The Different Web Hosting Plan for Your Online Business

In the era of computerization where most of the work is dependent on computers, Web Hosting plays an important role to all business activities. It allows individuals and organizations to provide their own websites accessible through World Wide Web. Those that are relatively new to web hosting, they stagger confusion to the quest for a good web hosting plan. One of the major sources of this confusion may simply come down to what is what where web hosting plans are concerned.

We must learn the different types of Web Hosting that contributes its usefulness to all business sectors. These are shared web hosting, dedicated hosting and virtual dedicated hosting. They vary mostly in price and fill different needs as far as hosting plans are concerned.

Shared web hosting is used to refer to when a hosting company puts websites from many different users on one server. Every user is usually given some limit to the amount of resources their site is able to consume. It is basically a type wherein several to hundreds of websites are being hosted by a single physical web server. The issue of slower performance often arises in here. A reputable web host doesn’t easily add up web sites without considering their would-be effects to the entire system. Shared hosting is really cost effective.

Dedicated hosting is the most expensive web hosting among the three. It is considered as the reverse of shared hosting. Instead of sharing a server with other users you are in effect renting an entire server for yourself. Usually, all of the resources of the server are at your disposal. Many times hosting companies give you several options for the type of server you can rent and the operating system it runs. It is applicable either for bigger sites or for the webmaster who has 200 web sites and is tired of paying for 200 shared hosting accounts

Virtual dedicated hosting is a combination of a shared web hosting and a dedicated server. The software on server is able to break it down into multiple “virtual” servers. The effect is basically like having several servers on the same machine. You would be paying for one of these virtual servers. A virtual dedicated server lets you run your sites as if you had your own “dedicated” server, except it is cheaper because you are really just using part of a server that has been split into multiple virtual dedicated servers. Virtual servers allow you the flexibility of customizing your server settings as if you were renting a dedicated server but since you are actually sharing a server with other users you pay much less. Its price is usually a bit higher than shared web hosting.
There are several web hosting providers in the locality but only few can be trusted. Look for the providers that are high in quality, high in performance and high-availability. Other factors to be considered are cost-effective, scalable, and customizable to meet the evolving business and technical requirements of companies. Pick the best plan that’s right for you. There are thousands of sites offering quality information about web hosting that will help you to fill in any gaps in your knowledge and enable you to make the best possible decision.

About Author

DANIEL DALTON has been a writer for many years. His experience spans a large variety of major industries. . As a journalist , Daniel is well-known and is considered one of the top writers in the region. His work can be found from small newspapers to national publications. Daniel recently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.

Source: ArticleTrader.com

Host Color Adds 6 Months of Free Service and SSL to Shared Hosting Plans

Global web hosting provider Host Color has launched one month promotional campaign on web hosting services. The company said it adds complimentary 6 months of free hosting service to all customers who sign-up or renew Multi Domain or Business hosting plans.

Multi Domain enables site owners to host 30 different web sites and to use 30 GB disc space and 500 GB monthly transfer. Business plan comes with 2GB disc space and 50 GB data transfer per month.

“We are quality web hosting provider focused to deliver results to web entrepreneurs. This means that we power their web sites with useful software applications which help them to better organize and to implement various businesses processes”, says Alexander Avramov, Marketing Manager of Host Color LLC.

Company’s customers of Multi Domain and Business hosting plans can use “PowerTools”, a software applications package that works with Host Color’s proprietary hosting automation system - NexColor. It features 20 of the most popular and software applications in web hosting industry such as phpBB and Vanilla forums, Drupal, Joomla and TextPattern CMS, OpenAds ads server, Zen shopping cart, various blogging capabilities and etc.

The complimentary 6 additional months are applicable for all customers who sign up for 12 or 24 month contract. The web host also adds a free SSL certificate to all Multi Domain subscribers. Multi Domain hosting plan also comes with free US or Canadian domain and extended 90 days money back guaranty. It costs $9.49 per month. Business hosting plan comes with SSH, com, net or org domain registration and many other useful tools. It costs $6.95 per month. Host Color recently added Textpattern CMS, Wiki software and Social networking capabilities to shared hosting plans.

About Author

Host Color LLC (http://www.hostcolor.com) is a U.S. web hosting company incorporated in Delaware. It hosts thousands small business and personal websites in data center located in South Bend, Indiana. The company offers discounts to academics and non-governmental organizations. It also provides shared hosting services in Europe through Host Color Europe, and Managed Dedicated Servers through its division Host Color Servers (http://www.hostcolorservers.com).

Source: ArticleTrader.com

Working for the web hosting industry sometimes means you have to set the standards. From customer service, training, tutorials, billing practices, server uptime, security and more it can be a handful. When choosing a hosting company you want to know that your website is in the right hands. You want to know that there are people as passionate about your business as you are about your site.

When checking out a hosting company you should see what self help resources they have available. Video tutorials, faqs and common information is a great start. It is important that the information is maintained, updated and corrected as needed. A forum is a good solution for customers to help each other. Live chat has proved to be very successful for customers when implemented correctly. You should be able to get to these solutions through one central point.

I have helped update faqs and create midphasehelp.com as a solution to some of these issues. Customers should have one page they can bookmark that gives them access to almost anything they need when they are in trouble. I have used articlekb to create an intuitive site where customers and tech support can find answers and resources to help them with common issues. I have helped add almost 1000 articles and it grows as we get questions from staff and customers.

We have a link to our status blog that shows current server issues and resolutions. We have all the different ways to get help. Ask a question in our help center, use our 24/7 live chat system, submit a ticket, visit our user community at midphasetalk.com. Its all easily accessible without being overwhelming to the customer.

When looking at what other hosting companies were doing and how we could set ourselves apart I realized that their resources were located all over their websites, hidden on other pages, in drop menus and some didn’t even have an easy way to get to the information unless you had a direct link.

My challenge was to act as a customer and use that perspective to design a page that had simplicity and all the resources at hand. It has been a great success for us as more customers are using it everyday. I personally answer any question submitted within 24 hours even on the weekends. Our technical support uses this site as a bible to help their customers. We have a search feature and an article number box. While you are on the phone with a tech they can give you the article number and you can both be on the same page. When it comes to step by step procedures such as site setup, dns changes and redirects this helps the customers get the information they need quickly and helps them get back to their passion which is designing and running their web sites.

Lunarpages client’s 404 error pages issue.

If you are hosted at Lunarpages, you should be aware that Lunarpages is poaching traffic away from your site. Lunarpages has added new 404 file not found pages. The domain name of the account holder is displayed right above a search box that advises it will search this site, but returns sponsored ad results. Below is a listing of the favorites of the domain name that also returns a bunch of advertising. These error pages use the domain name repeatedly, but do not offer any link to get back to the domain. So Lunarpages is hijacking domain names away from their customers and associating questionable links with customer domain names.

 You can still create custom error pages to keep Lunarpages from hijacking your traffic away from a site, but that is of little comfort if you are unaware of the new Lunarpages practice. They have hidden the forum discussion on this practice in a board that is not available to new member or guests. They are also now removing any posts that complain about Lunarpages poaching traffic away from customer sites.

 This might be considered acceptable if Lunarpages support had not become a total waste of time. They have removed the toll free numbers to call support, removed the dedicated hosting chat, and now are using canned messages and delaying tactics on all support tickets. If you have even a minor problem, you can expect two or 3 days of fighting with support just to get them to investigate.

 How can a webhost go downhill so fast? 1 year ago, LP was an excellent host with great support and now they are resorting to cheap tricks and deceptive advertising.

Limiting what search engines can index using /robots.txt

Various search engines such as Google have what are called “spiders” or “robots” continually crawling the web indexing content for inclusion in their search engine databases. While most users view inclusion in search engine listings in a positive light and high search engine rankings can translate to big bucks for commercial sites not everyone wants every single page and file stored on their account publicly available through web searches.

This is where /robots.txt comes in. Most search engine robots will comply with a webmaster/site owners wishes as far as excluding content by following a robots inclusion standard which is implemented via the use of a small ASCII text file named /robots.txt in the root web accessable directory of a given domain.

When a compliant robot visits a given site the first thing it does is to check the top level directory for the presence of a file named “robots.txt”. If found the directives within the file which tells the robot what if any content it can or cannot visit and index is read, and in most cases honored.

Creating /robots.txt files

To create a /robots.txt file simply open a plain text editor such as Windows NotePad, type or paste your directives and save the file using the file name “robots” (robots.txt). This file should then be uploaded to the /public_html directory such that it’s URL will be http://domain.com/robots.txt

/robots.txt syntax

All valid /robots.txt files must contain at least two lines in the following format:

User-Agent: [robot name or * for all robots]
Disallow: [name of file or directory you do not want indexed]

Unless one wishes to implement different rules for specific robots the user agent line should just include an asterisk [*] which is a wildcard read as “rules apply to all robots”.

Disallow lines can be used to specify specific files or folders one doesn’t wish to have indexed by search engines. Each file or folder to be excluded must be listed separately on it’s own line, and wildcards are not supported in Disallow directives. One can have as many or as few disallow lines as is necessary.

Example /robots.txt files

- A simple /robots.txt file which would allow all robots to access and index all content with the exception of the contents of a directory named “private” would be as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

- A /robots.txt file which would exclude all robots from indexing the content of “cgi-bin”, “admin” and “stuff” directories plus a page named “private.html” would be:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /stuff/
Disallow: /private.html

- A /robots.txt file which would allow all robots to access and index all content on a given site would be:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

- A /robots.txt file which would forbid all robots from accessing and indexing any content would be:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

- A robots.txt file which would allow Google’s spider (aka GoogleBot) to index all content with the exception of files stored under a folder named “private” and which would exclude all other robots from indexing any content would read as follows:

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: /private/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

- A robots.txt file which would allow all robots with the exception of HotBot’s (aka Inktomi Slurp) to index all content with the exception of files stored under folders named “images” and “cgi-bin” and which would exclude the HotBot spider from indexing any content would read as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

User-agent: Inktomi Slurp
Disallow: /

More Information

For more details on /robots.txt and the Robots Exclusion Standard visit
The Web Robots Pages at http://www.robotstxt.org

Many recently updated many shared hosting servers haved moved from php4 to php 5 with phpSuExec enabled. This update was essential for security and allows our customers to take advantages of all the new features of php 5. While the vast majority of our customers are not affected by this update, you may find that some features no longer work on our shared servers. Most notably, users are not able to have php flags in their .htaccess file.

Having php flags in .htaccess files is a common cause of internal server errors on servers with phpSuExec enabled. One way around this is to create a custom php.ini file with the php values you need. You need to place this in every directory that needs to use this as the custom php configuration values you set in your php.ini are not recursive. This file should have the following permissions: 644 permissions with the owner cpanelusername:cpanelusername

Lets assume your cpanel username is bobbob1.
You php.ini file should look like this in your file manager or ftp client:
-rw-r–r– 1 bobbob1 bobbob1 21 Nov 20 18:57 php.ini
Now that you have created your php.ini file you can populate with the php configuration values you need to override on the server.

The syntax generally follows this format: phpconfigValueToOverride = value The most common php value you need to set for many of the scripts that we offer via fantastico is register_globals. To enable register_globals you simply place this in your php.ini file: register_globals = On Conversely, you can turn off register globals: register_globals = Off

Other common configuration changes include: upload_tmp_dir, display_errors, session.save_path.
Note: we do not allow our shared hosting customers to change their memory_limit to anything past 32M to protect the quality of service for our shared hosting environment. If you require more then 32M then please contact our support department at support@midphase.com.
You can check your current php settings by using the phpinfo() function. Simply place phpinfo(); in a new file with a .php extension. Again, it is important to note that any changes you make in the php.ini are not recursive meaning they do not carry over to other directories in your account.
You must have a php.ini in every directory needing your custom php.ini.

We restrict outgoing port access as a result of the shared hosting environment. In this environment every account on a server shares a single IP address. As a result some outgoing ports are blocked because no single account is assigned the IP address for the box. Purchasing a dedicated IP address allows your account to have the ability to use a SSL certificate.

We require that you pay for the dedicated IP address because we have to purchase the IP addresses from our provider. Leasing the IP addresses is done in large batches to minimize costs. This price is included in the SSL pack pricing which includes an SSL and static ip.

VPS and Dedicated plans comes with full root access via SSH, shared hosting offers ssh on  a case by case basis.

• A good windows application for SSH is called PuTTY
• Mac OSX comes with a built in SSH client using Terminal.

The login credentials for accessing your site via SSH are the same as your cPanel login.

Point System Spam
Spam works on a Point System, for instance a person sends out 5,000 emails with the same subject, and content this email would receive a high Spam Point by whatever spam blocking agent is located on the mail server. If the same guy sends out one message at a time changing each message in a different way than these emails would be assigned a low Spam Point and most likely get through. Now if this message was sent to multiple accounts on the same mail server it would generate a higher Spam Point and most likely be blocked as Spam.

Spam Filter Program Example
Here is how a typical Spam filter program works:
It scans every email and assigns some grade to it. An email can get from 0 to 10 points. Emails assigned 0 - 3.5 points are being delivered to your mailboxes without any changes, they are not spam.
Emails got up to 6 points are marked as [SPAM] and being delivered into your mailbox as well. Emails got up to 7 points are moved to a quarantine mailbox and it sends a notification to you with a link to the blocked message. And emails got more than 7 points are definitely spam and they are deleted
automatically. 7 points is a very high value, we tested the system on many thousands emails
and it didn’t delete any non-spam message.

Spamalizer Example
With spamalizer added to your account all emails go through our Barracuda Spam Firewall first. Then the messages go through the standard spam filter that is on the server. The Barracuda Spam Firewall protects your email server with twelve defense layers, these layers are defined for you at http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/downloads/Barracuda_WP_Email.pdf

• Network Denial of Service Protection
• Rate Control
• IP Reputation Analysis
• Sender Authentication
• Recipient Verification
• Virus Scanning
• Policy
• Spam Fingerprint Check
• Intent Analysis
• Image Analysis
• Bayesian Analysis
• Rule-based Scoring

Spamalizer scans every email and assigns some grade to it.
Emails that get up to 6 points are rejected by spamalizer.
Emails that are identified by third parties as being black listed are rejected, emails that are relayed or “spoofed” may also be rejected.

The spamalizer service can be added to your hosting account at http://www.midphase.com/special_offers/upgrades.html

One of the biggest concerns when owning a website is security. One of the ways you can leave yourself open to being hacked or having your information stolen is when you do not update your scripts. Third party scripts that range from shopping carts, to blogs, forums and membership web sites are updated on a regular basis. Most open source software is updated by the community or by the developers as new issues and technologies arise. Most major updates include enhancements as well as addressing security issues.

There are people out there waiting for the newest exploit so that they can scan the internet for sites that have not applied the recommended updates. Some hackers write spiders to crawl the internet looking for sites in which to install their malicious code. Some will upload their own web page with an offer to fix the issue for a fee.

These exploits can allow unauthorized users to do anything from sending spam from an email box on your account, to injecting mysql code into your database, improper file permissions would even let them  corrupt, delete, modify, redirect or replace your website entirely.

Most third party scripts have their own support forum and website. Some software will even let you know through email or when you log into your account that there are updates. They will usually tell you how important the update is and the reason for the update. I suggest creating a backup of your data and files before applying updates. Most updates are easy to install and require you to download or upload to your website and install the updated content to overwrite your current content. This will sometimes break customizations to the script you have previously applied. Make sure to test your site and features right after you are done. I know a blog site that was wondering why it had no new users only to find that their custom registration page was broken after the last update.

I always keep a handy list of my account features. For example mysql version, php version on the server, and other settings such as php.ini changes I have made. Some updates are updates because of changes in technology. Make sure the requirements for the update are ones you already have for hosting account. If you are on a shared hosting account you can check your hosting control panel or contact your hosting company to have your account moved to a newer server if your account does not have these requirements.