Making Money With Your Blog: Tips Web Hosting

What is web hosting? Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website.

Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to ‘store’ the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called ‘data center’. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

What are the different types of web hosting?
There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following categories:

Shared Hosting

In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting), many websites are sharing the space on the same physical web servers. Depending on the web host, a physical web server can hosts a few hundred to even thousand of different websites at one time. You may wonder if a physical web server is shared by so many websites, will the performance of the web server deteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.

However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting would have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $5 - $20 per month.

Dedicated Hosting

In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 - $500 per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and extremely important website.

Co-location hosting

In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web hosting providers and customers only rent the web server during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed their web server within the web hosting provider’s secure data center. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location hosting range from $500 - $1000 per month.

Reseller hosting

In reseller hosting, a web hosting provider offers web server storage to third-party (i.e. reseller) at a discount price, who then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, or system integration company who resell the web hosting as a add-on service to complement their other range of services. Commonly, resellers can receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the Internet and start selling web hosting plans under its brand).

To the reseller’s customers, the reseller is the web host provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down and access problem arise, the resellers will have to correspond directly with the actual web host provider. Due to the communication process taken place between customer to reseller and from reseller to actual web host provider and back and forth, undoubtedly problems will take longer time to resolve. Unless you are running your own personal website or non-profit website and willing to take the risks of poor support from the reseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.

However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You don’t judge by the availability of toll-free number alone because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the reseller’s customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the reseller’s name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, don’t be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.

In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web hosting provider has solid company information such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background (here is just an example out of thousands out there). Moreover, the hosting price by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 - $10.

Therefore, you should not strive to find the cheap web hosting companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Don’t expect to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your web hosting plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly more for your hosting plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web hosting plans to host your important website

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If you are looking for a web hosting provider to host your website or blog, there are several features that you should consider before purchasing the cheapest package you can find. Not all web hosting providers offer the same services for comparable prices. You need to carefully scan each offer and look for the features that you require to host your website.

1. Disk Space

Disk space, or web space, is the term used to describe the amount of information that you can store via your web hosting account. Whether you'll be using HTML, images, sound or video files, they all take up disk space from your web hosting account.

Now-a-days, even the cheapest shared web hosting packages offer plenty of disk space to host your site. Do not settle for less than 1 gigabyte of disk space even if you don't need it. Most web hosting providers offer their clients hundreds of gigabytes at incredibly cheap monthly fees.

2. Monthly Transfer Volume

The monthly transfer volume, also known as bandwidth, is a term used to describe the amount of information that your particular web hosting account can receive and send during the month.

Most web hosting accounts will give you many Gigabytes of bandwidth per month. The more traffic your website receives, the higher your bandwidth will be. Keep an eye on this traffic. If it gets close to your monthly limit, consider moving to a higher web package that offers a higher monthly bandwidth.

Web hosting providers that offer a high starting bandwidth means that you'll be able to stay in that plan longer which is a benefit to you. Most good web hosting providers will offer bandwidth in the range of 250 Gigabytes to over 1 Terabyte of monthly traffic.

3. Linux vs. Windows Hosting

Most beginner web hosting packages will offer Linux based web hosting simply because it's often cheaper for them to run. However, Linux is an extremely fast and reliable operating system. Most Linux systems run the Apache web server which accounts for over 50% of the Internet's web hosts. It does not matter that you are creating your web pages on a Windows PC. They can be hosted on a Linux server without any problems.

Window web hosting is ideal for those requiring Active Server Pages (ASP) functionality or need better integration with Microsoft SQL server.

Linux plans normally tend to be slightly cheaper, which is why you'll see more of them around. This is probably your best option unless you have specific requirements that only a Microsoft server can meet.

4. Web Databases

Whether it's a MySQL or Microsoft SQL database that you need, make sure that the web hosting plan you purchase has access to some. Even if you don't need it initially, you may need it in the future and most beginner hosting plans offer at least access to one database in their packages. Plan ahead and save yourself headaches later on as you expand your website.

These databases have a wide variety of uses. From storing proprietary information for your company to forming the back-end storage for blog add-ons such as Wordpress or Joomla, you will need to have access to a database to make these features work.

5. e-Mail Space and POP3 / IMAP Access

If you want a professional appeal for your site, an e-mail account with your business name is vital. This shouldn't be too much of a problem since most web hosting packages now give you access to POP3 and IMAP accounts to setup for your business use. Just make sure there are enough accounts for each employee who needs access to e-mail on your business site and that there is enough web e-mail space for all those combined users. E-Mail space is usually quoted as a separate listing from web space. Pay close attention to what the web hosting provider gives you since this space is divided up between all allocated e-mail users.

6. Free Website Plug-In Scripts

These are scripts that are available for you to automatically install as needed. Most web hosting companies use the Fantastico Deluxe set of scripts. Some of the scripts included are: Wordpress, Joomla, PHP Nuke, Help Center scripts, Polls and Survey software, Guestbooks, and Form-mail scripts to name a few.

The automation allows for very simple integration with your website. Many of these products are very powerful and robust packages, so this is an excellent add-on to have available.

7. Secure Shell (SSH) Access

Being able to log into your web hosting account and make changes from the command line to your web pages is an incredibly convenient feature. However, power users will benefit the most from this option since some knowledge of the underlying operating system, Linux, is required to navigate easily.

Not all web hosting providers offer this service, so if you feel you may need it, make sure to find out ahead of time whether or not it's available. Some offer it free as part of the package, others have it listed as a paid add-on.

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