Shared, virtual private server, dedicated, and co located which flavor of Web hosting is right for us? Find out the pros and cons of each, and whether we’re paying too much for what we really need.

It might be easier to count the number of flavors one can find in ice creams or in choclate than to count the different web hosting flavors. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but going by the current trend it does not seem far from reality.

Free Hosting, Shared Hosting, Semi-Dedicated Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Virtual Private Server(VPS) Hosting, Managed Hosting, Budget Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Custom Hosting” and so on is what we see upon doing a simple search for hosting on the Web.

The search shows a number of results referring to different flavors of web hosting, in essence they all are variations of four main flavors: the famous four (Shared, VPS, Dedicated, and Co-located).

If we talk about shared hosting then What is it?: Sometimes referred as Virtual Hosting, “Shared Hosting” offers the customer a fixed allocation of disk space (data storage capacity) on a server as well as fixed bandwidth (data transfer capacity). This type of service allows a customer to leverage all the features and services that a dedicated server offers at a fraction of cost, and does not involve any server administration overhead.

While Pros is: Freedom from maintaining the server hardware as well as managing the server security and administration. Complete technical support is usually included with these packages.

At the same time Cons is: Does not offer root access to the server and hence access to the core functions is limited. Resources are shared by multiple sites hosted on the same server. A technical problem in one of the sites owned by a different client on a shared server may cause a system wide crash, bringing down all the other sites.

In other hand VPS that is Another form of virtual hosting is Virtual Private Server(VPS) aka Virtual Dedicated Server (VDS), which creates several logical/virtual servers on a single physical server using software. The major difference in shared and VPS hosting is how the resources are shared. Each virtual server created this way performs as if it were an independent physical server and eliminates the disadvantages of shared hosting.

A complete contrast from virtual/shared hosting, dedicated hosting dedicates a server and all its resources for hosting the sites of choice by the customer. Though this type of service offers complete control over the the system and its resources, it usually requires the customer to undertake the administration on their own.

Colocation is about placing something that we own at a place where it can be hooked up to the Internet. For example, with an ISP or at a data center (DC) multi-homed to the backbones.

Assessing the size of our site so we don’t pay for more hosting than we need.So how can we justify the size and bandwidth required?

Many web hosts try to sell us a large amount of web hosting space that then costs us a lot each month. However, we may not need this much space. Have we ever calculated just how much disc space (MB) our web site uses? Do we really need an expensive hosting solution for our web site?

For my first web site, we purchased 20mb of disc space and surprised if this would be enough as we added pages to it. Recently we checked the size of this site which had grown to over 20 pages. To my surprise the size was only 3,269KB. This means it only uses a little over 3Mb of disk space.

Most of peoples’s sites also only use 2-3Mb. Therefore it is not necessary to purchase a large amount of space for a small site . Are we paying too much for the actual space we need?

First we need to understand how file size is measured. The smallest unit on a computer is a bit. One bit is one electronic on or off pulse. 8 bits compose together make one byte. One byte of information can put a letter, such as “A” on our screen.

If we put 1024 bytes together and then we have one unit of information called a kilobyte. Put 1024 kilobytes together and we have a megabyte. Most of our graphics and web pages are measured in bytes or kilobytes.

To determine our total site file size, right click on the root folder where our web site is housed – this will not only give us the total site size but also how many files and folders are contained in our site.

If we use an editor, such as FrontPage, go to the reports view, click on the site summary and we will get a reading of the total site file size. In Dreamweaver, just use the special method .

Terms and Acceptable Usage Policy our Service Level Agreement, SLA is probably the most important piece of text we will need to read. And read we will have to, the entire text. Once we have familiarized ourself with this SLA we can start to skim through and look out for the details we feel are most important to us as we search for other hosting companies.

An SLA basically tells us what services we will be paying for, what rights we do and do not have. We are agreeing to pay for our web hosting and for what is in the SLA and nothing else.

The web host provider is letting us know in print, what we will have to agree to if we wish to use their services. But remember, that it also tells us, what rights we have. If the web host provider does not live up to the SLA, we now have a right to use this agreement to our advantage.

Web sites and web pages are very powerful marketing tools to appeal and enhanced the client to act or buy the service that company is offering. Web pages can contain images, Flash, colors, even sounds and music. A web page can even be interpreted as one big advertisement to the buyer.

Why the SLA of a company, or in this case, a web host provider is so important. It is straight to the point and to quite a number of people simply find it boring. Many times the SLA is written in small text, is very long and to some people confusing or complicated. We may notice some SLA’s are almost hidden or at the bottom of a page in small text or only available on the order form.

To have our SLA on the first page would look very odd and highly unusual. There are many reasons why some companies choose to have their SLA located where they are and written the way they are. Some do it simply so they do not confuse the buyer.

Companies do not scare the buyer so he or she thinks that what they are “getting into”, is way out of their league. Unfortunately, some companies “hide” these service agreements because it reveals too much about the company and what we are really purchasing.

The colorful and bedazzling web pages? Well these SLA’s are just the opposite. They get straight to the point. It’s like opening the hood of a car and looking at the engine to see exactly how it works.Means geting the way of working.

If we do not find an SLA anywhere on the website and have looked on just about all the web pages, then simply move on to another provider. This must be present on all web host providers selling services, even if they are free.

The web host provider can always change their SLA if need be, but find out if we will be notified of the change and how much time we will have to adapt to these changes. It is not good agreeing to their terms and then having them change it later on to something we did not agree to.

We may wish to make a copy of their SLA page and save it on to our computer’s hard disk. We may also find it much easier to read their SLA by copying and pasting the text into Notepad and reading it from there. There is actually no need to read the small print on the web page itself, just copy and paste.

Some web host providers is to provide their SLA on the order form. This is where we are just about to enter our credit card details and pay for our web hosting that they inform us of their SLA.

The differences between ‘free’ hosts and ‘budget’ hosts, and helps the persons to identify some important criteria in choosing a hosting provider for their personal web site.So how can we choose a proper host for our personal site?

A personal web site could consist of a site for our family, a hobby, an online resume, but not for commercial purposes.Usually personal web hosting ranges anywhere from free to some charges per month. We might be asking ourself why we would consider paying something per month versus free.

We can’t go wrong with free, can we? that depends whether free is truely free. Most hosting companies or services that offer free hosting will plaster ads on our own personal web site, some of which can be quite aggravating .

Free hosting generally entails many very restrictive policies on how much we can upload to our site . Free hosting also almost always comes with very low bandwidth allocations which if we have a large family that likes to visit our web site, or a lot of recruiters visiting our online resume, our site may be shut down if it folllows bandwidth restrictions.

As with most things in life, hosting is no different, we get what we pay for. That is why it is my recommendation to find a cheap/budget hosting company that will allow us for the freedom of running our own web site without nasty little ads everywhere, or tons of restrictions which hinder us from building the kind of site we want.

Our best bet when searching for this kind of hosting is to check out our Budget/Cheap category: Reseller Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Shared Hosting plans – CPWebHosting and sift through the many services that are listed there.

Some of the particulars we will want to note are as follows: 1. What are the bandwidth restrictions on traffic going to our site 2. What are the FTP restrictions 3. Can we pay month to month or do we need to enter into a contract 4. How long have they been in business 5. How does technical support work.

The hosting company we are considering offers a money back guarantee or at a minimum does not force we into a contract, if we are unhappy with their services we can always find another host.

Moving our site is pretty easy, simply download everything to our computer and upload it to our new hosting company.This is the best strategy.

The differences between various business hosting services, and helps the clints for identify some important criteria in choosing a hosting provider for their business.

A business web site could range anywhere from a simple ecommerce site which sells one product, to a very complex pay per click engine with real time statistics and payment functionality.

All of the consolidation going on in the web hosting industry, there are still thousands upon thousands of hosting companies to choose from. If we visit some of their sites,we will see that each of them tout some features we may or may not of even heard of before.

The very first thing we must ask ourself is not which hosting company to choose but rather, WHY do we need a hosting company?

Our particular needs are crucial in determining the kind of hosting we need. Web Hosting comes in many different flavors and sizes, so its key that we shop for only the services we require or us will be paying for a lot of services that we don’t need.

When trying to decide which hosting company will best suit our needs be sure to ask ourself a few questions first,like
What kind of functionality will we require?

Some more questions like:
What will our traffic needs require?
How important are load times (if a majority of our visitors are global we might want to consider a hosting company that has a presence overseas as well as the U.S. – also we may want to consider a dedicated server as opposed to sharing a server with several other businesses)

A business site can range in price anywhere from the low end of something all the way up into the thousands of dollars per month. Features that usually catapult the price range are things like dedicated servers and bandwidth capacity.

Choosing a web host for our business needs is absolutely one of the most important decisions we can make. If our site is down, our business is down, end of story.

Some of the important questions we will want to make sure we ask any prospective hosting company before signing on the dotted line.
1. Do they offer a money back, no questions asked guarantee?
2. Do they offer an uptime guarantee?

Stuck for ways to get the word out about our web hosting business? features a number of them, including some we might not have thought of before.
what idea we can follow for marketing of hosting site?

When we’re too close to something, we sometimes get caught thinking in one particular way. That’s why we hear the phrase “think outside the box” so much, especially when people are trying to solve problems related to business.

To tackle a problem in a number of different ways at once—and that’s very true for advertising our web hosting business, for the prosperity of the business is very important.

Oour web hosting business is already a “going concern” – we have the technical skills and the server in place, we’ve at least started to hire customer support people so we have some breathing room, we have our company’s website set up, and so on.

To get more customers, we need to reach the people who might be interested in our service, and convince them that we can offer them something they want that they can’t get anywhere else. How do we go about that?

Start by honestly considering what it is we have to offer that they can’t get somewhere else. Are our hosting packages larger than anyone else’s? Is our service better? Do you have some special knowledge from which they can benefit?

If we’re having trouble figuring out how to answer some question, ask ourself what we would want someone to remember about our business after they have had contact with it, whether it’s through poking around our website.

Once we know what makes us different from the rest of the pack, we have a focus to keep in mind when we start promoting our web hosting business to people.

Planning our web hosting business is the good deal but question is how can we start this business?

Web hosting was a business just like any other. Sure, it has its own unique challenges, but we want to approach it as a business.

We also mentioned the six parts one usually finds in a business plan: the executive summary, the enterprise, the market, operations, organization, and key risks/timeline. Since we did not have the room to cover all six in the previous article, we covered the first three.

The executive summary gets written last because we need the information in the rest of the plan to fill in the information. It provides an overview. It should include what the company is about, who the founders are, and what our “vision” is. It should explain the market opportunity.

If we are using our business plan to seek funding, it should also explain what we plan to do with our funding. It should also cover where we are now and where we hope to be in the future.

The enterprise describes our company’s product or service and what its advantage is in the marketplace. With so many different web hosting companies in the field, this is particularly important.

A great deal of detail about the section that covers the market. And rightfully so if we hope to compete, we’d better do our homework. We need to know the industry, our market size, our niche, who our competitors are, and how we will reach our customers, among other things.

It’s to help us understand that there’s work to be done, and research is our friend.

We will cover the remaining three parts of a business plan: operations, organization, and key risks/timeline. While these parts may not seem as important as, say, the market section of our business plan, they will give us and anyone who reads the plan a better handle on how the company is projected to operate on a day to day basis.

A lot of people have considered getting into the reseller web hosting business because they heard it was an easy way to make a lot of money. If we’re thinking along these lines ourself.

Reseller web hosting is easy. With the various control panels available, even those who are practically phobic about technology can run their own reseller web hosting business.

It simply comes down to the math, once the monthly fees from our customers cover the monthly fee we pay our hosting company, everything else is profit.

We have to do is sit back and watch our bank account expand as the money comes rolling in. After all, we’re working for ourself, not somebody else, so we won’t have anyone on our back.

What we think it is like to run a reseller web hosting business, think again. Anyone who owns their own business will tell us that it is a lot of hard work, and that there is no such thing as fast, easy money.

The things we must consider as we set up our own reseller web hosting business. It is a basic article, but it should get we thinking along the correct lines.

If someone we know is planning to go into the web hosting reseller business, and seems to think it will be a lot less work than whatever they’re doing now, we might want to hand them this article in addition to that one.

We see, there are a lot of misconceptions about what is involved in running a reseller web hosting business.The mistaken ideas that many novices have about running such a business.

There are many things to consider when we begin building our web hosting business. One of the most important concerns how to attract customers.

Four areas we need to pay attention to if we want to get visitors who need web hosting to our site…and turn those visitors into clients.

There are a million things to consider when we decide to start our own web hosting business. We need to think about what company to buy our package from, make sure we have the technical skills, create a business plan, deal with the bookkeeping, and so on.

Some of these points are the sorts of things we would need to think about no matter what kind of business we decided to get into. But some challenges are a bit more peculiar to web hosting, especially as an online business.

Start with the design of our website. This is the first thing that any prospective customer sees. As we’ve heard before, first impressions last. On the Internet, that’s even more important, if we make a bad first impression, we won’t get a second chance.

Our website should be easy to navigate, of course, because nobody is going to take the time to learn how to maneuver around a confusing site, especially since there are a million other places a web surfer can check out for the same services.

Our website also shouldn’t look like the thousands of other web hosting sites out there, which seem to have been built with generic templates. How will we ever develop a professional corporate identity if we look like everyone else?

If someone who is looking for web hosting for their website wants to feel as if they’re dealing with a professional. If we come off looking like an amateur, we will lose their business.

With the dizzying number of options for a web host for our site, how do you know which one to pick?So how can we select a proper host?

Choosing a web host is a big decision for any business or organization. Even someone who is working on their website only as a hobby would like to avoid the kinds of problems we have all heard about,poor customer support, too much downtime, and so on.

There are plenty of hosts also that explain what to look for, and what to do, when choosing a web host. In fact, there is an excellent one on our Web Hosters site right here:Reseller Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Shared Hosting plans – CPWebHosting

The first thing we want to do is make sure that smell doesn’t have its start in our backyard. A web host can’t be expected to read minds. Know what our website needs as far as resources, and be prepared to keep our web host informed when those needs change.