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.

Cloud Hosting

In a nutshell, if you’re a tech start-up that (1) relies on its web-based technology, (2) doesn’t yet have the resources to invest heavily into your hosting, but (3) plans to experience several significant growth spurts during the next few years, then cloud hosting is probably what your business needs. Basically, yours is a businesses that’s primarily web-based, so you can’t afford to experience any significant down-time. But at the same time, you still have to be prudent with your budget because you’re a start-up; you have to be careful to not invest in more than is necessary at any given moment because those resources might be better invested some other way.

Cloud hosting is a kind of hosting that lets businesses rent a virtual server, and then scale it as their business grows and fluctuates. This means that your hosting packages can be adjusted on an as-needed basis as your traffic fluctuates. Many cloud hosting providers will also let you choose your preferred operating system (Windows or Linux), will give you the self-service flexibility offered through dedicated hosting, offer flexible billing, and server configuration controls via an API or web-based interface.

Overall, with a cloud hosting package, your business can save money by not spending more than you need to, but still harness all the benefits of cloud computing — such as scalability and enhanced server performance. Such features are ideal for a company that’s tech- and web-reliant, but doesn’t yet have the resources or need to commit to something as comprehensive as a dedicated hosting package.

Granted, all this also means that your IT team will have to be standing by to manage your cloud hosting package to suit your business needs. After all, as your traffic and user-base fluctuate, so will your server configuration and hosting package. Of course, if you’re a web-based start-up, that’s probably most of what your IT team does anyway

Dedicated Hosting

What a dedicated hosting package consists in, is when a company leases one or many servers and has complete control over how it (or they) work. There are three main advantages that dedicated servers offer. First off, a dedicated server is located in a data center that is already secure and stable. This means that your business doesn’t have to invest in any hardware or infrastructure (e.g. redundant power systems) or the additional space that comes with having your servers on-site.

Second, a dedicated hosting is dedicated to your business’s websites, applications and platforms. This means that, unlike shared hosting where your site is sharing a server with other sites, your business enjoys the full and complete power and bandwidth of your dedicated servers, and nothing should affect server performance (such as load times), unless you choose to let it.

Finally, with dedicated servers, your IT team can fully customize server performance to the needs of your business. In other words, they can optimize server performance to best suite your business’s technology.

So who is dedicated hosting right for? Pretty much any large, stable business that depends on it hosting as part of its core infrastructure, but don’t want to have you own servers right on-site, then dedicated hosting is probably right for you. Essentially, your company can’t do business without the internet. It needs its site and applications to be running smoothly because it relies on them to interact with your customers and makes sales.

An example of such a company would be a large online retailer that uses a custom CMS to manage its immense inventory of stock. Such a retailer would be processing thousands of queries a minute, so every minute of downtown could mean a loss of hundreds or thousands of dollars in revenues.

Another example of such a company would be an online advertising network. This would be a business that would be operating an an ad platform that processes hundreds or thousands of ad campaigns across thousands of domains for dozens of advertisers. If those banners don’t render, clients don’t have to pay them, and publishers will stop working with them. So maximum bandwidth and up-time is essential to the businesses survival.

Choosing a Business Hosting Provider

Once you know what kind of hosting your business model calls for, choosing the right provider can be tricky. After all, while some hosting providers might excel at providing one kind of hosting, that doesn’t mean that they’re good at providing the kind of hosting your business needs. So start by looking for reviews not about web hosts in general, but on the kind of hosting you’re shopping around for.

Then, after you have a shortlist of potential hosting providers, involve your IT team in the decision making process. They are the ones who will be configuring your servers, so they’re going to be in a very good position to evaluate a hosting provider’s technology and help you make decision about hosting that makes the most sense for your business.

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.

When looking for web hosting I always recommend to listen to friends and family that can recommend a certain web hosting provider. These personal referrals are worth so much more. No money back guarantee can make up for that personal recommendation. Your chances to go with a bad web host are greatly reduced if you follow a friend or family member to a certain host. See it like your personal edition of “consumer reports”.

Believe it or not, but there is web hosting for life out there. As a matter of fact I do have 3 reseller hosting accounts with a specific company since 2003. There was a time when I was ready to leave the company because the owner decided to sell out at the peak. The new owner had a completely different approach to business and the quality of service was declining fast. Fortunately he was bought out by another web hosting company which then in return turned things around dramatically. For now (knock on wood) I am really happy with this host and have no reason to leave at all.

However, buying web hosting at a wholesale level is not for everyone. There is more work involved for yourself, but as I am hosting over 150 domains, I a) do have a certain level of experience and b) do need wholesale resources. A normal consumer does not need this kind of web hosting. If you are just looking to host 1 or 2 domain names there are many cheaper and better web hosts available to choose from. My recommendation is to look for a web host that has at least 3 or more years of business history. Their servers should be located in a larger data center with many Internet uplink providers or even in-house in a data center owned by the web host. You also want to look for a web host who offers a web hosting control panel like cpanel or Plesk. Pricing should be less than $10 per month and the more you prepay the cheaper your web hosting package should be. Support needs to be 24/7 and the more support options available, the better it is for you.

Conclusion: Web hosting can be an adventure, but your ultimate goal should be a calm passage. My biggest goal is reliability and super-fast support. I do not care about the latest and greatest feature as you would barely use those anyway (they’re eye-candy). Spend some time researching the new web host you are looking at for your website. This will not guarantee that nothing goes wrong, but it will greatly reduce the risk of signing up with another bad web host. Maybe you find web hosting for life the next time.

About the Author: Chris Puetz has been involved with the web hosting industry for over 10 years now. He has been a web hosting customer as well as he has been a web hosting provider. He frequently writes about Top Web Hosting providers at the Web Hosting Resource Kit website. Chris Puetz is the author of the books “The Web Hosting Manager” and “Web Hosting Manual”.

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.

And to help your business choose a reliant Exchange hosting provider, Microsoft also offers a list of such certified Exchange hosting providers here.

By partnering with one of these recognized hosted exchange provider, your business can enjoy the support, experience, and knowledge of their highly specialized staff. After all, their staff will be intimately familiar with the ins and outs of exchange servers, and will be able to anticipate your needs and requirements much more quickly than your in-house team. This will mean avoiding many of the unanticipated pitfalls of undertaking and exchange upgrade in-house, as well as being able to more quickly rectify any bugs or glitches that may arise in the future.

Furthermore, it will take time and experience for your own in-house team to become familiar and understand Exchange 2010. A certified hosted Exchange partner, however, will have the expert staff on-hand. This means that you can (1) avoid the costs of additional IT training, and (2) free up your IT staff so that they actually focus their resources on supporting your core business mandate.

Moving Forward with Microsoft Exchange 2010

The Microsoft Exchange 2010 servers clearly offer benefits that no serious company should forgo. However, the economy these days isn’t so amenable to investing in auxiliary, non-essential infrastructure.

But businesses who are serious about secure and efficient email communication can still reap the benefits of Microsoft Exchange 2010 without incurring most of the costs of upgrading. All they have to do is choose a reliable Exchange hosting provider that can offer the requisite expertise required to support you business needs.

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.

It’s too easy to understand what actually clustered hosting is. In this type of hosting, the load of hosting is served across multiple physical machines (servers or nodes), which increases availability & redundancy of resources thereby enabling the website to run smoother than ever.

Similar to cloud hosting, this hosting service utilizes virtualization technology to improve security & system resources. When you use clustered hosting, you don’t find yourself grappling with the issues of bandwidth, disk space, processing speed, RAM etc. This is practically because through your hosting account, you can easily access the infinite hardware. Also, you can upgrade your website without any hassles & take the productivity threshold of your website to a different level altogether.

Now answering the question when do you actually need it, we would say that sometimes arise  situations when upgrade is very much required but the restrictions posed in other types of hosting might cause your website to be down or run sluggish. This may result in loss of your potential customers & resultant sales. The other possibility of using clustered hosting is that sometimes a single server is unable to address the demands of a website. It is then this type of hosting services emerges as a feasible option.

Also, in clustered hosting you’re not supposed to plan in advance when you should upgrade your website. As & when you website requires some additional power, it can be easily obtained from the cluster of available system resources spread across a number of servers.

Benefits of Clustered Hosting

Speaking about the advantages of clustered web hosting service, it boosts the scalability, performance & efficiency of your website. Since your website remains no longer confined to a single server, it gains unlimited potential. When set up your website on this architecture, you can rest assured that you would not receive complaints of slow-running website as it suffers no effect from abrupt traffic surges. Like most other web hosting plans, you are supposed to pay for it too on a monthly basis.

After reading this post if you wish to set up your website on clustered architecture, we are there to help you out. At LimeDomains, you can choose from either of our hosting plans—Standard or Premium—& get started with reaping the benefits of our clustered web hosting services.

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:

1. It’s obvious, but has to be said. Find a new web host and make sure that it meets all your needs.

2. Check if you have enough storage space, enough bandwidth to prevent crashes and down times, support for the operating system and applications that run on your server, support for scripts and an adequate number of email accounts and auto responders.

3. The next thing to do is back up everything on your server to a secure location. You don’t want to be left holding an empty tub looking like a fool when you realize you’ve thrown out both the baby and the bathwater. Make sure you get all your email, databases and website files.

4. Upload all your files and databases to the new server and make sure you retain all the file permissions as they were on your old one so that you don’t end up with scripting errors.

5. Get your new web host to test the scripts, contact pages, and databases your website before you make the necessary DNS change.

6. Before you update your DNS to point browsers to the new location of your site, you need to plan for the downtime that results from this procedure. DNS updates take up to 48 hours to spread to all DNS servers on the Internet.

7. Let your customers and website visitors know of this planned upgrade. Make the move when your servers are expected to be the least busy.

8. To reduce down time as much as possible, make DNS changes before you move the domain. Before you do this though, check to see if your mail server is running on the new host so that you don’t lose any email messages.

9. If your domain name was registered using a third party domain name registration company, you need to check if your domain name is a part of your old hosting plan. If it is, you must separate the two, since moving your site to a new web host means that your domain name company remains the same while your web host changes.

10. If your site is dynamic, DNS update delays can cause havoc if you’re not careful. Some customers may see your old site while others have access to the new one. To minimize such occurrences, close down your old site with an alert so that it becomes static while the move to the new one is being made. You could also use a synchronization tool to get changes made on the old site mirrored on the new one.

11. Check for incompatibility issues between applications on your old server and your new one.

12. If you have more than one domain to migrate, make sure you start the process with enough time to spare for the DNS update delays.

13. Make sure all the visitors to your old site are being redirected to your new site before cancelling your current web host. It’s best to keep both sites up and running in parallel for at least two weeks before saying goodbye to your old hosts.

This web hosting blog post is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of web design schools. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

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.