Common Web Hosting Mistakes

Falling for the price trap

Yes, many different companies offer free web hosting services at no cost. However, a common set back is most of these free web hosting plans do not offer sufficient features you need for your website and/or most of them force you to place advertisements on your website.

Inexperienced reseller

Hosting with a reseller is not a bad thing. However, you need to do extensive research - sometimes a reseller is very good all around but inexperienced when it comes to scripts and server environments.

Not clearly defining your requirements

You should keep a list of what resources your website needs and add to that list as it grows. This will make it easier when you need to upgrade your web hosting services in the future.

Forgiving a host's bad or limited website

If a web hosting provider cannot or would not take the time to put together an informational website for their own business, most likely they won't be too concerned about yours either. Look out for cookie cutter websites.

Putting all eggs in one basket

If you manage several websites, it may seem like a good idea to have everything in one account. You can simplify your billing and get a better deal. But that's not always the case. If your websites generates income and they are all interconnected, having all of them down at the same time is bad.

Not keeping a record of their contact information

Many of us are satisfied with email, forum and live support. But when your web hosting provider is down for days, including their own site, you won't be able to contact them at all if you don't have any records of their telephone number.

Relying on host backups

Always keep your own backups, even if your web hosting provider performs backups as well. It happens far too often - a customer's website goes down indefinitely and they couldn't put the website on another web hosting provider because they didn't have any backups of their own.

Trusting your host to have the latest software

New software or latest patches are meant to plug security holes. Check with your web hosting provider what versions they are running and how often they make updates before you purchase web hosting services from them.

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How to Get Cheap Web Hosting

To advance on the internet with more domains and more hosting accounts has been a stumbling block for many because of the expense; hosting being the bigger expenses. But if you plan to operate  with more sites in the future then perhaps this article will help you bring your plans forward. The sooner you own more of the internet the sooner your profits will increase.

As you progress your own understanding of the internet you'll come across the need to have more than one website for each project or niche. You may find a need to have explore that niche further and have a different website for each sub-niche. Rather than sit back and wait for just one website to do the business, you'll need perhaps six other websites that each try and dominate their sub niche to get traffic. If necessary they can send the traffic to the main website. Understanding this principle will increase you traffic ten-fold.

Many people and I have been guilty of the same thought, set up a different web hosting accounts for each new domain name they purchase. The only real advantage of this is if you plan on having say 60 sites and want to spread them over 6 hosting accounts. Otherwise you'll save huge amounts of your online budget by hosting new domains within your own current hosting account.

Some of the shared hosting providers can confuse you to believe that each new domain needs a new hosting account. This is not true... and as such you should explore the internet further if I cannot explain the simplicity within this article.

Many so called bigger 'providers' have realized that to compete in the bigger market place they need to offer good deals. Such deals will include up to hosting 10 domains on one account, to hosting 25 domains on one account; and the more sophisticated businesses are now offering unlimited domains on one account.

It would seem prudent then to pool your resources and instead of having more than one account, use one provider and pay just the one fee. Furthermore you will find that these providers will give you one free domain for just signing up with them.

It should be pointed out that, like every business, your virtual company will evolve on the web, so you need to be prepared for evolution.  You may, for example, upgrade you web site to include a variety of interactive properties or implement a sophisticated shopping card to drive your ecommerce store, all these amendments and upgrades will steal a little more web space each time.  Moreover, your business will be developing and growing so you will want to reflect this within your virtual company.

I worked with one hosting provider from my early days in 2001 and would have suggested them to everyone as I thought they were excellent. Good customer service, pretty much reliable and my websites were seen on the internet. No qualms, no problems and no hesitations.

Everything was hunky dory and I accepted the $80 per month for all my sites. Then when I read more I found that you can now find hosting providers that allow multiple websites in one account. Today most multiple providers suggest 10 websites for one monthly fee. Yet even better news is that because of competition some hosting providers allow unlimited websites. Initially their costing was that little bit higher, but even that has come down to compete with the mainstream providers.

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Ways To Host Your Site

There are 8 basic types of the web hosting available in the market today. Hosting even by IT standards, is not considered exciting, if it was a country it would be Belgium. If it was another business it would be fleet car leasing, where shared hosting would be company car pooling. Dedicated, leasing of cars to a sales force on a rolling annual rental contract or lease agreement. Like the gold rush in the Sierra Nevada in 49, nobody pays much attention to the stores the picks and shovels, but this is a mistake it can be vital to your sites success. It is crucial to security and in vital if maintaining site integrity, to have a hosting partner who will grow with you and react quickly and decisively to resolve problems when they arise. A good host can even be a source of revenue for your site.

Dedicated Server – rental as well as the exclusive use of an internet connection, server and software
Shared hosting – Multiple websites are being hosted on just one remote hard drive and server
Reseller hosting –  reselling of hosting accounts for another web host under a brand of your own. You determine the pricing structure and other aspects of the offer.
Virtual Private Server - You are not renting a real server, but you are rather splitting hardware with the other virtual servers running on the same machine. Many self contained virtual server can exist on one rented remote server.
Free hosting – Service usually offered by ISP’s or compensated with advertisements on your website. Free hosting usually offers little or no support, bandwidth, space, or the free scripts or site building features you enjoy with shared and dedicated hosting.
Managed Hosting - Expanded dedicated server hosting. In dedicated servers, the client has to take care of his or her own server but in managed hosting, the provider would have the responsibility of doing that Unmanaged Hosting - Total remote control administration of your web server. The server's technical aspects are controlled by the designated administrator which you would select to manage and handle your website information.
Colocation – Requires that you to bring your server to the data center of your host.
Clustered hosting - Used by the biggest and most important websites, you buy manage and physically house the servers yourself. Clustered means that the same content would be served on a number of servers enabling better redundancy and resource. Works well for Google.

As you can see there are many types of hosting account. Whether you are planning business web hosting or you intend to run a school site or maybe you are simply planning on getting a small hobby site up and running, you have a decision to make, what shared hosting plans do you chose.

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