Server: Dedicated or Virtual?
Green Hosting Makes a Difference
Recently I came across a mention of green hosting - a concept that is becoming more and more popular as more people become concerned with environmental issues. The key idea in green hosting is in reducing the negative impact on the environment.
One such host I am aware of is ThinkHost. Their commitment to being green is expressed through their usage of renewable energy only - the energy of the wind and solar energy. Also, for each new customer that opens a hosting account with this host, a tree is planted! What a great way to become Earth friendly by just geting a hosting plan!
OK this is all great but since we’re talking about a web host, let’s see what features are offered with the plan:
- 100 Gb of server space
- 1000 Gb of bandwidth!
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- You can host unlimited domains
- FTP access
- Secure Telnet (SSH) access
- Unlimited POP3 e-mail accounts
- PHP 5 + Perl 5
- FreeBSD Unix/Linux Apache server
- mod_rewrite and other modules
- Ruby on Rails support
- FastCGI support
- Python support
- Full .htaccess capabilities
- and much more, all of this for only $7.95 per month and, what even more surprising, with a 120-day money back guarantee! I don’t remember when I have last seen a host offering more than 30-day moneyback guarantee so this sounds like they are really confident about their hosting’s quality!
Do you know of many non-”green” hosts who can match all of the above? Add to this the ability to automatically install all kinds of popular CMS and other scripts like Joomla, WordPress, ecommerse applications, and so on… Are you persuaded yet? - If so go get it, and while at it request a coupon for a discount they currently offer and get your hosting account for even less money - and remember a tree will be planted for you as well!
IPOWER Announces Integration with Google Webmaster Tools
iPower has just announced that it has integrated Google Webmaster Tools into all the hosting plans it offers as a free feature.
Google Webmaster Tools helps site owners inform Google about all the pages of a site as well as newly added pages and site updates through submitting a Google sitemap. It also provides information on possible crawling and indexing problems as well as what keywords are used by the site visitors in Google search and more useful features to improve a site’s visibility in Google. By including Google Webmaster Tools into its hosting plans, iPower helps less experienced site owners benefit from it and ensure their sites’ relationship with Google is smooth.
iPower offers a choice of hosting plans ranging from a starter plan and other shared hosting plans to virtual private servers and dedicated servers. Their current spring promotion is the Pro plan offered for $4.95 per month including one free domain name, 1,500 GB of web space and an option to host unlimited domains.
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Finding a Host for a Blog
While there are plenty of sites offering free blogs, from Blogger.com to minor WordPress MultiUser powered providers, you cannot consider yourself a serious blogger unless you own your blog’s domain name and host it on your own host. It gives you much more control over what you can do with your blog and how you can make it look. It helps you get rid of the ads those free blog hosts are often likely to force upon your blog. It gives your blog personality, after all.
So you decided to get a web host for your blog - how should you go about choosing one? Among other things, it depends on the blog platform of your preference. As an example, let’s take WordPress. It’s my favourite platform and it’ sone of the most popular blog platforms today. According to WordPress.org (WordPress’s official site), in 2007 alone there were 3,816,965 downloads of the software! And the search for “powered by wordpress” (a line most WordPress blogs have) in Google gives you over 30 million results. WordPress is easy to install, easy to use and can suit the needs of both beginners and experienced bloggers, regardless of their programming skills.
Hosts suitable for installing a WordPress blog should have PHP and MySQL as this is what WordPress uses. A vast majority of Unix-based hosts will have them available. All you have to do is upload WordPress to your host through FTP and follow the installation instructions which are pretty simple. Before installing you will have to create a database - a process that depends on your host but on most hosts, it is pretty easy to do through the hosting control panel.
It can actually get even easier than that. If you get a host that has cPanel as a control panel, often it comes with Fantastico - a script autoinstaller for cPanel. With Fantastico, installing WordPress is literally a single click operation - but again, you will most likely have to create a database before you install it. Which is very easy with cPanel.
To give you just a few examples of such hosts with Fantastico, let me name ANHosting (shared hosting), FastServers (dedicated servers hosting) and HostGator (a range of services from shared low-budget hosting through reseller hosting to dedicated servers).
If you have had any experience hosting blogs with any other hosts and would like to share it, feel free to drop me a line.
Check Whois through Google
Through iPowerWeb blog: it is now possible to get a domain’s whois information directly through Google.
All you have to do is search Google for “Whois domain.com” - and let Google do the rest. Google uses Domain Tools for the Whois information and if you click on the Whois search result link, you will be sent to the Domain Tools web site.
Actually, the only bit Google will display as a result of such is the date of domain registration and the date the domain expires, e.g. the search for HostingDaily.net Whois - but it is still handy.
Knowing that Google is a registrar itself, I was actually expecting to see it display the WHOIS data directly - but considering that Domaintools is a well known and trusted service by now, providing a lot of additional information and tools for domain research, kudos to Google for using it.
UPDATE: In the meantime, Domaintools blog reports an infrastructure update over at Domaintools - very timely, considering the traffic increase this Google service can potentially bring them.
Great Spring Hosting Offer from iPower
iPower just announced that they are offering their Pro Plan for only $4.95/month. This is the best offer we’ve heard of so far, considering the features they offer:
- 1 free domain name with each account
- host unlimited domains per account
- 1,500 GB of web space
- 15,000 GB of bandwidth
- the server supports CGI scripts, PHP 4 and 5, PERL scripts, server side includes
- 25 MySQL databases
and much more. This host offers great 24/7 support and a 30-day moneyback guarantee.
Purchase the Pro hosting plan for at least a year and benefit from this low price while the offer lasts!
What to Look for in a Web Host
When choosing a web host to host your web site, you need to realize that there are different options available at different price levels and it all boils down to your actual needs.
Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself when choosing your hosting:
- Do you intend to host one domain or multiple domains?
Some hosting plans are limited to one domain only while others let you host 5, 10 or even unlimited domains. - What country is your site’s target audience?
E.g. if you target the UK you will have better chances ranking in local search results if you host your site on a UK based server - be sure to check with the hosting provider where their servers are located. - What technologies do you intend to use on your site?
If you intend to build a database driven site make sure the host offers an option to create a database. If your site will be built using ASP you need to go with a Windows server. If you need to use secure transactions make sure your host provides a security certificate, and so on. - How large is your site going to be?
How much space does your host give you with your hosting account? - How much traffic will your site get?
This might not be an issue for most personal or small business sites, but you never know. Ever heard of the “Digg effect”? - If your site gets digged, will your bandwidth be enough to handle all that traffic you get? Or will you end up paying enormous extra fees for the bandwidth use over your plan’s quota? - How many email accounts are you allowed to have?
This is especially important for businesses as you wil probably want to have email accounts for all your personnel. - Shared, reseller or dedicated server?
For most small sites and newbie webmasters, a shared hosting account is perfectly enough. However, if you intend to host multiple sites and have more control over your hosting, you might want to opt for a reseller account. Dedicated servers and virtual private servers are good for more experienced webmasters who are familiar with administrating Unix servers and need to host multiple sites with heavy traffic.
Other things to pay attention to are, evidently, a host’s uptime, the control panel interface (CPanel or Plesk? or some custom solution? - what are you most confortable with?), options for file management, what kind of statistics you will get and of course pricing. It might also be a good idea to see if the host has a moneyback guarantee in case you buy it and then find out some features you needed are missing.
Make sure to compare several hosting options with similar features before buying and best of luck with you new hosting!
