Customer Satisfaction Ratingsof the most popular hosting companies in 2009
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Web Hosting Guide - Part2A website can be created with a variety of purposes but the basic idea is to share information, news, views and thoughts. Online business is also one of the common reasons for which websites, blogs and forums are created. Web hosting enables you to get your services and objectives known to the world. With a properly hosted website you can popularize your company and brand across the globe, especially to the target audiences who cannot be informed otherwise. To experience the benefits of creating websites, one needs to be careful while selecting a web host. Finding the best web hosting is often difficult and demands a lot of study and research work - hence the need for a web hosting guide. When you look for information on web hosts, over the internet, several results come up. But the question is who these hosts are? Are they reliable? Can they provide you all sorts of benefits that are required? It is very essential to get answers to these questions before venturing for any web hosting service. Here are some steps in which one should move to fulfill the web hosting needs:The foremost job is to determine the needs of web hosting:Once you are determined that you have to create a niche for your website in the Internet, it's time to figure out the purpose of the website. Decide on what type of website you want to build. There are various types like, e-commerce, hobby site, interactive sites etc that can be adapted. If you want to feature an e-commerce site, security requirements are must. You will require Secure Sockets Layer encryption and also shopping carts which form the very basic components of an e-commerce site. If you want to feature a customer e-commerce site then it is essential that you select the right sort of web hosting environment that supports the various software systems. Blog sites are often developed in PHP or Perl/CGI scripting and these sites need access to MySQL or SQL databases. These factors are highly technical and those with little knowledge depend largely on the web hosts. Some web hosts take the advantage of the customer's ignorance and charge unnecessarily for such information. Therefore the only solution is to gather some knowledge before hiring the web hosts. Storage spaceThe nature and content of your website would determine the storage space that you require for your website. If you are running a small website, which doesn't contain large number of features, it would consume less space. On the contrary, websites that consists of thousands of pages, images, videos and graphics would consume large amount of space. E-commerce websites generally contain large scale of information and contain large amount of data. Though in some cases, separate databases are provided to the customers, yet there are many web hosts that don't provide. It has also been noticed that, separate databases create problems as the storage limits are not always exactly what, it is claimed to be. Determining bandwidthBandwidth of a website is essential. The number of hits that your website would experience could determine the bandwidth limit that your website requires. This can be stated in a simple way, if your website is a popular one and is used by the visitors frequently, your site would require or rather consume heavy bandwidth than a site on which visitors hardly click. Suppose you have a website that is simple without too many features and average webpage is of 8KB. If it is assumed that your web pages experience 10 hits per day, then your bandwidth per month would be 8×10x30. Bandwidth is an essential factor of web hosting and before fixing up you deal with a company, try to estimate the size of your website. You can alternatively, put this decision on the web host's shoulders but provide the specifications of your website in details. Online forums and blogs consume more bandwidth than that of simple company websites. This is because visitors not only click on these websites for reading proposes but they also participate in it actively. Web hosting features:The next thing that you need to do is to select the web hosting features that are required for your website. Websites can be developed using simple HTML or using PHP/ASP and Flash. No matter what are the technical bases of the website is, you need to get it clarified from the web hosts that they have support to such services or not. Programming languages are of foremost requirements as they determine the look and feel of your website. As the owner of your website, you need special access to it. These accesses are provided with the help of FTP or Telnet. But what kind of access you need to your website will have to clarified and checked out with your web hosting service provider. Types of web hostingThere are several types of web hosting services offered by the web hosts. Each of these services is based on the budget and purposes of the web hosts. Web hosting includes shared, dedicated, managed, server co-location, reseller and free web hosting services. Depending on the website requirements of your budget you can make your selection. For large websites and companies with big budget, dedicate web hosting is always preferred whereas, for small business, with less or low budget, free web hosting is preferred. All these type of web hosting have their own pros and cons and hence you can go about any of these provided the web host is authentic. Some of the tips to move ahead:
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