Actual Testing of Web Hosting Companies – The Final Assessment
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- When you’re done with all the groundwork and research on several web hosting companies, you can narrow down your choices for your final pick. It’s now time to put to actual test the chosen finalists for ultimate comparison, evaluation and assessment to determine the most suitable web hosting company that meets your needs and requirements.
• Verify the authenticity of the contact information. The two most significant pages on the official website of the web hosting companies are the “About Us” page and the “Contact Us” page. These are the pages where you’re supposed to get the company’s contact information. You can then confirm the authenticity of the information through hosting directories, testimonials and unbiased reviews. If none of these pages contain any contact information, be wary; it might not be a bad idea to take the company off your list.
• Submit queries through their Email Customer Support System. After confirming the existence of contact information, start sending emails to the hosting companies simultaneously; this way you can accurately compare and gauge the response interval of each. Keep in mind that timely response may well be the clincher to your final choice. A useful hint for response time evaluation: Any response done under six hours may be considered a positive sign.
• Try the Phone and Chat support. Talking to a “live” person ensures that you’re not just getting automated responses. As with email and ticket customer support systems, response time is critically important here. The phone and chat support test may also provide further proof that there is indeed a technical staff/team, which ensures the smooth running of your website.
• Assess the quality of response. Even more crucial is the quality of response you obtain during this testing period. Are the answers accurate and relevant to the information you seek? Are the responses well-thought of with clear-cut explanations and not just littered with technical jargons that don’t make sense to a newbie or non-technical person?
• Read the fine print. Examine the Terms and Conditions and the details of the service agreements on the company’s website. Scrutinizing the fine print may sound tedious but it can save you a lot of headaches in the long run. This is imperative to reasonably compare and assess each company’s rules and regulations as well as hidden costs, if any.
• Give their free web hosting package a shot. If the suggested tests still leave you a tad uncertain, sign up for free hosting package that most companies offer; this is a good way to better analyze their product and services. Be aware, though that you can only do this if your website is able to run on limited features as most free hosting packages offer minimal features, services and support. Be careful about free web hosting with an unlimited amount of bandwidth, though.
It’s always smarter to do a thorough comparison and analysis of the various tools and features being offered by the hosts you’re considering for final selection. It certainly puts you in a better position to come up with a well-informed decision.
Best Web Hosting Service – Three Ideas To Consider
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- To find the best pick for a website hosting company, you have to compare features or services being offered by several companies. Each will offer you a package with varying services, and it’s up to you to settle on the best depending on your website’s needs. Here are 3 factors you should consider:
Operating System – Windows and Linux are two of the most popular operating systems now in use. MySQL is quite common for databases, but there is also the Microsoft MSL server or ASP pages. What’s important is you’re being provided a Windows-based server. PHP and Perl are also widespread programming languages.
Control Panels – Usually, the website host will give you a control panel (cPanel) by which you can run your site hosting easily. The control panel allows you to administer databases, deal with email accounts, access and update your website, check your server status, and check on statistics relevant to your site. If you’re a beginner, cPanel is just what you need, which most of the best web hosting companies offer; however, for more advanced users, you can choose which you think serves your needs better.
Hosting Types – Many different hosting types may be offered to you, so find time to know a bit about which should fit your requirements. These types include: reseller hosting, dedicated hosting, shared hosting, colocation and virtual dedicated hosting, also known as virtual private users.
The simplest and most economical hosting plan is shared hosting. This type is especially for those who are interested in hosting a single domain, and have no requirements for a large bandwidth. In this case, you share server space and resources with other websites.
For the reseller hosting type, there is the option of having several domains and reselling the hosting account. It is like shared hosting, but it gives you more resources with another cPanel to manage all your domains without difficulty.
The dedicated server type is for those who require larger than usual bandwidth or disk space, along with added resources in managing their server. This alternative lets you have the server with its resources all to yourself, while only your domains are being hosted on the particular server. A part of this type is being given root or administrator access.
With the colocation option, for those who want to own their server, the website host simply gives you bandwidth, network connectivity, rack space, and support.
And with the virtual dedicated hosting, you’ll be sharing the server with other people, but you are allocated a specific proportion of its resources. As a result, even if you share with someone who has a busy site, this will not have an effect on your operation.
These are the factors you need to think about before deciding on which is the best website hosting company for you.
WC3 Stands – Guidelines to Follow!
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- The world wide web (sites, applications and services) is not a fully regulated “industry,” but it is still subject to various standards for technical specifications. The WWW Consortium or W3C is an international community that has built up the standards to advance the long-term growth and usability of the web. To gain approval by the consortium and the larger web community, web developers have to adhere to the standards defined by the W3C.
With thousands of W3C standards covering the different aspects of web development, we cannot list them all here. We’re choosing a rundown of the most commonly used standards, to make certain that the web developer you get is creating a site recognized and approved by W3C. You can find the full details of the W3C standards on their website.
Web Design and Applications
• HTML and CSS – the most important technologies used for building web sites and pages: HTML/XHTML is used to define a web page’s structure, while CSS is used to create styles and layouts.
• Scripting and Ajax – the standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for client-side web application developments.
• Audio and Video – there are formats approved by W3C for AV productions, including HTML, SMIL and SVG.
• Graphics – there are the specified use of PNG raster, Canvas API, and SVG vector for formats for web graphics.
• Accessibility – WAI or Web Accessibility Initiative created and published the WCAG or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for developers. This is so they can create content and applications which people with disabilities can access.
• Internationalization – W3C ensures that web technology can work across different cultures and languages, and created HTML and XML standards which should be built on Unicode.
• Mobile web – the W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices encourages the “One Web,” providing developers with tools to produce content which can be viewed on several mobile devices.
• Math on the web – MathML allows maths to be received and processed on the web for educational and business purposes, as well as scientific investigations.
• Privacy – the confidentiality and security implications of web communications are critical in technology design and development.
Web Architecture
• Architecture principals – this is to provide regulation and information to design web technologies.
• Identifiers – we identify web items by their names, including URLs, URIs and IRIs, which are W3C approved web names.
• Meta formats – XML or Extensible Markup Language helps the developers to powerfully but economically build new meta formats.
• Protocols – HTTP is the core protocol, used to communicate ideas on the web.
XML Technology
• XML essentials – namespaces and infoset are some important XML technologies which deal with SML matters in specific application situations.
• Schema – SML (W3C’s XML Schema) offers quality control tools for SML data.
• Security – XML signature, xkms and encryptions create reliability and secure, private environments for XML.
• Components – other components including style sheets, xlink, xinclude, xforms, xpointer, and xml fragments were created for a better environment to use and manage XML content.
• Transformation – XPath and XSLT were created to let web developers convert XML content into other recognized configurations.
• Query – XQuery is used by web developers to extract data from XML content.
• Processing – this defines the operation needing execution in chronological order on an XML document.
• Publishing – W3C has created XSL-FO for web developers to publish complicated, large or multilingual XML files to HTML, PDF or other formats.
Fatcow – Why I Love Them?
Fatcow has been existence since 1998 and it makes perfect since that they are my number three recommend hosting site, right behind InMotion and Hostgator (they are cheaper than both). One of the reasons I highly recommend their service is because they are so cheap. It’s actually quite insane how cheap Fatcow is. Currently they are running a special for $44 dollars a year. This is $3.66 a month which roughly the cost of a gallon of milk a month.
I know since they are so cheap you might think, you aren’t going to get any support from them because you are simply getting what you are paying for. This isn’t the case and they actually have a promise that states they will respond to their clients questions within 2 min. (via live chat). Now, I am not a customer of theirs, but I have worked on a handful of clients sites that did use Fatcow as their hosting service. I decided to test it out for myself, and you know what. I got a response in in 30 sec. on average. To make things better, they will offer 24/7 customer service and are willing to help you if ever you are having any issues. Not that pointless assistance, either that some hosting companies seem to have like Canaca and AceNet.
So, another great thing I like about Fatcow is the fact that they do daily backups. We all know that if you are running a website or blog your site is going to get hacked no matter how secure you try to make it. So what can be done to fight site hacks? Unless you spend hundreds a month on dedicated hosting (but even that is not fool proof.) The simple answer is you can trust Fatcow because they backup websites every 24 hours. This is actually a lot better than the industry standard which can do site backups every 36-48 hours. A lot of people (including myself) run their business completely on the Internet, so it makes perfect since to have a trustworthy hosting provider. So you can fill confident that if your site is hacked you can easily have them restore it to an early point (kind of like windows operating system, “restore point).
Another thing I really like about Fatcow is everything is cut and dry. There is NO bullshit! For instance you know you are going to have a flat fee you pay and they are not going to try to stick in all kinds of upsells in order to make them more and more money. Unlike, GoDaddy who tries to sell you the world if you buy a domain name from them. I am sure you know what I am talking about if you have ever bought anything from GoDaddy.
So, you really do get more than what you pay for with Fatcow. Just in case you are looking to switch your site over from your current hosting provider Fatcow, really does make it easy as pie. So if you are looking for a good web hosting site to call your site home I would highly recommend you read my Fatcow review. If you haven’t already check out this interview with Paul Bukhovko at Fatcow.
Dedicated Web Hosting Solution – Not Colocation
( The Best Web Hosting Service )- There are several options for web hosting that an end user can choose from. Their decision may depend on the levels of control and the amount they are willing to pay for their web to be up and running. Those who already have advanced knowledge in web hosting and needs higher degree of control over their web page they would only have to choose between dedicated servers, and collocation web hosting.
When a client needs an entire server to implement his website, then he would just have to lease a dedicated server. He would have full control over the management of this server, including the content, administrative requirement, hardware, software used, operation system to run it and all other aspects of running a web server. The end-user may get technical support from the providers for the operating system and applications used but this may not be included in the terms of other providers.
The difference of a collocation service is that the client would have to purchase the server and determine the hardware and software configurations and preference. The external maintenance and upkeep of the server is provided by the collocations service. The collocation service includes the space to be provided for data storage ensures continuous Internet connection for the server, power and cooling supplies, fire protection and other security measures for the server. Still, the client gets complete control over the server and this is more costly.
To help you decide either to use dedicated servers vs. collocation hosting, here are the comparative analysis on the advantages and disadvantages of the two:
1. Control: the hosting company has more control over the server’s hardware and the dedicated account is still owned by them. In collocation hosting, the end-user owns the entirety of server (hardware and software), while the collocation host only provides the maintenance and upkeep requirement of the server.
2. Initial investment: It is more expensive to have a collocation server because the end-user would have to buy the machines, which is much significant compared to paying for a down payment when leasing a dedicated server.
3. Recurring cost. While new, the collocation server may run smoothly for a year to two after purchase. But it would cost more on the end-user if he would need to upgrade or increase the storage size of the collocation server. Unlike with dedicated server lease, the cost for upgrading is shouldered by the provider.
4. Availability of hosting: Many businesses prefer to employ a dedicated server nowadays because of the high expense required by collocation servers.
For companies who process huge databases, they still prefer usage of collocation hosting because it may initially be more expensive in buying the equipment but the maintenance expense is relatively low. Telecommunication companies, big corporations and eCommerce enterprises are usually on the collocation server because they see that the lease of dedicated servers for their requirement is relatively high when summed up.
Home users and small businesses may benefit more on dedicated web hosting because the dedicated servers are maintained and managed by the provider. Thus, they would not have problem when it comes to the protection of the servers from viruses and malwares, upgrading requirements and maintenance. This is somehow the most important advantage of a dedicated server over other web hosting options like shared hosting or virtual private servers.
We hope we were able to provide you a bigger picture of the difference between a managed dedicated server and collocation hosting. Both are useful to end-users depending on their website needs and online transactions. Determining which one to employ for your business depends on your requirements and budgets. Either way, it will serve the purpose of website reliability for your online transactions.
The Best Dedicated Web Hosting Solution
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