Budget Web Hosting Content Provided by iPage iPage Web Hosting

A common question that arises among webmasters and small businesses with a web presence is: ”My website and traffic are growing, how do I know when it is time to move up to a bigger hosting account?”. In order to answer this question there are several factors that need to be carefully considered. Presuming that the average small business launches their website on a smaller, shared web hosting account, here are a few points to consider when contemplating the move to a larger (potentially more expensive) hosting account.

Size - The sheer size of a website often determines the most appropriate web hosting plan that will suffice for proper operation. Besides the obvious specifications listed by the hosting provider, there are two main measures of website size which relate to the hosting account – disk space and bandwidth.

Disk Space – This term refers (literally) to how much hard drive disk space is required to house your website. A very general formula for disk space required by your site is the following formula: (number of pages in your site) x (average page size) = minimum disk space required. A very broad rule of thumb is to consider the html component of your pages (if well written and clean these should be less than 30kb) and then add in any CSS (cascading style sheets) or JavaScript files and then add on any embedded images. Using very broad strokes, a ”typical” flat html web page will then be somewhere around 100kb. Ergo, a site with 50 pages would require: (50 pages x 100kb) = 5MB. Similarly, a site with 100 pages requires 10MB. A website with 1,000 pages would require 100MB disk space at a minimum.

Remember an important caveat – any video files or extremely large graphics can increase these numbers by 100 times. So the type of content you display on your website will dramatically impact the disk space required.

Bandwidth – A second measure of website size is the amount of bandwidth (sometime referred to as ‘transfer rate’ or simply ‘transfer’) required. This is usually a reflection of the number of visitors your website is serving – and also the size of the files being delivered by your site. The more visitors you have to your website – the more bandwidth required to serve them. As noted above, streaming files, large video or music downloads are also bandwidth intensive. While there is no really easy formula to calculate bandwidth requirements, your current web hosting provider should be keeping a record of how much bandwidth your website consumes each month. Alternatively there are online tools to let you calculate bandwidth usage.

Clearly if your website is growing fast in terms of disk space and/or bandwidth you should consider your options for a larger web hosting account type.

Security – In order to make your website hosting affordable on the lower end of the spectrum, hosting providers will place multiple websites together on one web server. This practice is referred to as ‘’shared hosting”. Literally, you are sharing the server with other websites. The benefits of this arrangement are the lower costs – since the server costs are also shared between many websites. The vast majority of beginning websites are hosted on shared servers. For many purposes this hosting configuration is quite adequate. There are reasons, however, that one may choose to migrate their website services to a server with lower contention rates (that means fewer websites per server).

The most pressing of these triggers to migrate is security. While the vast majority of web hosting providers are hyper-vigilant regarding site security, a shared environment poses an additional loophole for problems to occur. Due to the fact that there may be over 100 websites on the server, each with its own user name and password, that means there are 100 opportunities for a weak user name / password combination. Believe it or not, every hosting provider has customers who use ‘password’ as their password. Not smart. What this means for your website, if you are on a shared server, is that the security of your server (and therefore your website) is only as strong as the weakest user name / password combination of all the shared accounts. Further, while not as common, there are unscrupulous characters out there that will purchase a shared hosting account for spamming or other malicious activity. If such a user is on your server then your website is at risk. A further drawback of this situation may be getting ”blacklisted” (blocked) by large ISP’s. The end result is often that emails are not sent and received properly. The best way to protect your website from undue influence by others on a shared server is to move to a server with fewer (or no other) websites on it.

Reliability – Reliability (also referred to as ”uptime”) is a key consideration in migrating upward in the web hosting hierarchy. At its most basic reliability boils down to this: Does your website ever fail to load when called for in a browser? You are paying your good money to a hosting provider to ensure that your website is always available. Every reputable web hosting company will have multiple connections to the Internet, a solid data center with lots of backup power and uninterruptible power supplies, and physical security to prevent downtime. These elaborate precautions are for naught if one of the websites on a shared server goes haywire. The most common cause of server downtime on a shared server is simple human error caused by webmasters on a shared server creating a script which is malformed and then proceeds to absorb all the resources of that server (usually RAM). The only way to completely eliminate this potential issue is to house your website on a server that is dedicated to only your site (virtual or dedicated server). If you are wondering exactly how reliable your web hosting is, there are many monitoring tools available to measure uptime. One popular free tool is Alertra. Simply type your website URL into the box in the upper right and you can see if your website is currently up. For a modest monthly fee you can have Alertra check your website every few minutes to determine reliability.

Remember to consider the growth of your databases and files when considering moving up to a new hosting account. Also, if you are on a shared web server and everything is working well with great uptime and good security, then you may want to stay where you are until you hit the next level of growth. When you do get ready to move up to a higher level web hosting account, be sure to work with your hosting provider to get tips on migrating your files and transitioning smoothly.

Source: Budget Web Hosting – Does Your Site Fit Into a Shared Host?

View sourse

Blog Web Hosting Content Provided by FatCow FatCow Web Hosting

If you are currently blogging, or are considering creating a blog you will need to have it hosted somewhere. With literally thousands of web hosting companies out there – how do you choose among them? What should you look for to ensure that you find a quality web hosting provider? Here are a few tips to get you pointed in the right direction.

Reputation – Perhaps no other single factor is as telling about a web hosting provider as their reputation. By reputation we refer to the comments generated by current customers. In other words, the publicly observable appraisal of those actually engaging with the web host day in and day out. There are a few great ways to check on a potential web hosting company’s reputation online.

Google Search – Step one is to search Google for the company name, but also search phrases like ‘company name problems’ or ‘company name service’. Google is great for seeing the total accumulation of comments over time. You’ll see the disgruntled customer from 2002 that created a whole website to voice his displeasure. Or you’ll see comments from years past about how great your potential webhost is. What to do if you want to see extremely current information? Try Twitter search – see below.

Twitter – Besides being a great place to view the outward face of your webhost through their Twitter feed, you can also see comments from current customers. These comments are often less than a few hours old as well. So the information that you are getting about a customer service issue or outage are often happening right at the moment you are learning about it. To use Twitter as a real time search engine simply go to the search box: http://search.twitter.com – and type in your query. Try both the format ”host name” and ”@hostname” (this is the usual Twitter handle for a business).

Web Hosting Resource Sites and Forums – There are also specialty websites that research and review web hosting providers and their products. These sites range from current news and information about reputable hosting companies to ongoing conversations and threads in various web hosting forums. Among the best resources are: The Hosting News, webhostingtalk.com, Ping! Zine and Tophosts.com. Be aware that there are also some ”Top 10” type websites that receive affiliate bounties for recommending certain hosting providers. While these may be great web hosts, you ought to conduct separate independent research on any web host recommended through a ”Top 10” website.

Account Types – A second important factor to consider when selecting a web hosting provider is to match your online needs with the specific account types offered by the hosting company. Often a webhost will specialize in a particular type of web hosting. As an example, let’s say that you have selected the WordPress content management system as your preferred publishing platform for your blog. You would of course want to make certain that your web host is capable at WordPress hosting. Further, if WordPress was a specialization of your potential web hosting company they may offer special features such as a ”one click” install of the WordPress software, or special proprietary plugins developed just for their customers. You may also need WordPress themes and a specialized WordPress provider may supply free themes for their customers. Here are a few different type of hosting that you may want to consider.

Linux Hosting – Plain vanilla Linux operating system behind the hosting. This is very common, flexible and often is at a lower cost.

Windows / ASP.NET – This operating system is built upon the Microsoft server technology and is sometimes a prerequisite for enterprise or business scale hosting.

Shared Hosting – You receive a small sector of space and resources on a web server shared with others. If high security and uptime are important to you – you may want to select a virtual server or dedicated server instead.

Virtual Server / VPS Hosting – Virtualization has become commonplace and can offer many of the same benefits of a dedicated server (security, space, scalability) at a lower cost. A virtual server is a ‘’server” that is created with software – but has all the same attributes of a dedicated server. This is true even though multiple virtual servers exist on a single dedicated server.

Dedicated Server – In the case of very large sites, or website where security is paramount, a dedicated server is a great option. This is an entire web server which houses nothing but your website and databases. The benefits are high availability, high security and plenty of room to grow. The benefits come at a price though – dedicated servers are at a higher price point than both shared and virtual servers.

There are many more types of hosting, with each serving a specific market niche. To match up your needs with those of your provider give them a call to discuss your specific website configuration.

Geography – When considering which webhost is right for you, take a moment to consider your audience. That is, who will actually be viewing your website content. More specifically, consider which search engines will be important to your business strategy. If getting traffic from search engines is important to you (and it should be) you must select a host that serves your geographic target. This is because search engines look at the geographic location of the originating server to decide which countries and local geographies will be most relevant for that website. For example, if you plan on targeting website visitors in the United Kingdom, you would want your business to be listed we among the search engines for the UK (for example google.co.uk). Therefore, you would need to select a web hosting provider who has servers based in the UK.

Note – the company itself doesn’t have to be located in your target geography. They just need to have a server presence in your target country that can house your website.

Service Factors – Webmasters range from the uber-technical to the novice. No matter your level of technical expertise, you will need to obtain the help of your web host at some point. A critical consideration in selecting a web hosting provider for your blog needs to be: Will this company make it easy for me to ask questions and get problems resolved quickly? Look for a web host that offers communication in the ways that you prefer. For example, if you like to use chat to get issues resolved – look for a hosting company that offers support via chat. Similarly, if you want to call up and get a human being on the other end of the call, look for strong phone support. It never hurts to do a ”test run” on communications prior to buying. Use the chat service or phone number to ask a few pre-sales questions. This will at least help you gauge how responsive the host is to queries.

Good luck in selecting the best web host for you. Remember to conduct your research ahead of time, to ensure that you have a great and trouble-free web hosting experience.

Source: Blog Hosting – Choosing The Right Host

View sourse

Budget Web Hosting Content Provided by iPage iPage Web Hosting

A common question that arises among webmasters and small businesses with a web presence is: ”My website and traffic are growing, how do I know when it is time to move up to a bigger hosting account?”. In order to answer this question there are several factors that need to be carefully considered. Presuming that the average small business launches their website on a smaller, shared web hosting account, here are a few points to consider when contemplating the move to a larger (potentially more expensive) hosting account.

Size - The sheer size of a website often determines the most appropriate web hosting plan that will suffice for proper operation. Besides the obvious specifications listed by the hosting provider, there are two main measures of website size which relate to the hosting account – disk space and bandwidth.

Disk Space – This term refers (literally) to how much hard drive disk space is required to house your website. A very general formula for disk space required by your site is the following formula: (number of pages in your site) x (average page size) = minimum disk space required. A very broad rule of thumb is to consider the html component of your pages (if well written and clean these should be less than 30kb) and then add in any CSS (cascading style sheets) or JavaScript files and then add on any embedded images. Using very broad strokes, a ”typical” flat html web page will then be somewhere around 100kb. Ergo, a site with 50 pages would require: (50 pages x 100kb) = 5MB. Similarly, a site with 100 pages requires 10MB. A website with 1,000 pages would require 100MB disk space at a minimum.

Remember an important caveat – any video files or extremely large graphics can increase these numbers by 100 times. So the type of content you display on your website will dramatically impact the disk space required.

Bandwidth – A second measure of website size is the amount of bandwidth (sometime referred to as ‘transfer rate’ or simply ‘transfer’) required. This is usually a reflection of the number of visitors your website is serving – and also the size of the files being delivered by your site. The more visitors you have to your website – the more bandwidth required to serve them. As noted above, streaming files, large video or music downloads are also bandwidth intensive. While there is no really easy formula to calculate bandwidth requirements, your current web hosting provider should be keeping a record of how much bandwidth your website consumes each month. Alternatively there are online tools to let you calculate bandwidth usage.

Clearly if your website is growing fast in terms of disk space and/or bandwidth you should consider your options for a larger web hosting account type.

Security – In order to make your website hosting affordable on the lower end of the spectrum, hosting providers will place multiple websites together on one web server. This practice is referred to as ‘’shared hosting”. Literally, you are sharing the server with other websites. The benefits of this arrangement are the lower costs – since the server costs are also shared between many websites. The vast majority of beginning websites are hosted on shared servers. For many purposes this hosting configuration is quite adequate. There are reasons, however, that one may choose to migrate their website services to a server with lower contention rates (that means fewer websites per server).

The most pressing of these triggers to migrate is security. While the vast majority of web hosting providers are hyper-vigilant regarding site security, a shared environment poses an additional loophole for problems to occur. Due to the fact that there may be over 100 websites on the server, each with its own user name and password, that means there are 100 opportunities for a weak user name / password combination. Believe it or not, every hosting provider has customers who use ‘password’ as their password. Not smart. What this means for your website, if you are on a shared server, is that the security of your server (and therefore your website) is only as strong as the weakest user name / password combination of all the shared accounts. Further, while not as common, there are unscrupulous characters out there that will purchase a shared hosting account for spamming or other malicious activity. If such a user is on your server then your website is at risk. A further drawback of this situation may be getting ”blacklisted” (blocked) by large ISP’s. The end result is often that emails are not sent and received properly. The best way to protect your website from undue influence by others on a shared server is to move to a server with fewer (or no other) websites on it.

Reliability – Reliability (also referred to as ”uptime”) is a key consideration in migrating upward in the web hosting hierarchy. At its most basic reliability boils down to this: Does your website ever fail to load when called for in a browser? You are paying your good money to a hosting provider to ensure that your website is always available. Every reputable web hosting company will have multiple connections to the Internet, a solid data center with lots of backup power and uninterruptible power supplies, and physical security to prevent downtime. These elaborate precautions are for naught if one of the websites on a shared server goes haywire. The most common cause of server downtime on a shared server is simple human error caused by webmasters on a shared server creating a script which is malformed and then proceeds to absorb all the resources of that server (usually RAM). The only way to completely eliminate this potential issue is to house your website on a server that is dedicated to only your site (virtual or dedicated server). If you are wondering exactly how reliable your web hosting is, there are many monitoring tools available to measure uptime. One popular free tool is Alertra. Simply type your website URL into the box in the upper right and you can see if your website is currently up. For a modest monthly fee you can have Alertra check your website every few minutes to determine reliability.

Remember to consider the growth of your databases and files when considering moving up to a new hosting account. Also, if you are on a shared web server and everything is working well with great uptime and good security, then you may want to stay where you are until you hit the next level of growth. When you do get ready to move up to a higher level web hosting account, be sure to work with your hosting provider to get tips on migrating your files and transitioning smoothly.

Budget Web Hosting – Does Your Site Fit Into a Shared Host?

View sourse

Blog Web Hosting Content Provided by FatCow FatCow Web Hosting

If you are currently blogging, or are considering creating a blog you will need to have it hosted somewhere. With literally thousands of web hosting companies out there – how do you choose among them? What should you look for to ensure that you find a quality web hosting provider? Here are a few tips to get you pointed in the right direction.

Reputation – Perhaps no other single factor is as telling about a web hosting provider as their reputation. By reputation we refer to the comments generated by current customers. In other words, the publicly observable appraisal of those actually engaging with the web host day in and day out. There are a few great ways to check on a potential web hosting company’s reputation online.

Google Search – Step one is to search Google for the company name, but also search phrases like ‘company name problems’ or ‘company name service’. Google is great for seeing the total accumulation of comments over time. You’ll see the disgruntled customer from 2002 that created a whole website to voice his displeasure. Or you’ll see comments from years past about how great your potential webhost is. What to do if you want to see extremely current information? Try Twitter search – see below.

Twitter – Besides being a great place to view the outward face of your webhost through their Twitter feed, you can also see comments from current customers. These comments are often less than a few hours old as well. So the information that you are getting about a customer service issue or outage are often happening right at the moment you are learning about it. To use Twitter as a real time search engine simply go to the search box: http://search.twitter.com – and type in your query. Try both the format ”host name” and ”@hostname” (this is the usual Twitter handle for a business).

Web Hosting Resource Sites and Forums – There are also specialty websites that research and review web hosting providers and their products. These sites range from current news and information about reputable hosting companies to ongoing conversations and threads in various web hosting forums. Among the best resources are: The Hosting News, webhostingtalk.com, Ping! Zine and Tophosts.com. Be aware that there are also some ”Top 10” type websites that receive affiliate bounties for recommending certain hosting providers. While these may be great web hosts, you ought to conduct separate independent research on any web host recommended through a ”Top 10” website.

Account Types – A second important factor to consider when selecting a web hosting provider is to match your online needs with the specific account types offered by the hosting company. Often a webhost will specialize in a particular type of web hosting. As an example, let’s say that you have selected the WordPress content management system as your preferred publishing platform for your blog. You would of course want to make certain that your web host is capable at WordPress hosting. Further, if WordPress was a specialization of your potential web hosting company they may offer special features such as a ”one click” install of the WordPress software, or special proprietary plugins developed just for their customers. You may also need WordPress themes and a specialized WordPress provider may supply free themes for their customers. Here are a few different type of hosting that you may want to consider.

Linux Hosting – Plain vanilla Linux operating system behind the hosting. This is very common, flexible and often is at a lower cost.

Windows / ASP.NET – This operating system is built upon the Microsoft server technology and is sometimes a prerequisite for enterprise or business scale hosting.

Shared Hosting – You receive a small sector of space and resources on a web server shared with others. If high security and uptime are important to you – you may want to select a virtual server or dedicated server instead.

Virtual Server / VPS Hosting – Virtualization has become commonplace and can offer many of the same benefits of a dedicated server (security, space, scalability) at a lower cost. A virtual server is a ‘’server” that is created with software – but has all the same attributes of a dedicated server. This is true even though multiple virtual servers exist on a single dedicated server.

Dedicated Server – In the case of very large sites, or website where security is paramount, a dedicated server is a great option. This is an entire web server which houses nothing but your website and databases. The benefits are high availability, high security and plenty of room to grow. The benefits come at a price though – dedicated servers are at a higher price point than both shared and virtual servers.

There are many more types of hosting, with each serving a specific market niche. To match up your needs with those of your provider give them a call to discuss your specific website configuration.

Geography – When considering which webhost is right for you, take a moment to consider your audience. That is, who will actually be viewing your website content. More specifically, consider which search engines will be important to your business strategy. If getting traffic from search engines is important to you (and it should be) you must select a host that serves your geographic target. This is because search engines look at the geographic location of the originating server to decide which countries and local geographies will be most relevant for that website. For example, if you plan on targeting website visitors in the United Kingdom, you would want your business to be listed we among the search engines for the UK (for example google.co.uk). Therefore, you would need to select a web hosting provider who has servers based in the UK.

Note – the company itself doesn’t have to be located in your target geography. They just need to have a server presence in your target country that can house your website.

Service Factors – Webmasters range from the uber-technical to the novice. No matter your level of technical expertise, you will need to obtain the help of your web host at some point. A critical consideration in selecting a web hosting provider for your blog needs to be: Will this company make it easy for me to ask questions and get problems resolved quickly? Look for a web host that offers communication in the ways that you prefer. For example, if you like to use chat to get issues resolved – look for a hosting company that offers support via chat. Similarly, if you want to call up and get a human being on the other end of the call, look for strong phone support. It never hurts to do a ”test run” on communications prior to buying. Use the chat service or phone number to ask a few pre-sales questions. This will at least help you gauge how responsive the host is to queries.

Good luck in selecting the best web host for you. Remember to conduct your research ahead of time, to ensure that you have a great and trouble-free web hosting experience.

Blog Hosting – Choosing The Right Host

View sourse