Nowadays business is mainly based on commercial, on the way you are marketing your products. One of the best ways to do that is to create a web site. This is the best way for you to get lots of people looking at your offers and maybe convince them to invest in them. One of the easiest ways to have a web site that anyone with Internet access can see is to apply for web hosting. Obviously, like in any other domain you should consider some important aspects in order to benefit from the proper service when it comes to web hosting. It is very important to have a decent web hosting because otherwise you risk losing a great amount of money depending on the mistakes the web host makes.

In order to find the right option for your needs in what concerns the web hosting you should know very well what you want. If you find a bad solution your investment will suffer and the results will not only have the consequence that people would not visit your web site but also on your business. Therefore when you intend to ask for hosting service you should verify the offer of a company that provides such a thing by asking for detail about some major aspects. For example, in what concerns the technical support, you have to know what exactly they can provide you in this area, when do they react if you ask for help and if this service costs extra money.

Security is another important aspect that you should have in mind when you plan to buy web hosting. It is recommended for you to go with a company that provides servers which are protected by a double firewall. This way, you will be sure that you are away from problems caused by power failure or by other people who plan to use in an illegal way your information. It is also recommended that you apply for a Web hosting company that provides its services for many sites, thousands. Ask for information like how does the company assure protection for its clients.

You will want to know for sure how large can your website be and how much you will be able to expand it if you use a certain web hosting service. This aspect refers at the storage which is usually for 1 - 5 GB. Do not forget to ask the web hosting company how large is the storage they can provide in case of expansion – it should be something like 30 GB. Other important aspects when it comes to web hosting refer at the domain you want for your business and the design, surely important when it comes to determining people who see your website to become your clients. You can get a domain on your own or ask for the web hosting company to help you with that. Take care of all these things and some more – such as search engine optimization, the costs and the contract - and you will surely benefit from the web hosting you will have.

About the author:
Marble Host offers outstanding phpAdsNew hosting at http://www.marblehost.com/phpadsnew.php with 99.9% uptime guarantee.

The world of Web hosting business can be bad if you do not know the basics!
By Smit Mathur
Avoiding Scams while choosing a Web hosting service:

In today’s competitive business world, web hosting companies are offering services at an extremely lower price. Due to competitive prices, scams keep popping their heads every now and then. While searching for a webhosting service, one can find numerous such websites offering free services. Most “Free” Web hosting sites usually trap individuals by acquiring their e-mail address and selling them to spammers or keep on popping their head in the form of “free offers” or force Google Adsense and other advertisements on web pages to draw people away from the site. It is advisable to stay away from any kind of free hosting services and sub domains with advertisements that are forced to be placed anywhere on the website.

What one needs is a webhosting service that is honest about a Bandwidth service. A good webhost should support scripting languages such as a MySQL and PHP and ensures no unnecessary banners or advertisements.

Choosing Reseller hosting as an excellent web hosting business:

Reseller hosting allows individuals to sell their hosting space to customers. Some webhosting companies offer a percentage of their income through a reseller hosting program. Individuals who sign up for reseller hosting are given a chance to set up their own prices for different webhosting packages and plans. Resellers either buy web hosting packages at a discount or pay at a flat rate which is lower than the price paid by the customers.

The best part of reseller hosting business is the hassle-free approach. There is no need to give technical support to customers and there is zero involvement in the billing process. Resellers are free to set their own prices for different web hosting packages and plans. This ensures full control over the profits generated from this business. They have access to their own personal account which displays the packages that are sold, details and statistics of customers and their accounts.

Resellers aiming for a particular sector of the market may either sell smaller packages to individuals and professional packages to organizations who want to attract more traffic. Some web hosting companies give the option to earn extra money from affiliate sales. This involves recruiting more individuals by promoting and advertising, making a profitable business opportunity.

Smit Mathur is an expert for writting Articles and is currently working for Aussie Webhost.For more information related to web hosting, Affordable web hosting, Business web hosting, Web hosting provider, Ecommerce web hosting, Web hosting solution please visit http://www.aussiewebhost.com.au/

There is nothing more frustrating as a webmaster then waking up in the morning, firing up your browser to check your website only to find a message saying “This site has exceeded it’s bandwidth limits for the month”

It’s embarrassing, time consuming and not to mention costly if you are missing out on sales.

On the other side of the scale, it can be very costly to be on a larger web hosting plan or dedicated server and hardly even use the services it offers.

Good quality web hosting is not cheap, but you need to balance your business needs with what you can really afford to pay.

So what web hosting service should you be using? Good question!

In this article I’m going to be talking about the pro’s and con’s of both shared web hosting and dedicated web hosting packages. By the end of the article you should have some idea what your online business needs now and what it will need when it expands.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is what most small online businesses use. Shared hosting means that your site is on one server that also holds other peoples websites as well. Your website will not be the only one on that server. Very few small online businesses need the power of a dedicated server.

Most companies offer a few different types of shared web hosting services. The only difference usually being how much disk space you want or how much transfer allowance you need.

The best way to show you what the difference is between shared hosting services is to show you an example.

Go to http://www.marblehost.com/hosting-plans.php

This is an example web hosting companies shared hosting services. As you can see they offer two different types of shared hosting services. Basically they offer a small and large service.

The major differences between each package really is how many domain names you can host, how much transfer (how many megabytes that are downloading from your website) you can have and how much disk space (how many files you can store) you need.

If you’re just starting out online and haven’t got a website up yet and not sure what you are doing exactly, start off with the small plan. That’s more then enough for a small site or blog for that matter.

Now if you run a larger website and you offer a lot of downloads, say for example you’re selling a rather large ebook, you might need the large service. Let’s say you have a 10mb ebook for sale, the large service this company offers would allow you to have roughly 2000 downloads of that package before you ran out of bandwidth (transfer).

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is for the big boys. It’s for medium to big business looking to do a lot of work online. A dedicated server is just that, you’re own server. You get your own server just for your website which is unlike shared hosting as you have to share a server.

There are many different packages available with dedicated hosting depending on how much you want to spend. The more resources a server has, IE, RAM, Hard drive space, processor speed, the more it will cost.

You can see that a dedicated server allows you a lot more disk space and transfer allowance. It also allows you unlimited domain names. Dedicated servers are also known to be a lot more stable and allow you more control over your website and are perfect for a professional image.

There are two types of dedicated servers….

Managed hosting

Managed hosting offers you the support of a technical team looking after your server. They do all the updates and technical side of things for you. They will perform routine maintenance without you even asking. Managed hosting how ever does cost quite a lot more then un-managed usually.

Un-managed hosting

Un-managed hosting isn’t as support less as it sounds. Most dedicated servers do come with technical assistance and routine maintenance, but any support questions will more then likely cost you extra. If you need something added to your server, it will cost you a in maintenance fee’s. Rebooting your server should also come free with un-managed dedicated hosting.

Multiple Domain Name Hosting

Another thing you should look at is whether or not you want to host multiple domain names with your one hosting package. Both shared hosting and dedicated hosting can allow you to do this. A lot of share hosting services now allow this.

I recommend always using a web host that allows you to have multiple domain names with your one account. It really does solve the problem of having multiple hosting accounts for different domain names.

Other Things To Look For

Other things to think about when searching for a web hosting company is what you intend to do with your website.

Do you need a lot of technical assistance? If so, look for a hosting company with live 24/7 support. Do you want to create a blog, or lot’s of blogs? Then you will need to see if your web hosting company allows you to setup multiple MYSQL databases.

With such a huge market of web hosts on the Internet you may be lead to believe that they all are basically the same. I would caution you to rethink this philosophy.

There are web hosts that offer huge amounts of disk space for a small monthly fee and there are web host that offer a very limited amount of disk space, bandwidth, email accounts for a more expensive price.

When searching for a web host there is more important factors to take into consideration.

When searching for a web host please look at the following factors:

What is there uptime guarantee.

May host offer a guarantee of uptime. Please inquire to determine if there are any discounts if they do not meet this guarantee because this is your business and if your website is not visible on the Internet you cannot sell your products or services. For instance, does your prospective web host offer a guarantee of discounts for each hour that your site is inaccessible from their servers or their network.

Ask for information regarding their network

On the Internet there are several interconnected networks. There are some networks that connect smaller networks to larger networks and some networks are top tier networks. It would be a good idea to ask your prospective host for their network diagram or documentation regarding there network backbone. A top-tier provider offers more reliable and faster connectivity while a host that connects via a 3rd party network may experience frequent network issues and reduced speed on there network. For an example please review 561Hosting’s network provider info at: http://nsssc.superb.net/information/dca2net-info.php. This is quite a bit of technical information. If you should need an explanation please visit: http://www.561hosting.com. Our support staff will be happy to answer your questions via live chat or email.

Support

Support is a very important factor as well in your decision-making process. Please ask your prospective web host about their support package. Is there support 24/7, do they offer live chat? Is there a cost? At some point you may need support and it is really reassuring to know that your web host is there when you need them.

Above are a few issues to consider when selecting a web host. There are more factors to be considered but the factors above determine if your experience with a web host will be a pleasant one or one that can rivals a natural disaster.

As nearly every web host provides the option to purchase reseller accounts, the Internet has seen a significant increase in 3rd party hosting companies looking to develop a stable recurring income. With a market filled with competition you have probably asked yourself, “Should I become a reseller?”

Points to think about before deciding

Before taking the plunge and signing up for a reseller account maybe you should ponder these points:

Do I have the time to market my services? - To stand out among the many webhosts you will be required to market your services. Be prepared to spend time every day marketing your new hosting company or learning of various techniques to market your services.

Am I prepared to offer support to my clients? - To effectively support your clients when they have a question about web hosting or if something is not working you should either have experience with web hosting or the company that is providing reseller services should provide this support. For instance 561Hosting provides free support to resellers thus eliminating the need to be an expert to provide services to your customers.

Am I in this for the long haul? - As you advertise your services and become more visible to the Internet community you will no doubt start to land customers. Be sure that you are committed to providing these services indefinitely because your customers have put their trust in you and are counting on you to be around.

Is it worth it?

Selling hosting services can be a very rewarding business that you can run from the comfort of your home. Please be patient and market your services everyday and before long you will have several clients and may consider upgrading to a dedicated server account. But that’s another article…

Following is a list of the common mistakes that different web hosts tend to commit.

1. Falling For The Price Trap
A website price at a very low rate will generally provide extremely slow site or common services will be denied because the bandwidth was maximized.  Use your instincts and avoid low-priced websites.

2. Lack of Reseller Research
Reseller hosting is not bad.  As a matter of fact, good support is provided by resellers.  However, it will be safe to research your reseller.  They may offer good packages but they may be inexperienced in other aspects of web hosting.  A good reseller must know their products inside and out.

3. No Clear Definition of Web Site Requirements.
List down the resources that your web site will need and add more as you begin to expand.  This facilitates everything when an upgrade of your website is needed as you can simply discuss them with your host.

4. Purchasing Hosting In An Auction
Auctioned hosting, to say the least, is not unreliable as it may seem.  However, these hosts have a great deal of terms and conditions which are usually more than what that regular websites would offer.  As a result, inflexibility of the package may be experienced.

5. Forgiving A Host’s Bad Or Limited Website
Host that do not develop their own informative sites are unlikely to spend time developing informational site for your website.

6. Putting All The Eggs In One Basket
Putting several sites in a single account may seem like a good deal.  This does not hold true most of the time.  When you site is income-generating, it may not be wise to interconnect them.  Chances are when all your sites breakdown, your income will be lost.  Try to work out with your host about how to spread out the connection of your sites.

7. Taking Testimonials At Face Value
Not all testimonials are similar or true for customers.  Ask the host if they have a contact of their customers and if you can talk to them.    If the host does not want you to do this, that is a danger sign.

8. Not Keeping A Record Of Their Contact Information
Keeping track of telephone numbers, addresses, contact persons or e-mail addresses is important.  When a problem occurs in your site or when the system goes down, you can easily talk to the customer service to troubleshoot the problem for you.

9. Relying On Host Backups
It is advisable to keep a back-up copy of your website.  This is critical in times of emergency.

10. Trusting your host to have the latest software
Viruses and computer hackers can strike anytime.  It is always safe to check the software versions that you are planning to purchase from your host.  Make sure that it is always updated.

In scouting for a web hosting company, always ensure the disk space and amount of traffic needed.

Amount of Disk Space

The requirement of a small or medium web site is between 10 and 100MB of disk space.

When looking at the size of HTML pages, you will notice that the average size is very small - smaller than 1K. But looking at the size of the pictures used within the pages, you will often find them several times bigger than the page itself.

5 and 50K of space on the server is the expected consumption of each HTML page which is dependent on the use of images or other elements that may consume disk space.

More disk space is needed for web sites that plan to utilize lots of images or graphic elements (not to mention sound files or movies).

Before scouting for your web host, make sure that you have knowledge of your requirements.

Monthly Traffic

Monthly transfer of data for a small or medium web site will take up between 1 and 5GB.

On the other hand, monthly traffic in larger commercial sites consumes more than 100GB.

Before the contract with the host provider is signed, be sure that the following is checked:
What are the limitations on monthly transfer?
Will your site be closed if you go beyond the volume?
Will you be the billing be higher if the volume is exceeded?
Will it cover future requirements?
Is upgrading easy?

Connection Speed

Your web hosting provider should offer a relatively faster connection for your visitors who often connect through a modem.

During the early days of the Internet, connecting using a T1 was considered a fast connection. However, modern speeds are much faster.

One byte is 8 bits long, and that is usual amount of bits used to transfer a character (a letter or a digit). 14,000 to 56,000 bits per second (bps) is the transfer speed for low speed communication modems.  The range is within 2000 and 7000 characters per second, nearly 1 to 5 pages of written text.

Before making any deal with hosting providers, research some other web sites on their servers, to have a good background about the speed of their network. Likewise, compare the other sites with your site, to check if you have the same requirements. Getting in touch with other customers is another alternative.

Disk space and the amount of monthly traffic is not the only requirement in web hosting.  This will depend on the web site you are planning to put up.

If you own one or more websites, it is vitally important to know how many people are visiting your site and where these visitors originate from. Analyzing website statistics should become a regular habit for every webmaster who wishes to improve website traffic over time. You’ll be able to test and track the popularity of your updated site content and even see how visitors find your site in the search engines.

There are many web statistics programs on the market, each one unique in price and features, but did you know that some of the best website statistic programs already come free with most web hosting plans?

If you have a hosting account for your website that includes cpanel, then you probably have a whole bunch of web statistic programs built in. Cpanel is by far the most popular control panel for web hosting accounts today. It is extremely easy to learn and use for regular website administration.

There are usually 3 different types of statistics you will find inside cpanel. These are known as Analog, Webalizer and Awstats.

Webalizer is a statistic program that shows you in a graph form how many visitors have visited your site month by month. This type of statistics is very basic and only takes a quick glance to receive your web site information. If you want more detailed information you will probably need to check out the other two statistic programs.

Analog and Awstats each offer different presentation styles. All the essential visitor information you probably wish to see is listed on Analog, but most people have difficulty finding it as it is primarily text based and requires close attention.

Awstats on the other hand, is usually the favorite web site statistic program on cpanel. Not only does it give you plenty of visitor information, from number of hits per day and month, it also tells you where they originate from, how long visitors stayed at your site, the country from which they are viewing your site, what browser they are using and much more. Basic colored graphs and simple to read layout make it a quick and easy task to find the information that you are looking for.

So if you have a website and would like to know more about your visitors check out your cpanel statistic programs inside your website hosting account. They can be extremely helpful in analyzing your site and drawing more traffic to it.

It used to be that choosing a web hosting company for your small business web site was a difficult and confusing exercise. Thankfully, those days are long gone. Today you can do an online search for web hosting companies and be presented with a fantastic selection of cheap hosting packages, all of them offering a wide range of features.

Choosing among all the alternatives still takes a bit of research. Many people focus on impressive technical specs — available bandwidth, storage capacity, number of email addresses, and so on. But the truth is, web hosting has gotten very inexpensive. You can now get cheap web hosting for as low as $1.95 per month that includes many of the features you find in much more expensive plans.

So how do you go about choosing a hosting company? Here are some suggestions.

**Determine what you need

If you have a bit of web experience, choosing a host can be fairly simple, but if you are without experience, then it might be a good idea to discuss your requirements with a friend, business colleague, or a consultant.

There are also lots of good articles available online that can help. Or you might try contacting the support or sales staff of the different hosting companies on your short list. Tell them what you want to do and ask for their recommendations. Then compare notes after talking to three or four different companies.

Bandwidth, and storage capacity requirements may seem critical, but in fact, it is more important to find out if you can upgrade your service if and when you need more capacity. Every reputable hosting company is prepared to sell you more services when you need them, so don’t make this the determining factor in your search.

Determine what “extras” you need. These could include extra space for storing lots of photos. Or you may want database support so you can run a blog, a photo gallery, a forum, e-commerce software, or any number of other add-on programs.

**The Basics to look for in a web host

* 24/7 Live Support by e-mail and Live Chat - There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to get quick response from the technical people at your hosting company. Every reputable host has 24/7/365 support by email. Many now have 24/7 Live Chat as well.

* The ability to easily upgrade your hosting plan - As your business grows you may need to upgrade your plan. This should be a simple, transparent process that does not involve any downtime.

* A web-based control panel - You need this to add or modify email accounts, work with databases, change site configuration, and do basic editing of files.

* 24/7 FTP access - You will want to make changes to your site at unpredictable times, so you will need FTP access to the site at all times.

* Web-based e-mail - Your colleagues and employees will want to pick up their email from anywhere, not just from their primary computer. Webmail is the easiest way to give that feature.

**Extras to take you beyond the basic business web site

1. Shared space or dedicated server - As your online business activity increases your web site will have more traffic, and may require more space. That is when you may think you should move from shared space — where your site is hosted on the same server as potentially hundreds of other sites — to dedicated space, where your site has its own dedicated server.

Since making this move can be very expensive, it is something you should discuss with your host provider. They may have an intermediate solution with a limited number of sites per server. For example, some business packages (see below) limit the number of sites per physical server processor to 50. This gives you something much closer to a dedicated server, with a huge monthly data transfer rate, but without the high cost.

2. e_Commerce capability - Shopping carts let you display your products to customers and allow them to purchase items online. Some hosts provide free shopping cart systems with integrated payment “gateways”, that let you get your online store up and running for minimal cost.

3. Other Extras - Some hosting packages include free scripts such as blog software, content management systems, forums, picture galleries and much more. One of the best free packages is called Fantastico. It contains more than 40 free programs, each of which can be quickly installed from within the site Control Panel.

Choose a web hosting company you can grow with

Price and features are important, but they are only part of the story. Find a web hosting company that has a solid track record, offers reliable, technically advanced services, and gives you room to grow in the future.

Free or Paid Web Hosting?

Just finished your first website? So it’s the time to look for some hosting and make a choise. Your first qustion probably will be whether to choose free or paid hosting service. Let’s have a look at some advantages and disadvantages of these solutions.

Free web hosting:
(+) It’s for free. You don’t need to pay for domain name.
(-) Your URL will be something like username.freehost.com or freehost.com/username. As I noticed above, the advantage is that you don’t need to pay for domain. But note that if you move your website to another provider in the future you can loose some or all your traffic (there are some solutions how to solve this problem but it is not the point of this article).
(-) Your provider will probably include ads to your pages - usually 1 or 2 banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site read carefully their Terms and conditions. Some free hosts doesn’t allow it.
(-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwidth then paid hosts and a lot of them don’t offer futures like PHP and MySQL.
(-) A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions during some time. If your free host offers hosting wihtout ads now, don’t be surprised when banner or popup appears on your site in the future.
(-) Sometimes happens that free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choises - pay them or loose your website.

Paid web hosting:
(+) You can host your own domain. If you decide to change the web hosting provider in the future, you easily transfer the domain to the new provider and don’t loose your traffic.
(+) Most paid hosts offer 24/7 support via email or live chat and some of them provide toll-free phone support.
(+) You can expect better uptime then on free host. Some paid hosts offer uptime guarantee.
(+) Paid hosts usually offer enough disk space and bandwidth. Futures like PHP and MySQL are standard. Even if you are not programmer you can download plenty of free PHP scripts from internet.
(-) Paid hosting cost money :o)

Before you make the decision if choose free or paid host you should answer this question: How big ambitions do I have with my website? If you are starting small personal page for your friends consist of a few *.html files then free host will be sufficient. In case you plan to run serious business website, need PHP, database and don’t want ads on the site I recommend to look for quality paid host.