There are many different kinds of hosting for businesses to choose from, and depending on your business model, some kinds of hosting will make more sense than others.

When it comes to tech companies — i.e. companies that exist and operate primarily online — there two alternatives to actually having to invest in the infrastructure of having your own servers in-house. For companies that are relatively well established and are experiencing stable growth, dedicated hosting probably makes the most sense. But for newer companies still in the start-up phase of their existence, cloud hosting will probably make a lot more sense. Let’s take a look at how these two kinds of hosting differ, and why your tech company should rely on one rather than the other. read more »

Would you sign up for a web hosting offer that is branded as “Web Hosting for Life?” I doubt you would and neither would I. Web hosting is a volatile industry and especially smaller players come and go faster than most of us would expect. As a web hosting customer it is always risky to go with “the little guy” for web hosting as you never how good or bad this web host is and if he is still in business tomorrow morning. Of course on the other side you might miss out on a web host that offers a much more personal approach to web hosting. Sometimes these web hosts are the best out there and they will go the extra mile to make you happy. read more »

Now that Microsoft Exchange 2010 is available, many business are looking at a considerable investment to upgrade their infrastructure. But the costs of doing so can be stifling. After all, in addition to actually migrating all your employees over to the new system, there also costs associated with ensuring that your IT staff are fully trained in how to configure and maintain the new system. Many businesses can get around this, however, by partnering with a reliable Exchange hosting provider and simply outsourcing all these headaches.

Why Upgrade?

When it comes to dealing with such IT upgrades, it’s easy for many business decision makers to say “well, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?” But there are actually 9 good reasons to upgrade to Exchange 2010 from whatever earlier version that your business is using. Specifically, Exchange 2010 offers:

• Reduced deployment cost: Exchange Server 2010 can help your business reduce costs by addressing common infrastructure requirements such as backup, e-mail archiving, mobile e-mail access, and voice mail.
• Simplified high availability and disaster recovery: Exchange Server 2010 has also introduce a mor esimplified approach to high availability and disaster recovery than previous versions, and this can help your business achieve new levels of reliability and reduce the complexity of maintaining business continuity.
• Easier administration and decreased help desk dependence: Another benefit of Exchange Server 2010 is that it provides new self-service capabilities that help your users (i.e. employees) perform common tasks without calling the help desk and taking up your IT team’s resources.
• Greater mobility: Exchange Server 2010 also offers a better universal inbox experience, letting your users with access all of their business communications from a single location.
• Decreased inbox overload and increased productivity: The latest release of Microsoft Exchange Servers also adds new productivity features that let your employees organize and prioritize their emails.
• Transformed voice mail: Microsoft Exchange 2010  can actually let your team creceive and preview their voice mail in text form right in their inbox.
• Simplified compliance: Microsoft Exchange 2010 also offers more efficient archiving, which will simplify compliance and discovery.
• Safeguards for sensitive information: Through centrally managed and enforced data protection and control features, Exchange Server 2010 makes it easier to encrypt, manage, and control your company’s communications.
• Reduced risk of malware and spam: Exchange Server 2010 features enhanced built-in defenses against junk e-mail and support for an array of third party security product.

Upgrading to Exchange 2010: Taking the Leap of Faith

If these are benefits that your business wants to enjoy, your decision to upgrade will then come down to some old fashioned number crunching. After all, as much as the upgrade is in an investment, and you’ll likely realize the ROI, we are in recessionary times, so some longer-term investments are better put-off until after the economy has rebounded before.

But there are ways your business can implement an upgrade, but not incur the costs of new hardware, data migration, and training your system admin and other IT staff. Specifically, by partnering with a recognized hosted exchange provider, your business can considerably reduce the costs of both the upgrade an ongoing system maintenance. read more »

There’s a certain element of luck involved in finding a perfect web host – not all free web hosts suck and not all hosts who charge sky-high rates are the best in the business. Some people get lucky with the first host they sign up with, and for them, it’s a lifelong relationship that has its ups and downs, but which survives nevertheless. Others however, have to undergo a number of divorces before they find their perfect match. Although a lot of thought and research go into the process of finding the perfect web host, you know you got lucky with your choice if:

• Your site is up 99 percent of the time: If your web host has servers that are not capable and that get pretty slow when they are overloaded, you know you’re out of luck. Your page does not load and the status is often “not found.” This annoys visitors who are specifically looking for your site and drives away those who are arriving for the first time based on search engine results. So if your site is up and running 99.9 percent of the time, you’ve struck it rich in the world of web hosting.
• Your visitors don’t complain of slow access: When your server is capable of loading your pages in the blink of an eye no matter how large your files are or how heavy the traffic is, you know you were lucky enough to find a good web host. Most web users are frustrated with slow load times – even if their speeds are at DSL-level or higher, they are limited by the speed of the server that loads the page they’re looking for.
• You know how to reach your hosts in case of any problem: Not many hosts are great with customer support and service, so if your provider answers your calls and takes care of any issues immediately, you’re luckier than a man who just won a lottery. When you’re able to avoid downtime and frequent technical hassles because your customer support is top notch, you know you have a web host worth staying with.
• You have the option to upgrade your space requirements as you go: Your storage space depends on what you pay for your web hosting service. When you start out on the Internet, you don’t expect too many visitors and your needs are limited. But then as you gain in popularity and your traffic increases, you expand accordingly. And if your web host accommodates your storage needs as and when you need more space, then you know your partnership was a stroke of luck.
• You don’t find that your site has disappeared overnight: We live in a world of fly-by-night operators who close shop without a word and disappear into the dark when they’ve made their money. They don’t bother to inform people who depend on them to run their sites, so if you find that your website has disappeared, it’s because your service provider has shut shop to cut their losses. If your host has been around for a while and you’re never worried about being left in the lurch, you know you got lucky with your choice of web host.

About the Author:

This guest post is contributed by Barbara Williams, she writes on the topic of Computer Technician Programs . Email her at:  barbara.williams07@gmail.com .

Clustered hosting has lately turned around heads of many including biggies such as YouTube, Yahoo!, MySpace, Flickr etc, which use this web hosting service. Usually, it is chosen by big companies with massive websites receiving thousands of hits every day.

read more »

Agreed, it’s a pain in more places than one when you have to migrate from one web host to the other, but when your needs grow and your current host fails to keep up, it’s best to do the dumping as soon as possible. But before you sever all ties, you must protect what’s yours and make sure your site is up and running without a hitch at your new host. Here’s a list of 13 things you must do before you dump your web host:

read more »

Choosing between a dedicated servers and shared hosting brings up a lot of questions. Does your site need a dedicated server or is shared web hosting good enough? How can I tell? Should I save money or get a powerful server now? How much control will I have with each option? Today I will be answering these questions and hopefully helping to make the choice easy.

When Is The Decision Is Easy?
The decision is easy when you don’t have a choice… If your site is getting tons of visitors, if your current shared host says it is using too many resources, if you are running a lot of dynamic php mysql sites that demand a lot of memory and cpu, or if you can’t afford downtime because you are doing marketing on your sites that can’t be down. Any of these reasons make the decision to go with a dedicated server easy and the real question then becomes what type of dedicated server.

By The Numbers…
You should fit into one of these hypothetical situations… Just keep in mind these are very ruff and you should give your hosting company stats so they can decide.

1. I run WordPress or PHP/MySQL site and get over 500 unique visitors a day. Get a dedicated server. Under that number of visitors and you are probably fine on shared web hosting.

2. I run a static site and get under 500 visitors a day. Shared hosting is fine. Go dedicated or VPS if it grows a lot. Static is a lot easier on the server.

A lot of shared hosts will be fine with bigger sites but its borderline in most cases. I also tend to error on the side of caution. I’ve seen plenty of intensive forums with 3,000 visitors a day running on shared hosting for months and then one day something flukes to cause a spike and suddenly they have 10 days to upgrade.

By The Money
Shared hosting is around $10 a month while a dedicated server is at least $70. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to make this choice. If money is a factor go with shared hosting.

I Want Control
If you want complete control of your hosting environment go with a dedicated server. Shared hosting will limit what you can do, what you can tweak, and what you can install. With a dedicated server you can do anything you want!

I work for UK2 and over the last ten years have helped a lot of people choose between the dedicated servers we offer versus our shared web hosting. It really just boils down to the above issues.

Yahoo reports that Online retailer Amazon.com’s Web site went down for more than two hours in the middle of the day Friday.

Around 10 a.m. PDT, the Web site shut down, giving an error code to anyone visiting it, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a California-based company that measures Internet activity.

One digg.com user asks:

Amazon’s down!!! What’s going on? Asks one Digg.com user.

Error message is: Http/1.1 Service Unavailable. Major update? Technical difficulties? What’s the deal?

Maybe they didn’t pay their 6.95 for shared cPanel hosting?

So you built a Web site? All done? Amrit Ray posts his thoughts on how to promote a Web site.

How do I effectively promote my website, is a million dollar question. And yes, it is no exaggeration. People all over the world are making millions by effectively promoting their websites and reaching out to thousands of potential businesses that they otherwise had never thought possible.

The advent of technology and its easy accessibility has changed the way people buy or do business online. All this has ushered in a new era of e-commerce where people’s perception towards online businesses has changed dramatically and they are ready to accept the concept of online businesses and feel comfortable buying from someone they have never met or probably will never meet in person.

Now this has opened up a whole new world of opportunities for businesses worldwide. Everybody is vying for a share of the million dollar online market. The first step of course involves getting an attractive website done highlighting the products you want to sell. A good professional web designer would be able to help you out here both with web hosting and design. The next step involves promoting your website so that it reaches its target audience.

There is no sure shot way or magic pill that one can use to promote their website. And in fact, no one knows for sure what works and what does not. All major search engines have different criteria or algorithm to judge how relevant a website is to its audience. No one knows the exact factors that make one website feature over the other on certain keywords. However some factors that could increase your search engine visibility are back links and good content.

Back links are links from other websites leading back to your own website. The quality of the website linking back to your site is also very important. Back links from negative websites could harm your websites image, so be careful about that. Now the question is how do you get back links? The simple answer is, ask them for it. Though, link exchange in my opinion is not a very good idea. Search engines will know that you have mutually exchanged the links and the link backs are artificial. Submit your website to Directories. There are thousands of them out there. It takes time and patience. Leave comments on blogs with a link to your website. This is one point that should never be over done. There is a fine line between promoting and spamming and crossing the line could be disastrous. No one likes spammers and neither do search engines. Too many back links in a short period of time can also arouse suspicion, so continue at a steady pace until you see your ranking improve. Another good way of getting back links is posting in forums as most of them allow you to use your website address in your signature.

Now when people start to find your website online it is important that your website has relevant and interesting content so that your visitors stay online longer. The longer they stay the more chances they will buy.

These are a few small steps one can take to promote ones website effectively.

Thinking of registering a domain with the hot keywords “web hosting?” Sure you are. I can read your mind. Well, I was bored today and thought I’d search and see what web hosting domains were available. So, to start my quest, I visited Godaddy and typed in webhosting .com into the search…

Looks like I’m about 15 years too late on that one. Some clever soul reserved webhosting.com back in January 1993 when I was in the fetal stages of Internet growth. Can’t say I’m surprised. If you are, I’ve got some .info’s over in Iceland that I’d like to sell you:). Have you noticed that just about any occurence of the word webhosting + any valuable keyword has been registered by domainers, SEO’s or individual businesses?

But what I really wanted to see was what results the Godaddy domain suggestion tool would offer as alternatives. Here’s what came up:

Is this sad or what?

Some of the premium domain names aren’t that bad but look how expensive they are!

The additional domains, those at regular prices, are the worst of the crop, wouldn’t you say? I mean, who wants to start a web site called “Web Hosting Store” or “Net Life Hosting.” Also, maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t it seem strange to have the word online and hosting together in the same domain name?

So what’s a web hosting sitebuilder to do? I know you’re out there so please speak up and liberate us from the prospect of buying a bad domain.

What Websites are Hosted on this IP?

This is one of the best reverse ip tools I have ever seen. Most reverse ip tools do not show you nearly all the sites hosted on a server and sometimes there users are even charged for a premium service to use the full tool. At first, I thought it was capable of actually displaying all domains hosted on a server. However, it doesn’t because I checked one of my servers and it got only 3 out of 7 domains on ip address. But, in other cases it seems to list a long list of domains hosted on a server. Over at digg.com, users are having fun poking around on government and scientology sites to see what domains are hosted.

Using the You Get Signal “Reverse IP Domain Check,” you can see all of the other sites hosted on the same web server as a particular domain name. Try it.

Here’s more from YouGetSignal.com… and story at Digg.

I saw this story at Web Host Magazine reporting on Web sites that naively call for user input, then fail to put strict checks on what that input may be, are susceptible to SQL injection attacks. Security is an oft overlooked issue for many of us who own and operate multiple sites. Now just might be a good time to check under the hood of your server for any potential exploits. Procrastinate on other things, not your site security!

read more | digg story | Information Week Story

I got started doing graphics editing with JASC Paint Shop Pro way back. I haven’t used the program since it was purchased by Corel. Now I use Photoshop and have recently begun toying around with the open source GIMP graphic editor.

This is a neat tutorial will show you how to create Web Host company header using photoshop and the free stock photo above.

What Graphics Editor do you use?

Opinion by Weber Hostetler

Why do so many website builders use Linux web hosting? My guess for this preference in operating systems would be: stability. Linux is perhaps the most stable operating system in the world.

There are two of essential foods: peanut butter and jelly, two major political parties: democrat and republican, and two kinds of web hosting which make up practically all web hosting on the planet: Windows based web hosting and Linux web hosting. The Windows operating system’s proprietary API (application programming interface) which is complicated and which is not entirely open for developers to know the ins and outs of. As a result, computers which run Windows as their primary operating system are suspected of being more prone to crashes.

Why is Linux stable? Servers running Linux web hosting just might be more stable because Linux is an open source operating system. The code is open to the public so that anyone can read it and suggest improvements or point out bugs. Over the years, Linux has been developed in various flavors such as Red Hat and Debian. Thousands and thousands of people have contributed their time and effort to making Linux web hosting run faster and to provide simpler, more efficient and bug free code. With an open programming environment, improvements are made on a continual basis and problems are seen relatively quickly and solved with a minimum of difficulty.

When you are starting a web site, one of your chief concerns is stability. Any time that the web site spends offline as a result of technical problems is time that your customers are unable to use your site, and this is bad for your bottom line. Businesses tend to want the most stable operating system for their web sites to minimize the dreaded server crash.

Another issue the webmasters have to consider when setting up a new online site is whether the operating system they are using will be able to use the full range of software and scripts that they require. Again, Linux web hosting is a winner in this regard. Lots of major web hosting companies offer Linux web hosting and with so many people using it around the world anything that you can do with Windows hosting can also be done with Linux web hosting. Many of the most popular script packages on the web today are available in both Windows and Linux web hosting versions, with the Linux web hosting version generally being more stable and having all of the same features as their Windows cousins. This is of course my opinion and I am sure that there are some who may disagree.

Linux web hosting is typically available at the same price as Windows web hosting. So consider that for the same price you can get an operating system for your site on the world wide web which is:

• stable
• runs popular script packages
• considered the best operating system in the world in terms of these criteria by many of the internet’s most well respected independent sources of judgement.

When you ruminate on all of the arguments for Linux web hosting over Windows hosting (there are more as I don’t even mention the whole Apache stuff), the decision would seem to me to be a no brainer: Linux web hosting wins hands down as the operating system that you should choose if you want to have a stable, reliable and full featured site that takes advantage of the latest in web technologies.

Getting your web server with the Linux operating system is particular important for companies which need to set up eCommerce sites. When customers rely on your site for sending in their orders, you need to make sure that you web site is running twenty four hours a day. Linux web hosting with live support might not be a bad idea for mission critical sites. Some Linux web hosts reviewed at Webhostingfinds.com include:

• BlueHost
• HostGator

Agree or disagree?

Could this be a new hacker tool?

Do you remember the power mishap in July that brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter? A  similar incident took place at Rackspace, a Dallas, Texas Web host which serves several local companies.

I doubt that I will ever get around to building my own datacenter, but if I do, it will not be close to a highway. Yep, the security implications that this event brings to the surface are disturbing.

Now what?

How about a new cPanel feature: Truck Redirect

Valleywag | Techcrunch | Digg

Will Google Buy GoDaddy?

There has been a bit of buzz about the possiblity of accredited registrar, Google (oh and search engine giant too), buying Godaddy. Could this be possible? Looks Like Google might be lining up to Buy GoDaddy Inc the worlds largest domain registrar, a move that some speculate might help Google remove spam from search engine results. GoDaddy has applied for several patents in the past months. GoDaddy may be trying to attract Google as a buyer.

Read about it here and Here | via digg

There is a lot of talk about server clustering these days. Not that I understand this or that it is actually easy for us all, but I thought this tutorial from the folks at IBM was interesting. It shows the thinking that goes into constructing an Apache Web server cluster that spans multiple physical or virtual Linux servers in 5 easy steps with Linux Virtual Server and Heartbeat v2.

read the full article at IBM or check discussion on Digg

Been here before, but here are a few important items to look for in a host from GreatResponder.com. Web hosting is a major part in the success of your online business. By choosing the right web hosting company for your web site, your success will be one step nearer.

After finishing the first stage of preparing your web site online which is designing the your website in a way that knock out all the competition, the second step in creating your online presence is to decide on the way of choosing the best web hosting company that will fit your needs.

This decision needs many different factors that can make your final decision a success. We will summarize here the most important factors that effect your decision and you must look for when choosing a web hosting company.

read more at GreatResponder.com or at Digg

The 100 Oldest Currently Registered .COM Domains



The list appears a bit dated (ha, ha, ha), but it is rather interesting to see who jumped on the web early. I was surprised to see domains this old. It won’t be long and we’ll have the attention of antique collectors.read more about this | digg.com story

Now why didn’t I think of this? Maybe I did. There’s a Digg like site for every niche these days. Why not web hosting? I haven’t fully checked this out this Digg-like web host rating site, Hostigg, but it looks interesting. Like Digg – but hosting!