Posts filed under 'Hosting'
Free Hosting
Ten years ago your options for free web hosting were pretty clear cut; there were a few major companies that ran the market and you simply chose between them. Their options and conditions were also pretty clear cut: each one had ads that displayed on your web site, each one severely limited your allocated web space, and each one controlled the content that you were allowed to display on it.
Now, in 2007, the market is much different. Most free web hosting companies still require you to place their ads on your website, though now the ads are far less intrusive and take up much less space. Free hosting companies are now offering much more space (I’ve seen free hosts offering in excess of 100 megabytes of storage) and are giving their users more control over what can be displayed and how it can be accomplished (website, forum, blog, etc.)
There are even companies that will give you free domain names in exchange for advertising space.
Almost all free web space providers also limit your monthly bandwidth (the amount of data that your site can send or receive). If your website becomes popular you may see it taken offline when it exceeds it’s daily or monthly bandwidth allocation. This can be, at the least, incredibly annoying; at the worst it could cost you or your business money (from lost profits are lost sales).
Paid Hosting
Free hosting will always be the same animal: free web space and a sub domain, but you must place their advertisements on your website (and receive none of the profits). For many users it doesn’t really matter. However, if you are trying to create a website for business, profit, or professional use you do not want someone else’s ads on your site, period.
Advertising on the internet has become a big business. In fact, billions of dollars are spent each year on internet marketing. If you have a website that’s hosted by a free provider chances are good that you’ve given them their fair share of that billion dollar pie. Having your own hosting leaves you open to choose what you want to do regarding advertising or monetization.
Essentially, your website can make you money much easier than a site that’s hosted for free can. This is primarily because all of the ads that may appear on your website will be because you chose to put them there. If your website becomes popular this could become a big income- why give that to someone else?
Paid hosting has come down in price quite dramatically. You can now find hosting for $3 a month Host Gator and domain names as low as $8.88. The number of features that that you receive for such a low price are also on the rise.
A few years ago $3 a month might have gotten you 100 megabytes of storage and a few e-mail addresses. Today $3 gets you 500 megabytes or more of storage, hundreds of e-mail addresses, multiple FTP accounts, mySQL databases, and so much more.
Many hosting companies will give you a domain name for free when you purchase a hosting plan through them. This is a low-cost way to create a professional and branded website.
So, which is best?
Well, they’re both good. In fact, as time goes on, they’re only going to get better. However, if you want to have any level of professionalism you are going to want to allocate a few dollars every month to professional and reliable web hosting- the number of benefits are simply too numerous to pass up.
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April 4th, 2007
In the Philippines, cheap and affordable are interchangeable in the web hosting market. plogHost tries to seperate each one from the other.
Cheap hosting means that you get more for less and thus gives the impression that clients get a huge bargain for cheap web hosting. This is usually measured in peso-per-megabyte in the resource allocation for disk space and bandwidth.
On the other hand, affordable hosting is a little different in our definition. Affordable reflects the ability of the consumer to be able to acquire such a prodyct or service, whether or not it is cheap.
Case in point, fully managed dedicated servers nowadays are cheap and could be had for around Php8,000 in the Philippine web hosting market. However, not every person who wants to get a web host can “afford” such cheap servers.
Thus, a more affordable alternative is to go for shared hosting. It may not be cheap, but most people can afford it.
May 23rd, 2006
We’ve been getting a couple of inquiries about Ruby on Rails hosting support. In as much as we wanted to, we are still constrained withe the technical knowledge that our support team has in order to properly assist clients on RoR.
We’re still studying things and we’re looking forward to be able to provide hosting for Ruby on Rails in the near future. Stay tuned.
May 6th, 2006
When choosing the right package for your needs, you will have to compute for your monthly bandwidth requirements by checking what kind of files you are going to serve in your site and the estimated number of people going to access it.
For example, if you are serving a podcast with 5MB of mp3 twice a week, then that’s 5MB x 2/week x 4weeks/month for a total of 40MB per visitor downloads. Say you have 30 subscribers and they all download your podcasts for the month so your total consumption would be 1,200MB for the whole month.
Also take into consideration your pageviews and other image files you may also have on your site or blog.
December 29th, 2005
NameSearchDomain explains about expiring domain names:
It is annoying to find that you have a great idea for a site but when you start searching for a domain name to match you find every possible combination has been registered. Don’t worry all is not lost there are still the expired domains to check.
Not everybody reregisters their domain names. For whatever reason, financial or otherwise good domain names come back onto the market. These are expired domains and you can get your hands on them.
Full entry here.
July 4th, 2005
According to Joel Mangilit, IT and Web Design professor at the Graduate School of Business of De La Salle University, there are five attributes he condsiders in choosing a Web Host.
- Easy to Use. This refers to the user-friendliness of the control panel. Learning FTP should not be a requirement.
- Speed. Mangilit prefers fast connections where web pages loads fast.
- Reliability. Hight uptimes is a must.
- Tracking. There should be available site statistics.
- Value. This is about price to performance ratio.
The Hosting Chart adheres to the following similar criteria in reviewing web hosts (aside from “General Impressions” which is arbitrary to The Hosting Chart):
- Price Cost and Effectiveness. Again, this is about price to performance and quality ratio.
- Reliability. This regards server uptimes.
- Data Center. The Hosting Chart also looks into a Web Host’s data center.
- Connectivity. Topologies, network providers, network redundancy, are also considered.
- Customer Service. This looks into tech support and the availability of support.
- Control Panel. The control panel must be user-friendly, fast, reliable, easy to operate, and packed with features.
June 2nd, 2005
Whenever we hit a snag or someone claims that something is wrong with their website, one of the first places I visit to check on the problem is DNSReport.com. It’s basically a simple online tool to check if your domain or site is working or not. In short, it will tell you if there is really something wrong with your domain or your hosting. Just type in your domain name and hit the submit button. It will show you a list of information and theDNS analysis (which is either Passed, Warn or Failed). It should give you an almost perfect “Passed” result just like this. If you get a red “Failed” result on at least one, then it’s time to get some support.
Likewise, a more comprehensive one is DNSStuff.com. It has dozens of usefull tools one can use, with the more frequently ones ranging from the WHOIS LookUp, Tracert and Ping to check if your site is accessible from other parts of the world.
Half the time, the cause of problem is just local — slow connections, ISP issues, corporate/school LAN restrictions, firewalls (like ZoneAlarm), and browser problems. With these tools, you can quickly get a second opinion.
June 2nd, 2005
