Blog Web Hosting

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 December 2009 02:02 Written by Editor Tuesday, 29 December 2009 02:00

Starting a blog can be a fun and fulfilling adventure, where you can reach out to millions of people around the world. It might be a good idea to begin with a free hosted blog, like blogger.com, but if you are serious about your blogging you should go with a blog web hosting company and self-host your blog.

HostGator Review

Last Updated on Thursday, 24 December 2009 11:26 Written by Editor Thursday, 24 December 2009 10:08

HostGator Review

http://www.hostgator.com

HostGator was the first web hosting company I signed up for this year, after starting up my online business efforts again after 7 years working “offline”.
 
 
 

Background

I have around 10 sites hosted on one account (business plan) with HostGator, and have been with them for around one month. I can’t remember exactly why I chose to go with them, but most likely I read reviews on sites like Good Web Hosting that were positive and gave them a shot.
 
 
 
Click here for HostGator plan details

Good web host

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 December 2009 02:04 Written by Editor Thursday, 24 December 2009 06:36

Finding a reliable, cheap and good web hosting company can be a daunting task in a market that is overcrowded with offers. The “cheap” part is easy, but finding a good web host you can rely on can often take a while. I know, because I have tried a lot of different web hosting companies up through the years, even run one my self. To give you a better understanding of what sets hosting companies apart from each other I will give you a “backstage” view.

A web host company really only consists of two services (from the customers point of view) and this is where the bad are differentiated from the good web host companies:

• web hosting
• support

Everything else usually goes on behind the scene. Your credit card gets charged each month, the techies at the good web hosting service stop a network attack, you really don’t care as long as your web site is up and running, and that your questions are answered or problem resolved when you contact their support department.

From the web hosting companies perspective, these are obviously the most expensive services to provide to the customer also.

Web hosting

The most common form of web hosting today is referred to as “shared” web hosting. Basically, all web pages that exist on the internet are stored on a  hard drive, on some computer with network access. A web hosting company usually has they’re own storage facility (data center) where these computers are connected to the Internet.

These computers, or “servers” as they are called, can host anywhere from 1 to several hundreds of web sites, depending on how powerful the servers are. Generally speaking, if the server hardware/software is cheap (old) and/or poorly set up, few sites can be hosted. If the server hardware/software is expensive (new) and/or efficiently set up, more sites can be hosted. But of course, the most crucial factors in being able to host few/many web sites is the traffic to the web sites, and what kind of content/services it is offering. High traffic and/or resource intense content (for example streamed video) and services can quickly place a strain on the server.

Where the web hosting company might cut on quality

Now, based on the above information about how a web site is hosted, you can see that it is in the interest of the web hosting company to place as many web sites on a computer/server as possible, so that the expense for hardware, software and man-hours is kept low. This gives us two ends of the spectrum with regards to quality:

Bad web hosting

• Places too many web sites (customers) on the same server. In other words, the server is overloaded. This can result in down time due to the server not being able to serve your web site to your visitors when the server is most busy. It can also result in down time because the server needs to be rebooted often.
• Does not handle instances well when there are specific web sites on a server that are utilizing most of the resources and creating problems for the other customer. This can happen even if the web hosting company has a policy to not place too many web sites on the same server. They need to actively monitor and take action when needed.

Good hosting

• Only places an amount of web sites that the server can truly handle. The good web hosts have a nice buffer between what the server can handle and the number of web sites, so that they have time to handle growing web sites that need to be moved (see next point). 
• Once they see a trend that a web site on a server might jeopordize the server performance through increased resource utilization, the good web hosting company will ask the customer to upgrade/move to a server that can handle the traffic. They monitor, and take action when need be, all the while helping the customer that needs to move so that the effort is minimal.

There are of course other factors that can degrade the quality of the web hosting service, like network problems and outages, small network connections to “internet providers”, the servers burning up, etc. However, it is my opinion that most of the problems customers with a “bad” web hosting company experiences is due to overcrowded servers. That and bad support, which I will discuss in part 2 of Good Web host: From the web hosting companies perspective.