Web Host Trader

There are hundreds of reasons that you could be looking to build a website, but if you are even considering a VPS chances are you aren’t looking for a personal blog or a site to host your family tree, instead you might be looking for a place to do some web development, a stable place to host your business website or e-commerce site, or perhaps a site to market a product for your company. What it comes down to for you is Shared Hosting vs. VPS Hosting and whether the costs of each outweigh the benefits

Shared hosting is what most webhosts offer, unless they specify that you are getting your own server or VPS assume that you are getting a shared hosting plan. Shared hosting is exactly what it sounds like, a whole bunch of websites available on the same server, all using the same resources and using just a few different IP addresses amongst them. Many new businesses and people who are starting up personal web pages decide to use shared hosting to cut their expenses, the amount of money that can be saved this way can be significant and the whole process is very easy to use, but what are the costs?

Bad Neighborhood

Your shared hosting account is on a server with a whole bunch of other sites, they may contain content you don’t personally agree with on moral or ethical grounds, or just content that you don’t want associated with your business. People can find out what sites are coming from what servers, and you may be tarred with the same brush. Worse still the other sites may be running malicious scripts and your site could be banned from being accessed, from sending mail or any of a hundred other things that are totally beyond your control.

Greedy Neighbors

Your site will be running on a server getting requests for these other websites, if it turns out that one of them ends up being really popular and gets lots of traffic all at once, your site’s performance will suffer, and if your site’s performance suffers, your users will not be happy. It doesn’t even take a hugely popular site on your server to mess things up, poorly written scripts can eat server resources and leave your site responding slowly or not at all.

Big Fish, Small Pond

Shared hosting will restrict the availability of services, applications and technologies available to you, in addition to often having smaller bandwidth limits than VPS or Dedicated Server hosting plans. This means as your success grows and your website tries to grow with it you may run into serious issues, and the process of transferring a site out of shared hosting and into a VPS is not trivial.

VPS to the rescue! (maybe)

VPS solutions are not perfect, but they do provide many advantages over a conventional Shared Hosting option. If your website represents your business, it is good for your professional image that that website is available as often as possible, and that it responds in a timely manner and is not associated with sites containing illicit or explicit content. VPS Hosting gives you more control, more power, more reliability.

Your website is the online extension of your business, what does your hosting choice say about your company?

If you found this interesting we have a site on Australian VPS Hosting that has some more information on Choosing a VPS Host.

Andrew Mailer is a Web Developer, Systems Admin and all round geeky guy bringing you information and advice on web hosting.

5 Tips For Choosing the Best Cheap Web Host to Fit Your Needs

Finding the best cheap web host to use for hosting your website is something that will save you a lot of money and will provide you with quality website hosting. Whether you are just getting started with setting up your online business or you are an individual who is setting up a personal blog and do not have a lot of money to spend hosting your website you will want to find an option that is cheap. The 5 tips that you find here will help you to be able to know what to look for in order to get the cheapest reliable web hosting that you can get.

One thing that you will want to look for is a company that has multiple payment options for the web hosting plans that they are selling. Some big companies will only provide you with the option to pay your hosting on a yearly basis and the fees must be paid up front. This makes is a little bit expensive and hard for a lot of people to be able to afford.

Another thing that you will want to look for is a company that does not do a lot of commercial advertising. If you hear about a company on the television, on the radio, or even read about them in one or your favorite magazines then they are going to have a high overhead cost. That means that they are going to pass those costs along to you in the form of higher prices for the web hosting that you are buying from them.

You might also want to try to find a hosting company that has an affiliate program. When you sign up for some hosting plans you will be able to enroll in their affiliate program and recruit your family and friends to use the same hosting provider that you are using. By doing this you will be able to pay for your hosting each month using the commissions that you get from the people that you get to sign up.

When you are looking at the different plans that are available you will want to make sure that you choose the one that fits your needs the best. This is another way that you will be able to save money. Most companies usually have at least two different options for you to choose from. One will allow you to host only one website and the other will allow you to host multiple websites. If you have more than one domain that you need to get hosting for then you will want to choose the option that allows for you to host multiple sites on one account. This will save you money from not having to get multiple hosting accounts to be able to host all of your sites.

A final tip that you may want to keep in mind to be able to find a cheap web host to fit your needs is to find a small company and see if you have any type of services or products that they may be interested in trading you for. When it comes to getting things that people want they often forget about the barter system that is the foundation of this country. There are a lot of smaller web hosting companies available for you to use that provide great hosting service. If you have something that you can trade them then all you have to do is contact them and ask. You have nothing to lose and who knows, they may even take you up on your offer and provide you with the service.

5 Sizzling Tips For Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company

If you want to set up a personal blog, a company website, or even a multi-million dollar social network, choosing the right hosting company for your website is paramount. Without laying this essential foundation, your internet site may experience frequent downtime, or worse still you could lose all of your important data.

With the five tips below I will show you how to make the right choice when it comes to choosing a company that can responsibly manage your website or blog.

Tip #1 – What is their advertising campaign?

If you head over to your local bookstore and go to the magazine section you will probably find a few magazines targeted to the web developer crowd. Often in these magazines there will be advertisements for web hosting companies that flaunt their impressive stats such as “99.9% server uptime” and others.

If a company is not running a legitimate operation, they would likely not be able to afford this type of advertising and also the magazine would pull the ad immediately if they began to receive a lot of negative feedback about this company. Any hosting company that you find this way will probably be a very safe bet for your business, because the more customers they have the more they have to keep their servers up 24/7 and put in place proper data backup procedures.

Tip #2 – What are other people saying about them?

One of the best ways to check and see if your web hosting company has a good track record is to see what kinds of reviews other people are giving them. Bring up any popular search engine and type in your host’s name with the word “review” afterwards and see if the feedback is positive or negative.

Tip #3 – How much does their shared hosting cost?

While the cost of website hosting has gone down dramatically in recent times and you likely can find a reliable hosting company for under 7 dollars per month for a small site, there is a scam that some shady hosting companies use which is to overload the amount of shared hosting accounts.

For your small monthly fee you may get a large amount of space and bandwidth, but the host counts on the fact that you are only going to use a small percent of it, so they will put more shared accounts on a single server than the server could handle if everyone used up all of their allocated capacity.

This means that with this type of account if someone else who had a shared account went over their bandwidth limit, it could bring your website down. Not a safe bet for someone who wants constant uptime.

Tip #4 – What kind of guarantee do they offer?

Even to this day the website hosting industry remains semi-anonymous, and there are a great deal of sob stories about people who lost all of their valuable data and literally their entire business overnight. But if your hosting company has a plan to take your money and run, it is not likely that they will offer a refund policy and money-back guarantee that is fair for customers.

Check to see what your hosting company’s policy for refunds is, and if they hold themselves to strict measures of transparency and accountability than it is probably a reliable company.

Tip #5 – Do you feel safe trusting them with your business?

Sometimes the most important tip you could follow is your gut feeling about whether or not this is a competent company. If they have a poorly designed website and no customer service then maybe it is not a safe bet for you.

And even if they do have all the bells and whistles on their website, if they do not return your email requests in a timely fashion then it may turn out that they are not a safe and reliable web hosting company.

Nathan Navachi