Tag Archives: web hosting services

Finding The Right Web Host With A Hosting Guide

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A web hosting guide can assist you in comparing the services being offered by different hosting companies. This is a significant benefit as you won’t have to visit various sites in order to obtain details. You can log on to a single site and compare services by bandwidth, price or disk space.

Nevertheless, before you visit a web guide you will need to define what your needs are. For example, do you need one GB of space or 10 GB? And what is the likely data transfer per month? Would you prefer a Unix environment or a Windows server?

You will also need to decide what the additional services needed are, such as e-mail aliases, URL redirects, FTP access, FTP accounts, web control panel, sub-domains, auto responders, etc. Try to consider your need for support, promotional aid, shopping cart, chat, etc. If you must, you might ask the help of a professional in order to make these details final.

Once you have established what your needs are, you can start searching for a hosting service. You can use one of the more popular search engines, such as Google or Yahoo in order to find a web guide which is suitable.

Log on to the site and try to compare the different packages, and decide which packages or bundled services meet your needs best. In the best possible case, you should seek a hosting service that is situated close to your office. You can then drive across and meet the company representatives and check all the offered facilities. You can also check if they are the actual owners or if they are reselling services on behalf of others.

Check and make comparison for the hardware specifications being offered by the hosting services. Try to cancel the hosting services that don’t meet your needs and send the remaining hosts all the questions you might have. The questions you ask might not be so important, but they will give you a good idea about how prompt the hosts are in answering all your queries. This will then become a useful benchmark to you and you will be able to reject those who did not answer in time.

At last you will need to test connectivity. Try to visit a few sites hosted on the servers of companies that you have short listed. Check the download speeds. Cancel ones that take too long to open. Then make a final comparison and choose the one that serves your needs in the best way.

J. M. Stevens is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.

Pros and Cons Of Unmanaged Hosting

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Managed and unmanaged hosting services are intended for customers with various needs. Both services have their pros and cons, and should be chosen on the basis of the technical expertise and the needs of a particular website.

Managed hosting, as the name indicates, has several advantages. The most important advantage is that it provides end-to-end server management, and looks after all server-related troubleshooting requirements. This could be a big relief for a website owner who doesn’t need to worry about a server’s needs or its maintenance.

The website owner won’t also need to worry about the server side hardware and software requirements such as the choice of the operating system, network connectivity or administrative controls. All these come along with the managed hosting package. The site owner’s responsibility is only limited to the hosting of content. This can be achieved from the same city, another city or even another country.

Several managed hosting companies even provide easy to use control panels in order to enable inexperienced site administrators to set up and make their websites function. These control panels are programmed in order to execute complex commands at the click of a button. They also solve problems that might arise at the server end during the course of hosting.

Another important issue that is looked after by managed web hosting services is bandwidth. These monitor the sites to study the traffic density, and make arrangements for smooth data transfer. They also take care of load balancing, which is extremely important for sites that attract high traffic. Without this device, the traffic will get choked.

In contrast, unmanaged hosting services provide customers with the capability of a remote server administration. The customer will then take care of all server-related requirements. Nevertheless, to do so the customer should be well versed in server management or else hire a technically qualified and experienced server administrator.

Unfortunately, server administrators don’t come without any costs. These costs will be difficult to afford for small and medium websites. They will also leave a vacuum when they quit. The new server administrator will then have to spend several weeks to understand how the sites are configured.

Managed hosting then seems like the best solution. It saves websites the trouble of managing the server, and helps them to focus on their core area of activity – that is hosting content. They also save money in the process due to the fact that managed hosting is much cheaper than the cost of hiring a full-fledged server administrator.

Michael Beattie is contributing editor at WebDesignArticles.net. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.