How to Avoid a Web hosting Scam?

Web hosting has become a lucrative business. No wonder many mendacious web hosting companies have ventured into it. These companies always look for unsure clients to strike deals to make money the wrong way.

Most of the mendacious web hosting service providers offer their hosting plans at unrealistically low prices. You sign an agreement and pay the required amount. The plan requires a full year payment in advance, but the host doesn’t give the log-in account on one pretext or the other. And suddenly you realize that you have made a big mistake.

You should verify whether or not the claims made by your hosting company are valid. Here are a few tips for the same.

• Ensure if your host use Verisign or has a BBB seal visible on their personal site. If you don’t see an assurance about their business practices, you should not trust it.

• Compare your hosting plans with some of the other reputed hosting service providers. If you find that the price that you are offered is too good, and at the same time, you are offered tremendous disk space, excellent connection, and download speed along with advanced control panel features, move on to look for another host.

• It is advisable that you verify the credentials of your web hosting service provider. Check the host’s reputation in the market, and proceed further if the claims are genuine.

• Do proper research to assess what other clients say about that host. Check why they are satisfied or unsatisfied.

If you find that a couple of points mentioned here do not go in favor of a web hosting service provider, it does not necessarily mean that it is a fraud. These are only pointers to caution you that you need to study well, and do your homework well before signing any contract.

The Truth about Unlimited Bandwidth Offers

While looking for a Web hosting service provider, you may find that certain companies claim to offer unlimited bandwidth or data transfer. However, the ground realities are entirely different. Do not rush to such companies; rather, take time to verify their claims. Do some research and give it a deep thought, because unlimited bandwidth means you will be paying a hefty amount to the host. So, you need to be absolutely sure if it is worth the deal.

Bandwidth is the most important and also the most expensive component for a web hosting company. If the company claims that it offers unlimited bandwidth, more often than not, it may not true.

It is not that such companies are trying to hoodwink you, or they are lying. One of the cases can be that their clients have small, static sites that don’t even reach the smallest level of bandwidth. The agreement that you sign with your host should clearly state that how much is the unlimited bandwidth. Clarify with the owner of the web hosting company as to what exactly the unlimited bandwidth means. If the answer is ambiguous, you better seek another host.

The amount of bandwidth that you require depends on the purpose of your site, the design of site, and the target audience. If it includes good amount of graphic files, audio, and video media files, you require a huge bandwidth. On the contrary, you don’t require huge bandwidth if you have a basic, static site.

Another factor that affects your bandwidth requirement is the expected traffic at your site. For example – a personal site which is meant for family, friends, and a handful of other people does not involve huge traffic. However, if you plan to advertise your site and target it to more people, you should be prepared for a high volume of traffic.

It is highly unlikely that a company can offer you unlimited bandwidth. Just evaluate all the factors that cause the requirement of high bandwidth and if the reasons are genuine enough, pay higher amount according to the unlimited bandwidth hosting plan. It pays you in the long run.

The Basics of Web Hosting

Web hosting is the placement of your website onto the Internet through a server. Once you have placed your website on a server, anyone using the internet can access your website from anywhere in the world.

Website: this is a page or a set of pages that is located under the same domain name. A web page is a computer document that is written in a publishing language called HTML. As an internet user types in your web address, your web server will send the content of your web page to the user

Domain Name: this is a unique text based address that is used to locate a specific set of web pages. It is made up words and/or numbers plus a TLD (top level domain). The TLD for most businesses is “.com”. Non profit organizations use “.org”. Universities and educational websites use “.edu”.

Server: this is a computer that stores information that can be accessed through the network. It is used to host a website. Servers can also be used to store website information that can be accessed by any computer that has access to the internet.

Web hosting can be looked at as something similar to renting property. There are a large number of companies that will rent you space on their web servers, on the other hand, you can decide to buy a server for your own personal use. People spend thousands of dollars a year on web hosting alone. An average person or a small business would spend $10 - $50 a month. It all just depends on how many features, web space and data transfer they need.

Do not use your own server if you are planning to establish an internet presence in the form of a personal homepage or a full service e-commerce catalogue. You will definitely need a web host. Making the wrong choice for a web host can be damaging to your business. Find out all that you can about your prospective host before making any decisions and have a clear idea of the functions of your website that you wish to have prior to searching for your host. Finding the right web host is often daunting, so it would be best if you can look for a provider with many years of experience. Look for a list of the provider’s list of customers and check out some of their pages. Check out the contents of the web host’s websites as well. They should have a large website that contains several pages of services and support documents, plus their phone and fax numbers, as well as their physical address. Email them with a few sample questions to check out the speed and quality of their responses.

Using SSL or TSL to Secure Visitors’ Information

The rise in incidents of hacking and unauthorized access has raised security issues in web service arena. The news of internet crimes, credit card thefts, identity thefts, and spying has made the web community realize the importance of increased security by using better, advanced technology.

Some businesses require sharing some personal information. If you want to enable a user to download a document from your site, you need to ensure its security. The information may include your contact information, your credit card information, which you want to keep away from access by a malicious user.

Therefore, it is your responsibility to secure your web visitor’s information. This is a real challenge for small hosting companies, as the information is flown to different systems at different locations across the globe. You can address this issue by using some form of encryption between the web browser and your website. This feature is available by using SSL or TSL.

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a protocol that takes care of security of a message transmission on the Internet. SSL uses a program layer which is located between the Internet's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Transport Control Protocol (TCP) layers.

The data is transferred from the web browser to the website in this encrypted format. The web server software unencrypts the data to be used by the website. This ensures that a user’s personal information is not being transferred in a readable format for anyone to capture it and use for personal use.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a protocol that ensures privacy between the applications that communicate with their users on the Internet. When a user interacts with your site, TLS ensures that no third person may tamper with any information. TLS enables the server and end-user to authenticate each other. It uses an encryption algorithm and cryptographic keys before the data is exchanged. TLS is basically designed on the same model as SSL, and works on same principle.

SSL and TSL encryption have become the necessary tools for making your website secure for your visitors. Contact an experienced technical engineer and get these two integrated into your site.

Unmetered Web Hosting

Web hosting is one of the most dynamic business activities today. The manner in which your business grows, and the way your requirements change, you are never sure how your requirements have changed in terms of bandwidth, disk space, or connection speed for your website.

As a result, you may also require more databases and email accounts. If you have a simple, static website then it may not grow as it is not dynamic. It only serves the purpose of providing information and doesn’t grow too often.

However, you can still face problems when a large volume of traffic may use all your bandwidth, and thus your site goes offline. A solution to such a situation is an unmetered web host. An unmetered web host ensures that your site is always available, irrespective of the amount of traffic that it receives.

So, the first point when you are looking for a web host is that the company should provide unmetered resources. The best possible web hosting solution would provide unmetered services that include – data transfer, bandwidth, disk space, domains and sub-domains, email accounts, and databases.

Instead of going through all hosting plans and then evaluating which is the best option, it can be more cost-effective solution if you pay a single fee for unmetered bandwidth. Your monthly bandwidth requirement can reach any limit so it pays not to have a specific bandwidth limit which may result in you having to pay fees for excessive usage.

You can avoid the extra charges to be paid in case the bandwidth expires before the end of the month. So, paying large fee altogether is a better option, thus ensuring that your web host offers unmetered data transfer.

Same holds true for your disk space. You can not use extra disk space without having to contact your web host and requesting that extra storage to be made available, by paying some extra money. This is time consuming effort and is not a permanent solution to disk space issue.

So, having an unmetered storage space is the best option, where you site doesn’t experience any downtime, and you are not worrying about limits of disk space; instead you can focus solely on your business. Ultimately, you will realize that opting for unmetered bandwidth and disk space is a better solution than hosting plans since you can’t afford downtime in today’s competitive market.

Importance of Hosting Automation Software for Web Hosts

As a web host, you may feel that the customer should not be calling you so frequently over very small issues, for example – changing password, changing personal information, or knowing if they are approaching their bandwidth limit. It can not only be frustrating, but time consuming as well. This makes automation of account management the most important feature of a control panel.

An automation software should provide the following basic features to your customers.

• It should enable your customers to change their password, update their personal information, and pay for their hosting plan online. It makes the job easy for you as well as for customers
• The software should help the customers upgrade or downgrade their hosting plans if and when required.
• A customer should be able to receive confirmation emails.
• The software should include a component that enables your customers to know if they are approaching the stipulated bandwidth limit and disk space.
• Give your customers a feature to add, update, and delete email addresses on their own.
• The software should help customers to upload new files to the server and delete old files that are not required by your site.
• If you are targeting ecommerce sites, your customer should be able to manage small activities in database. The kind of database tool you provide to your customers depends on the kind of market they want to hit.

All these features make your customers self-dependent in many ways. You can provide them with a list of FAQs to help them use these features without calling you frequently for one issue or the other. Trust your customers and provide them your email and personal contact information for any emergency situation.

History of Web Hosting Industry

The credit of web hosting goes to Tim Berners Lee when he wrote the first program in the year 1990. Soon after, the same program was further developed and many companies participated in taking it to the present stage, where we have seen unprecedented growth of web hosting market.
It sounds unbelievable, but is true that nearly thirty five thousand businesses host more than hundred sites at the same server, and the list is always increasing. The first program for the World Wide Web was that of a hypertext editor that was executed in the NeXT machine. The first ever browser – “line mode browser" was used by a student – Nicola Pellow.

The specifications of the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and UDI (Unified Display Interface) were published on the server. It was done to facilitate a discussion on these three by the experts who do research on these.

To access the web, clients that can work on the machines other than NeXT were needed and hence the browsers like Viola, Cello, Erwise, and Mosaic came into existence. The inception of World Wide Consortium in 1994 prompted the companies to involve themselves in creating the common protocols for the Web. As a result new standards began to evolve. Before web made its mark, TCP/IP were used for networking purpose only, without realizing its real potential in coming years.

Discussions were held on the features of the tools required for the web. Basic networking products were developed that provided connectivity and fundamental services for internet. Slowly, web began to expand and the developments in the technology fueled its growth. At present, there are hundreds of products that are available for the internet.

When giants like Microsoft, IBM, and the Sun Microsystems stepped into internet scenario, the market got decent options as many new products and technologies were launched to be used for web.

The internet has changed the life of a common man. From personal computers to client server to peer-to-peer network, internet itself has changed. File sharing, remote login, email, and voice conferencing – everything is possible through internet. It has not completed its transformation as it is still in the process. It's hard to realize what is in store next!

Benefits of Web Hosting Forums

Whatever are the goals of your business and whatever is the purpose of your site, you should be aware of your site requirements. Besides, you should know some of the basic hosting concepts.

A web hosting forum is a discussion board on internet where users share information about web hosting related issues. You can find reviews of different web hosting services, check listings of the top hosting service providers, read hosting related news, and post questions related to web hosting.

View ratings
If you have built a website and you are looking for a web host, you have to decide among the hundreds of services available. The top host listing on a web hosting forum is a great starting point to search for best hosts.

Go through reviews
Some web hosting forum members might have done some research on web hosting providers and can offer useful information. If you have a list of a few potential hosts, reading some reviews of their services can be very useful.

Use discussion threads
Members in a web hosting forum get involved in discussions on several topics. You can browse discussion threads on a certain topic that is of interest to you. You can find comparisons between different web hosting services, which can help you make a better decision on which provider would suit your requirements.

Post questions
Some of the members of web hosting forums are highly experienced in this field and can provide answers to your questions related to web hosting. This is a kind of online technical support.

Read the news
The basic purpose of a forum is to share the latest news with others. When the members find some interesting news about web hosting, or learn about a new service that has been launched, they post an announcement on the forum so that others can learn about it too.