How to Choose the Hosting Company

By Vitaliy Petrenko

Sometime it happens that we buy a web hosting and look only on the amount of gigabytes of space and traffic. And also price. But why? This approach is not correct generally because reliable hosting is a combination of many factors, such as hardware, network architecture, external channels, technical support, uptime and so on.

The choice of hosting is the most important factor when you start a new project. What do you need a site for if it cannot be visited by people due to bad hosting? ;) Your goal is providing fast and reliable connection to the site for the hosting price that you are able to pay.

How can you determine whether hosting is good or bad? There are several questions that need to be answered to determine that:

1. How much traffic do you expect to have on the site?

2. What amount of disk space do you need for storing data?

3. Does hosting company have enough scalability to help you in case if your site becomes very popular and highly visited?

4. What networks does hosting provider use? One network or more? What total channels? How much are they loaded?

5. What equipment does hosting provider use? You need to ask what equipment is used for construction of their networks. Company manufacturer and brand switch is a major factor for the rapid and smooth functioning.

6. What software environment is used? Operation system, databases, supported programming languages.

7. How is monitoring of servers done?

8. It is necessary to find out whether a hosting company has 24-hour support. It can be checked out easily - just write some test messages during weekends or deep night.

9. What level of uptime does hosting company guarantee?

I believe that answering these questions carefully you will get suitable web hosting for your site!

http://to-hosting.com - Search engine for finding Web Hosting that is best for you.

Benefits of the Help Desk System

By Sreelatha Maneeram

Modern technology is on the threshold to improve management processes in small business enterprises. The key areas are customer service & support management. Customer support is an indispensable part of any business proposition. Customer satisfaction in modern day world is directly proportionate to a company's bottom line and growth prospects. A company with good product and excellent customer handling always emerges as the winner. Thanks to the widely available customer support software making it possible for small enterprises to achieve the desired goals.

Unearthing the gaps:

Customer support is a widely emphasized service that most business concerns preach and practice. A comprehensive support service to control and manage customer queries towards providing prompt solutions is what business enterprises look for. The progressive business trends have a clearly defined objective to maximize the productivity and sales.

However,there are some bottlenecks involved in the procedure. Due to the disorganized structure in receiving queries,quite often the queries fail to reach the correct person who can actually solve the issue. The customer queries are very diverse thereby making it difficult for the email service to prioritize the queries according to the urgency. There is no proper arrangement wherein the support executives can view the assigned queries. There is no channel/room for discussions among the persons handling the queries due to restricted access settings. The entire process of resolving issues becomes tedious.The email service is not considered reliable and prompt by many a customers. As a result,the number of authentic and regular customer queries goes down and the email functionality falls short of its purpose.

Unfolding the Remedy:

With an array of help desk systems offering enhanced customer support facilities, small business enterprises can choose a system that has features compatible with their organizational setting. Apart from the basic requirement of installing a web based system with the essential plugins, the core functionality should be focused on attaining optimum customer satisfaction. Categorization of queries sent by customers helps in proper delegation and coordination of tasks among support staff. Customer support is never complete without the scope for knowledge gaining & knowledge sharing in the organization. The support system that provides an updated database on related issues helps solve similar queries in lesser time. A reliable help desk system will surely gain the goodwill of many a customers. An effective support system will broaden the scope of growth and profitability for small business concerns.

Help Desk Pilot is a complete web based help desk software with an amiable user-interface and enables organizations to effectively maintain customer support and service. This is a flagship product of Tenmiles Corporation.

Critical Facts You Need to Know Before Choosing a Hosting Company

By Sean Breslin

Which Web host You Choose; Will impact on your webhosting experience and your wallet, quick point here cheaper is not better sorry but the phrase " You get what you pay for " is very true in the world of website hosting. This can be a hard lesson and one I personally would rather You avoided and with a little due diligence You can!

Avoid companies with a server in the back room and a get rich quick scheme based on Your online future

Avoid cheap companies who charge extra for services that are standard with a decent hosting package

Uptime Speed and Reliability

Ideally You want a hosting service that owns and maintains its own equipment in a purpose built dedicated facility with back up power, and data back up with state of the art safety systems ( back up data in a different location )

Most hosts boast of high speeds and reliability, can it be independently verified? (ie; uptime witness)

Resellers and Affiliates

Lots of hosting services are operated by resellers. This is where it gets difficult are they part of a larger company and have rebranded with their own pricing structure and the parent company deals with support issues or do they themselves deal with support issues, the question then is can they? and when? can you find them when things have gone pear shaped

Support

Can Your hosting company choice give you a good prompt efficient and effective support system look for: Ticket Submission and ideally Free Live video Support, It is out there and is the support 24/7/365

Have they got video tutorials to guide you on all aspects of your new service? the cpanel fantastico etc

Do they offer a trial period Yes! then check them out, Do They Walk The Talk !

Equipment and Operating Systems

Are they up to date, are they compatible with your needs, will they be able to run and understand the modern scripts you may wish to use for your membership sites etc You know what You need and the systems you require at more advanced levels.

My point in adding the above paragraph is that you may be new to hosting now, but make yourself future proof get a great host that can accommodate your future needs as you progress online.

Access and Control

Do you get a control panel, cpanel with fantastico and elefante etc ( Not always check ) even if you don't know what they are You want them You need it! FTP access don't know what it is doesn't matter You want it You need it!

Email, how much and what kind can you add forwarders aliases' is there web mail ( horde squirrel etc ) don't know what they are it doesn't matter again You want it You need it!

Are there tutorials on getting the most out of all these new fangled wotsits at your disposal now You want your hosting online to be easy

I will stop writing now this article is long enough truly I could write thousands of more words on choosing hosts for Your website but we have lives to live, (and I have to do the shopping for Sunday dinner now )

Just think a little please and do a few checks all the above are good pointers If the company that you choose has all the above chances are you have picked a winner and it will have all the other features of a great hosting company.

I wish you all the best online, who knows one day we may be J.V partners on a project, that would be good!

Sean is a keen member of the online Marketing Comunity happy to share information and resources with other online marketers. http://www.easysitehostingonline.com

Free Web Hosting Or Paid Web Hosting

By Ryu Ken

It is web site hosts that allow you to make your web site accessible. Today there are a lot of web hosting companies. The two main types of hosting services that are available today are free and paid.

Free web site hosting services allow you to upload your web site content without any cost. This is great for people who are new to the Internet. These hosts will put ads and banners on your web page so that they can make money to pay for the service that they are offering you for free.

There is one main advantage to using this type of hosting: You do not have to pay for displaying a small amount of content online to a small number of people. Plus, most of these services offer you integrated, easy tools to use in uploading your web pages to your hosting account. The reason why they offer these tools is because they realize that most of the people who use their services are newbies.

Of course, there are also some disadvantages to using free web hosting services. Another disadvantage is that most free web sites' URLs start with the web site hosting company's name, then your web site's name. Then your space is also limited.

Paid web site hosting companies obviously require you to pay them a fee. This fee varies from one company to the next. These companies are best suited for professional web site owners who need a lot of space for their web site and who expect a high number of visitors. You will also be able to place ads and banners on your web site so that you can earn the money that they bring in. Plus you will not have to have a web site hosting company's name as a part of your domain name.

Visit our how to build a website to learn website building tips. How to build a website

What About Web Hosting Uptime?

By Phil Anderson

The term Uptime in web hosting refers to the time where the website is up and running. It is vital in evaluating the reliability of the website.

For your information, there are 2 kinds of uptime when it comes to web hosting. One is what we called the Network Uptime and the other one is known as the Server Uptime.

The availability of the network provides the uptime for the website. Usually, this network is located in data centers with powerful internet connection. Therefore, it will provide stable network for the websites to assure that the websites hosted are working perfectly fine. For the servers to be located in the data center, we called it the network uptime.

For the servers located outside a data center, it is known as the server uptime. This is also important as it will determine whether you website works properly or not.

Therefore, even though you have your website place under network uptime you might be 100% safe. In shared web hosting, nearly all uptime is under this network uptime category and in the industry today, the standard uptime provided is 99.9%. So, to have you website kept being in uptime all the time, it is going to cost a bit because companies will charge you for this reliable service.

To find a reliable web hosting in shared web hosting isn't really difficult but you have really test it out to find out their uptime reliability. Most provider provide 30 days money back guarantee. So you can really try out their service to see whether is it acceptable or not. Other ways to find out which host really performs is to read reviews.

Another way to test the uptime of a web hosting company is to do a 3rd party monitoring. You can do it here: http://www.siteuptime.com/. This is very useful if you are testing out the company. Once you get the results, you can proceed and ask for a refund if you are not satisfied with the results.

In case that you find some websites that claim that they know the uptime of hosting companies, you can just ignore them because they are probably just scammers trying to cheat you so that you fall in to their trap. There are thousands of servers in a data center. It is kind of impossible to monitor the uptime for a thousand servers yet alone know which website is hosted from which server. So if you see the reports from such website, it may only be a data from one or 2 domains hosted in a data center. Although it could be a reference, you should still read through as many reviews you can find to determine the uptime of a web hosting company.

Many who search for web hosting will come to the big name in web hosting - Lunarpages. At the time of writting, their web hosting plan offers unlimited bandwidth and disk storage space with less than $5 per month. Sure, the offer sounds like a great bargain! But is Lunarpages good? Check out Lunarpages web hosting service and compare them with other major web host at LunarpagesSecretRevealed.com. Article by Phil Anderson.

Website Hosting Guide - How to Switch Your Web Host With Zero Down Time

By Phil Anderson

One of the scariest problems that we have with our website is the drop of performance. This often happens when your website needs greater service in places like storage or bandwidth. During this kind of situation, there is no need for panic because we can simply switch from one hosting to another hosting. There are no worries when you think of this procedure because the internet is very powerful at redirecting the websites. All you have to do is select which sort of package you need so that you website will have a better performance, no downtime and it will be virtually be ready in your new hosting in just one day.

Before you start the switch from the old host to the new one, you should backup all your information and files. Ensure that you have everything backup because all the files that you backup will be the content of your website with the new hosting. You should also backup the database from the old website. Make sure you even backup the database which is still under testing as well. To be extra sure of your content, you should make a list of all the files that you have backup o paper so that you have a written record. It is better to take precaution so that you will be able to know the location of the files when you want o find it. Details like passwords, login is very important. Therefore, make sure you have all the information.

You can keep you backup data in storage or you could even have it place in a CD or DVD. This is a safety measure taken so that you have the backup even when your website has totally gone crazy. The new host which you register will provide you with a domain name server. So, it is most likely that you will get 2 DNS for you to redirect you website. You must remember this DNS because this combination is the key to connect to your new website. Just write it down to be safe.

Next, you will probably have to make a duplicate of the email account on your new hosting. This configuration is simple but make sure that you record all the required details like username, SMTP server, pop server, IMAP server and the ports that they are using. The port is important because most of the host will usually change the port for the use of the email.

Once you have settled everything with the new host, all you have left to do next is to upload all you backed up files on to the new host. You should have your new folders copied over he old ones. It is up to you to keep you files organize and similar to the structure of the old website. This will help you to maintain so that you won't run into confusion state with all the information overloading in you mind. Having said that, bear in mind that the old website is actually still running. The only things is when people go to your website, it will be redirected to your new website in the new host.

After all your data is copied, you must create a replication of any database that is created in the old website. The idea is like making a mirror of the old website on to the new website. When we enter the new DNS address into the old website's setting, everything will be seamless. Therefore, we need everything on the new host to be as close as possible to the one in the old host. When this is done, you will have all of your data backed up. You will also have the new DNS server address to each your website on the new host. The database on your new host is also created with the same information as the database on the old host. Now, you are ready to put up a notice in your website using the old host notifying your visitors that you are currently updating the website. Also inform that any errors are temporary as your system will be back up running in not time.

Now is the time to point your old website to the new website in the new host. You must find you DNS settings in the control panel of the web host. Proceed to enter the new web host's DNS primary address and DNS2 as the secondary. You should be able to find your DNS easily in the control panel. If you face any problems, please contact the administrator of the web host company and they will be able to assist you in this matter.

After you entered the new DNS server address, it will usually take up to 24 hours for the DNS to work out in the internet. In this time-length, there is a probability that your website will go down. Usually for around 5 to 10 minutes at most. If you are lucky, you won't experience any downtime at all.

So, after completing all the procedures, you have successfully transferred you website from the old host to the new host. Once the DNS completely resolves, you can proceed with the demolition of your old website.

Many who search for web hosting will come to the big name in web hosting - Bluehost. At the time of writing, their web hosting plan offers unlimited bandwidth and disk storage space with less than $7 per month. Sure, the offer sounds like a great bargain! But is Bluehost recommended? Review Bluehost web hosting service and compare them with other major web host at BlueHostSecretRevealed.com. Article by Phil Anderson.

Things to Know Before Buying a Web Host

By Phil Anderson

A website is made out of many web pages. For a person who wants to build his website, all they have to do once they have their web pages ready is to get a hosting company and buy their services so that he can get a domain name registered for his brand new website. To get a good web hosting services, you should really do a research on all the companies available to find which one that is more suitable for your website needs. You may need better performance in a certain criteria of a web hosting, therefore, choose whichever hosting company that suits you the most.

For any great hosting company, they must have a great uptime. This is very important so that your website is always available in the internet. The availability of you website is important so that it can be reach anytime. It will be irritating if your website often experience interruption, slow loading time and so on. When this happens, it will do you no good and you loose credibility to your viewers or customers if you are running a business related website. Usually, a reputable company will provide money back guarantee on their availability service. So, do not choose any company out there which doesn't have this feature.

To have your website running smooth, you must have a high uptime and a high traffic support so that you're the people who access your internet gets to your website very quickly. In the industry today, the standard uptime for a good hosting company would be 99% for as long as 87.6 hours. 100% uptimes are sort of impossible and if you come across a company that offers that, stay away from them because they are most likely to be scammers. For traffic support, the industry today is in gigabit per second standard. Therefore, if you are expecting a huge amount of traffic to your website, make sure you have that level of traffic support. The traffic support is usually very high in shared hosting plans.

Another important factor to bear in mind for a good hosting company is their customer support services. A good customer support is only considered good if they can provide 24 hours a day, seven days a week customer support via phone, email and even interactive chat. It is important that the company can assign a technical agent or assistant to help you troubleshoot your problems if they occur to get your website back up and running. The faster they can restore your website, the better their customer service are.

Nevertheless, besides the customer support, website owners would definitely want a website with ample disk space. Nowadays, hosting companies are providing a lot of space in their packages to stay in contention or to stay in business. Therefore, this is good news for consumers because they can benefit from this. This disk space should have the option of upgrade. This is very important because there will be a time when your website needs to upgrade when you gain popularity. So make sure the hosting provider possess this feature to make things easier for you in the long run.

To have all these features, customers will still consider the one most important factor that helps them decide. We are talking about the price. Some providers could provide very cheap rates and some affordable while other cost a little more. Therefore, it really depends on the preferences of the person on how he wants his website and what are the features that he desires most. Lastly, we should look out for added value service from the hosting company. See if they provide automated script development tools which you can add to your website. Check out whether do they have added service like gallery thumbnail feature, visitor tracking, forum support and so on.

Many who search for web hosting will come to the big name in web hosting - Bluehost. At the time of writing, their web hosting plan offers unlimited bandwidth and disk storage space with less than $7 per month. Sure, the offer sounds like a great bargain! But is Bluehost recommended? Review Bluehost web hosting service and compare them with other major web host at BlueHostSecretRevealed.com. Article by Phil Anderson.

Implementing Google Apps in Your Web Host

By Phil Anderson

In the midst of the ever evolving web hosting industry, customers or website builders would like to get on the internet with their website to make a presence in the huge world of the internet. Many would like to begin by choosing a free web hosting option.

Today, Google provides a simple and easy way to create you own website and have it available for search in Google with their Google Apps. Google Apps is a web based application that allows users to build, maintain and upgrade when you feel the need to. It is very simple to operate because it does not require any server maintenance at all. All you have to do is to upload your content and it will be ready for visitors to see.

By using Google Apps, you could serve the application from your own domain or have it served with a free domain name from appspot.com domain. It is free to use Google Apps. All you need to do is to sign up and you are good to go. By using the free account, you will get up to 500MB of disk space. As for the bandwidth, the exact amount that you will receive is undisclosed. However, the company does have a bandwidth claiming that they can provide 5 millions of pages being viewed per month.

The features that Google Apps provide are the ability to have a website hosted in a high volume environment with a huge amount of content. This is definitely a better option than any other free web hosting available in the market. They provide a complete support for the most common web technologies available today. They also have an automated scaling and load balancing function, authentication system for authorizing users and a local environment which easily run the simulation of the Google Apps on your PC.

Google Apps provides a Datastore function which works like the mySQL. It is data service distribution for search engine as well as other transactions. With your data expanding, this Datastore will also expand. This data is not an average database because the data objects in it will have a specific filter and properties. Therefore, when search query is done, your properties will match to the specific search more efficiently.

The Datastore also includes the Python API that allows modeling and interface. This function can be use to define your entities to match a certain structure of data. However, the Datastore system does have a few disadvantages because it only supports Python programming language. Increased efforts have been put by Google to make it available for more scripts in the near future. This limitation will proof to be a negative issue for skilled programmers because they have limited sources to build the ideal website which they want to build. Another problem is the frequent Internal Server error that many users have to put up with. This problem apparently has a connection with the problem of hosting under your own domain name. Based on reports, Google does not provide a satisfactory answer or solution regarding the reason for these common problems.

In any case, this free web hosting provided by Google Apps is only at its beginning. You can say that it is on preview status or testing period. Eventually, they will launch paid hosting plan for the customers to stay in competition with the aggressive market in this industry.

Looking for an affordable web hosting service? Then you must check out Hostmonster hosting at HostmonsterSecretRevealed.com! Review Hostmonster service and compare Hostmonster hosting packages with other web host. Article by Phil Anderson.

7 Things You Must Consider Before You Start Your Internet Business With a Free Web Hosting Services

By Nizzura Sofea

Choosing a web host is not easy, and you will have to consider the background of your website in the process. The characteristics of a free web host and a commercial web host are not entirely similar. A free web host is good enough if your website is more of a personal or experimental site without commercial basis.

There are different categories of free web hosts, such as those with PHP support, free domain hosting, free sharing hosts or free video hosting. Your choice of a web host depends on the purpose and requirements of your website.

For a free web host, the characteristics are:

Advertisement- most of the free web host is providing their hosting service free, but with some conditions applied. They require some amount of space on your website for advertisements or pop-up windows to advertise the sponsors. Thus if you are signing up for a free web host, be prepared to sacrifice some of the space for advertisement.

Amount of web space-there is a limited amount of web space for your website. The needs vary according to the types of media used, such as images or video clips. Usually, websites use less than 5MB of web space. If you are using simple designs, it is unlikely that you will use up this limit.

FTP access- this is an important must-have element. It is the ability to upload your pages vy browser or email. There are some free web hosts that only allow designing your website with their online builder. Although this is really helpful for beginners, it is the barrier for advanced expansion of your website. They might not be providing facilities for experienced users.

Types of files and size- free web hosts might impose a maximum size of each of the files or the types of the files to be uploaded.

Speed of access- you risk of losing your loyal visitors and traffic if the website is always down or very slow in page-loading. It is very frustrating when visitors have to wait for such a long time before your page can be fully loaded. Worse still, if the host is unreliable, your website may be inaccessible and one who is intending to visit your website will have to look for other websites.

Bandwidth allowance- most of the free web hosts restrict the amount of traffic your website can use daily and monthly. Once the limit is reached, your website will be disabled and you might receive a bill for that. The bandwidth that your website uses varies according to its usage and the number of traffic.

PHP or CGI-BIN access- there are a lot of free CGI hosting services such as search engines, forms, polls, mailing lists or counters for your website without the need for you to do these yourself. But if you want to do it yourself, you require either PHP or CGI-BIN access. However you must know the kind of environment that your scripts are running under.

You must be very careful while choosing for a free web host. Read thoroughly for the offers, limitations and even reviews by the experienced available on the Internet. If the offers and terms are not what you need, go for other web host with better offer. Again, free web host is most suitable for personal websites and not commercial websites.

Nizzura is a full time internet marketer and has helped hundreds of Internet marketers create wealth from their own online business using various free traffic tactics, secrets and techniques. Click here to find out how: http://FreeMoneyMethod.com The author grants full reprint rights to this article. You may reprint and electronically distribute this article so long as its contents remain unchanged, and the author's byline remains in place.

Web Hosting For Small Enterprise

By Justin Knights

There are many web hosting plans and company out there for business owners to choose from. There are large and also small companies that will need different needs in their website. A large business may need larger features to support the amount of data and transaction which will go through their website. A small website will need different needs and if their use web hosting design for a large enterprise, they will be over paying for their website. So, small enterprise or business will have to determine the features that they need in order to find and choose the proper web hosting for them.

For a business, the website is a marketing tool and the tool must work properly so that they can benefit the most out of it. Therefore, the technical support of the web hosting company is very important as it will assess to any problems that they website may suffer. It will do no good for the website to have problems. However, we cannot be 100% confident that errors never happen. Therefore, when these problems occur, we need a good technical support to fix the problem in the shortest time possible. A web hosting with great technical support will be able to provide 24 hours a day seven days a week of support. They will answer to your problem at the fastest speed possible.

Next, business owners that want to have a website should look out for the software that is used by the web hosting company. There are some software that is suitable for small business and other software that suits other types of online business. Therefore, we must know what sort of software is being use by the web hosting company of our choice. Usually, the software for a small business will have shopping cart software. Most web hosting company provides a software called Fantastico. Fantastico is software that allows user to install different types of software to be used on their website easily.

Then, we should also think of the editing tools. Some web hosting company provides user friendly design and editing tools. If we are using Microsoft Frontpage, we must make sure that the web hosting company supports Frontpage extensions. The web hosting should also provide other script languages like PHP, ASP and Perl. As for the smoothness of the website, we should look for web hosting companies with great uptime. A good web hosting company will be able to provide 99.9% of uptime. Not only that, we must also study the information about their data centre and the stability of their internet connection.

Lastly, as we are running a business, we need ensure reliability to our customer. Therefore we need the website to be reliable to achieve that. Look for reputable web hosting companies. Check out reviews to know how the companies stand among its competition. There are also reviews from magazines that we can refer to. We should also check the company status to ensure that it is not a scam company. This can be done by checking the Internet Better Business Bureau. We can also look for certified logo or seal of awards won by the web hosting company to make sure that there is a reliable company. There are many scam reviews out there, so we must be extremely careful to check from different sources. If the information does not match, there is a probability that the company might be a hoax company.

Looking for affordable web hosting? Then you can't afford to miss Lunarpages. Review Lunarpages web hosting: You'll see how you can get 15,000/1,500 GB bandwidth/disk storage in less than $5 with them. More details on Lunarpages Secret Revealed. Article written by Justin Knights.