUptime. These will check your website availability at regular intervals.
- Netcraft – Netcraft is a data and analytics company which provide a wide range of services from anti-phishing to hosting provider server failure.
- Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions (NMS) : NMS is another useful monitor tool for monitor the performance of server resources, CPU memory, logs, disk, counters etc
- Load Impact – Load Impact is an online tool to test the amount of concurrent visitors and connections that is handling by your server.
- Macfee Secure: is a leading name in internet security. Macfee also have a tool of monitoring your site with a suspicious virus, Trojans and Spam.
- DNSstuff – provides a collection of useful tools to analyze a hosting provider.
- YouGetSignal.com – YouGetSignal.com provides a collection of useful tools such as reverse IP domain check, WHOIS lookup, host server location tool ect to analyze a hosting provider.
- GeoTool – With Geotool you can check up where all online businesses have their hosting situated. You can see details of the city where the server is situated, its IP Address, ISP and the region of the server.
Using these Monitoring Tools, you will be able to check the server performance and solve the configuration problems. Thus improve the security and performance of your web hosting company.
Top 3 Best Web Hosting Companies 2012
Creating a website is an essential thing to do in this modern world particularly if you need an online presence to either earn money, or promote your business, goals, or advocacy. Without an online presence, you are cutting yourself of the valuable revenue streams may it be money, or your ideals. If you need an online presence, you will have to invest money on a reliable web host. Below are the best web hosting companies valued for its price, features, and reliable customer service.
- ArvixeKnown for:Cheap small business web hosting
Free domain for life
99.99% uptimeArvixe is the fastest growing web hosting company because of the features the company has that are offered to customers at a remarkably low price. Online businesses can benefit from Arvixe specially their VPS hosting solutions that are priced similarly to most shared web hosting plans other web hosting providers offer.Features:Linux and Windows web hosting
Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
Host unlimited domainsPrice: $4.00 a monthWhy Arvixe is he best web hosting company
Arvixe is not only cheap, reliable, and feature-rich but also, the best in providing customer satisfaction to all their subscribers. That is why they have received numerous awards and positive reviews from customers. One of which is when Arvixe was reconized by Inc. Magazine the 209th fastest growing private sector company in a 3 year span. - iPageKnown for:Host unlimited domains
Anytime money-back guarantee
$400 free extras
99.99% uptimeiPage is a web hosting company that have been providing cheap hosting solutions for several years now. One of the advantage of iPage web hosting is that it comes from a well-established parent company. As a result, this web hosting provider does not experiment on the features and only uses the tried and tested features and solutions that their parent company had been doing.Features:Unlimited disk space and bandwidth
Host any number of domains
Free domain registration
Anytime money-back guarantee.Price: $3.50 per monthWhy iPage is the best web hosting company
iPage has the best equipment around; the company uses the latest Dell servers which in turn results to highly reliable and powerful servers that have 24/7 monitoring, daily backups, and 99.99% uptime. - WebhostinghubKnown For:First class service
90 Day Full Money Back Guarantee
Free domain
Host unlimited domains
$75 marketing bonus
Webhostinghb is a first class web hosting provider providing the best customer support, and is one of the most reliable web hosting service. Webhostinghub is committed to providing a reliable web hosting solution.FeaturesUnlimited disk space and bandwidth
unlimited email account
No-Downtime transfer process
free site builder
99.97% uptimePrice: $4.95 per monthWhy webhostinghub is the best web hosting company?
Webhostinghub is committed in providing a secure and reliable web hosting environment. That is why customer websites are hosted using high-performance quad core servers, and their data center has UPS backup power generator. Which means 24/7 monitoring, reliable customer support and excellent service at an exceptionally affordable price.
Conclusion
Carefully inspect each of the best web hosting companies as not all its features are compatible with your website. These web hosting companies are at the best at what they do, the only difference is the way they can handle your website well. Do not worry about trying each of these best web hosting companies because you can always get a full refund in case you are not satisfied.
ASP SQL Hosting – Choosing Between MSSQL and MySQL
ASP and SQL are two technologies which can benefit every website. ASP helps to create dynamic web pages while SQL stores database that your website can use to either archive a post or let the visitors search for old posts or products. When choosing an ASP SQL hosting, people are confused about which SQL technology to use, will it be Microsoft’s SQL or the free and open source MySQL?
Both technologies uses almost the same features that is why deciding between MSSQL and MySQL relies on stability, reliability, and what other features it has that can compete with its counterpart. Both of these does what exactly as intended but there is one technology that stands out from the rest.
Principles
Microsoft’s SQL is closed, proprietary while MySQL is open source. You won’t have a lot of options when using MSSQL and you’ll be stuck with SQL Server’s Sybase-derived engine whether you like it or not. On the other hand, MySQL lets you choose several SQL engine such as MyISAM, Heap, InnoDB, and Berkeley DB.
But there are technical differences over closed and open sourced. MySQL for example doesn’t use foreign keys thus makes it less of a relational database compared to MSSQL which has a lot of relational database features. Moreover, MySQL lacks support for stored procedures and the default MyISAM does not support transactions which can be very beneficial for an ASP SQL hosting website.
Licensing/Cost
Microsoft’s SQL offers licensing in which one can get through either purchasing Microsoft Office Developer or Microsoft Visual Studio but this is only for development use only, not for commercial. If you want a commercial license, you will need to purchase a commercial license which could normally cost for $400.
MySQL is under GNU Public License, which means that you don’t have to pay for MySQL license.
MSSQL will be more expensive if you set up your own ASP SQL web hosting but if these are offered as a plan by ASP SQL web hosting providers, you will not notice the difference in price between the two.
Performance
When it comes to performance, MySQL leads the pack because of its default table format, and MyISAM. MyISAM databases are very compact and does not require extensive CPU nor memory to run. MySQL can be run in Windows but you get the best performance of MySQL when it is running in Unix or Linux systems.
A better performance is achieved by MySQL when a 64-bit system is used so do check this out when hunting for an ASP SQL hosting.
MSSQL’s extensive features weakens its performance regardless whether there are features that aims in performance tuning, or other features which can help your website. As a result, MSSQL’s performance is a bit slower, requires more CPU and Memory and are unreliable at times.
Conclusion
Most of best web hosting companies provide both MySQL and MSSQL. Choosing between MySQL and MSSQL depends on what your want your website to be. Should you aim for better performance yet sacrifice some features MSSQL have or should you aim for more features and compensate a bigger disk space and higher memory more than MySQL requires?
BlueHost Review – Best Features of BlueHost
BlueHost have been offering web hosting services to personal blogs, online businesses and companies since 1996. They are considered as one of the earliest web hosting companies and managed to survive even at the toughest times which leads us to having this as one of our best choice in selecting a web hosting company. Following brief BlueHost Review would be helpful.
Features
BlueHost is equipped with the best quality equipment around. They use modern quad-core servers, have mirrored backups and backup generator, has an outstanding 24/7 support with well-trained staff. They have a very fast 2GB per second bandwidth.
Here are the features BlueHost are most notable for:
- Host unlimited number of domain names/website for a very low price of $6.95 per month.
- Unlimited disk space and bandwidth.
- Free domain name hosting upon signup in any of their plans.
- CPanel with Fantastico Script Installer.
- 24/7 live chat, phone, and email support.
- Free SSH Shell access.
- Free shared SSL certificate and support for eCommerce hosting.
- Submit your websites to search engines for free.
- Audio, video streaming, real media, flash, support for a number of programming languages like Ruby on Rails are enabled by default.
- Anytime money back guarantee.
Hardware and Operating System
BlueHost uses quad-core modern servers under a Linux operating system. This may be one of the reasons why BlueHost is able to maintain almost 100% uptime. BlueHost also has DDOS protection and power backups to keep your website up and running without problems.
Reliability
As far as I am concerned and based on my experiences with BlueHost, they have 99.99% uptime. There may be times where my website goes down but it is a rare occurrence and if they are down they will be back almost instantly.
What I like best in BlueHost is their secured, accurate, and very reliable backups, and the various tools required to manage my website.
They have a very excellent customer support – responds easily to customer queries. When asked a question, they can give you accurate information and solution to your problem. A great plus for any web hosting providers.
Performance
BlueHost offers 99.99% uptime so it is recommended for running a serious website project or wants to keep your website traffic flowing. Their performance is also backed up by the excellent customer support teams ready to help you whenever you need one.
Price
BlueHost only has 1 price plan. You can subscribe to them for only $6.95 if you want a two-year contract or $7.95 per month for a 1 year contract. With all the features added in this single plan, it is such a great deal for you to miss.
Conclusion
One thing I don’t like, is BlueHost do not inform their customers when they will have a system upgrade. Your website will be down when this happens but it is rarely a case to deal with. I hope they won’t fail on notifying people about their system upgrade in the future. Overall, this web hosting provider has a reputation that we, as customers looking for the best web hosting around can take advantage of.
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Arvixe Review
Arvixe (see Arvixe Review) is a popular web hosting provider these days which offer several web hosting solutions that were of help to blogs, small and medium enterprises, and even reputable companies online since 2003. Arvixe offers both Linux hosting plans as well as windows web hosting plans. Arvixe is a reliable web host with plans for almost anyone looking for a reliable web hosting provider.
Arvixe offers affordable web hosting plans that seemed too good to be true. Let us have a look at what Arvixe has to offer:
Cheap But Feature Packed
The personal class or a shared web hosting service is offered at $4 for month in a 24-month contract, not bad at all since most web hosting companies use this kind of pricing for their shared web hosting service. You can have additional add-on for your website offered at a lower price, thus more ways to make your website more secured and user-friendly. Their best feature, they will provide you with all the packages you need to set up a website and not only that, all plan comes with a free domain for life. No other web hosting provider I encountered has this kind of deal.
Performance Wise and Very Reliable
When Arvixe claimed that they are 99.9% reliable, they lied..instead they go beyond that reaching 99.943% reliability at most. This goes to prove that they deserve to have such award and indeed they have. Arvixe was awarded as the 209th fastest growing company in the United States by INC Magazine in August 2011, and is also recognized as the 17th fastest growing company in the IT sector on that same time.
Customer Support is Superb!
I have conducted several tests to see if this web hosting provider has excellent customer support. I tried contacting them to live chat and I was surprised on how fast their support staff where and how knowledgeable they are on certain web hosting problems. Arvixe has chat, email, and phone support in which you will never go wrong as all these options have a quick response, and a very knowledgeable technical and customer support teams.
User-Friendly Control Panel
Arvixe uses cPanel for their customers to manage websites. I’m glad they chose cPanel to be their web hosting control panel because this kind of control panel is intuitive and very customizable. I’m also happy about how their control panel are very easy to use that anyone who knows about how to navigate in a computer can easily manage a website.
Summary
Arvixe is a reliable, performance-wise, and feature packed web hosting provider that will give a bang for the buck. Their support team is one of the best, or by far the best customer support that I have ever encountered. Moreover, their control panel is very easy to use in which can greatly save us time, money, and effort in creating a website. Overall, this web hosting provider is recommended to anyone, beginner or experienced because they will all get what they need at a very affordable price.
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Cheap Web Hosting or A Free Web Host?
If you are just new and you don’t know what web hosting company to trust, the first thing you will think about is the cheaper web hosting company or if possible use a free web domain service. Here is a quick overview on the free and the cheap web hosting.
With cheap web hosting you can avail of any web hosting service for a small monthly fee. There are no restrictions in a cheap web hosting, you can add as many domain names as you like or add as many page as you can. You can also promote your internet marketing business without the fear of being banned or rejected.
You can customize the page based on what your website needs. Your website will be unique and will stand out from the rest, which means you have your own branding and reputation in the online industry.
Moreover, a cheap web hosting provider lets you own a domain name ex. (www.yourdomain.com), a great way to increase your page popularity.
Free web hosting on the other hand, has lot of unnecessary stuffs in it. The web hosting provider will fill your website with advertisements because this is their way to cover the cost for their monthly bills, the servers they are using, and other stuffs.
Free web hosting does not let you control your website. Therefore you will have to use a pre-built themes which limits customizations like adding affiliate banners and ads on the websites’s “money shot” areas. Moreover, there are only a few pre-built themes available so you won’t get that unique look and feel you want as your branding theme.
Some free web hosting providers will not let you own a domain name. You will have to park your domain name in their hosting website(ex. yourdomain.webhosting.com), not friendly for website optimization and not a good way to obtain page reputation either.
Free web hosting has a lot of restrictions. Some will not let you post ads as this will not help their hosting service, others add a landing page/splash screen not related to your website.
In terms of reliability, the ones that you have to pay for are more reliable than the one that is free. Expect to see server downtimes and unresponsive customer support. Free web hosting on the other hand, has excellent customer support and almost 99.99% uptime.
Of course, the free ones are not secured because they are only meant to host, not provide other features that will make the customer satisfied. There are also some free hosting solution that are meant to scam, hack or make your website miserable. So I suggest you stay away from free hosting providers.
Cheap hosting is meant to be low-priced so anyone can afford the service and stay away from scams and besides, the demand of web hosting today is really high so they are forced to lower the price so they can compete with others. Just remember when looking for a cheap web hosting service, you have to pick the ones that are the best in customer service with all the package you need.
Is ASP Web Hosting Still Worth It?
ASP or Active Server Page had been introduced to the public more than a decade ago and since then developers still stick to ASP even though the newer version, ASP.NET has a lot of features to offer. ASP or Active Server Pages is a scripting language developed to create dynamic web pages. A dynamic web page changes from time to time and website visitors can change and customize your web page based on the action of your visitors. So if you want your visitors to have a showcase of things every time they reload a page, ASP Web Hosting is your excellent choice. But since ASP is old and Microsoft is focusing more on ASP.NET you will get to experience:
Slower speed and poor performance. ASP is slower than its free alternative, PhP. It is based on a COM architecture that is actually an overhead to the server. You will also experience frequent bugs and errors since older methods and components are injected in ASP.
Microsoft-Only Application. ASP web hosting runs only in Microsoft that unlike PhP do not solely depend on Microsoft products. You will also need a Windows platform in order to run ASP.
Expensive. You will be dependent on Microsoft-only applications therefore you will pay for the operating system, price of the scripting language, or buy MSSQL. Which is very costly knowing that there are free alternatives to these paid applications.
ASP is also known to have a bad interaction with the server and the developing code.
ASP is best for developing an e-business software, moreover:
It is very easy to use. ASP are just HTML pages encapsulated in tags. To run, you need to place it in the directory in your server then run it.
It supports other tools. You can drag and drop web controls just like the way you do Visual Basic controls.
Stable. ASP had been developed and maintained by Microsoft programmers for years. So any kind of vulnerabilities and threats have long been solved.
It is also known to have applications ready-baked for business sites, take advantage of these applications if you own an e-commerce business.
Is ASP still a worthy option?
If you have been using ASP for a long time, shifting to ASP.NET is not as easy as what you think. Changing to ASP.NET you will need to learn how .NET is used. There are also newer codes in which as a developer, you must learn to use and adapt.
ASP is similarly priced as ASP.NET, if you are new in web hosting ASP.NET is preferred over classic ASP because it has more features available at a cheaper price.
ASP is a worthy option because not only that it has built a reputation that no other language can beat. Businesses prefer ASP over ASP.NET because ASP is more stable than the new ASP.NET.
There is a reason ASP did not became obsolete the moment ASP.NET came out. This kind of technology is about the most recent version since newer releases are bug, but about the additional performance it can do to help your website prosper.
What is ASP Hosting
The letters in ASP represent Active Server Pages. It is an advanced hosting technology that lets user produce interactive web pages with server side scripting. Interactive means including forms, blogs, search boxes, calendars, polls and anything that needs user input. Now, a web master does not have to be concerned with the kind of browser their visitors are using. You sire will look the same regardless of the browser or computer the visitor users. This isn’t so for HTML pages.
When a browser is instructed to pull up a page that uses asp hosting script where HTML usually would be, the provider interprets these scripts prior to decoding the HTML. This is the reason you can not just run ASP on any web hosting provider. The company you choose must be able to decode these scripts or your pages will not display correctly.
When searching for ASP web hosting, look for a provider that specially supports this technology. You can not assume because a provider supports scripts from PHP to CGI that they support ASP. If you can not find support, look on the FAQ page. It will tell you what scripts are supported. It will not be hard to do a search on the page. You can also use their contact information to ask them about ASP support.
ASP hosting works best on Windows. If you want to test scripts on your server, you can download them on your system on an ASP server like Microsoft’s Internet information Services or MS Personal Web Pages commonly available at no additional price with Windows hosting packages. ASP is getting to be such a universal language, many providers are encouraged to offer support because of competition which will work to your advantage. Be certain to compare different host before deciding on one.
Choosing the Best Cheap Web Hosting Companies
You have made it passed the hard part by creating your web pages and now you need cheap web hosting companies. Too many people fall into the snare of a bad company. This is because they do not consider certain factors when they chose their provider. Here are a few tips that will help you find the best cheap web hosting companies.
Price should not be the first thing you look at in a cheap web hosting service. We all like cheap but it is not always what you should buy. If you run across a host that sounds too cheap for what they offer and wonder how they stay in business, avoid them. Your site may pay the price with slow server speeds and little bandwidth. There may be no customer service or very unprofessional service. On the flip side expensive is not always better, either.
They should have reliable customer service. Try sending a question to customer service to test their response time. You should get an answer in no more than three days. Trouble with your site can happen at anytime. The longer your sit is down, the more money you lose. You need a service with 24 -hour support and fast response time.
Any host should give protection against hackers and viruses. Your files should get protected by your web hosting company at all times. A few web master have been unlucky and their sites got hacked because the lack of security patches. New customers should ask how often the server is updated and what software they use for virus protection.
Do not go with the first cheap web hosting company you see. Compare prices and packages of several providers and be certain of what you are getting. Never buy any service without reading and understanding the terms of service.
