May 26 2008
Looking For Good Web Hosting?
It would be useless to ask if anyone is looking for a good webhosting site because I know everyone wants the best out of their money. In this post I will try to make you understand what are the things you should look for when buying a package from a webhosting site. Nowadays due to competition the hosting plans on the web are more or less the same among different web hosting providers. It helps a lot to check and gather as much information about the service a hosting company would provide. If you are in doubt about anything before buying the package, you should always query with live-chat feature available on most of the webhosting websites.
It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or an expert, in this article I think you will find a lot to learn on how to choose a good web hosting company. Here, I am not going to talk about hard drive space, bandwidth provided and prices as these will be all dependent from one user. Some of the basic features you must look are as follows:
- Control Panel - This is from where you will be managing your hosting account. Keep in mind that it should be easy and user friendly to access everything such as creating mailboxes, setting up email forwarding, uploading and editing files, creating sub domains, park additional domains, etc. Some host use third party control panel like cPanel and some other use inhouse developed control panel.Most of the website hosting companies lets customers to enter a demo control panel just to make sure you are ok with it. If any website don’t have that feature, ask for the demo control panel access before buying.
- FTP Accounts - With FTP you can upload your large files, delete them, update them. You can find it from the control panel. Just make sure you have handful of FTP sub-accounts which can also be provided to your clients/users and have password protected directories features.
- Backup - Most Hosts take Automated Backups. Backing up data is very important when you are hosting your website remotely. This feature is as essential as any other.
- PHP & Mysql Support - All the Linux Plans support PHP & Mysql. PHP is a scripting language focused on server-side scripting for Web development and can be embedded into HTML as well. Whereas MySQL is a SQL database server which allows users to store logs, datas and pictures in it.
- SSL - SSL is needed if you are going to host an eCommerce site. Sites that require submission of sensible information like usernames and passwords can use SSL certificates. SSL certificate are provided by some hosting company and if not you can always purchase an SSL certificate for another site and ask the host to install it in your account.
- Shell - With this feature on you can zip, unzip files, change permissions of files, run certain programs on the server. This make it easier for you to access you account securely.
- Shopping Cart - A shopping cart is a software that put up an online store catalog and ordering process. This is very important if you aregoing to host an eCommerce website.
Apart from all these basic feature one of the most important feature is CPU usage limit given to users. Most website fair very poorly and end up suspending website for too much load as they offer a maximim of 5 per cent of cpu usage. This gets a website into trouble if there is too much traffic. Ofcourse you would want loads of traffic so that people know about your website and you can gain good Alexa ranking and as well as PageRank to monetize your website.
In my personal experience I found “only” Hostgator who are a top class webhosting company. Hostgator lets their user/client use 25% of cpu usage for not more than 90 per cent, which no other webhosting sites provides. They have support 24 hours and you can call them anytime for any trouble you face while hosting your account. The service is too good to be true. Click the little banner to get started:
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