If you plan to own a new website, you will need to host
your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server,
online users can then browse your website on the Internet. A company that
provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.
A web hosting provider will
typically have a fast connection to the Internet housed in a physical building
called a ‘data centre’ and they may host thousands of websites on many servers.
The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your
website up on the World Wide Web.
With a well-managed web host, you
can free yourself from worrying about the up-keep of complicated server
technology and proper technical maintenance. That’s the whole purpose of web
hosting companies. You should leave the technical work to a web hosting
professional while you focus on your own internet business.
There are thousands of webhosting providers on the internet and how do you decide which one you should
use? Sites like betahosts.com can help you by comparing all the best hosting
providers.
The features that web hosting
companies are offering are getting quite standard nowadays. There are basic
features that you’ll need in a web host. You can find out more here.
To give a web host a competitive
edge over others, more attractive features are very necessary. You’ll find that
many hosts are willing to give away free stuff that used to cost over $10 per
month.
These are some of the advanced
features that our top hosts are offering.
* Web Builder many of our top 10
hosts offer a powerful web builder program called Site Studio. Site Studio
allows you to make sites without any HTML, FTP or HTTP knowledge. You can also
build a site on the fly while at home, at school or even at work. Hostgator’s
SiteStudio has over 500 ready-made templates for you to choose from.
* Ecommerce Enabled If you are
selling products on your site, you need a merchant account. A shopping cart is
a useful tool if you have more than 1 product in different categories. SSL(Secure
Sockets Layer) is a must-have if you need to receive valuable information such
as your customers’ credit card information. PowWeb, Hostgator and Lunarpages
provide an osCommerce shopping cart and shared SSL for your eCommerce needs.
* Marketing Package Most
marketing packages include search engine submission software, keyword generator
and link checker. Some hosting companies like iPower have established
partnerships with Yahoo! Search (previously known as Overture) and Google AdWords
to offer you pay-per-click credit to jump-start your business.
Popularity
The best marketing method is by
far word of mouth. If you sign up for a web host and are satisfied with the
performance, most likely you’ll recommend it to anyone who is looking for a
good host. Big web hosting companies know about this concept so well that they
would go all out to retain their existing customer. The more satisfied
customers they have, the more popularity they’ll get. We take this as an
important indicator of how good a host is. # there are a few factors that we
judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider. Several existing
customers. # The satisfaction level of their existing customers: We manage to
get hold of their existing customers from the positive reviews they submitted
through our host comment form, their comment in the 3rd party web hosting and
in-house forums and the customers’ comment found on other hosting directories.
# The amount of prestigious hosting awards they won # Their sites Alexa traffic
ranking
Lunar pages is on top among our
top 10 hosts. Network Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee
In terms of reliability, we are
looking at how redundant is the server, how often the companies backup the
server and how well they handle emergencies. “Redundant” means that if any of
the Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet connection
will take over. Pow Web Load Balancing Technology is one of the best that we
found to ensure your site is up 99.9% all the time.