Being successful in any growing business means being opened to changes. Every person should follow a well-analysed business model in order to decide how big their company is permitted to become. Should it remain a small business or should the growth-to-the-sky become a target of that person, that’s the question. Of course, this succession of decisions is only on owner’s hands so it should be well thought before put in practice. Not being flexible in a service based business will not lead you to anything good, as the persons and industries needing your service always will be on the move, meaning that they’ll always have dynamic requirements and needs.

Let’s consider, for an example, that you manage a small business that offers only basic website hosting services. As a business like this one, things are going well, you have a satisfying number of customers that pay every month for hosting and for their website development, adding some SEO flavor, writing fresh content etc. Your company is running fine and money come, why shouldn’t you be happy? But at a given time in the future, some of your customers decide to go with the internal email server off-site and think why do should pay fees to two companies that offer hosting services when they are able to transfer the corporate email and web services on just one server, with a smaller amount of money involved. Others decide to grow their business and hire some webmasters to do the work, even move their websites on a dedicated servers, so no longer needing your services. Yes, that’s an ugly side of a small hosting business, but in this industry, for some very low reasons, your business can go down and become out-of-date in barely 5-6 months. Just like that. Read more…

Shared web hosting and its advantages

Shared web hosting is yet the most favorite type of hosting and this is for a reason – shared web hosting provides very much with a decent cost. Furthermore, for numerous users shared web hosting is the perfect type of web hosting.
For whom is shared web hosting suitable?

Shared web hosting is the greatest alternative for webhosting in many situations. Shared web hosting is an extraordinary selection for everyone who is searching effective, low-volume hosting with lower costs involved.

1. Individuals. It’s veracious that numerous bloggers succeed to bring a lot of hits and traffic to their web site only that for the majority of individuals, who are seeking a location to host their tiny blogs or own sites, shared hosting with its storage and bandwidth supplied, paired with small monthly fees, is the most effective choice for webhosting.
2. Small-scale web sites. Besides individuals, modest company sites are additional good prospects for shared hosting since their bandwidth demands are lower as well and the reduced monthly fees are more than welcome.

Learning how to use shared hosting

If you are inexperienced in web hosting, it could look as a difficult task to discover how to utilize shared hosting. Even so, the truth is that determining how to use shared hosting is not problematic at all.
In many instances, you will not need any conventional schooling. Only study the papers and keep an eye on the videos your web hosting provider supplies and you will be able to catch the tricks of the basic skills you require so that you will turn into the webmaster of your shared hosting account.

Shared Web Hosting’s characteristics

While we say that shared web hosting is bargain-priced webhosting, this does not imply that its quality is lower or crappy. Shared web hosting is low-priced as you share one and the same server with more other users and this is certainly more inexpensive than setting out your personal dedicated server. Shared hosting just utilises efficaciously the existent server resources and this is what drags its costs lower, not the deficiency of features. Shared web hosting does provide complete features for a modest web site/private blog’s demands and here are few of those:

Enough amount of space and bandwidth. You could find numerous shared web hosting offerings that include GBs of storage and GBs of bandwidth monthly. For 90% of the modest web sites, the monthly amount of bandwidth is much more than they will deplete in 12 months.
Decent costs. With monthly fees in the single digits (and often even more inferior than $4-5), price is a major advantage of shared web hosting.
cPanel, Fantastico, and other admin instruments that make a webmaster’s life easy. Nearly most web hosting vendors include a large variety of admin tools in their shared web hosting offers.
Technical support and back up. Once you pay for a shared web hosting plan, you are eligible to gratis technical support also. This means you have someone to address to once you are stuck with an issue regarding web hosting.

Shared web hosting is a true deal – you pay a few bucks and you obtain dozens of features. You can kickoff with shared web hosting and if your web site turns into a high-traffic one, you will always be able to migrate to a greater plan with additional storage space and bandwidth.

In the world of Web Hosting, we see there are many hosting providers offering different types of hosting solutions. The different types of hosting services offered these days are Free Hosting, Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Colocation Hosting etc. Many new web users get attracted towards the adverts about the Free Web Hosting. They are quite impressed to own a website for free and see it as a good way to get started however in the real hosting world, it’s not always best to be hosted on free hosting plans. Let’s take a look and learn the advantages of choosing a low cost affordable web hosting plan over free web hosting.

Domain Name: You must be aware about the importance of a domain name. Your visitors know about your business online only through its domain name. If you are hosted on a free hosting plan you are forced to use a URL like http://www.examplefreehostingprovider.com/yourusername. Unlike a paid for hosting provider, you can’t have your own domain name nor can you select the domain name of your own choice. Therefore, if you want to give anyone the URL of your website, you have to give this subpage domain name which will leave a bad impression and unprofessional opinion of your website and in turn, your company. If you want to transfer your website to any other hosting provider, you are not able to host your website on the same domain name. So, if you already have done with the marketing part of your domain and SEO optimisation and are now planning for the transfer to another host, then you are back to square one. You lose your traffic, page ranking and therefore business very quickly.

Unwanted Advertisement: Though it seems to be free hosting, the hosting provider place many unwanted advertisements on your website which it will be paid for. These advertisements will have no limit on the space they allocate, the place where they would be placed on your website etc. This would not let you place your own banners, advertisements on your webpage. You also have no choice as to the type of banners or adverts that appear.

Less Features: You do not always have enough privileges to host the webpages created using PHP, Java etc. You are sometimes tied to a few default templates provided by the hosting provider. You can not always host your databases on these free hosting packages.  If it is a business website then you might face many issues with these hosting providers. With most you do not get any online shopping cart, SSL certificate etc. to manage your online business.

Lack of support: You do not get enough support to host your website. Even if the server goes down, there would be no clarification about what exactly the issue is. You have to wait for hours and sometime days to get your site up and running. Even if you raise ticket for any issues with the server/website, it is not guaranteed that your email would be answered.

There is no one to monitor these servers on regular basis. Hence, you may find these free hosting servers getting crashed each now and then due to spam and illegal activities. How nightmare it would be to lose your important data in a minute or two! You do not any chance to get it restored or at least get a backup. For these reasons, I would always prefer to spend few pennies for affordable or low cost hosting instead of considering free web hosting providers.

The World Wide Web is quite a new place for everyone who puts his first step here. Every person that is willing to have a successful “relation” with this environment should first do some deep analyzes related to this matter. That also applies for those who are in search for a web hosting plan. The encountered terms, plans, hosting types and so on must not be something unknown for that very person.

The best place to start for getting familiar with hosting is from its very basic. Every feature that comes with a plan, every plan that comes with a cost and every term bumped into should be something a new user must be aware of. These being said, let’s start with the first term, exactly the “web hosting”.

Web hosting is the way to make a website accessible to the Internet users. For this, web hosting companies use servers – some powerful computers on which a website content is held – that can belong to those vendors or even being leased.
So how many types of host categories can a person find when searching for this information?

First, there are the free hosts. Those might be a good choice for those that do not need many features or a lot of bandwith. Put this simple: this is not for professionals but for those that see a website as a hobby of them. For example, blogs can be well hosted on free servers. However, deciding on a free host the user will not gain full benefits from support, performance or trustworthyness.

Next, there is the shared hosting. This service is quite common among small and medium businesses, as well as among personal websites. The costs vary a lot from as low as ₤1/month to even ₤15-₤20 monthly. The “shared host” term comes from the fact that one single server is used by a large number of websites, so that all its features are distributed to every single user. With more sites added to the server, the performance, bandwith and other features are going down. A golden rule would be that price is rising according to the number of websites hosted so that if a customer is searching for a server that hosts fewer sites than the rest, then he should expect to pay higher fees monthly.

The dedicated hosting, on the other hand, is the most flexible and reliable solution, meant to deliver best services to large companies or sites with high number of visits. In this situation, a rented server serves one single customer that can create multiple websites, have total control over it or even grow its own hosting company. The price range for dedicated hosting has gone down nowadays, a person might find a good option starting at prices even lower than ₤40/month.
Almost similar to dedicated hosting, the collocated hosting differentiates from the first one by the fact that the customer actually owns the server used for this purpose. The costs are bigger while the customer must provide a data centre where the server will be located.

The last important type of hosting is the reseller hosting. There are other available like data hosting or email hosting, but those will not be subject to our post while their importance is minimal. The reseller hosting describes the situation when vendors resell a server’s storage to customers at a lower price than the average.

We have now a minimal knowledge about available hosting plans, let’s move further the discussion to domain names. Every website’s name is actually a set of numbers, named the IP, but how would someone be supposed to remember an address like 74.220.215.224? Here is where domain names make their entrance, for a person to easily remember any website’s name.

Whenever a folk is searching for a hosting plan, will definitely hit upon terms like storage, bandwith, database, server type and others. Space on server, or storage, has a great role in a website progress while depending on how large it is the user can host more files, images, databases, videos etc. One will find storage as low as 5MB for free hosts or nowadays even unlimited for shared or dedicated servers.

In the same time, offered bandwith can vary from, let’s say 100MB/month to unlimited for different servers, although finding a host that offers unlimited storage and bandwith at low prices is not a hard task anymore. Bandwith refers to the quantity of information transferred from server to browsers, whenever someone is browsing a webpage of that particular site. Of course, if the website provides audio or video content, the bandwith consumed will be much higher than in the case of having only text with some images, so bigger is definitely better, in our case.

The operating systems that run the server can vary from Windows to Linux or UNIX. Windows based servers are quite more expensive than Linux one; other major difference would be that Windows web servers run ASP/ASP.net with Access/SQL databases while Linux web servers run usually CGI/PHP with MySQL/Oracle databases.

However, what are those ASP, MySQL terms mean? Well, the first term refers to server side scripting, and PHP is one of the most preferred one due to the large number of open source scripts available. Although new users prefer PHP, more professional webmasters usually choose ASP.NET, CGI or PERL while the limitations in characteristics are fewer than in PHP case. Like in the server side scripting case, for databases most users go with MySQL, while larger companies/businesses actually need more potent databases like Oracle or SQL Server.

When we speak about free hosting plans, these usually come without an important feature needed by personal or business websites, the email. Depending on the paid hosting plan chosen, the number of email accounts a person is able to create gets from 10, for cheaper ones, to unlimited email accounts, for bigger hosting plans.

For uploading/downloading new material to or from the website, a person must use the File Transfer Protocol, also known as FTP, through a FTP client. Usually hosting companies provide an username and password to gain access to the web server; a free and good option as FTP client would be FileZilla.

One very important aspect of a hosting plan is the control panel. This is an online application provided by the vendors for helping the users managing FTP accounts, domains, websites, view traffic and many other vital information. One popular control panel application widely spread is cPanel, although lately more and more merchants have started to create their personal control panel apps.

It is crucial when someone goes with a hosting plan to look-up for the period the website is live, or the uptime. It does not matter how many features the company offers or how cheap the plan is if the website is not available to visitors most of the time. That is why when choosing a hosting plan it is best to choose one that offers an uptime period higher than 99.9%.

To end with, most people searching for a hosting plan usually go with very cheap plans, however that is not a best practice. The costs these days can vary from as low as ₤2/month to even ₤500 or higher fees, but it all depends on the purpose of the website. It is clear that a large company will not go with a ₤15/month hosting plan, nor a person to a ₤250/month for a single person, although there are some exceptions online. The price range is wide, in the end choosing a plan depends on each person’s/business’ needs.

Web hosting companies offer, among many other features, control panels with graphic interface and automation tools aiming to deliver users an easier experience of hosting a website. There are two types of control panels, the cPanel and Spanel, both doing almost the same thing but with slightly little differences that we will talk about.

The main differences are that each is developed by a different manufacturer and the interface between those two.

Spanel is created by PT Master Web Network and it is a control panel based on Unix. As interface, the Spanel features a simple web interface and the bandwith is represented only by text, for delivering a more simple version of those sophisticated bandwith tools. Among many other feature the Spanel is able to show a 12 weeks browsable backups history that can be restored at any time in that period and as for security, a CGI scripts security feature.

On the other hand, the cPanel is Linux based and provides functionality and increases usability for three different categories of users : websites owners, agents and admins. With only the Internet browser and the cPanel, anyone with access to it can control and modify diferent things related to website administration.

To conclude, both share the main purpose : to allow administration of a web hosting package in an easier way, with the help of user-friendly software tools.