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It Was the Best of Hosts, it Was the Worst of Hosts
When looking for
a Web host, one of the first questions to ask yourself is whether you look for a
Quality (and somewhat costly) host, or whether you opt for the budget option.
Today, we’ll take a look at both ends of the spectrum and find out that although
it may take a lot of digging, there’s a good chance of finding a diamond in the
rough.
Web Hosting: Which is the Host with the Most?
So you want to
publish a web site do you? Welcome to the club. These days it seems that almost
everyone has a web site of some kind, and thousands more continue to be launched
every day. It’s challenging enough to design a site and fill it with interesting
content, but when all is said and done another challenge still remains – where
to host it?
A popular choice
for newbie webmasters, and even experienced ones, is to secure a free hosting
plan with a company such as Yahoo! Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire. While these
are easy to setup and free of charge, they do have limitations. Most free hosts
don’t offer all the nice features that paid hosts do such as FTP access,
CGI-BIN, or your own personal domain name. Instead you’re stuck with minimal
features and a generic URL such as www.freewebhost.com/marcswebsite. This
somewhat limits your web site‘s potential. Most free hosts also require you to
run banners or pop-up ads on your web site to make it worth their while – these
banners and pop-ups can obstruct the view of your web page and ultimately annoy
visitors and drive them away. Lastly, most free hosts have a daily bandwidth
limit that is very small, so if you do get a lot of traffic you’ll most likely
exceed the allotted bandwidth and your site will be temporarily disabled.
Overall I would recommend free web hosts for people that are new to web hosting
and want to get a feel for how it works. I’d also recommend them for web sites
that are personal in nature (such as an online journal) as well as web sites
that don’t plan to generate any revenue. Free web hosts are a great stepping
stone to paid web hosts – I myself starting building web sites 4 years ago using
free hosts, and today I run several high traffic web sites that are hosted on
paid web hosting plans.
Now it’s time to
get into the good stuff – paid web hosting. Web hosting companies that charge
money for their services are plentiful on the Internet, and feature a wide array
of hosting packages at various price points. First we begin with so called
“budget” web hosts, who claim to offer you the world for only $1 per month.
Having used numerous such companies I feel I must tell you to proceed with
caution here, as these companies aren’t all that they are cracked up to be. Many
claim to offer 24/7 e-mail support, which in my experience turned out to be 0/0
e-mail support. My e-mails were either never answered or answered a week after I
sent them. Even when I got a response it was generic in nature and completely
unhelpful. Also, expect frequent outages with these budget web hosts as they
rarely even have their own web servers – often they are reselling space on
someone else’s web servers over which they have no control. One budget web host
I used went down unexpectedly for 6 days, and they didn‘t even bother to notify
their customers. As a result, my web site was down for 6 days and I lost most of
my visitors as well as my hard-earned search engine rankings. Lesson learned: if
the reliability and success of your web site is important to you, budget web
hosting might not be the answer. However, this is not to say that all budget web
hosts are bad – 1dollarhosting.com is one of the leaders in the budget web
hosting arena and has quite a good reputation.
http://www.exaltersolutions.com
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