Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Web Hosting And Multiple Websites Management

For internet pure players, their website(s) is the primary source of business income. There are many individuals and enterprises which rely on the internet alone for their earnings. Usually, this involves setting up and running of ten or more websites simultaneously by a single organization or individual. Management of multiple websites may not be a cakewalk and it is essential to keep them up and running 24X7, all through the year.

Depending on a single web hosting company will expose your business to significant risk. If the server fails at any time, all your websites will go offline, leaving you helpless. It is better to host your websites with 3-4 web hosting providers. This may seems to be more expensive and time-consuming but it has various benefits too.

The cost of web hosting doesn’t form a large part of a single website business owner’s budget. However, for 15-50 websites, your web hosting costs will be substantial and may lead to business failure or success alone. To minimize such costs, use reseller hosting accounts for hosting some of the new or small websites at a small cost ($15- $30). Use a dedicated server for large and critical websites.

Verify that the uptime availability isn’t less than 99.9%. Server updates or failures can lead to downtime of upto half a day or more. This leads to huge losses for websites which provide substantial income to their owners and are very popular among customers. This situation can be avoided by hosting websites on different servers.

Online business websites involve huge amounts of data transfer. Sensitive customer information, sales records and payment details are common information available on a website. All these are stored by web hosting companies through their backup and statistics software. Using multiple web hosting accounts will allow you to switch information to another domain if one fails.

With too much choice and too little clarity, you may end up buying the wrong hosting plans. This is fatal for your business. Search, compare and choose the right web host with best price, features, security and experience before making a commitment. Then, you can be assured of effective management of your multiple websites online business.

Friday, September 21, 2007

How to Compare Web Hosting Providers Websites

A website is an important part of any business. You can advantageously explore the potential for a larger customer base, sales and profits by making and operating an attractive, customer-friendly and secure website.

Even the best website is worthless if it doesn’t have the support of a reliable web hosting provider. This underlines the significance of choosing the right web host for your website. However, there is endless number of web hosting companies, each claiming to be the best. This makes it very difficult to find a good host which is not only feature-rich, affordable and most importantly, delivers according to its promises.

It is best to search for the most popular and reputable web hosting providers online. Compare their packages for price and features included. This can be done effectively and lucratively, as follows:

1: Keep it simple
Web hosting websites with complex content and too much technical details should not be preferred. If they cannot offer services in a simple and clear method, you can expect to be confused later on as well. Such websites focus more on sophistication and creating hype than on customer understanding and satisfaction. If the plans are precise and to the point, you can easily determine whether the web host will fulfill your requirements or not.

2: Contact them
A good web hosting site will provide contact information on its website. Call them and check the kind of technical and customer support offered by the company. You can also ask for customer references and check the company’s past performance and experience before actually signing the service agreement. This is often a great way to differentiate the good web hosts from the bad ones.

3: Web hosting packages
Some websites will offer cheap plans including a variety of features. Avoid them. Go for a reasonable priced hosting plan which suits your website’s requirements and provides flexibility for future expansion as well. A cost benefit analysis is a must to get you money’s worth.

Do your homework and choose a web hosting provider after keeping all these factors in mind.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Effective Technical Support for Your Website

One of the most important determinants of a reliable web hosting provider is the quality technical support. You don’t want to wait endlessly for the web host to provide solutions to your technical problems while your customers can’t access your website. this can result in loss of revenue as well as reputation for your business.

As a customer, there are certain things which can be done by you to speed up the process of technical assistance.

Precise description
If you define the problem in a clear and precise manner, the technical staff will be able to understand the same with minimal time wastage. This includes details regarding the time of error, the action resulting in such malfunctioning, the kind of operating system being used, etc.

Urgency
You must know the priority status of your request. If the problem is secondary, the technical staff of the web hosting company may not deal with it immediately. This may result in delay of technical assistance. However, minor problems can be handled independently by you to ensure minimum downtime for the website. The more critical a problem, more prompt will be the support services. You should be prepared for this accordingly.

Response time
If the web hosting company’s technical staff takes an unreasonably long time to solve your website’s technical problems, you must ask for appropriate explanation from them. If you are still unsatisfied, it might be better to take support from another technician or even change the web host in prolonged condition of downtime.

Terms and conditions
While taking a web hosting plan, you should enquire about the responsibilities of the technical staff. They are not bound to deal with each and every problem faced by your website. their services may be restricted to web hosting, DNS, etc but may exclude web design and content issues. However, reputable hosts will offer solutions to almost all sorts of problems.

All these elements should be considered while assessing the quality of the technical support team of a web hosting company. The more efficient and prompt they are, the higher is the possibility of the success of your online business

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Web Hosting Aids Online Marketing

With the growing popularity of Internet, there has been a surge of online businesses. No business owner can ignore the power of internet to increase sales, customers and business profits. Like any other field, web business also requires marketing. The most common way of doing this for the online medium is the creation of attractive, user-friendly websites.

Website designing is not a difficult task. What matters is the optimal use of internet marketing tools and techniques. This, in turn, depends on the quality of services provided by your web hosting provider. You may choose another company for hosting your website or let the web designing firm be your web host. This decision should be made after taking a few things into consideration. Remember that a discounted web hosting package from the designing company is not always the best option for you.

An important consideration is the search engine ranking of your website. if your website is ranked high on the first page of a search engine, more and more users will visit it. However, a bad web hosting server may result in slow loading of web pages and users getting annoyed. Not only will you lose potential customers to competitors, but also suffer unnecessary loss of time, effort and money. Before you start marketing your website, make sure that the web hosting server is capable of providing consistent support and service at all times.

Compare the charges for different web hosting packs and choose the best deal according to your website needs such as bandwidth, disk space, server speed and applications. Verify the price of similar plans to ensure that you are not being overcharged.

Another factor is the response time taken by the web hosting server to answer customer queries. This should vary from 3-5 seconds to a maximum of 10-20 seconds. If a page takes more than that to load, users will generally close it or move on to another website. So, it is imperative that your web hosting provider offers fast web page processing.

In case of shared web hosting, verify the number of websites hosted on a single server. This will give you an estimate about the server load and expected connectivity speed. You can also contact other website owners to know about their experience with the web hosting company’s services.

Marketing your website without the support of a reliable web host can prove to be very difficult and ineffective. Visitors should be able to get the desired results instantly to build their interest and ensure repeated visits.

A web hosting server is the foundation of your website and hence, needs to be strong. After all, Internet marketing is about promoting your quality content website in the best possible way and that is good customer service.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Web Hosting Tips: Where To Host Your Website?

Before deciding upon the web hosting package for your website, you must be sure about the basis of such decision; be it the web hosting features or the price of the chosen plan. Of course, the best option would be a combination of both these factors.

New website owners are attracted by free web hosting providers. However, you should remember that such packages may not provide you much benefit. There is lack of flexibility, good applications and effective security systems. Instead of getting advantages of no cost, you may end up with minimal features and an unsuccessful website.

A better option is to go for paid web hosting. These can be of different types such as:

Budget web hosting:
These are available at about $1 per month. Such plans may offer a wide range of services but may not be actually available to you. This may be suitable for personal websites only. For a more professional website, you will need a more reliable and higher priced web hosting plan.

Medium web hosting:
These web hosting packages are available for about $5-$10 every month. These will be inclusive of features like shopping cart software, email accounts, domain names and sub domain names, security mechanisms like SSL encryption, etc. the bandwidth and disk space is also adequate for a reasonable amount of traffic. This proves to be a fairly reliable and secure option for most websites. However, you may have to shift to an upgraded plan if your website is getting heavy customer traffic and file uploading.

High end web hosting:
This kind of web hosting is used by popular websites which get a large amount of web traffic every day and have highly interactive and technically advanced websites. The web hosting providers ensure up-to-date applications and 100% uptime to keep the websites up and running at all times. These web hosting plans may be priced at around $50 and above. This is a very reliable, secure and effective web hosting alternative. You can be assured of prompt technical and customer support, high-end applications and flexibility in bandwidth and server space.

You may go for dedicated web hosting or even colocated hosting if your website requires complete server support. This will cost you much more than the shared hosting plans, so you must carry out a cost-benefit analysis before making a decision.

Remember that in web hosting, you will get what you pay for. Assess your needs and objectives for the website as well as your budget before going for a web hosting plan. Search for and compare different web hosting companies to find the right host for your website.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Web Hosting For Small Businesses

In the present era, there is no business which can ignore the importance of an online presence. This is true for all types and sizes of enterprises. If you run a small business, you can take advantage of the wide reach of Internet by making a website. This can provide many benefits for your company, like:

• Wider customer base, both present and potential
• Building brand image
• Targeted marketing
• Opportunity to increase sales and profits
• Lower costs of operation
• Targeted marketing

Your web hosting needs can be determined by considering various factors.

Firstly, you need to understand the business needs and then, decide about the kind of website you want to create. This, in turn, will help you in selecting a suitable web host for your website. The basic requirements for all web hosts are:

  • Bandwidth
  • Disk space
  • Price
  • Reliability

For small businesses, it is better to go for shared web hosting rather than advanced forms like dedicated hosting which will be more expensive too. You must also consider the operating system being used, technical support service, guaranteed uptime, payment and security systems, applications offered, etc.

The disk space used by an average website will be about 100MB. Most web hosting companies will provide much more disk space for your website. You will also need email accounts for easy marketing and customer communication. If you have an ecommerce website, make sure that your web hosting package includes features like Shopping Cart, SSL Encryption for security and PayPal or other payment system.

Another important element is the server location. The server should be as near as possible, to the prospective customers. This will enable faster access to desired information and better website performance.

As your online business grows, you will need additional bandwidth, applications and other features. So it is imperative to choose a web hosting provider who allows some flexibility in the hosting plan. After all, you must receive value for your money. Compare various web hosting companies and make a wise decision to find the best web host for your website.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Understanding Web Hosting Server Load

Basically, the server load is the number denoting the tasks in queue which wait to access the processors. Server load values start from 0.00 and is calculated for a specific time period. The higher the number, the worse is the server’s performance.

To find out the server load, you can use the control panel of your web hosting account. Under the head “Server Status”, you can see the required value. This value is not static for long periods of time and will change very frequently. This means that it is calculated at the moment. After continuous observation, you can find the usual server load value.

However, analyzing the server load correctly is more important than just knowing its value.

There are various aspects of this interpretation, such as:

#1: A server load of 0.xx is considered safe by web hosting companies. Usually, your website will not face slower downloading if the server load value remains below 1.00.

#2: Above 1.00, the impact of server load is determined by the number of CPUs with the server. A single CPU will not be able to handle the server load in excess of 1.00 but if there are two CPUs, this value can be upto 2.00. However, there may be different reasons for server load such as server backups for later processing and misuse of resources by users. There may even be high-power servers which can handle load upto 2.00 singularly.

#3: Server load also depends on the processes waiting in queue for CPU access but these tasks or requests may be low priority or high priority according to their content. This determines the requests which will be handled instantly and which will have to wait as they are assigned low priority status.

#4: there are various other factors which influence the server load. These may be CPU space, memory usage, size of swap files, etc. Any changes in these factors will lead to a simultaneous increase or decrease in server load. If the internal memory is inadequate, the server will use a swap file. This will lead to higher CPU usage and increase in server load.

This can be prevented by installing higher level of internal memory. This can help to reduce the size of swap file, CPU usage and ultimately, server load. The server is able to process requests at a faster speed and hence, provide quick results.

If the server load is constantly high, resulting in slow processing and downloading, you should ask your web hosting provider to correct this problem. If it persists, you must consider shifting to another web host. Reputable web hosting companies ensure that the server load is minimized to provide maximum results in the shortest possible time.

A business website cannot expect to do well if customers cannot access relevant content and get orders processed in a timely manner. If you want to establish an online presence, you must choose a web hosting provider which can handle server load without compromising on quality.

Friday, September 7, 2007

Tips For Becoming A Web Hosting Reseller

A web hosting reseller is one who rents space from a web host and distributes it for housing websites of customers. For successful web hosting, you must find a web hosting provider who offers certain essential features to make your business profitable. An effective web host will enable you to earn good profits even after charging low fees from customers.

Firstly, you must get a multiple domain account to start your web hosting reseller business. The web host may offer one website per account but it is much better to go for an account which provides multiple domain names. As you can use one domain to create your own website while allocating the rest to your clients, you can benefit from this opportunity to pay less and earn more.

Secondly, it is imperative to have maximum administrative control over the customer’s websites. A good web host will provide an efficient and easy-to-use control panel for your multiple websites as well as a separate control panel for each customer’s website. Moreover, you must be able to conceal the identity of your web hosting provider to appear as the web host and not a reseller, to the customers.

Thirdly, there is need for creating your own policy and terms and conditions for customers. Many resellers ignore this aspect of business and take copies of the web host’s terms and conditions or the ones framed by them for resellers. It is best to frame your own policies and not adapt those written for other purposes for this function.

Fourthly, the web hosting company should provide consistent and reliable support to ensure hassle-free functioning of your own and the client’s websites. Select a web hosting server according to the current requirements of your customer’s websites and the desired flexibility for future expansion.

Effective technical and customer support is also an important determinant of the success of your business. You should be able to solve your client’s problems smoothly and without delay. Higher the website downtime, higher will be the loss for websites. Moreover, service failure and unhappy clients reflect badly on your business.

Finding a good web hosting company is a primary factor for setting up a successful web hosting reseller business. it may seem to be a daunting task initially but a little more time and effort can help you get substantial rewards later on. Once you find the right web host for your business, you can reap the benefits of reselling by getting returns through high-quality services.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Affordable Web Hosting Is Not Just About Prices

Before you get excited about a free web hosting package, stop and think about the benefits you will get from it. A free deal is not necessarily the best one. If you are looking for an affordable web hosting plan, you must look beyond the price. There are numerous web hosting companies which claim to provide unlimited features like bandwidth and disk space at rock-bottom prices.
It is better to steer clear of such web hosts to avoid wastage of your time, money and effort.

Moreover, any good website will need a quality web host to generate financial rewards and keep the customers happy.

One of the most important factors to be considered while selecting a web hosting provider is the speed of the server. Unlike disk space and bandwidth, server speed or responsiveness doesn’t have the flexibility to change according to website upgradation. When a web hosting company provides unlimited features at a cheap price, it indicates that many similar websites will be hosted on the same server. This will inevitably lead to a slower connection and loading of pages of your website.

Another key element is the service rendered by the web hosting company. You will come across a large number of web hosts claiming to be the very best but in reality, offer a large number of services in a single package to attract customers. These features usually falter while application. There may also be security loopholes which may expose your and the customers information to hacking and other forms of infringement. This can prove to be disastrous for your business sales, profits and most importantly, reputation.

You may not be able to use most of the updates either. This is due to the incompatibility between the webmaster coding and the server. Finally, you may have to change your web hosting company to one which can provide all the features required for a successful website. Make sure that the new server is able to support such features and does not compromise quality for price.

Free web hosting plans will rarely provide good technical support for your website problems. This is essential if you want to minimize the downtime for your website and ensure that it functions consistently. It is better to go for a reasonable web hosting plan which offers prompt service rather than a freebie which has no troubleshooting options.

Remember that your web hosting provider can make or break your business. So, it is best to ignore the marketing gimmicks of unreliable web hosts offering unlimited services for all your needs. A reputable web hosting company will provide you all the requisite features at a reasonable price. Compare the various hosting plans to get the best deal. You will find a lot of relevant information on the Internet through online forums, experts and websites of web hosting companies.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Nuts And Bolts Of Unlimited Web Hosting

Nowadays, a lot of web hosting companies offer unlimited web hosting option in the web hosting package. This may seem to be an advantage for most people who are starting an online business but may not prove to be advantageous in some cases.

While free hosting may seem to be a great idea initially, there are various factors which may be compromised due to this offer. There may be no or very less quality control provided by the web host. This can be risky for the quality of content and security of the website. Hence, you must choose a web host offering free service only after complete investigation and comparison with other web hosts.

As a newcomer, you must know the web hosting basics before choosing a web hosting package. Web servers are computers or servers which house your website along with other websites or exclusively, depending on the kind of hosting you want. This may be:

Shared hosting

Dedicated hosting

Co-location


For small companies, shared web hosting is a good option as it offers unlimited services and is easily affordable by all businesses. Simple websites with personal information will prefer unlimited hosting to get the benefits of no cost and flexibility to try different hosting companies.

However, there are several hidden costs of unlimited web hosting. These include:
Clients may have to display advertisements on their websites

Server may take fee for using domain name or website address

Limited or ineffective technical and customer support

If you are planning to go for shared web hosting for free or discounted price, you must ensure that you are sharing server space with reliable websites and not inappropriate websites which may cause slow connectivity, spamming, etc.

With a reasonable amount of investment, you can get good web hosting services for your website. There are many reputable web hosts offering quality packages at reasonable prices. You must research online for good web hosting providers and compare the features and prices of different packages to determine the best web hosting plan for your online business. Remember that it’s important to choose a web host carefully because you will only get what you pay for.