Archive for the ‘Reseller hosting’ category

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4 stuffs Your Web Host Doesn’t Want You to Know

February 4th, 2011

Looking for a web host for your website? Ever feel like some of the things being promised are far fetch Check this list to see if your host has done this to you! And if they have: run, don’t walk… Get far-far away! There are plenty of web hosts in the market to not waste your time and money with the bad ones.

1. WE OFFER TERABYTES OF SPACE… ALL FOR $1 … WE GUARANTEED!!

You’ve seen all the offers. Tens of thousands of gigabytes.  Thousands of terabytes.  All for just a few dollars. Think it’s too good to be true? Well, it is. How do you think the hosts afford all that space? It’s a simple trick that is known as “overselling” in the web hosting world. Hosts sell 100x-1000x more space then they actually have hoping you don’t use it. And what happens if you start using it? Well if you read their terms of service, most of these hosts control your account based on cup usage. At the same time, “file storage” isn’t allowed. So as soon as you upload more than 1 GB, or get more then a few thousand visitors on your site, you will find your site gone. Of course none of the hosts want you to know this, so they hide it in confusing fine print and terms of service agreements. I hate to say it, but mom & pop might have been right… if it’s too good to be true, it probably is a scam.

2. WE HAVE BEEN IN BUSINESS FOR DECADES.

I find it funny how several well known hosts claim to have been around for “decades”. Another one boldly states “In Business since 1988″. I hate to break it to you guys, but there wasn’t really such a thing as web hosting back then. I’ve been involved in the hosting industry almost since the beginning, and I know for a fact there weren’t any $5/mon. hosts around in the 1980′s. Before believing a hosts claim, check the who is on the domain and see when they registered it. The funny part is that most hosts that claim to be more than 10 years old haven’t been around more than a 1 year! Obviously they don’t want you to know this, so do your due diligence and make sure you don’t get scammed by a fly-by-night host.

3.  WE HAVE OUR OWN DATACENTER – THOUSANDS OF SQ FEET

Face it, no matter what web host you go to, their site has pictures of huge datacenters, thousands of servers! Unfortunately, most web hosts are just “re-sellers”. Just people with some spare time that rent some space on someone’s server for $20/mon. and try to re-sell the space to a 100+ people. Best way to check? Ask for the address and other information on their datacenter. The trick here is that many hosts will give you the information of their providers datacenter (who they are renting from!), but if you are persistent enough and dig around you should be able to dig up the truth.

4. OUR HOSTING IS ONLY $5/MO – BUT YOU HAVE TO SIGN UP UNTIL 2050.

I don’t know what it is these days, but web hosting used to follow the logic of “what you see is what you get”. Now you have everyone advertising plans for $5/mon, but when you get to their website you find out its $20/month! What’s the deal?? Well it turns out that you need to sign up for 2 years, 3 years or even 5 years to get the “$5/mon”. Is it just me, or is that not $5/mon.? That would be $300/5years, not $5/mo! The worst part is that you usually don’t realize a host is doing this until you get to the final part in the check out. Do your research! Make sure when they say $5/mon. they mean $5/mon.! Not $300 for 5 years divided by 60!

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Posted in About Web Hosting, PHP mySQL Web Hosting, Reliable web hosting, Reseller hosting, Web Hosting News, Web Hosting Types

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Setting Default Page With Plesk.

February 1st, 2011

How do I set my default page using Plesk?


In the Linux world, you can use an .htaccess file to specify your default
page.

In order to do the same thing with Windows, you would need to use Plesk for this functionality.

You can set the order of pages searched for the index page by doing the
following:

* Login to Plesk
* Click your domain
* Click Web Directories
* Click Preferences

In the section labeled Documents, you can set the order of which files are
searched. If you want index.aspx instead of index.html, you would make sure that the index.aspx is listed above index.html.

If you would like a file-name that does not exist in the list to be your
preferred file-name, you can add it using this same section.

After making sure that the file-names are in the order you would like, the
selected page will come up in the browser if it is present in your files.

For more visit: www.version-next.com

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Posted in About Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers, plesk setting, Reseller hosting

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Be a successful web hosting reseller.

January 31st, 2011

Web hosting is an exhilarating first business scheme for many people, and while it might sound difficult to begin with; becoming a successful hosting reseller is actually a fairly simple process. In many cases, you don’t even have to do anything apart from sell the services of an established web host through your own website.

It is especially appealing to web designers and developers as an addition to your existing services.

The first step to becoming a web host reseller is to find a web host who offers several website hosting accounts. By taking out a several domain account, you can use one domain for the development of your own site and then set up other domains to clients’ websites. This enables you to pay a regular fee to the web host while charging clients any price you wish.

After setting up your domains to clients, it is preferable to have full administrative control over your clients’ websites. Ensure that your web host provides not only yourself with a control panel that features full administrative facilities to manage your account, but also provides your clients with their own control panel too. Perhaps the most important feature your web host should offer is the facility to hide your web host’s identity, preventing clients from knowing that you are offering a third party service.

It is also essential that your clients have a copy of your terms and conditions, which are vital in any business. While the writing of terms and conditions can be time consuming, many web hosts may let you copy theirs or supply you with terms and conditions specifically written for this purpose. It is also important to provide your clients with fast and reliable support, solving any problems that arise with their websites as soon as possible. Failure to do so will result in unhappy clients and it will also reflect badly on your other services. Tools such as white label guides offered by web hosts can help with this.

One of the best aspects of the business of reseller hosting is that you can start out on this business venture even if you do not have a great deal of expertise. It is also the case that there are times when a reseller can be more scalable than a typical hosting firm, due to true web hosts being limited in its hardware. If a client suddenly requires an upgrade that the host was not prepared for, it will have to go through the time consuming and costly process of upgrading its hardware. A reseller host, however, can simply choose a different web host that will better suit the needs of their customers.

Reseller hosting can be a great profit making venture once you’re up and running and understand the figures and profit margins involved. Buying web space from a major web host is relatively inexpensive and can be redistributed to site owners who need space for uploading their website at a suitable cost. What’s more, some hosts allow customers to oversell the space they buy and do not charge extra unless your account usage go above a certain level, while others offer unlimited web space and bandwidth at no additional cost.

It is said the average user uses less than half of their allotted web space, which means you could double or even triple sell your quota, earning considerably more money in the long run.

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Posted in About Web Hosting, Reliable web hosting, Reseller hosting, RVSkin web Hosting, Web Hosting News, Web Hosting Types

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Dedicated Web Hosting.

January 31st, 2011

It is extremely important to recognize the concept of web hosting, even if you don’t know anything about it. When you visit a website, you will see a web page that is downloaded from a web server on your own web browser. Generally the website is composed of many web pages and web sites in turn are composed of graphic images and text. These web pages are stored on web servers so that they can be available to web users. It is good to have an understanding web hosting basics that will allow you to make the right decision when you purchase hosting plan. Often times, You May find everything from a dedicated web hosting provider, and the situation may require you to go to the custom server.

If someone wants to have its own website, it is the first time will have to have a host of services that will host Web sites on the web server. Web hosting provider that was well established, it can host many web sites, to thousands of items, for example, Version Next Technologies is a Web hosting company that is very popular and seats up hundreds of thousand pages. While the host of a large number of web sites, web hosting providers require a huge number of web servers to store Web pages. After that, all those web servers are connected to the Internet and are kept in a ‘data center’. Since web servers must work properly all the time, data centers are fully confident that it gives them 24 / 7 environment and protected from fire, virus detection, redundant power backup, HV AC temperature control, computer data backup, and full of opportunities for recovery in case of some fail.

Your website will need about 10 MB (for a small web site) to 250 MB (for large sites) on the server hard disk. Web-based records will enable you to manage your domain name, e-mail and FTP services, password protect directories, and much more.

There are some disadvantages to a dedicated hosting arrangement. You have to pay high monthly fees in exchange for their freedom and an exclusive web hosting. You will also have good technical know-how to run the server properly and resolve any technical problems that occur. It could be time-consuming, but if you hire someone to do it for you, you’ll have to pay for their services. This would mean that you now have the maintenance costs on the amount you have already, that will not be the case in a shared web hosting.

If a dedicated hosting plan is something you don’t like and want to go for a custom dedicated server, then keep in mind the following:

Data storage – this means the area of your website will need the server’s hard drive.It May ranges from a small town with 10 megabytes of storage for large business sites that require 250 MB or more.

Data transfer or bandwidth, which refers to the amount of data transmitted over electronic networks as a response to the demands of visitors. It depends on the size of your website and the flow of traffic to your site.

You would need a web based control panel too with the help of which you can manage your domain name, e-mail, FTP services, as well as password protection and much more.

When you decide to custom dedicated servers, You May want to include a private CGI-bin, which will allow you to run your own PERL scripts and executable s. With a custom dedicated server, it is also possible to get SSI (Server Side Includes) that you insert a file in your HTML pages on the server side.

For more visit: www.version-next.com

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Posted in About Web Hosting, eCommerce Web Hosting, Reliable web hosting, Reseller hosting, RVSkin web Hosting

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.htaccess Tips and Tricks

January 25th, 2011

.htaccess (hypertext access) is the default name of a directory-level configuration file that allows for decentralized management of web server configuration.

There are tons of things you can do from the htaccess file inside of your web hosting account.  From redirecting the users to controlling who can get in and who can get out, it is a very useful file to have on your hosting account.  To help out the new web hosting clients and to act as a reminder to the old pros around here, I thought I would go through five of the most popular .htaccess tips I know.

Redirect to a Maintenance Page

This is a great one to use if you need to make some quick web page edits, and you don’t want the public to see you edit your web site, while it is still live.

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/offline.html$

RewriteRule .* /offline.html [R=307,L]

This will redirect anybody who checks out any web page on your web site to the “offline.html” file.

Force the Use of “www” in Front of a Domain Name

If you want to keep the www in front of your domain name, no matter how somebody types it in, here is the ‘bit of .htaccess magic you will need:

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^mydomain.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Once you have done so, both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com will both send you to www.mydomain.com

Remove the “www” From in Front of a Domain Name

You can also force your domain to drop the www from the address when typed in, if you would rather have it the other way around. In that situation, you would need to add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will make both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com send you to just mydomain.com.

Manually Create Custom Error Pages

Ever check out some of those customized error pages and wonder how it could be done? Just use these snippets of .htaccess code to tell people where to look for your error pages.

ErrorDocument 400 /errors/400.html

ErrorDocument 401 /errors/401.html

ErrorDocument 403 /errors/403.html

ErrorDocument 404 /errors/404.html

ErrorDocument 500 /errors/500.html

This tells the server to look inside the “errors” folder and that specific page for each of the different error types. That is not all of the error codes, but they are the ones that will be ‘hit by your users 99 percent of the time.

Block Visitor By IP Address

Need to keep somebody from checking out your web site?  This next tip will give you the ability to deny somebody based on what their IP address is:

order allow,deny

deny from 123.45.6.7

deny from 012.34.5.

allow from all

The above blocks access to the site from 123.45.6.7, and from any sub-domain under the IP block 012.34.5. (012.34.5.1, 012.34.5.2, 012.34.5.3, etc).

Before you go off and plant htaccess everywhere, read through this and make sure you don’t do anything redundant, since it is possible to cause an infinite loop of redirects or errors if you place something weird in the htaccess.

Also…some sites do not allow use of htaccess files, since depending on what they are doing, they can slow down a server overloaded with domains if they are all using htaccess files. I can’t stress this enough: You need to make sure you are allowed to use htaccess before you actually use it. Some things that htaccess can do can compromise a server configuration that has been specifically setup by the admin, so don’t get in trouble.

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Posted in About Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers, Linux sever, PHP mySQL Web Hosting, Reliable web hosting, Reseller hosting, RVSkin web Hosting

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Reseller Hosting Can be a New line of business Choice for Web Designers

January 18th, 2011

When we talk about the web hosting industry, we generally can think of two classes- the provider and the client side. One offer the service, while the other utilizes it to run his or her business online. But actually, there is a third side to it too or one can say a service model that lies between these two sides i.e. reseller hosting. This is a competent yet easy-to handle business model that can anytime be blended with any other business model, enabling owner to earn doubled profits.

The option of Reseller hosting services has been opening opportunities for a number of small business owners who are aiming at taking their current revenue stream higher by rendering custom hosting packages to their client base. However, amongst all business models, the one that seems most apt to be united and rendered with reseller hosting package is of web development services. This is why web developers having a consistently growing client base must consider adding web hosting service model to their line of business.

Including the Cost of Services

an ideal way to begin with this is starting to sell all-inclusive packages. Such packages take care of complete site development and management on the basis of a set monthly fee. Typically, this monthly fee includes expenses of hosting, site maintenance and custom design tweaks that are made as per clients’ suggestions. By combining the two services together, you can actually quote a higher price and aim to make a bigger profit. With the added advantage of being a web designer, you may easily convince your client with a convenient package comprising site design, organization and hosting.

Internet Businessmen

pitching for already established online websites or big giants is not very suitable for you since these will already have big hosting plans. Hitting the right set of crowd is very important for business growth at any stage. Hence, rather than opting for experienced online businessmen, it is better to go after offline crowd, since their information and experience in this field would be much limited. Offline business owners who are not technically inclined are more likely to buy reseller plans, and let me tell you this does not limit your targeted crowd.

One thing that is always consistent with every business owner is the aspiration of growing bigger. Be it a medical shop or a giant corporate house, every business wishes to expand more and more, so that they reach to the biggest of podium of clients and customers. Fortunately, World Wide Web successfully fulfills this aspiration of reaching out the masses, economically. Hence for a reseller hosting service provider, the clientele is humongous. Moreover, since you are a web developer who is ready to take up the projects of web hosting services, the combination of offering website development and hosting may pitch your sales much higher.

For more visit:www.version-next.com

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Free Web Hosting Might Be a Bad Idea.

January 13th, 2011

Internet is growing very fast. In developing countries, many people have now started using internet. If you want go global with your business or with your hobby, you need web site. To make web site, you will need web space. This web space is provided by hosting service providers. Some hosting provider gives hosting service free of charge. This article has full information about free hosting account.

A webhost essentially provides you with the space and the domain for your web content and as you can tell with a quick search using the Google search engine, there are many free services out there.
Free hosting services, there are many issues attached. The first issue is with the domain name they give. Free hosting providers don’t allow you to choose your own domain names. You will have to select sub domain of the domain name they provide. So your domain name will become lengthier. It’s really hard to remember long domain names.

Free hosting providers put advertising on the hosted web site. This way they generate money to support their hardware and expenses of hosting service. If visitors see the ads which are not related to web site content, then they don’t trust on your writing. When visitors become unhappy, you lose your business.

There is a problem of bandwidth limitation also. Free hosting providers have put restriction on some ways. If free hosting providers don’t put restriction then their maintenance cost will be very high. So they give limited bandwidth. When you reach your bandwidth quota, your account is suspended. So nobody will be able to access your web site.

There are also many technical limitations in free web hosting account. You won’t get any database access. You are simply given ftp access. You are also not provided more secure access like SSH. Today many web sites have become dynamic and use PHP. These PHP support is not provided by free service provider.

The biggest problem we can think of is a suspension of an account. Imagine a situation where you have made your web site, you have given time to promote it and when your web site become famous, your account is disabled for some stupid reason. What will you do? All your attempts to promote your web site is now waste. You can’t do anything.

In my opinion, the only advantage of free web hosting is that it’s free. There is no other advantage but there are many disadvantages. I wouldn’t recommend free web hosting.

After all there is nothing for free in this selfish world.

Visit: www.version-next.com

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Resellers: thoughts toward sell more web hosting.

January 12th, 2011

1. Clearly define your audience:
this is one of those bits of advice that’s sounds blindingly obvious, but so few people actually do. We’ve seen big companies that couldn’t tell you who their core target audience is, or you’d get a different answer depending on who you spoke to. Ask yourself these questions…
• Who is our ideal customer?
• What do they want?
• Why should they choose me?
• Where do they go?
• How do I let them know I exist?

Life is so much easier once you have a clearly defined target market. You know what type of product to create, how much to charge for it, how to position your brand and where to advertise your services. Make the product fit the customer, not the customer fit the product.

2. Be creative with your marketing budget:
You can’t compete with the large web hosting company’s marketing budgets; it’s a simple as that. They spend £1m+ per year and if you try to go toe to toe with them, you’ll probably go bust. I’ve seen it happen a couple of times over the years I’ve been working in the industry. For example, the most competitive keywords advertising on Google are off limits to all but the biggest spenders with the average cost per click for “web hosting” currently running at £8. Some ideas you could pursue include:

• A lot of web hosts haven’t really got their head around social media. They have twitter accounts and pages on Facebook, but I’d argue 85% of them are poorly thought out or token efforts. That’s a gap for you to fill.

• Online press releases are great ways to announce news to a large audience, establish authority and build quality incoming links. At only £100 per release through a distribution service, this is great value for money.

• I personally would not go near the most competitive keywords through Google AdWords if I was on a limited budget but I would still use the Google Display Network. Put together a tight list of target sites and advertise your service there using graphical banners.

3. Assemble your customers:
Excellent customer support and product performance will lead to customers spreading the word without much encouragement. However, you can be more proactive than that and get even more customers to refer you to other people who are looking for web hosting. A refer a friend program with a financial incentive is a tried and tested way of getting customers to refer people. This can be in the shape of cash, credit or vouchers. Review sites are a big part of a customer’s journey. Unfortunately the reviews being left on these sites tend to be from customers who have had a bad experience, certainly much more than those who are happy. Companies are becoming wise to this and starting to counter the negativity by asking their customers to review them, and there is no reason why you can’t do the same.

4. Get to the know the web hosting industry:
You are not competing in a vacuum and the more you know about the industry you are operating in, the more successful you will be. Who are your competitors, where do people go to research web hosts and who are the major web hosting news outlets with the most authority? If you can answer all those questions, you can relax. If not, here are some links to get you started…

5. Sell the core products:
Shared hosting, domain names, dedicated servers email solutions are the bedrock of non-managed web hosting companies. They also offer huge cross sell and up sell opportunities. For example:
• Domains: More domains, email, shared web hosting, domain privacy
• Shared web hosting: Dedicated servers, Hosted Exchange, search engine submission, SSL certificates, higher spec hosting
• Dedicated servers: Server back up, higher spec servers, cpanel, MS SQL, Hosted Exchange, SS certificates

6. Get visitors to trust you:
If you are asking a customer to essentially look after their web site and make sure it is secure and always accessible, there has to be an element of trust on the part of the customer. The challenge is to make them trust you enough to hand over their money. You can reduce the level of perceived risk through an attractive and modern website. Nothing screams “Stay away” more than a website that looks like it escaped from the 90’s.

Beyond being sexy to look at, all but the most carefree of people like to know they are part of a group, it makes them feel more comfortable. Positive customer reviews and testimonials go a long way to relaxing potential customers. If you can source them, case studies are a great way of showing visitors their peers are already your customers.

For more blogs visit www.version-next.com

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Strengthen Your Web Servers with Load Balancing

January 5th, 2011

On the Internet, organizations whose has web sites and also get huge traffic usually use load balancing technique to manage server. Every webmaster keeps a complete eye on there load balance to mange the web server traffic. The web servers are one of the most important factors for growing business. As sever administrator manage the load balance in different ways. The load balancing of the web server technique is been done in round-robin fashion.

For balancing the website traffic, there are several approaches. The webs servers are are one approach is to route each request in turn to a different server host address in a domain name system (DNS) table. Balancing the web server load is a procedure in which inbound internet protocol (IP) traffic can be distributed across multiple load balancing server or on the Load balancing Switch. There is multiple load balancing solution available with in the web hosting industry. There are high end Internet load balancing solution as well as load balance routers to manage online server.

In this type of balancing technique two online web servers are being used to balance the complete work load on the servers and the third server is used to determine which server to assign the work to. Since load balancing requires multiple servers, it is usually combined with fail over and backup services. In some approaches, the web server is distributed over different geographic locations. Load balancing can be implemented with hardware, software, or a combination of both. Typically, load balancing is the main reason for computer server clustering.

A Network load balancing is also a balancing technique to distribute workload equally across two or more web server, CPUs, hard drives, network links, or other resources. Which indeed to get optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Load balancing is dividing the amount of work that a computer has to do between two or more computers so that more work gets done in the same amount of time and, in general, all users get served faster. Commonly the network load balancing can also manage popular web sites that usually get high traffic.

Load balancing enhances the performance of the web server, leads to their optimal utilization and ensures that no single server is overwhelmed. Network load balancing also helps in managing DNS servers. The large Internet Relay Chat networks, high-bandwidth File Transfer Protocol sites are also being monitor. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase scalability and reliability with redundancy. The load balancing of a service is provided by a dedicated program or hardware device (such as a multilayer switch or a DNS server). Load balancing is a procedure in which inbound internet protocol (IP) traffic can be distributed across multiple servers.

Benefits of Load Balancing:-

  • Improves server performance – With the help of load balancing server the performance is achieved .The advanced load balancing technique can easily re-direct end-user service requests to the servers with the fastest response times.
  • Adds Intelligence – The servers also has a feature in which it allow you to send requests for certain web pages to specific groups of servers. The special request is been done with the help of priority to the servers.
  • Enhanced availability -If the online server application gets failed the load balancing can be easily redistributed by the end-user service requests to different webservers within a server farm or to servers in another location to manage the server load balancing.
  • Creates Resilience – High- Availability pairs for load balancer resilience, and creates fault-tolerance for your back-end servers.
  • Improves Reliability – With the help of online monitoring on the health of your web servers. The failed servers easily get detected and removed from the cluster until they recover.
  • Improved flexibility and scalability – Majority of the content intensive applications has been scaled beyond the point of limits where as a single server can provide the web based client a adequate processing power.
  • One-Click Session Persistence – A client is just one click away, for the sticky sessions for your web application when ever required by the.

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Posted in About Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers, Linux sever, Reseller hosting

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Most important factors.

December 28th, 2010

It is easy to overlook some of the most important factors when selecting a web host while paying too much attention on great features which you may not need at the start.

For example, most people judge a web host by the amount of disk space they offer. The thinking is generally, the more the better.

There are many other factors to take into consideration:

Tech Support- I don’t know about you, but I like the feeling of knowing that support is available when I need it. Test different companies before you sign up by sending them an email with a question or two. If they respond quickly, this is a good sign.

Uptime – The more uptime they guarantee the better. 99% uptime is the minimum acceptable standard. I look for 97%-99% guaranteed uptime.

Disk Space – Decide how much disk space you will require. A web page with one logo does not take up much web space at all. Calculate how big your web site is in relation to the disk space allotted.

Bandwidth – This factor is usually overlooked until the bandwidth limit is reached. If you go over your allotted bandwidth, you will get a hefty bill. If you are running a site with lots of downloads, or a site with lots of images such at a photo post site, your bandwidth will be a lot higher than a site with mainly text.

CGI Bin – This is now standard with good hosting companies. If you do not have access to your own CGI Bin, you cannot install scripts and programs.

Perl – If you do not have Perl, you cannot run Perl Programs. Many good scripts that you buy or get for free are written in Perl. In my opinion, it would be a limitation not to have the latest version of Perl installed.

SSL – If you intend to accept credit cards orders directly from your website, you will need Secure Socket Layer included in your plan. This is one of those easily overlooked features. You might sign up for a plan that looks attractive for whatever reason, then down the track, you might discover that you need this feature. If it is not included in your plan, you might be gob-smacked if the extra monthly charge is $10.00. To use this feature you need a merchant account. There is no need to make this a priority if you have no merchant account because you can use a third party credit card processor.

SSI – Server Side Includes are great if you want to spend minimal time updating your site. Here’s how it works. This page contains SSI’s. The left and right nav menus and the little search engine in the left nav menu are “included” with an SSI command in the master page template. If I need to update one of the nav links, there is no need to edit all the pages that contain the menus. I just edit the one page which contains the menu HTML and upload it to my site. It’s awesome.

MySQL – What scripts are you going to run? Some programs require a MySQL database to run. I had this problem with a particular webhost. They wanted to charge me $10.00 per month for a MySQL database. WOW. I just took out a new plan with another hosting company for under 10 bucks a month and 5 MySQL Databases are included in the price. Say no more.

PHP – Many new scripts and programs require PHP support. Again, this feature can be a $10 extra but most good hosts offer it standard. Imagine if you do not have PHP support but the latest new FREE top list, blogging script or shopping cart requires PHP. Again, this feature is almost standard these days.

Domain Name – What’s the point in buying web space if you cannot point your own domain name to the site? Some companies will help you register a domain name but you should compare prices and learn how to register your domain yourself. This way you are in control of your domain name if you ever change hosts.

FTP Access – Unlimited and unrestricted FTP access to your site is essential. You will need an FTP program to transfer files.

Control Panel – Not all control panels are the same. Some are easier to use than others. Some control panels the learning curve is steep while others are easy. If you select a plan where you cannot preview your control panel before you buy, you can always use the 30 day money back guarantee to get out if you are not happy. If they are not offering a working demo of the control panel, maybe they are not proud of it. In my experience, I have always been disappointed with the quality of the control panel when a demo was not available.

Statistics Program – A good stats program is handy if you want to keep an eye on how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from, referrers, top entry and exit pages and so on. Some companies offer excellent stats programs as standard while others offer basic stats but you have to pay extra for advanced statistics. If you find a good hosting deal but the stats program is a bit basic, why not email the company and ask if they can install AWStats before you sign up. AWStats is an excellent FREE advanced statistics program.

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