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Criteria of choosing an Ideal Web Hosting Company
Before we talk about what it takes to be a cheap and good
quality web host, let's get to the fundamental first.
What is a Web Host?
A web host is a service provider that places your web site
on a computer which is connected to the internet. The term
for this 'computer' is called a server.
A web hosting provider will typically have a fast connection
to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites
on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space
to you so that you can get your website up on the world
wide web.
With a well-managed web host, you can free yourself from
worrying the up-keep of complicated server technology and
proper technical maintenance. That's the whole purpose of
the web hosting companies. You should leave the technical
work to web hosting professional while you focus on your
own internet business.
Let's begin...
Feature Offered
The features that web hosting companies are offering are
getting quite standard nowadays.
The followings are some of the common features you'll see
in most web hosting plans:
* Control Panel
Control Panel is an interface where you can access your
site on the web server, allowing you to set-up and subsequently
update and customize your web site. Though cPanel is by
far the most popular control panel, some hosting providers
customize their own so that they can up-grade and expand
it at will.
* Diskspace
A vast majority of sites that don't have tons of graphics,
sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit in
50 MB of disk space. You should always leave yourself some
room for growth or check if the host has a bigger plan in
case you need to upgrade.
* Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted or received
through a unit of time. In web hosting, bandwidth is consumed
when visitors make requests for files on your web site and
download them to their personal computers.
* Email Account
With POP3 email accounts you can check email from Outlook,
Netscape Mail, Eudora or any other Email software.
* Scripting language
As all our top 10 listings are using Unix and Linux platform,
php, perl and CGI are the languages we are talking about
here. It is best to choose a host that supports the latest
version to maximize the latest web technologies for the
fee that you pay.
* Database
If your web site is going to store a lot of data that should
be dynamically accessible (like user accounts, stock prices,
maps, Interactive news, message boards and forum etc.),
you'll need to look for an account that offers a database.
MySQL is a powerful and most popular database program that
runs on the Linux operation system. It is able to handle
million of entries all at once. Its flexibility and speed
allow you to also store logs and pictures. MySQL is designed
to scale well under heavy traffic conditions and is ideal
for database-intensive or e-commerce-enabled Web sites.
Customer Service/Support
No matter if you are an expert or a novice in web hosting,
you need a web host with good customer support system. What
is the criteria of an excellent customer support? Let us
explain.
* How big is the knowledge base?
This is particularly important for those who want to search
for quick answer without seeking direct assistance from
customer support staff. Due to the huge database, normally
it's searchable. Some web hosting providers will even make
your life easier by making a video tutorial guiding you
step by step in setting up your new account. Very useful
for beginner.
* Responsive customer service staff.
If you are too lazy to find the answer out of a big pool
of database, get the direct answer from someone who knows
it. Direct customer support comes in a few forms.
a. Email support
b. Phone support: Normally, sales and technical support
uses separate phone line. A good phone support staff knows
what your problem is and answers with relevance.
c.Web Host like Lunarpages and Globat even have live chat
support. However, it's not how many support channels that
are available but how responsive it is of the staff. You
can find out the hosting reviews and ratings of each of
our Top 10 Cheap Web Host.
Price to Disk Space / Price to Bandwidth Ratio
Are you paying too much for your Web Hosting Plan?
Having done the research on hundreds of web hosting companies,
in general, we've come to this conclusion: the more disk
space and bandwidth you are getting, the more expensive
is the monthly price.
To help you understand which price is competitive enough
for you to take up the offer, we have categorized 5 different
price range. For each price range, a score of maximum of
10 is assigned. To understand the concept behind this, please
refer to the details here.
Popularity
A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable
customer support and reliability in place but without an
effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let's face
it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members
and steady growth of new members, it's very difficult to
survive in this highly competitive industry.
We judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider
by looking at the number of awards won, the reviews of other
websites and the Alexa traffic ranking.
All the hosting providers listed on our Top 10 Cheap Web
Hosting Directory are among the top 40,000 most visited
websites in the world.
Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee
Nothing can hurt you more than this: your visitors come
to your web site only to find that it's not accessible.
You lose credibility and possibly even a sale. If your web
host does not guarantee at least a 99% uptime, leave the
web host now!
To ensure maximum uptime, installation of redundant back-up
systems is essential. Each web host has their own management
systems to minimize downtime. "Redundant" means
that if any of the Internet connections get interrupted,
the alternate Internet connection will take over.
We use Alertra software to monitor the uptime of each of
our top 10 web hosts.
As for speed, even though routing, web server set up and
local area networks play a part in determining the speed
of a site, the main concern of how fast your site is depends
very much on the types of network connections.
Many hosting providers still connect to the Internet through
T1, or T3 connections. This is not the case for our top
10 hosts- they are using OC (Optical Carrier) lines.
A T1 line will offer data transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps (megabits
per second), while a T3 line can supply data transfer rates
of 43Mbps. OC-1 refers to a circuit that transmits 51.85Mbps.
Higher levels are multiples of that speed. Ultra-High Speed
OC3 and OC12 lines offers 155Mbps and 622Mbps respectively.
Some hosting providers have connections to major internet
backbones at the speed of OC48 (2488Mbps) and OC96 (4976Mbps).
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