hosting services

Web hosts are service companies that provide space on their servers for internet users. Web hosts provide online systems for internet connectivity and for storing information, image mediums and other internet content. For the company interested in conducting business on the web, the proper choice of web host is a crucial step in any internet marketing plan.

There are several types of web hosting available. Free hosting is the least costly, but the most limited with regard to services and space; though a free web host may be a consideration for an individual professional or small business to start out. The restrictions on advertising, bandwidth and permissible edit sites, may be limiting for a company looking for rapid growth.

Shared hosting places your website on the same server as several (potentially hundreds) of other sites. Although these are less restricted than free hosts, they do impose some limitations on site capabilities. Reseller hosting allows an e-business to obtain a large amount of bandwidth and space on its account and divide the space as it sees fit. This is similar to a shared hosting because your server is placed on the same server as others. But you can decide on the amount of the divisions and with whom to share.

Less Restricted Web Hosting Choices

Dedicated hosting and Virtual Private Server hosting provide very similar results. A dedicated hosting is relatively expensive, but is less restricted than those previously discussed. With dedicated hosting, you, as the user, have a server to yourself. Thus, there are very little restrictions and you are on your own with regard to services.

Virtual private server technology enables one server to host multiple virtual environments. These environments have the characteristics of individual stand-alone servers. Essentially, the results are the same, though a virtual private server hosting is less expensive. With Colocated hosting, the user installs a self-purchased server at the data center of the host. The services often provided for other types of hosting, must be paid for by the colocated hosting user, thus the costs associated with this choice tend to be high.

In order to use a web-hosting service, your e-business must already have an existing website ready to go. So as you develop your website, one of the crucial planning components is deciding what web hosting service your e-business and site will require. Valiss are the internet marketing experts. They will help you design and implement your entire internet marketing plan, and will then help you navigate the many issues involving your web hosting choice.

Ted Prodromou spent over 25 years in the computer industry working for IBM, Digital, and Cellular one. Today he's the owner of Valiss IT, a consulting firm that provides small business coaching and marketing help. He's also a certified personal and professional coach.

Ted has created and led many coaching workshops and today is helping small businesses automate their marketing with his latest coaching program, "Attract Clients While You Sleep".

free domain transfer

You've already got a website, but your current hosting provider can no longer meet your needs, provide adequate service, costs too much, or is going out of business. You need to move your website to a new host. How do you do this? This situation arises all the time, but many people don't know where to begin. This guide is designed to help you understand what is involved in a hosting transfer so that you can transition from one host to another as smoothly as possible.

Step 1: Determine What You Have

Before you move anything, you need to know what you've got to transfer so that you can determine your requirements of the new hosting provider. Ask yourself these questions and find out the answers. You may need to ask your website designer or your current hosting provider for some of this information.

• Do you have all of the information you need to manage your domain names? If you don't know what this is, read our guide to Understanding Your Domain Name.
• Can you get a complete backup copy of your website?
• What kind of server are you currently hosting on? Windows, Linux/Unix, something else?
• Is your site running any kind of dynamic code, scripts, or software, such as ASP, PHP, CGI, Java, etc.? What kind? Most shopping carts and data processing applications fall under this description.
• Does your site have a database? What kind? MySQL, SQL, PostgreSQL, Access, Oracle, something else?
• How many e-mail addresses do you have? Do you have a list of usernames and passwords? Are there any e-mail aliases or forwarded addresses set up?
• Are any parts of your site password protected or secured? How is this set up?
• Are there any elements of your site, such as the shopping cart, that are not under your domain name and cannot be taken with you? Some hosting providers offer a shopping cart which can only be used by their customers.
• How much storage space does your website take up?
• How much bandwidth does your website use up every month?
• Do you have any special requirements, such as the ability to receive delivery receipts for your e-mail?

web hosting tips

1. The reliability of the service and their offers.

Sounds too good to be true? Betcha! After they cashed in two fat checks from AdSense they simply went offline. No prior notice, no apology, nothing.

Things to watch out for:

- Design. If the site looks like it was bought from a man in a white van, or if it's using a design from a free template site, it's probably just a waste of time. If these guys couldn't pay a web designer $100 for a decent layout, they don't probably have the skills to run such a site.

- How long they've been around. I'm not saying that new sprung hosting services can't make it, just be careful when choosing one that's two months old.

- Check their Google PR, ranking on free hosting directories and any other location you might think of. If the site has tons of inbound links, the owners have probably spent a considerable amount of money advertising it, so they plan to do their best to keep the service up.

2. Ads

Advertising placed on your web space is how free web hosting providers support their service. Having someone else's ads displayed on your page is usually the price you have to pay for their free service. There are a select few hosts that won't plug in banners or other forms of advertising in exchange for your performing other services in their favour (like posting in their forum or referring other members). What you should look for:

- How well the ads blend into your design. A red frame at the top will probably not go well with your blue template. If possible, pick a host that allows you to place a banner code anywhere you want-- this way you can put it wherever it best fits.

- Whether or not they display targeted ads. If your site is on dog chewing toys and the ads are on car dealsyour visitors will probably not like it. Worse, watch out for sites that display pornographic ads.

- What kind of ads they're displaying. Never, under any circumstances, sign up for a site that advertises through popups. Popups are extremely annoying, and most visitors will not return to your site.

- Do they allow your own ads to be displayed? It's one BIG issue you should know before signing up if you plan to make money with your site.

3. Tools and scripts available

Forums, guest books, counters, polls are always nicefeatures to add to your site. If you can't or don't want to handle installing such an addon from a third party you could look for a host that already provides it. Keep in mind that these tools are not always the best and that there are most likely many other free ones out there. On the other hand, if your chosen host provides very few or no such tools, then it's probably either running on a slow server and doesn't want to clog it up or doesn't give a dime about their customers.

4. Monthly bandwidth and what they do after you eat it up

Always, no matter how small your site is, look for a host that offers at least 1GB of traffic per month. Also consider going with a host that will offer you a paid subscription if you go over this quota instead of simply blocking access to your page. Say you hit the jackpot and visitors start flowing in like crazy from day one. Next day you don't want them to see a page like "Sorry, this site has gone over the allotted bandwidth, please check back in a month or so".

Try this simple calculation: say your pages average 50kB, including images, or (approx.) 0.05MB. Now let's say your visitors browse 3 pages on average, before they leave the site. That's 3 x 0.05 = 0.15 MB. If we divide 1GB (or 1,000 MB) by 0.15, we get 6,666 -- the average number of visitors you can get in one month without going over the bandwidth quota. Divide that by 30 and you can have 222 visitors per day. Also keep in mind that search engines also eat up bandwidth, a deep crawl from a spider can eat up as much as 100MB if you have a lot of pages.

uk hosters

Easyspace, one of the leading providers of domain names and web hosting in the UK, has launched a new feature on its website to allow non-UK visitors to view more accurate pricing for each of its range of products.

In response to a continued high volume of non-UK traffic to the website, Easyspace has launched a currency convertor on the easyspace.com website targeting the two most popular currencies used by the majority of its non-UK visitors – American Dollars (USD) and the Euro (EUR).

By simply selecting the preferred currency using the relevant onsite navigation, users can view equivalent and up-to-date pricing for all products, including Domain Names, Web Hosting and Virtual Servers. Non-UK currencies on site are reset every morning to reflect an accurate equivalent based on a live Exchange Rate feed.

“For a long time now we’ve had visitors to our site from the USA, France, Spain, Ireland and further afield, but those visitors have been left to do the conversions themselves in terms of calculating the equivalent cost for products in their own currencies.” Comments Errol Vanderhorst, Managing Director at Easyspace.

“While the core of our business still comes from the UK market, there has been an evident growth in interest from non-UK visitors, so improving Usability and Pricing Accuracy was a logical step. We’re continuing to monitor and will look to implement additional currencies should it become a requirement in future.”

The Currency Selector is one of several recent developments by Easyspace targeted at specific customer segments. With the launch of its Vouchers product for those looking for gifts or “cash in the bank”, the re-launch of the Web Design section of its website and Web Design related products to better reflect the growing list of offerings within its Web Design portfolio to the launch of SaaS application plugins for its Shared and Virtual Hosting products, Easyspace has started the year as it means to go on.

Errol continued “We continue to monitor our customer base and take time to reflect on the feedback it provides us. The result is several new features on a variety of products alongside some improved functionality making the whole Easyspace experience even smoother.”

domain hosting

Colocation and managed hosting provider PEER 1 Hosting (www.peer1.com) announced on Tuesday that it has opened a new $40 million, 40,000 square-foot data center located in Toronto, Canada, saying the facility will be the company’s first to offer colocation, dedicated hosting and managed hosting under one roof, and will mark the first time Peer 1 offers all three in Canada.

Peer 1 says the new Toronto facility is the most efficient PEER 1 data center to date, and was built with power density, reliability and security in mind. The company says the facility was constructed in four sections, each as a separate Performance Optimized Data Centre, or POD, enabling the company to cost-effectively manage the facility’s growth.

The WHIR has covered the construction of this particular facility in stages, through a series of videos appearing on WHIR tv. Click here to view the most recent WHIR tv video of PEER 1's Toronto data center construction.

According to financial observers, the facility is opening slightly ahead of schedule. Pre-sales will open February 1, with a move-in date in March. The company reportedly hoped to sell between 15 and 20 percent of the facility’s capacity before it opened.

Each of the four PODs will include space for about 270 cabinets, or 7,500 servers. The first will include 7,500 square feet of data center space and 8,000 square feet of office, inventory, network and storage areas. It was built on-budget for the capital cost of $10 million.

“The Internet is a vital platform for our customers, and it continues to grow,” says Fabio Banducci, president and CEO for PEER 1 Hosting, quoted in the press release. “Our new state-of-the-art Toronto data centre ensures we stay current and provide the fastest and most reliable network to serve our customers, now and in the future, while providing PEER 1 with enhanced flexible capacity to support its own growth.”

Financial observers expect the facility to generate between $25 million and $30 million annually once all four phases are deployed and operating at utilization rates of roughly 70 percent, depending on the mix of services.

According to PEER 1, the new facility uses a variety of efficient products and technologies, including a redundant critical cooling infrastructure that uses a local well as its primary water supply, along with a connection to the city’s water system.

“We’re also using redundant high-efficiency Variable Frequency Drive centrifugal chillers to reduce cooling costs and condenser towers with economizers,” says Ryan Murphey, vice president of facilities and data center operations for PEER 1 Hosting, also quoted in the press release. “This enables PEER 1 to lessen the environmental impact of the data center by taking advantage of “free cooling” when the temperature drops below 10C.”

Each of the three remaining PODs will be built out as demand requires. The facility is PEER 1’s third data center in Toronto, and the company’s 17th facility worldwide.

The company is hosting event in Toronto on Wednesday, January 27, to celebrate the opening of the facility. Check out the WHIR on Thursday for coverage of the event.

hosting sites

I found a lot of PHP web hosting on internet, some cheap some highly expensive. After few research on hosting forums I collected some cheap high quality web hosting for PHP site. Here are the list of Good quality PHP website hosting :

1. ExclusiveHosting"Best Choice"
PHP and MySQL support web hosting. Price $2.95/month Free Setup
+ Free Domain Registration, Almost all features included in package.
- Paid Annually but you have 30 day money guarantee

2. HostMonster
PHP and MySQL support hosting. Price $4.95/month Free setup, Free Domain
+ Big Storage (300GB), Accept Multiple Domain (You won't wasted that big space :), 100 MySQL Database

3. WhipOrbit
PHP and MySQL support web hosting. Price $1.50/month Free setup
+ 3 MySQL Database, support almost all PHP hosting needs.
- Not included domain name

4. SiteFlip
PHP and MySQL support web hosting. Price $0.99/month Free setup
+ Unlimited MySQL database, Good upgrade option
- Domain not included, $8.8 domain registration annually

5. BigBlueHost
PHP and MySQL support web hosting. Price $3.95/month Free Setup
+ Unlimited MySQL, all features included, one month free if you paid annually.
- Not included domain name