No web hosting company is willing to host the Syrian website, as the country is under U.S. sanctions. The American government prohibits web hosting companies from hosting sites and other services of the Syrian government. Furthermore, it also ensures that their sanctions are respected enormously by their allies. Syria faces a complete Internet and telecommunication blackout, and few Syrian government websites hosted by Western providers are available to the public.
Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), an office of the U.S. Treasury Department‘s Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, enforces U.S. economic trade sanctions against targeted foreign countries, including Syria. Under a series of executive orders, U.S. businesses are prohibited from selling goods and services in Syria. The hosting providers cooperate with law enforcement and regulators to prevent illegal activity online and take the necessary steps to comply with applicable laws and regulations. The sanctions have the inadvertent effect of cutting the Syrian people off from the rest of the world.
The U.S. Treasury Department makes the hosting providers and domain registrars aware of civil enforcement actions. They impose potential hefty fines if a hosting company gets associated with the Syrian government or regime.
.sy is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Syrian websites.
A2 Hosting currently cannot provide any hosting services to individuals in the following countries and regions:
Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, & Region of Crimea
Treasury regulations prohibit hosting providers from registering domains or hosting websites that use the TLDs associated with the countries and regions listed above. The specific prohibited TLDs are:
A web hosting service started in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and it was the third most visited website on the world wide web. Earlier named Beverly Hills Internet (BHI), a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California, later renamed GeoCities. It allowed registered users called ‘Homesteaders’ to create and publish home pages and e-mail addresses, chat, bulletin boards, and community elements with neighborhoods they wanted to belong to with 2 M.B. of space provided. The neighborhood was part of the member’s Web address along with a sequentially assigned “street address” number to make the URL unique (for example, “www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/number”).
According to their content, the users select cities or regions to list hyperlinks to their web pages like computer-related were placed in ‘SiliconValley, and entertainment placed with ‘Hollywood.’ GeoCities included GeoCities Marketplace, a commercial website, which sold GeoCities-branded merchandise.
The users need to provide personally-identifying and demographic information when they register for the website. In the privacy statement on its New Member Application Form, the website promises not to give anyone personally-identifying information without the user’s permission. The visitors can browse user-created websites by their theme or interest. They enjoyed the user-created websites and built a profound community.
In 1999, FTC received a complaint against GeoCities that it violated provisions of (the Federal Trade Commission Act, precisely 15 USC & 45. The act states, “Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.” The agency found GeoCities engaged in deceptive acts and practices in contravention of their stated privacy act. The website sold personal information to third parties who used the information for purposes other than those for which members gave permission. The website illegally permitted third-party advertisers to promote products targeted to GeoCities’ 1.8 million users by using personally identifiable information obtained in the registration process. Subsequently, a consent order was entered into, which prohibits GeoCities from misrepresenting the purpose for which it collects uses personal identifying information from consumers.
On January 28, 1999. Yahoo Inc. acquired the GeoCities hosting service for $3.57 billion in stock and abandoned this practice to favor Yahoo member names in the URLs.
In July 1999, Yahoo! switched from the neighborhood and street addresses Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for homesteaders to “vanity” URLs through members’ registration names Yahoo! (“www.geocities.com/membername”). This service was offered previously only as a premium.
Later in October 2009, the United States GeoCities services came to an end. Yahoo terminated the most user-written website with at least 38 million pages – The vintage personal web hosting site got farewell on October 26, 2009. Yahoo asked and encouraged users to download content to computers if they want to rebuild them on another site, as they won’t be archiving user pages. Yahoo urged users to try the company’s pay Web-hosting service. The company introduced a for-fee premium hosting service at GeoCities. It reduced the accessibility of free and low-price hosting accounts by limiting their data transfer rate for Web page visitors.
By 2008, the domain geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors annually and had 18.9 million unique visitors from the U.S. during March 2006. Later in March 2008, it decreased to 15.1 million unique U.S visitors and in March 2009 had 11.5 million unique visitors.
GeoCities Joined a long list of other services, including Yahoo! 360, My Web, Yahoo! Briefcase Farechase, LAUNCHcast, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Photos, Live, Kickstart, etc. Web messenger and teachers prioritize their products and services to deliver the best products to consumers. The visitors looking for GeoCities won’t find flashing banner ads, questionable color schemes, guest books, streaming HTML marquee tags, and omnipresent “Under Construction” signs. The site touched the hearts of millions of users that “RIP GeoCities” was a trending topic on Twitter. The website where millions first tried their hands at coding and designing before Yahoo scrubbed it.
The web hosting business can thrive only when it can retain existing customers and keep adding new ones. The web hosting platforms like cPanel & Plesk have provided ease of integration and migration. Still, the web hosting providers are categorized as Windows & Linux web hosting service providers. Each has its allegiance, revenue, and marketplace, as web development goes in all these languages Laravel, ASP, Microsoft’s .Net.
Microsoft offers and is continuously developing tools for the web service provider industry & hosters with products such as Site Server and Commerce Server to gauge the application management, integration, and packaged value-add delivery nuances of Web services and .Net. Microsoft makes it easy at work to integrate and build responsive websites for handsets and PDAs. The company has remained a solid contender for the Linux web services space and has continuously improved and overcome shortcomings.
Linux is open-source, accessible, and cheap to deploy back-end services. Thus, it’s gaining much popularity & accounts as a leading platform for the web. While being economically viable, the hosting platform provides the best security, stability, and transaction support. Most hosting providers offer Linux hosting solutions with plan customization.
The choice of Linux or Windows platform largely depends on the web programming language as ASP, Visual Studio .Net, and .NET run only on Windows and its excellent reliability. Web developers still use these languages as the toolsets and resources make it easier to modify applications, customize them faster, integrate changes, and the ability to deliver them with the best functionality. Thus, bringing dynamism to customer applications as per needs. The customers didn’t need to wait around to get results. Furthermore, .Net applications are considered secure compared to others magnified by ten and hence dominate the web development market. With the best engineering, full support, and Microsoft build products, the Windows web hosting services will stay for long in the web hosting business and keep drawing the attention and momentum.
Microsoft upgrades and enhances the web host’s capability of deploying Microsoft Microsoft architecture in their data centers. Furthermore, it supports the development of an internal service-level management application built entirely using .Net. Most hosting providers endorse ‘.Net’-based web hosting services to small and midsize businesses to use a shared hosting environment and when applications outgrow the use of windows dedicated servers.
The web hosting services market is growing fast, as the amount of application-to-application or server-to-server traffic will explode.
Most businesses list their products on top marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Etsy, and others to increase sales. While focusing on their e-commerce portals, SMEs list products on branded marketplaces that helped increase revenues by 80 per cent. The global marketing websites allow listing men’s and women’s clothing, fragrances, skin-care products, cosmetics, and much more. Their product pages look like brochures. With managed services, these marketplaces make buying, selling, and sophisticated transactions easier.
Most businesses start their e-commerce portals, but one in thousands begin getting traffic. Thus, these businesses find it comfortable to list products on marketplaces where traffic is already there. The e-commerce marketplace provides fully managed services, responding to the complex needs of SMEs and large businesses. Hence they are gaining popularity as more businesses go online. The company gets the liberty to sell products worldwide with hosted applications and even don’t need employees scattered across those selling destinations. The standard, the preconfigured platform, enables companies to list products instantly after signup to get customers.
The marketplace provider installs base e-commerce software, apps, round-the-clock monitoring, caching, 100% uptime, periodic backups, and other plugins on standardized hardware and server infrastructure and configurations. The technical team takes care of performance, complex needs, and speed deployments, and manages the application, content distribution, network, storage capability, and service-level agreements and licensing. Furthermore, it makes data accessible anytime and anywhere, with real-time access to billing information, trouble tickets, and other data associated with their accounts.
The businesses find the cost of listing or launching products on marketplaces much lower than implementing and maintaining e-commerce portals themselves. Thus, they decided to go with branded marketplace instead of making a significant investment in bringing up sites, thus capitalizing on the marketplace’s extensive infrastructure.
Most companies don’t have the skills, technical staff, & technologies for those pieces. Marketplaces like DownTown.us do much more marketing stuff like offering streaming media services, social media sharing, & business listing apart from providing the platform, thus making the companies profitable by increasing the visibility and demand of their products. Therefore, most small and midsize companies are moving into the managed services arena.
After this CORONA pandemic, online businesses have taken a significant stake. Almost every company has come online with substantial investment and started an e-commerce website to facilitate sales, ordering, and other online transactions. Businesses have started relying on online sales much compared to their physical stores. The factory outlets started their online e-commerce portals to provide products or services at lower prices, eliminating intermediaries. Thus, online business has become highly competitive; hence, it requires quality websites and the best web hosting services. No company would like to risk its online presence to host its website on a notorious web hosting provider who has server downtime, provides no security and backups, and have frequent technical gaffes.
Online e-commerce businesses need fast servers, security, backups, and the best look-n-feel to attract potential customers.
The hosting providers set up high-performance criteria with cloud hosting living consistently with their claims. Ananova.com reviews all such web hosting providers to ensure they continuously meet standards and then list them on its top Web hosting providers list.
The web hosting providers ranking in the list depends on the customer/visitors reviews and ratings, professional hosting ethics, customers support and services, and brand acknowledgement in the web hosting market. Most website visitors rate hosting providers and consider these criteria necessary to meet website requirements, including a money-back guarantee, 24×7 technical support, payment options, hosting prices, hosting resources, usage, and access logs. Business Hosting Journal (BHJ) considers Ananova criteria can strengthen the web hosting industry as s whole.
No hosting company allows hate sites, and the latest example is Godaddy cancelling the website registration for the white supremacist and neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. The website posted an extremely misogynistic post mocking Heather Heyer, the young 32-year woman murdered at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, by a neo-Nazi. It certainly appears that he deliberately drove his car into her and numerous other counter-demonstrators.
In this case, a GoDaddy spokeswoman said The Daily Stormer crossed the line and “encouraged and promoted violence. In instances where a site goes beyond the mere exercise of these freedoms, however, and crosses over to promoting, encouraging, or otherwise engaging in violence against any person, we will take action.”
Under the GoDaddy ToS, GoDaddy had the power to terminate a domain registration based on the user’s “morally objectionable activities,” including “[a]ctivities designed to encourage unlawful behaviour by others, such as hate crimes.”
After that, the website didn’t get any hosting platform, and they tried on Google and then Russian servers but quickly withdrew the registration. The hate content violates the web hosting company’s contractual Terms of Service (ToS), and now the website has a hard time finding a place on the web. No primary web hosting provider is willing to register the Daily Stermer domain and provide hosting.
The Daily Stormer is an American far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, Islamophobic, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for the second genocide of Jews. It is part of the alt-right movement. Wikipedia
The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and expression from government censorship and government punishment. Also, Internet neutrality claims to transmit any content, but the land laws of all the countries ban and restrict such objectionable hate content. Legally drew a line and held web hosting companies responsible for not allowing any such website. Furthermore, even the website hosting companies have the policy not to host such websites. It’s within the web hosting company’s rights to decide whom they conduct business with, and they don’t allow the expression of hate, racism, and bigotry on their platforms.
Ananova.com lists the power hosting providers to help businesses running e-commerce websites that do heavy business transactions pick the best web host. Ananova selected the hosting providers by considering security, SSL/TLS to enable “HTTPS” pages, handling payments, guaranteed 100% uptime SLA, cloud resources, snapshot backup facility, and other features, thus helping Webhosting customers to reap the benefits.
The world is moving fast toward online markets, and every business considers it must have an online presence to sell goods to consumers worldwide. The businesses create online marketing plans and strategies to reach, catch & communicate to customers, thus fostering a community around their company.
The Ananova listed hosting provider offers professional e-commerce templates to enable businesses to build a website with all available capabilities. It’s good to have a business e-mail address, blog, and social media presence for a business.
Ananova recommends WordPress.com eCommerce & Business plan for e-commerce sites and shopping carts. The programs offer Premium themes and more than 50,000 WordPress plugins to provide businesses with the best look-n-feel and functionality with the best security and backups. The provider takes care of security, making the website 100% secure to minimize hacking or malicious activity. For an e-commerce website, this feature is a must as customers do share sensitive credit card information while making purchases. SSL/TLS – Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security ensures information encryption.
Furthermore, WordPress allows customization, accepts payments in 60+ countries, and integrates with Top Shipping Carriers.
Share your Web hosting tips and experiences in Business Hosting Journal (BHJ.org)
Business Hosting Journal is one more review and rating website in the web hosting industry, run by SCPL as a statistics and analytical company. The website is updated daily with the latest reviews, web hosting trends, industry news, technology updates, tutorials, forums, press releases, and resolutions to most web hosting issues. BHJ collaborates with SiteGeek to rank web hosting providers in various categories like Shared Hosting, Cloud Hosting, VPS, Dedicated Servers, Local Hosting, and SSD hosting. Daily the website publishes numerous articles related to the web hosting industry. The website is affiliated with a few web hosting companies. It receives affiliate income whenever hosting consumers purchase the hosting plan by clicking the banner links—the affiliate income help to defray the site’s operating cost. The website claims to provide honest hosting editorially independent reviews by website visitors.
BHJ discusses hosting experiences and ranks legitimate hosting providers on a scale of their hosting processes, resources, security, support, and customer services. Thus, it helps the hosting consumer evaluate the most vital features for its business or individual website or application. The hosting industry is completely consumer-centric, and good customer support is crucial for success. No business or personnel continuously pays the hosting provider who doesn’t offer the best value and customer services. Every customer wants a hosting company to resolve the issues before it comes to them.
Before Damage, preventive mesaure must be taken. A hosting provider must ensure 24×7 technical support via experienced experts who can resolve customer issues asap.
Rohit Kumar (BHJ)
An issue may arise anytime in a hosting business, but if somebody is available to address it and get the best solution on time, it makes the best customer experience. Hence, the hosting provider must ensure the technical staff is available via phone, trouble ticket, email to answer questions and concerns. Everybody understands that most hosting consumers don’t want to wait, but they need immediate responses or resolutions to their technical issues.
Every business knows how much downtime can cause headaches, financial setbacks, and setbacks to Google ranking. They always want 100% website content available to their customers or visitors, and they are right in that. A hosting provider must always provide explanations or reasons for the issues or downtime. And if it is due to server maintenance, then intimate the customer well in advance. If the hosting provider fails to do so, then the knee-jerk reaction from hosting customers is obvious. A hosting consumer looks towards the provider and blames them for downtime for every issue. Thus, a hosting provider must always be responsive and provide timely notifications.
Most hosting consumers trust web hosting reviews and rating websites like Ananova, SiteGeek, Chatwoo, and BHJ to get a sense of web hosting reliability. The hosting consumers look for various hosting features in the hosting providers listing, like effective data backups process to prevent data loss, upgrades, updates, maintenance notification, customer support, uptime guarantee, etc.
Rohit Kumar, BHJ, says, “I’m sure, most of the hosting consumers never go through host’s service level agreement, they just take few moments to skim and then took buying decision, which they already thought in their mind.” However, it is always recommended to go through the service agreement, mentioning the uptime guarantee and the host’s redundancy arrangements.
BHJ suggests that consumers go for public cloud hosting providers like ‘Google Cloud’ or ‘AWS’ to host a business website, providing the best backup and disaster recovery plan. They have the best support on cloud computing, and the hosting specs meet the consumer needs and are fully scalable. A customer does not have to worry about disk space and bandwidth on cloud computing. Most websites have quality full-size images, downloads, extensive audio and video, and content. The customer gets as much as required and can scale later as needs arise.
Ananova is a web hosting demystified where hosting consumers can find the meaning of most fancy tech terms and abbreviations. Most hosting consumers don’t exactly understand what the hosting provider offers. The provider’s website is filled with Questions and Answers, Tutorials, Videos, How to use services, Expert Tips, Tools, Business ideas, Turning customers into repeat buyers, and a lot more. Most hosting providers’ sites look like content farms. They contain everything from accounts, finance, women, minorities, kids, government regulations, green business, hiring, managing, legal issues, marketing, raising money, real estate, startup, and technology-related articles. It becomes confusing for web consumers, as its purpose is an online presence with the best web host. For the first time, every hosting consumer wants to make the best decision, a reliable hosting provider, where it can smoothly run its online presence.
Most hosting companies rent remote servers and then sell their resources to businesses and individuals to run their websites, emails, and other services. The data centers allow them to control the rented servers to these hosting companies, and they sell the servers to thousands of such hosting providers. Thus, most hosting companies offer similar features. It becomes daunting to hosting consumers to choose the right hosting provider which offers the best suite of resources required for its website.
The websites like Ananova.com, Sitegeek.com, and Business Hosting Journal (BHJ.org) help in research to compare the resources and other features of various hosting providers. Although these sites claim to provide honest reviews, they are paid by a few companies to whom they sign up for an affiliate account. Their site disclaimer shows that it’s always good to use various resources to get multiple opinions, conduct fast checks, research, and then make the final buying decision.
Ananova releases the top web hosting providers list https://ananova.com/best-hosting-providers, based on reviews, brand recognition, support services, hosting resources, technologies, and many more. The hosting company listing helps host consumers compare to an assortment of prominent hosting providers, best for its online presence.
Hosting companies need new demographic customers to survive in this highly competitive international market. The hosting provider develops various hosting plans for different countries to cater to the hosting consumer’s needs or requirements. They remain up to date with the current conditions, desires, and requirements to gain potential or prospective customers while retaining the existing ones.
The hosting providers diversify hosting plans and markets to yield high rewards in entirely new markets. It takes time to get established, but they need continuous cash flow to make significant investments. Some markets evolve with issues like bans or country-specific requirements, requiring significant huge investments and initially yield minimal returns. The high competition in the existing market leads to low growth and a dwindling market share. Thus, hosting businesses need to hunt for new markets continuously.
The technology changes very fast; thus, the hosting market also changes, including business models. A hosting provider cannot remain satisfied with the existing technology but must keep up to date and updated with the changing upcoming technologies. Those who do not upgrade and update become antiquated.
Ananova 