Web Hosting and Why Service Is King

Web Hosting and Why Service Is King

If you are an Internet business owner, you definitely have a website. Where you choose to maintain that site makes a big difference. You can’t afford to trust your Internet business to just any web hosting company. You need a web hosting company that understands that service is all they really have to offer.

Technical Matters

No one can dispute the fact that server speed and reliability, upgraded hardware and software and web hosting features are all important. After all, these are the features that will determine how fast your Internet business will be able to grow and expand. You don’t want to have to change web hosting companies in the middle of the game. Ideally, you want to stay with the same web hosting company for as long as you own your business. It just makes life easier.

Time Is Money

One important aspect of web hosting that people frequently overlook is the service. Yes, price matters, but service matters even more. Low prices won’t mean a thing if your website is down. If your site goes down, you lose sales – it is as simple as that. Also, when you have an Internet business, time is money. You don’t want to waste time waiting for the web host to provide you with that much-needed support. Every minute, hour or day that you have to wait for answers is another day that you could have spent doing what matters most – providing service to your customers and increasing your bottom line.

Why Service Counts More

These days, it is hard to find a web hosting company that focuses almost entirely on customer service. Yet, if you are able to find one of them, you will have hit the jackpot! A web hosting company that specializes in customer service is very valuable to you. Why? Because their aim is to keep you happy as a customer. This means that they will answer your calls promptly and provide you with the very best service. Additionally, because their focus is on you, the customer, this means that they want your business to succeed as well. It is in their best interest to make sure that they are providing you with the tools that you need for your business to be successful. Instead of trying to sell you a cookie-cutter web hosting package that has been sold to hundreds, perhaps thousands of businesses, they will listen to your needs and be able to customize a web hosting package especially designed for your business. In addition, they will:

* Provide customer support 24/7
* Give you real-time access to their server status
* Give you a money-back guarantee
* Assist you with moving your website from another web hosting company
* Have a toll-free customer support phone number
* Consult with you on customized solutions for your busines

Your Internet business is your livelihood – don’t leave it to chance. Your choice of web hosting company can make the difference between the success and failure of your business. By choosing a web hosting company that focuses on service, you can make the right decision and give your business a fighting chance!

7 Simple Steps For Choosing A Great Web Host

There are thousands of web hosts around today with thousands of plans to choose from making what was once a simple procedure seem like a daunting task for both newbie and pro alike.

Whether you're looking for your first host or looking to move on to a better one there are 7 simple steps you must follow to succeed in choosing a great host.

1. Platform
The first and most crucial step in choosing a web host is determining the platform the web server should run, usually a choice between Unix/Linux and Windows.

Your choice is largely determined by your website and the technologies used to create it, generally a website created with Microsoft technologies (ASP, VB) will run on Windows servers while most other sites using open source technologies (PHP, Perl, Python etc) will run on Linux based systems.

2. Features
Once you've chosen your platform the next step is determining the features you'll need from your web host. Take your time with this step as the feature lists of web hosts are getting longer and longer every day and while some plans may look similar on the surface, a good look at the feature lists may tell another story.

Only you can determine the specific features you'll need, but some key things to keep an eye on are:

Disk Space
Bandwidth
Backups
Uptime
Money Back Guarantee
Domains Allowed
Databases (Number & type)
CGI, PHP, Perl, Python, SSI
Cron
Email accounts

The list goes on and on, just remember to take your time and make sure your new web host is going to provide you with everything you need.

3. Cost
Often this is the only thing people consider when choosing their first web host, funds are usually tight and on the surface most hosts look very similar. Sometimes you get lucky and choose a good host, but more often than not it turns out to be a horror story.

I can't stress enough that choosing a web host based on price alone is asking for trouble, remember that the cost of your web hosting is more than just the monthly fee, think about the total cost of ownership. TCO includes lost sales due to downtime & slow speeds, downtime rebates, extra bandwidth charges, setup costs, extra feature costs, and your monthly fee.

Many hosts will require you to pay yearly to get the best price available though there are some that allow you to pay by the month and still get the best price, it's really a matter of personal choice as to what payment method works best for you.

4. Customer Service
Customer service is another aspect that is often forgotten about until it is too late, something breaks and you need it fixed and those wonderfully handy sales people who were more than helpful in taking your money are now nowhere to be seen, all the while you're losing out on sales every minute.

You shouldn't settle for anything less than 24/7/365 service, your website needs to be running all the time so it's no good if your hosting company doesn't work during the holidays. Don't take the web hosting companies word for it, they all claim 24/7 support but few back it up with consistent performance. Be sure to test them out at various times of the day and night via phone, email and live chat if they offer it.

5. Support
An extensive knowledge base or faq can be a real time saver as well as being an indication of the level of customer service support and expertise you can expect to receive. Spend some time browsing the support sections of the website and see for yourself the level of support provided.

Are questions in the knowledge base answered thoroughly? Are real solutions provided or are they just “cut and paste” replies?

6. Longevity
Do a whois on the web host's domain name and find out the creation date, anything less than a year ago and the risk that they won't be around next year increases. They could be a great host, but considering more then 95% of new hosts go out of business within a year that really isn't something you should be taking a chance on.

7. Uptime
It's a fact of life that a web host cannot be online 100% of the time, servers need to be rebooted for security and software updates and any web host that doesn't get updated faces the increased risk of being successfully hacked.

99.9% uptime guarantees are pretty standard in the industry however a guarantee is only as good as how it is defined and the company behind it. Look for no less than a full months free hosting should they not meet their guarantee, a prorated refund based on the amount of downtime is virtually worthless. Say you pay $10 for a month of hosting and your site is down for 24 hours. They will refund you for one day of downtime which ends up being about 33 cents.

There you go, 7 simple steps for choosing a great web host. It's not rocket science, just a little research and investigating that can save a lot of heartache in the future.

ASP Hosting Simplified

ASP stands for Active Server Pages. It is a technology that enables users to design and creative interactive pages for their websites, using something called “server-side scripting”. What do we mean by interactive? Forms, in-site search engines, blogs, user forums, newsletters, calendars, WhoIs searches, web-based email, polls, surveys, hit counters and more.

Best of all, with ASP, no longer do webmasters have to concern themselves with what browser a visitor to their site is using. With ASP hosting, your website will appear identically on all computers, on all browsers, a claim that HTML simply cannot make.

Anytime a browser requests a webpage that has the .asp extension where the more familiar .htm or .html would be, the hosting provider’s web server interprets any ASP scripts in the program first and foremost, before delivering any HTML info to the browser. This is why you cannot simply run ASP websites with just any hosting company. The hosting company you choose must have servers that support ASP, or else the ASP scripts you use will be rendered useless.

When examining web hosting companies to find one that supports ASP, you must look specifically for ASP support. Do not simply assume that because a hosting company supports “most web-based scripts, from CGI to Perl” that it supports ASP. If it doesn’t say so in an obvious place on the sales site, go to the hosting company’s FAQ and look for ASP. And since most FAQs are searchable, this shouldn’t be difficult to do. If you’re really enamored with a particular hosting company (or their current promotion) but can find no information on ASP support, consider contacting them via email, telephone, or web chat to find out. It’s possible that they do support ASP and just have a lousy sales site (which may be an indicator of an altogether different sort).

Microsoft brought ASP to the world, and as such provides the platform - Windows - on which ASP generally works best. In order to play around with ASP scripts on your web pages, you’ll have to download and install onto your system an ASP server, like Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) or Microsoft’s Personal Web Server (PWS) -- one or both of which is included with most Windows packages for no extra charge. If you use Windows on your machine and have never encountered IIS or PWS, chances are it’s because you have to “Add” the program to your hard drive using the Windows software CD-ROM or through your control panel, since it’s often not included as part of the “Basic Install”.

Incidentally, Windows ME and Windows XP Home Edition are lacking in support for ASP scripts. But we’re willing to bet the forthcoming Windows Vista probably does.

For those webmasters on a PC that isn’t Windows-based, all hope is not lost. Sun Microsystems has developed a program called Chili!Soft ASP that allows other servers -- such as Red Hat, Apache, and Secure Server -- and other operating systems -- such as Linux, Solaris, and AIX -- to support ASP hosting.

Writing and using ASP scripts is easy too -- at least it’s no harder than HTML, with all commands occurring between “<%” and “%>;” instead of “<” and “>”. Not so big a difference, is there? And you can find an abundance of software tools all over the web (many for free) that helps even the greenest novice create interactive web pages rife with ASP.

ASP is such a versatile language that more and more hosting companies are finding themselves compelled to add ASP support to their hosting packages just to remain competitive. This, of course, is only to your advantage as you can comparison shop around for the best ASP hosting offerings right alongside all the other features you’re looking for.