Top 5 Must Have Web Hosting Plan Features

There are hundreds of Web Hosting companies providing thousands of web hosting plans making it difficult to choose the plan with the right features. Have you ever thought of what features that you want in a hosting plan or are you the one who choose their plans based on price. Well even if you choose your hosting plan based on money terms, look out for the following top five features.

These are the must have features in any web hosting plan, without them you might hit a dead end, ah sometimes. So if you are serious about your online business or even your blog, then you wouldn’t compromise on not having these web hosting features.

Now lets dig deep and find the “Top 5 Must Have Web Hosting Plan Features” that you should have in your next hosting plan :

Unlimited Disk Space: When possible, always choose the Web Hosting plan with unlimited disk storage or space. This will be useful when you need to add more content to your website or want to add social features such as photo gallery or videos online.

Unlimited Transfers: choosing unlimited monthly transfers or bandwidth in your Web Hosting plan will ensure that you have enough capacity to attract large volumes of users and very useful when you target larger audience.

Server Uptime: it is imperative that your visitors must be able to see your website at all time. So having a Web Hosting plan with guaranteed uptime is the lifeline of your website. Hosting plan with anything below 99.9% (0.1% is act of god) should never be chosen.

24 Hrs Support: service and quick support at all times gives your business peace of mind. When choosing a Web Hosting plan choose one with 24 hrs support be it phone, email or even live chat support. This will help you fix things when it doesn’t go your way.

Avoid Long Term Contract: web hosting plan should be flexible and affordable. The plan should not commit your business to long periods. You should be able to upgrade or change your hosting company when it suits you. Contracts less than 1 or 2 years are appropriate lengths. One should be aware that monthly plans are bit expensive.

You should also consider your own business needs and financial circumstances when considering the above features. Always choose a hosting plan that suits your need.

Top 10 Web Hosting Features and Services

Setting up your own website would be impossible if you will not seek the help of a good web hosting company. This article will help you choose by giving some tips about the top 10 web hosting features and services that you should look for in a company to make sure that you are getting the best value for your money. This is also a good way to help your site benefit from the hosting services that you will choose.

The first one that is on the list of top 10 web hosting features is reliability. This is very easy to understand since all website owners would not want their website to experience a long downtime period where their site will be temporarily inaccessible to anyone who wants to gain access like your customers and visitors. If your site would have many downtime periods, customers might just go to another site that offers the same products and services as yours. Secure your traffic and customers by going for a web hosting company that could offer 99% uptime guaranteed.

The second to the list of top 10 web hosting features and services is the customer service. For some, this is not very important but they are just wrong. Website owners, especially those who just possess the basic knowledge about how to run a website or those who are new to online business, are more likely to encounter some troubles and problems regarding their sites and it would be very helpful if you could get immediate help, support and assistance from your hosting company’s friendly staff. They should be able to provide quick response to their clients in a friendly manner.

The price or the cost made it to the 3rd spot of the top 10 web hosting features and services because this is one of the major things that people consider when choosing a web hosting provider. Opt for a company that could offer the best services for a price that is competitive and affordable. The disk space and the bandwidth size also made it to the top 10 web hosting features because you will want to make your website more interesting and appealing to customers and visitors so you will have to put images or videos that will catch the attention of visitors and will encourage them to explore more. You should also have enough spaces to accommodate all your files and emails.

The top 10 web hosting features would not be complete without security. Customers would usually prefer to purchase from sites that displays an image or an icon that sends out a message that transactions done through your site would be safe and secure. Another thing to consider is the control panel. The web hosting provider should be able to provide you with an easy to control panel. They should explain everything clearly to you if necessary to make sure that you will have little to no trouble running and managing your site.

The reputation of the company can also be considered as one of the top 10 web hosting features because this will give you peace of mind. You will be confident that you are getting the best services because that company has already served lots of clients that are leaving positive feedbacks or reviews about their services. You must not forget the tools and applications that these companies are willing to offer like a script or a site building tool that could really be helpful to every website owner. PHP, Joomla, Ruby on Rails are also good additions to their services. The last things that have made it to the top 10 web hosting features and services are freebies, extras, and bonuses.

Advanced Features of Virtual Private Servers

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VPS hosting is established between the shared and dedicated hosting. This is the best alternative option for online business who requires extra resources on a server. In this hosting plan, you get as much similar benefits of having a dedicated server while being less expensive than dedicated server. In general, as VPS use the technique of partitioning the physical server into several (virtual) servers, all having independent operating systems.

 

 

Web site owners who are looking for great aspects associated with better control over the management website. Only VPS hosting is most measures than any other type of web hosting because of its security it provides. Root server access is the main advantage of dedicated hosting though shared hosting can be cheap and dedicated can be costly.

 

 

In a VPS Hosting plan is very workable to have sandboxes contain up to two virtual servers with a single physical server. Hosting two sites on the same server also provides the convenience of making changes to both interference with practice. The biggest advantage of VPS hosting over other servers either an individual or a company is that its data can be customized in any way with all the add on features.

 

 

The virtual private servers are specially made to create bridge and fully grown economies of shared hosting and dedicated hosting the big budget is now a reality. The biggest positive aspect of virtual private server is its instantaneous speed that comes into contact with other servers easy. No one access your confidential information because server to be private and completely locked. It is therefore possible to enjoy a higher level of an independent status the website at an affordable price.

 

 

The online community is now abuzz with the concept of virtualization. The biggest advantage of going into virtual private servers are the cost-effectiveness. Although the performance of these servers are very dynamic and parallel to dedicated servers, it is much profitable than any other server. The planning and implementation of tasks becomes quite unpretentious that activity in RAM is divided into small pieces for convenience. Most web developers and web master have become charmed by the kind of ease and convenience offered by these private servers. Although it is quite possible that VPS hosting can be run on the Windows platform once can also make use of the platforms and Linux or UNIX.

 

Five Features You Need for Successful Web Hosting

So you need hosting for that great website you have planned. You did the obligatory Google search and found out there are a gazillion web hosting companies. They all are offering what you need (web hosting) and you found the price varies from free to sky’s the limit. You also found that there are a ton of features some of which you have no idea of what they are. So now what you thought was going to be an easy task has just turned into a semester of study at your local junior college. Well believe me I know what you’re going through. Through trail, error and mistake I have learned that not all web hosting is created equal. While there area ton of features and hosting plans offered by web hosting companies, there are five basics factors you will want to make sure you are getting when selecting your hosting provider.   

1. Databases
Be sure you are getting ample databases to support and expand your website. All blogging, forum, and Websites that use any form of dynamic data applications or capture user data require a database to function. Unfortunately, most shared hosting packages only offer one to five databases; this can limit your ability to expand and may not be enough to carry out the planned functions of your website. The minimum number of databases you should look for is ten. Granted you may not need that many but if you do they will be readily available without spending additional money to add on databases. Usually the higher priced hosing plans offer more databases but you should not have to opt for a more expensive plan to get 10 databases.

2. Multiple Domains
Web hosting companies usually limit the number of domains you can serve from your hosting plan. Some hosting plans, usually the lower cost or free plans, only allow one domain name per plan. If you are for sure you will only have one website then this will be of no consequence. However, if you plan on having multiple websites then you should look for a hosting plan that offers the ability to host multiple sites from a single hosting plan. A hosting plan that offers at least 5 domains is a minimum. You should be aware that the resources of your hosting server will be shared by all domains assigned to the web hosting plan. Make sure the plan you get provides ample disk space, bandwidth and databases to keep multiple sites up and running.    

3. Developer Support
Developer support is the litmus test for any Web host. You may be starting with a simple website but as time goes on many times you may want to add additional functionality or features to your site. Also when adding new websites to your hosting plan additional capabilities may be needed. This is where a hosting provider can easily make or break your plans. If your web hosting provider is limited on developer languages or web application offerings you may have to find a new hosting provider. This is something you do not want to do. Having multiple hosting accounts or hosting providers is a sure way for confusion and frustration. Most hosting companies offer various language support and misc. application support but why not get it all. Yes there are hosting providers that offer everything you will ever need and it doesn’t cost any more.
 
No matter what hosting package you are considering, make sure you are getting the most support possible. Below is a list of the most popular website development items available:

• PHP
• MySQL
• Ruby on Rails
• Python
• CGI
• Perl
• Java
• ASP.net
• Coldfusion
• Frontpage Server Extensions
• Content Managment Tools
• eCommerce Solutions
• Project Management Tools
• Blogs
• Message Board/Forum Tools
• Photo Gallery Tools
• Admin Tools
• Misc. web-site add-ons

4. Customer support
Working late at night on that website, or perhaps on the weekend (Sunday Night)? Got a deadline to get a site up and running but just ran into a problem. Perhaps you just discovered you need an additional web app or database. It can be very frustrating and sometimes costly if you cannot get customer support from your hosting company when you need it (on your schedule). Always look for a web hosting service provider that provides 24×7 customer support. That is 24 hours a day 7 days a week and I don’t mean just Email support. Email support is important and should be part of the customer support package but what you really want is phone support. Many times problems or issues need to be discussed to reach a quick resolution, passing Emails around can takes days or sometimes weeks. Your number one tool for support should be the phone, make sure your web hosting company is awake and working when you are. You will want to make sure there is an on-line knowledgebase as well. Not only is a knowledgebase good for answeering questions, it is also very usefull for use as a learning tool.  

5. Server Uptime
Your website should be up and running 24×7. However things do happen in the real world that can sometimes cause a website to go down. In spite of real world problems, your web hosting provider should offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. With today’s internet technology there are ways to insure websites stay functional virtually every minute of every day. Don’t settle for a hosting company that cannot guarantee your website is up and running around the clock.   

Web hosting is the backbone of the success of your website. While the content of your site is vitally important, any short coming in your web hosting service is sure to translate to failure at your site. The hosting company you start with is most likely the one you will stay with, so take the time to choose the right web hosting company from the start, you’ll be glad you did.     

Functions of Active Server Pages and Their Significant Features

Active Server Pages or ASP is one of the most familiar and commonly known technologies in the IT world. It is a server side technology which is used to display dynamic content on web pages. Active Server Pages was initially launched and established by Microsoft on its web server. It is possible to write code using ASP, which could provide your visitors with unique information, different images and even a totally different page depending upon the kind of browser version used. ASP can be used along with various scripting languages such as PerlScript or JScript. However, it is better to use VBScript as it is the default scripting language.

ASP or Active Server Page is a technology which enables you to create dynamic and interactive web pages. ASP Application development is of great demand on account of its easy interactivity. ASP pages have the extension “.asp”. When a page with the extension .asp is requested by a browser the web server knows to interpret any ASP page contained within the web page before sending the HTML produced to the browser. Any web pages containing ASP cannot run by simply opening the page in a web browser. The page must be requested through a web server that supports ASP, and hence, ASP stands for Active Server Pages.

Active Server Pages or ASP and Hypertext-Pre-Processor are the two standards for web application development. ASP is created and widely distributed to large businesses and corporations. ASP applications are often used primarily on windows-based servers and not on UNIX. This is the reason why ASP is not used much for small and medium sized businesses. InstantASP and ChiliASP are technologies that run ASP without Windows Operating System. In general, ASP applications are good for huge database projects that essentially offer high level of protection for privacy of databases.

ASP web hosting would refer to the services provided by the web hosting companies which offer support for ASP. If a user is browsing on a website which has been developed with the help of ASP, then the pages could be changed based on the user’s actions. This type of code allows linking the pages of your website, in which the users can interact with the pages as they log in using their personal settings. They can also place orders interactively on your website. It also permits the users to access the data from a database, as well as interact with objects like Java components or ActiveX.

VBScript is the default scripting language which is used for writing ASP. Though VBScript is the most common language, a few other scripting languages like Java Script and PerlScript are also used. Any web page containing ASP Application Development cannot run by just viewing the web page in a particular browser. The web page must be requested and demanded through a server. ASP permits to modify a web page dynamically or insert any content in a web page. The major feature and advantage of using the Active Server Page is its low maintenance. An ASP-driven site is much simpler and less complicated than other sites. ASP codlings provide safety and security since the code cannot be observed from the browser.

Yahoo Web Hosting and 5 Great Features That Are Included Free

Are you looking for a reliable Web hosting company that gives you more than other companies? There are a lot of web hosting companies to choose from but they offer wildly different pricing plans and services. Some hosting companies offer free basic service, but you need to sign up for a monthly plan in order to have access to any tools or stats. Some companies offer ala carte pricing but then you end up paying more per month than you need to just to get basic service and tools. Yahoo Web Hosting gives you reliable hosting services and a lot of great free tools and stats that are included in the cost of your monthly plan. For one low monthly fee you get Web hosting from one of the most reliable companies in the business and you also get:

Free Business Email – Create up to 1000 custom email addresses for you business. You get top of the line virus protection, customizable spam filters, and the reliability of Yahoo mail customized for your business. You can access your mail from anywhere there is an Internet connection or you can use programs like Outlook to get your mail on your main business computer. Best of all, your employees can work from home and still get their email because it’s not routed through your own office server.

State of the Art Design – You don’t need to be a graphic designer to create a professional looking website, all you need to do is sign up for Yahoo Web Hosting. You can choose from more than thirty customizable design templates that have been created by Web design professionals. The colors, layout and other features are designed for you to make your website multi-functional, easy to navigate, and great looking.

A Personal Domain Name – Unlike some Web hosting companies, Yahoo Web hosting won’t charge you an additional fee to register your domain name. You can sign up for Yahoo Web Hosting and get a domain free. When it’s time to renew your domain you can renew your domain name through Yahoo for a reduced fee.

Great Customer Service – Yahoo Small Business knows that their customers are all over the world, and they offer 24 hour per day customer service so that no matter where you are you can get the service you need. You can reach customer service reps online using chat applications, on the phone, or through email whenever you need help or have a question. Yahoo takes customer service seriously.

Unlimited Space – When you use Yahoo Web hosting you’ll never have to worry about your Website running out of space. You can load your site with videos, Flash animation, graphics, and other items that take up lots of data storage space and never have to pay for more storage. Yahoo gives customers unlimited storage space for one low price. Lots of other companies make you pay more if you use more space but with Yahoo one low fee means you can grow your Website as much as you want without worrying about increasing costs.

Basic Features of a Web Hosting Plan

Web hosting plans come outfitted with varied features, tools and functionalities in order to cater for diverse needs and budgets. In this article, we would be discussing the basic features of a web hosting plan and which features and tools are best suited for your website. This will help you determine and ascertain the type of hosting plan that befits your website needs.

Disk Space: Disk space is the amount of space offered by the hosting provider to store all your files. Here it becomes important to determine the exact amount of disk space that your website would require. Different web hosts offer different amounts of disk space for individual hosting plans. It is advisable to have an estimate of your disk space requirements. Try to ascertain as to how much space you would require for storing your email, web files, databases and log files.

Once you get a breakdown of these figures you would be in a better stead to work out the disk quota required for hosting your website. It is important to note here that certain we hosting providers would also include email and/or logs in the quota. This could make your disk storage estimate a tad difficult. Therefore always keep a safe margin in selecting your disk space since your email and log file needs could change as your website grows.

Email Accounts

Email accounts are a common and essential feature offered with hosting plans. While with some hosts, you may wield control over mail settings, putting restrictions on mail activities (for example the number of accounts or maximum size of mail boxes) on the server side, other web hosts would do the entire set up for your account. There are essentially 4 types of email accounts including POP3, forwarding, aliases and auto responders. How you wish to configure each is of course a matter of preference.

FTP Access

Most paid hosting accounts come equipped with the FTP access feature. These FTP programs allow the users to upload files and to edit and delete the content more quickly and conveniently as compared to the web-based interface. In fact, hosts also offer the option of creating one’s own FTP accounts. This is a highly utilizable feature if you wish to share your web space while keeping the user files separate from your own or if you want someone help you on your website.

Bandwidth

This is one vital feature that needs to be taken into consideration when selecting your hosting package. Choosing the right amount of bandwidth is imperative for the growth of your website. A wrong decision here could either make or break your website. The amount of bandwidth or data transfer differs depending on the type of website you own. Therefore the requirement varies and this explains why web hosts make different hosting packages available. Once you have a rough estimate of the amount of bandwidth required for your website, make sure that it suits your monthly hosting budget. For this one also needs to ensure that the company has mentioned all prices in a clear format and there are no hidden costs involved.

Current Inimitable Features for Client From the Hands of Top Web Hosts

In the current event of time, some web hosts are offering additional features compare to others to the clients for the same price or even for a lower price. One cannot deny the fact that as due to cut – throat competition in the market several hosting providers are trying desperately to stay outstanding by adopting various methods. As a consequence, the web hosting service standards improved a lot and constantly is on verge of rising and evidently the clients are constantly enjoying the taste of amazing new features that were previously not there. Given below are the few things, which some web hosts frequently offer to their clients.

1.) Due to competitive market scenario website hosts are coming forward to assist the clients in the purpose of publishing and managing their own email newsletters or eZines. It is one of the most effective marketing weapons that promote sales. But some hosts go two-step forward by offering an infinite amount of auto responders. This assists a site owner automatically to pursue with prospects and therefore probability of making sale become significantly higher.

2.) In the contemporary era of time one can easily get the facility of hosting services that assists him/her to set up one’s own affiliate program which is verified to be the most successful route to grab traffic and profits for webmasters. There are several good sites like Amazon.com, which enables other website owners to promote their site and products on their site and in return can earn commissions from the sales that result from traffic that they have referred to one’s site as well.

3.) If one talks about the third most popular feature then it will probably be the service provided by the host to the users to protect their download page where the user is selling digital products for e.g. e-books, software etc. from his/her site. As in the current time period increasing number of hackers is a contentious issue and such sort of services definitely going to act as a pain killer for many webmasters.

4.) A few hosting services are also taking into account the hastily increasing threat of junk mail and offer quality filters to protect one’s email accounts. A few hosting providers even provide built-in anti-virus software in order that email that come to the inbox of the user along with the company of viruses, is automatically deleted.

Thus, above mentioned are the extra services, which hosts provide to the client. Thus, one can rightly say that,” The war between two, benefit the third party”.

Choosing a Web Host – Web Hoting Features Explained

Web Hosting

When you start looking for a web host you should ask yourself one question. Why do I want web hosting? Most people give one of the reasons below, if you have a different reason please tell me and I will add it.

1. I want to put my website on the internet so everyone can access it. 2. I want somewhere to put my website which I am going to make or have made for me. 3. I just want to know a bit more about web hosting. 4. I am learning web scripting and want somewhere where I can test my scripts.

What I would recommend for each reason is:

1. This is a really good reason to be looking for web hosting. You will have a good idea of the size of your site and may know roughly how many visitors you expect to visit your site. 2. You should look at getting your website made first before you look at hosting it. The only reason you shuld be looking at hosting is to see whether it is possible to get you website online inside your budget. If your website isn’t made you don’t really know how bigit will actually be. Anyway there is no point paying for something that you don’t use so you won’t be buying the hosting for a while. Prices could well change by the time you are ready to get your site online. 3. Well, its always good to want to learn and you could well get some valuable knowlege from learning. I wouldn’t like to stop you. 4. You don’t need to hire part of somebody elses computer to test your script. You could just install some simple server program on your own computer. For example if you are learning php the why not download easyphp and then you don’t have to hassle of using an ftp and setting up the hosting account.

Web Hosting Features

When you visit a web hosts website you will probably find a few details about the hosting package. Usually there will be a ‘More details’, or similar, link which leads to a page with a huge list of options. You will probably understand a good few of these but a lot will be jargon.

Basic features

Disk Space – This is how much space you have to store your files. Every file that is on your website will be kept here. If you have lots of large images it can be a good idea to put them on something like a free image host to save space. You can also get free file hosting for things like videos etc. People really overestimate the space they need for their website and you will probably find that 50mb is plenty unless you have a very large site with lots of files to download. To save space you should compress your images into the right format. jpg for pictures, gif or png for patterns or large flat colours. If you get a good quality graphics program such as The GIMP you can preview an image as you adjust its quality which helps you find the right balance between size and quality.

Bandwidth – This is also known as data transfer. Basically every time somebody visits your website the web host has to send them some data. The bandwidth is the total data sent to all of the visitors. If you have large downloads on your site then bandwidth is quickly used up. Obviously the number of visitors has a big impact on the bandwidth used. For popular sites this is a good reason to keep files sizes down. The reason for having bandwidth is because the host has a limited speed connection to the internet (like dial-up is 56k, broadband 2mb etc.) although the speed is very fast, with lots of websites and lots of people visiting them it can slow down the connection. To stop some websites from taking all of the connection the limit is put in place. This is usually a monthly allowance and should be at least 10 times the size of the disk space. You should look at small print to see what time period this is measured over because some hosts have a daily limit in force or even hourly. This is bad because you could well run out at peak times such as weekends but have spare during off-peak during the week. If you exceed your limit your web host will probably disable your website until the next month or unless you pay extra for some more bandwidth.

Control Panel – This is where you control all of the extra features of your website from. Some are better than thers. My personal favourite is cpanel which is well featured, well laid out and widely used.

Backups – A lot of paid hosts will do automatic backups for you which helps take some pressure off you. It is rare that all your data will be lost but it does happen. It is hard to tell whether a host has a backup facility for you to use so if you are really worried you could contact the host. I know that if the host uses cpanel you will have a backup feature.

Upload method – This tends to be quite hard to find and you will probably find each method is on its own. There are two ways to upload and manage files: ftp and a file manager. Ftp is by far preferable.

A file manager is a web based file system where you login and click links to move around and edit files. The upload files with a file manager you will click a button which pops up a dialog (like M$ Word’s open dialog) where you will select your file. Only one file can be selected at a time so this is a slow process for a large site.

Ftp works by you connecting to the server using an ftp client (internet explorer has a built in one) in which you can easily select multiple files to upload very easily. Many of them work just like windows explorer.

Ftp accounts – Most hosts allow you to create several ftp accounts so you can give them to different people. You are able to restrict access in ftp accounts so that they can only access a certain folder.

Statistics – These are useful for analysiong your websites traffic. This can help you target the right people to make your site more popular. It also gives a good indication of how many people are visiting. I personally like awstats but I don’t have much experience with the different programs. You can get stats from an independant site like statcounter if your host does not provide nice stats.

Pre installed scripts

This saves you a lot of hassle by making it easier to get fancy features onto your website such as a hit counter, guestbook or forum. If the host mentions fantastico then they are referring to a library of scripts. You can find out what scripts are in this library at this website. http://www.webmasterstop.com/110.html. There will be a list somehwere of what pre installed scripts are included if any are.

Scripting languages

Server side scripts are very useful. There are lots of script you can download form the internet or you could write your own (It really is fun). Unless your website is very simple and extremely static you should look at having a host with this. Any paid host worth its salt should have all of the languages but many free hosts don’t. One of the most simple but effective use of scripts is to keep a menu file in a single place and then include the file on every page of your site. Then when you need to add an item you only need to change it in one place. To find out how to include a menu using SSI take a look at our tutorial.

Php – Pretty powerful, easy to use and versatile this is the most common web scripting language. You will find most forums are php based, but its used for almost anything.

CGI – Powerful but hard to use and not that common.

Perl – In between php and cgi. It is inserted similarly to php but the syntax is like cgi.

ASP – This is Microsofts language so it is only for hosts providing windows servers. It has a nice easy syntax.

SSI – This is used for smaller things like including files and getting a bit of dynamic stuff.

Databases

These are closely coupled with scripting languages as the scripting languages make them work. You tend to use one for each script that need one. Scripts that tend to need then are things like forums, guestbooks, voting systems and CMS’s.

The main types are:

MySQL – The most common type found accross most servers.

PostgreSQL – Quite common so lots of big scripts can use it.

MSSQL – Microsofts version of SQL. I think it can handle the same requests as MySQL but im not sure.

OBDC connections – These are slightly different as you don’t have to create the databases using your control panel. This saves the data into a M$ access database which you can download and read with access or another database program.

Domains

Your domain is the name of your website that people type into their web browser. eg. quantumstate.co.uk is my domain. Some free hosts give you the option of having a subdomain for your website so it website.host.com. This means you do not have to pay for your domain.

Host Multiple Domains – This allows you to have lots of domains for one website or even lots of websites on your hosting account (most hosts don’t allow this). This option isn’t very useful for the majority of website owners.

Subdomains – These are addresses which are something.yourdomain.com. If your site has well defined sections these can be nice but they are mainly of aesthetic value.

Dedicated IP address – I am not quite sure why you want one of these as not many people use IP addresses to find your website. I think it could be useful in some scripting instances.

E-Commerce

This includes things such as shopping carts. The big thing is SSL certificates which make your website secure for entering credit card details and personal information. If your web host doesn’t have this you could always use PayPal.

Advanced Options

Custom error pages – have you ever had a page not found error, or a server error page? This option allows you to set these error pages for your site. I use them with my site so why not take a look.

Cron jobs – These are tasks that you can set to be done at certain times. These are quite tricky to set up.

Hotlink protection – This stops other sites linking directly to pictures and other files on your site. This is effectively stealing your bandwidth off you so you could well want to stop it.

Frontpage Extensions – If you have created your website in Frontpage then you may have some special scripts on it which will require frontpage extensions. If you are using Frontpage then I would recommend switching to a better program but if you really do like it you may well need this option.

Free or paid?

Now that you know a little about what each of the features of a web host is you can start thinking about the second big question if you haven’t already. Do you want frre or paid web hosting? Some people will already have decided on free hosting because they don’t want to pay, which is understandable. You should read this section anyway because there is information about different types of free web hosting here.

As many of you will know virtually all free web hosts make their money from adverts. What many don’t realise is that there is an alternative to having a dirty great banner or popups on your nice website.

This alternative is forum posting. Forum posting for hosting works so that if you participate in the hosts forums then they will host your website. How they make their money from this is that when you post in their forums you are adding content to their website, although it is often poor content there will bbe some useful posts made that will attract visitors. The visitors that come click on the adverts (as well as those inside the scheme) and in rolls the money. This is not overly time consuming and you coudl well have some fun if you post about something you are interested in. As you may have guessed I in fact have this very website hosted like this by www.hostmatrix.org.

There is one other way in which a webhost can provide a free service and that is a loss leader, the problem with these is that they tend to have poor features so you are more likely to upgrade.

In general forum posting will get you the best features but you have to ask yourself whether you want to spend the time. In reality forced adverts are not that big or intrusive and provide an easy method.

Picking a host

By now you are ready to start looking at some web host to see what they offer. Below I offer some advice on choosing a good host. I have also provided links to some large well nkown web hosts and a couple of directories of free web hosts. The benefit of looking at the directories is that you get peoples ratings and comments. You should always take comments with a pich of salt however because some web hosts will compliment themselves and play down others.

Paid hosting

When looking at paid hosts I found that most of them tended to be good value in a certain price range but outside of that they were not so good value. You shoudl think about whther you would ever upgrade your account as your site grows and therefore look at the slightly more expensive deals. It saves a lot of hassle that you get when you change hosts.

Avoid hosts with unlimited space and bandwidth because they will have a poor service due to people with large download sites hogging all of the resources on a server. This will make your site very slow. This can apply to too good to be true offers which could easily crash completely or they may be selling more resources than they actually have.

If you pay for a long period of time make sure it is a long standing and reputable host because the last thign you will want to do is to be trying to get $100 back off some failed company.

If you are careful, do your research properly and treat it with common sense then you should be fine. If you are worried stick mainstream where you probably won’t go wrong.

Free web hosting

Follow the same kind of lines as for pad hosting. I had a bad experience with a too good to be true web host which experienced about 70% uptime then crashed completely.

Unfortunately I have been forced to remove some items from this articles due the size limit enforced. This was mainly the email section but included some other parts. You can find the complete unshortened article at http://www.quantumstate.co.uk/webhosting.html.

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Features of Free Web Hosting:

There are several types of hosting available. However often free web hosting sounds interesting for a user especially for a newbie. Here we are going to discuss about the free web hosting in detail. Internet hosting or web hosting is a profitable business and getting more advanced day by day. Inventions in this industry are taking place very regularly. At present one can have the hosting service according to his/her demand. There are number of hosting firms presented in the market. The charges of the hosting services are as per the quantity and quality of features and support one asked. The user who does not want to spent even a single penny for hosting service then for them free hosting services are also available through free hosting firms.

In the beginning users finds free hosts to be very generous as they use to provide all the hosting services absolutely free without charging any money, but after some time user will come across with the real picture of these hosts when they get to know the methods by which free hosts are making their money. The most common method by which free hosts are making their money is that they use to place their banner ads on their client’s site. The biggest drawback is that there are other hosting firms who just jump on user with the client’s e-mail ID at the time of registration, by using ads and spam mails. In spite of all this, there are some providers offering free hosting in hope of trapping customers by charging fewer prices in order to attract customers. Not only that, there are some providers who charge an excessive registration fee from their user.

If talking wisely, free hosting is not at all considered a good option for business websites as there is not at all any guarantee of either perfect service or security. The situation is so pathetic that there are some free hosting firms which get shut down even within a first year of their start. There are some other companies which get closed even a day or two. Now after analyzing all the above facts it can be seen that free hosting is only considered a right choice if one’s website is for his/her personal use like for uploading some family photos or for posting personal profiles, or for any other non business purpose. Also this sort of hosting is crucial for those who want to try their programming scripts in different environments. Thus for business purpose free web hosting is surely not considered the right choice.

It is advisable to check in advance the websites already hosted by the provider in order to check the types of ads displayed on those web sites. In addition one should check the bandwidth speed also provided by the provider. Another way to find about the providers is by reading the reviews being posted by their clients.

Thus one should always keep in mind that the motive of free hosting provider is just to extort money from one’s website. So be careful and select the best.

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