How can we Monitor Web Sites for Downtime ?

Many of today’s web hosting providers offer 99% uptime for their web servers. If you have already chosen one or if you are planning to use one with such a high uptime should you be concerned on the whole matter anyway?

Let’s see how much 99% uptime means. For a 30-day month you have a total of 720 hours. 99% of this is 712.8 hours. Are you comfortable with your web site taking a day off every month? And this if 99% uptime happens. Can your web hosting provider back up its uptime promises with real facts?

For those in the Internet business the availability of their web site is a major concern. The cost of downtime for web businesses can amount to $10,000 an hour. And this is without counting the losses caused by missed opportunities and lost sales. Losses in image and credibility these businesses suffer because eventual downtime is even harder to quantify.
The best way to avoid that while ensuring your business is online is to have monitoring reports available on your web host’s uptime.

For companies or individuals having their web hosting providers monitored by a third party is a guarantee not only that their money is well spent, but also, an most importantly, that their Internet business is up and running.

Monitored by a third party is beneficial even for the web hosting providers. That is serious web hosting providers. Offering reports of their uptime monitored by a third party and placing links to them on their home page is bound to boost the confidence of existing customers as well as the one of the prospecting customers in the quality of service that host is providing for its customers.

Having a web host that provides monitoring of its uptime by a third party is the best guarantee that you can get for your web site’s uptime. With such level of service you can be sure that the money you are spending for your web presence can give your or your company the best return of investment.

There are many MYths about free hosting:-

1.The first myth we must know is: It’s not a good host if it’s free.
Fact: Sometimes we are paying for something that could be found for free.

Nowadays,I think, it’s not hard at all to find free decent hosting. All you need is to find a good host directory that possesses an excellent search tool, so we won’t have much trouble browsing across the hosts.

2.Myth: All free web hosts are either slow or clutter your website with ads.

Fact: The large free web hosting companies are usually like that, but I am actually aiming for smaller hosts, which brings me to another myth.

Some others are:-

Myth: Small free web hosts don’t provide good support.

Fact: On 90% of the cases the hosts have a forum. The admins frequently visit those forums, so it’s almost sure that you’ll get great and speedy support.

Myth: Those free web hosts offer very small webspace ammount and don’t allow a lot of extensions.

Fact: Believe me, you wouldn’t need so much webpace. In fact, 100 MB of webspace with 3000 MB of Bandwidth should sustain your free hosting website through out the month

One more myth is

Myth: Free Web hosts don’t support any kind of coding besides HTML!

Fact: You can find hosts for free that offer, domain/subdomain hosting, cPanel, Fantastico, PHP Hosting, MySQL, CGI/Perl, ASP and almost anything a paid host can offer.

I’d like to remind you guys that if you want large resources, you should go to paid hosting. I mean, you can’t get everything for free!

What is difference between web hosting and file hosting?

web hosting enables you to place your website on the Internet. And file hosting offers storage space, where you may store whatever you want – including movies, music, work documents and other pertinent files.

Thanx brinks

Why do we need file hosting?

The need for file hosting may arise if you wish to share files with friends and family, and your files are often large in size. Making floppies and burning CDs is neither economical nor it is an easy chore. Carrying physical media can be quite cumbersome at times. File sharing via email is not secure, and moreover, email cannot be used for large file transfers. In such a scenario, the best option available is file hosting and sharing. Unequivocally, there are 4 common types of files – video, images, music and data. If you desire a file hosting and sharing server, you may use the following keywords while you carry out a search on Google (arguably the best search engine) – “share files with friends and family”.

Recently I have started a web hosting company and now I m looking for customer.With over twenty thousand webhosting companies competing for new customers, there’s been a lot of speculation over what people are looking for when they purchase hosting.

There are the obvious answers, of course – reliable servers, lots of features, reasonable prices, etc.

One thing that is almost always overlooked though, and I believe most people are looking for this, is “relationship”. After eight years in this business, it’s been my experience that cultivating good relationships with my clients is the best way to keep existing customers and attract new business.

While we can’t ignore essential elements of the business, like uptime and security, we must always remember that those faceless clients who subscribe to our services are real, living, breathing people with very real feelings, worries, and concerns. The better we can get to know our clients on a personal basis, the better we can address those worries and concerns.

As the Internet expands, demand for different web-hosting services increases proportionally. Additional numbers of people are joining the web world every day with personal sites for their business or organization. Many people choose low-cost solutions to host their web site, but it if your web site is important to you, you should consider quality as much as price.

Quality is most important in web hosting.

For instance, putting your site on a low costs web host can affect the speed at which customers access it. Many surfers on broadband connections get annoyed when site’s server does not keep up with their connection. If it does not offer fast access and downloads, people will be reluctant to revisit the site. They would leave the place with a negative impression about you result in long term economic loss.

A well-established web host may charge more for the facilities but in the long run they may offer better and latest services complying with the trends in the market. Some high quality hosts even offers free add-ones and promotions. The features like free web site builder or support for MySQL databases ensure that the ultimate cost involved in building a productive website are a lesser amount. These facilities may not be available when one goes for a cheaper web host – or you may have to pay extra for them!

Quality is more important than price.

It is advisable to check out a host’s reputation and quality as well as its price. The good news is, there are some web hosts that offer both outstanding service as well as competitive prices like cpwebhosting.net.

Three Reasons Why You Should Spend Some Time Choosing a Good Website Host:-

Three Reasons Why You Should Spend Some Time Choosing a Good Website Host:-

1. Lost of sales

Any business owner knows that when your website is down, you lose sales. It’s that simple. Spending time looking for a good website host with minimum downtime is important as it can allow you a good rest at night knowing that your internet sales websites is running like it should.

Mary an internet business owner had a problem with her web host and true enough the web site server went down and her ecommerce website also went down with it. To add to her troubles, she was running a Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign with several Pay Per Click Search Engines like Google Adsense, Overture, Find what and she had to quickly disable all her ads until her website came online again. She later realized that she should have spent some time looking for a website host that was not only value for money but had a good reputation.

2. Lost of Advertising Revenue

Another business model online involves advertising and content related websites. These websites provide lots of free content but make money when people click on contextual and banner advertising on these websites. Some popular websites have many visitors a day and the loss of advertising revenue can be staggering.

3. Inability to grow your website

Another reason to choose a website host is that when most of us first startout online, we know nothing about web hosting features and choose the cheapest deal around. The problem with this is that the cheapest deal may not be the best deal and when you have a huge content website later and want to grow your website, you may find that your current web host is unable to provide the support for certain scripts.

Why Linux Hosting is Gaining More Presence than Windows Hosting?

Linux platform has been developed by Community based efforts and it has been rendered for professional use with the efforts of many IT companies like Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, and like. This background of Community development and open source nature of Linux Server and backup of professional IT companies has made Linux platform more powerful, inexpensive and secured.

The following are the advantages of using Linux based web server compared to Windows based web server:

Stable and Robust: Linux/Unix operating systems has traditionally been believed to be very stable and robust. A web site housed on a Linux operating system will have very high up-time (of the order of 99.9%). Of course, other factors such as power supply, network admin skills, and network load etc. also matter when it comes to maintaining the system uptime.

Low cost of ownership: The Linux OS comes free of cost (or at very insignificant cost, usually cost of distribution). Also, it has full fledged server, and desk top applications that comes free along with the OS. These server applications (such as FTP, Web Server, DNS Server, File Server etc.) being free, are also very stable.

User Friendly: When it comes to web hosting, it is easy to host on Linux web servers. The process of uploading and hosting is almost same for both Linux and Windows web servers.

A web site designed to be hosted on a Linux based web server can be hosted on a Windows web server easily, where as the reverse is not always true.

How to Get to a Cheap Web Hosting and a Reliable Web Hosting in the Same Time?

My recommendation about deciding on a cheap web hosting server is not to go straight to the cheapest, better choose an offer with a medium price, it’s better to spend a few more $ a months then to change the server, because what you found is a cheap, but not reliable web hosting service, which is down most of the time.

Most of the sites where you can find cheap web hosting claim they offer the cheapest services, so do not bother with that, better make sure the server offers reliable web hosting, because good price and good quality are quite hard to find toghether. .

If you plan on having two or more web sites, search for a provider who offers multiple accounts at the price of one, many of the cheap web hosting service providers do that, and if you are lucky, you may find a special offer, which will spare you some money, offering you free setup or something similar, but try not to sign a long term contract (I also recommend paying great attention when reading the contract) with the provider, a thing which will surely offer you a large discount, until you are sure that you chose a reliable web hosting server.

Do not forget that the cheap web hosting providers do not have full control of their of their server, they are working in cooperation with other companies, to make their services cheaper.