6 Main Things Discussed In Most Web Hosting Reviews

Most consumers use the Internet to locate information about products or services they would like to purchase. This includes site owners, web masters, and developers interested in learning more about hosting plans. One of the best ways of learning about reliable hosts is by reading reputable and unbiased hosting reviews. Here are six main things discussed in most web hosting reviews:

Hosting Plans

Although most hosting companies focus on providing hosting and domain registration services, some companies offer extras such as SEO. With this in mind, make sure a hosting review has a section covering the packages/plans on offer. This is important because it makes it easier for one to have a good grasp of what is on offer at a glance.

Cost

For many web consumers, cost can make or break a deal. As such, most hosting reviews touch on the prices of the available plans. Such plans could be from either a single host or multiple hosts. In fact, a review with a price comparison chart/table makes it easier for consumers to choose see what is on offer as well as choose plans they can afford. If it also contains information on price discounts, the better.

Tech Support

Web hosting reviews written by knowledgeable authors should cover technical support in detail. Consumers have a right to know if a hosting company has a technical support team in place or not. Technical expertise comes in handy when a hosting company’s clients need help on issues such as downtimes, data breaches, upgrading hosting plans, or purchasing domain names. If a company does not have experts who can competently resolve such issues, it shows that it is likely to provide sub-standard services.

Customer Relations

Before proceeding further, it is important to note that customer relations and tech support are quite different. The former essentially focuses on how a company handles/responds to communications to and from its clients. Web hosting reviews should contain information on ease of getting in touch with customer relations personnel. For instance, the availability of communication channels such as email, phone, instant web chat, and accounts on social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

Service Reliability

One of the key pillars in the web hosting industry is reliability. If a site suffers regular downtimes, visitors are likely to head elsewhere. For this reason, it is necessary for a hosting review to touch on this facet as well. The gold standard on this front across the hosting industry is minimum uptime of 99.9 percent. Look for a review that compares reliability standards across various companies. Furthermore, it should have information on server speed because it determines how fast webpages load.

Features

A web hosting review would not be complete without a paragraph or subtitle dedicated to features. Savvy consumers scrutinize available features carefully to determine if hosts suit their hosting needs. For example, a host who does not offer dedicated IP addresses (necessary for SSL) is not the right choice for an ecommerce entrepreneur. Other important features that should be in such a review include programming technologies, control panel functionality, operating system, and data security systems.

Summary

A brief summary at the end is a great way of reminding readers about the information they have been going through. However, some reviews have summaries while others do not. It all depends on writing style of writer.

Web hosting reviews play a big role in informing consumers about services offered by various industry players. They should contain information on product prices, available products, technical support, customer relations, service reliability, features, and a brief summary. Armed with this information, a consumer can make an informed decision.

Web Hosting Hub: A Refreshing Take on a Crowded Space

The public’s addiction to the Internet has made it necessary for businesses to cultivate their own online presence. From small mom-and-pop stores to large corporations, everyone needs their own website in order to stay relevant. Creating a webhost account is the first step toward this goal. Not surprisingly, the webhosting industry has experienced incredible growth in the past decade.

Now there are so many of them offering nearly the same things that it is difficult to tell them apart. Fortunately, a few companies are making an effort to go the extra mile. Web Hosting Hub (Hub) is one such provider. It aims to make a good impression with its distinctive brand of service. Hub’s offerings are distinguished by green webhosting, excellent customer support initiatives, a generous money-back guarantee, and affordable hosting packages.

Green Webhosting

Servers are under tremendous pressure to perform. Websites are expected to be available at any time of day so these servers need to work around the clock. This means that they draw power on a 24/7 basis. Large operations require massive stacks of servers that need a great deal of energy to run continuously. They also generate a lot of heat which needs to be counteracted through air conditioning which adds to the energy requirements of the data center. Hub has made it a mission to use green technologies in their Los Angeles data center to reduce power consumption and minimize environmental impact.

Excellent Customer Support

Every minute of downtime translates to revenues lost. When websites go down, owners are understandably anxious to know what is going on and how long it will take to get things back up. The problem is that most webhosts are unresponsive to inquiries and calls for help. Hub has made customer support a priority and makes this felt from Day 1. New clients get a call from a technical support representative for what they call the “on-boarding process”. The representative will provide a walkthrough of the account and answer all pertinent questions for a faster setup. Further inquiries can be made via phone, email and chat.

Generous Money-back Guarantee

It’s difficult to decide on which service to pick when there are a number of good options to choose from. However, this can’t delay the process too long as competitors are gearing to launch their sites as well, if they haven’t yet already. Hub‘s 90-day money-back guarantee makes the decision easier to make as it eliminates the risk involved in committing to a contract and paying for the cost of the service. Ninety days is more than enough to explore the various features and test the performance of the platform. If the service is satisfactory, then the contract can stand. If not, then there is a no-questions-asked policy for full refunds.

Affordable Hosting Packages

Web Hosting Hub has three levels of hosting available called the Spark, Nitro and Dynamo. The Spark contains the essentials and is meant to be a starter plan. Account holders can build two websites, create 10 MySQL databases, park 5 domains, make 25 sub-domains, and get $50 in ad credits all for $4.99/month. The Nitro provides a huge step up with unlimited websites, databases, parked domains and sub-domains with $100 of ad credits for $6.99/month. The Dynamo improves upon the former with $200 in ad credits and greater resource allotment to boost performance at $8.99/month.

Environmental consciousness, superior customer assistance, minimal risk, and reasonable prices make Web Hosting Hub a company that is worth look at. Whether it succeeds in its attempt to create a compelling set of offerings is for each person to decide.

Learn to Install WordPress on Web Hosting Hub

What You Should Know About HostGator When Searching For a Web Host

Whether you want complete control over your entire hosting configuration or simply want to save money by securing a high-value and fairly comprehensive, shared hosting plan, HostGator may be the right provider for you. This is by far, one of the best-known companies out there. It is also among the cheapest. Following are several things that you should know about this provider when shopping around for a hosting service.

Even The Starter Plans Are Fairly Impressive

HostGator offers VPS hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated hosting and shared hosting plans. The Hatchling plan is the company’s most basic and low-thrills, shared hosting offer. Surprisingly, it comes with nearly everything that most small business owners and bloggers need to get started. Those who sign up for this service can enjoy unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, a single domain and a shared SSL certificate. With a good promo code, the already low cost of this service will drop even lower. Best of all, subscribers will only experience a slight bump in prices after their first year of service has passed.

Guaranteed Uptime

Like most other hosting services, HostGator promises 99.9% uptime. This means that over the course of an entire year, subscribers will experience just 8 hours of downtime or less. For those who have tried other companies that have made this same promise, this provider appears to live up to its offer. In fact, most HostGator reviews assert that this company is both low in cost and reliable.

Excellent Customer Service

There are certainly other features that make HostGator a standout contender in the hosting industry. This can be seen in the fact that they offer continuous customer support. No matter what time of day or night problems occur, subscribers can count on reaching a live company representative if this level of support is required. This in turn helps to minimize the amount of downtime that is experienced by ensuring a swift resolution to problems.

Avoid Manual Transfers

It is not necessary to transfer your website manually when switching to HostGator. This is very helpful for those who already have existing sites and simply aren’t happy with their current hosting services. This company will transfer your entire site for you through a reliable process known as QuickInstall. Within a couple of hours of your initial sign-up, their tech team will have your site transferred over and ready to use. This saves site owners countless hours of frustration.

Powered By Clean Energy

If you are concerned about the environment and want to minimize your carbon footprint in every way possible, you will be happy to know that this company runs its data center on energy derived from natural and sustainable sources. This is not the case with other big-name hosting companies. HostGator uses energy from massive wind farms in Texas, as opposed to relying on large and outdated coal plants.

The Drawbacks

There are, however, a few drawbacks of using these services. Although this company has a number of accessible and very helpful tutorials, the dashboard and other features are often considered less intuitive than those of its competitors. Thus, it may take a bit of technical know-how in order to get optimal value from the available plans, particularly its shared hosting packages.

In spite of the massive amount of support that this company provides concerning its hosting packages, another drawback in working with this company is having a limited amount of support when it comes to prevention. There are backups that are performed on a regular basis and ample access to malware. Those who are operating WordPress sites, however, will have to maintain and run them on their own.

Finding and Using Web Hosting Coupon Codes

Web hosting coupon codes can create significant savings on hosting and related products. Deals and discounts are available for popular providers and for those that are less commonly recognized. Knowing how to find the coupons and making optimal use of use them can help to keep costs low without sacrificing good service.

Sources for Coupons
A search engine is the first place to start with locating sources for coupons and discount codes. The types of websites that contain coupons will vary a little. Some sources are dedicated to hosting and related products, but others will have coupons for a wide variety of products that happen to include web hosting. Coupons dot com is a site that has coupons for tangible consumer products and digital items that include hosting. In the Coupon Codes area of the site, there are discount codes available for domain registration and hosting products at GoDaddy.com, Register.com, NetworkSolutions.com, Domain.com and many others.

Retail Me Not is another source for coupons of all types. The webhosting coupon area is difficult to find from the entry page of the site, and many prospective customers would not find this section at all from the front page. This illustrates the effectiveness of a savvy search engine query to locate web hosting coupon codes. The codes for products related to hosting on this source are located at RetailMeNot, and they include discounts for hosts such as Arvixe.com, JustHost.com and EasySpace.com.

Another source for discounts is Facebook. This one is exclusively for web hosting and related products. Coupon codes are available for domain name registration, shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting and cloud solutions. Godaddy.com, Name.com, HostGator.com and A2 Hosting.com are among the widely known services for which it provides discount codes for domain registration and budget hosting. The site offers discounts for VPS, dedicated server and cloud hosting for an assortment of other providers that are popular but somewhat smaller.

The Fine Print
Coupons can make hosting and related services much more affordable than purchasing these products without discounts. It is important, however, to read the fine print and determine the conditions for accepting the discounted pricing. Coupons that promise a very low monthly hosting fee, for example, might require a hosting package that pays for the plan one or more years in advance. Also expect to have the same limitations and conditions for discounted hosting packages that include a free domain name registration. After the contract period has ended, normal pricing will generally be in effect for domain name registration and the hosting plan.

The terms of service for taking advantage of the coupons can make it difficult to keep pricing low for extended periods of time, but it is not impossible. The key is to understand all of the rules and agreements before making any purchases. With a thorough understanding of what to expect with each of the coupons and the hosts offering them, it is easier to find a satisfactory web hosting company at a discounted price.

How Do I Protect My Website Against Hacking?

How do I protect my website against hacking? This is the most common question asked by businesses and individuals who are thinking about setting up a website. There is nothing scarier than the thought of seeing one’s site wiped out entirely or altered by nefarious hackers. Having worked so hard and spent money on developing a website, one should take the time to protect it by putting into place some basic hacking protections. Some people do not think that their websites contain anything worth being hacked for. However, most website security breaches are not meant to deface or alter a website, or to steal data. Rather, they are attempts by hackers to use another person’s server to set up a temporary server, or as a relay for spam of an illegal nature.

How do I Protect my Website against Hacking?
Hacking is often done by automated scripts written to search the internet for known website software security issues. Most website developers and owners are aware of the threat posed by hackers. There are many ways of protecting a website from hacker attacks, ranging from strong to weaker security measures. Although site developers and owners implement such measures to keep their servers secure, individual user accounts can still be maliciously hacked and exposed. In addition to regularly backing up their files, website owners should take the following easy steps to keep their websites safe:

• Keep software up to date.
One of the best ways to protect a website is to ensure that any software installed is up to date. This applies to the server operating system as well as any software one may be running on the website. When hackers find any website security holes, they quickly attempt to abuse them. Individuals and businesses using a managed hosting solution do not need to worry much about applying updates for the operating system. This task is carried out by the hosting service provider. However, people using third–party software should quickly apply the necessary security patches.

• Install security plug-ins
After updating the platform and scripts, one should look into the security plug-ins that actively protect the website from hacking attempts. People running a WordPress website should look into free plug-ins such as Bulletproof Security, Better WP Security, or other similar tools available for websites built on other systems. Such tools address the limitations that are inherent in each platform.

• Lock down file and directory permissions
All websites are made up of a series of files and folders stored on the web hosting account. Besides having all the data and scripts needed to make the website work, each of these folders and files has a set of permissions that determine who can open or alter them. As one might expect, a file with a permission code that gives anyone on the web the ability to open, write, or execute is less secure than one that is locked down to reserve all rights for the website owner alone.

Other ways of protecting a website against hackers include removing the install script, maintaining strong passwords, keeping one’s computer virus free and up to date, and never logging into one’s account via unsecured wifi.

What You Need To Know About DreamHost Webhosting’s Services and Features

As an Internet user you have probably had several experiences in which the website that you are browsing is taking too long to load. The wait frustrates you and you end up going to another website instead. Now that you are about to put up your own online retail shop, that is one thing that you would never want to happen. Having a slow website would mean losses for your company. How do you remedy this type of situation?

You could search for hosts that provide solid state drives (SSDs), as they are known to increase the speed of your website. However this type of hosting is not generally available with low-cost shared plans. But there is an alternative.

The first thing that you need to do is to look for a web host that is reliable and extremely efficient. While there are probably hundreds of different companies offering web hosting services, you need to do a large amount of research to make sure that you end up with the best one that will give you all your web hosting needs at the same time will also give you great value for your money. The best web hosting company to give you all that and more is DreamHost WebHosting.

What you need to know about DreamHost WebHosting
DreamHost Webhosting started in April of 1997 is currently one of the most sought-after and most successful web hosting companies in the Internet. Headquartered in Los Angeles, Dreamhost offers a wide range of services that cater to the needs of the simplest blog owners to the large businesses. The company currently employs over 60 full time employees all of which are working on different specializations thereby making them one of the most comprehensive web hosts today.

DreamHost Web Hosting Packages and Features

1.) Shared Web Hosting
For a monthly fee of $8.95, you will get unlimited disk storage, a monthly bandwidth, hosted domains, Full Shell, SSH/FTP/SFTP users, email accounts, mySQL 5 Databases, and a Debian Linux operating system. When you are using a shared web host, you are sharing a single server’s resources such as the CPU and the RAM with a number of other clients. This is the most ideal package for web designers, bloggers, and small-scale business owners.

2.) Virtual Private Server (VPS)
The fee for a VPS can set you back anywhere between $15 to $200 per month depending on the RAM that you require. Each server has exclusive use of a certain number of features therefore the activities of one website in that server will not in any way affect the activities of the other websites. If you are generally concerned about the slowing down of your website due to the higher demands of another at a given time, the VPS will be the best option for you. If you are currently expanding your website to include newer and better features such as a faster shopping cart and check out function, you might want to consider investing in the VPS package.

3.) Dedicated Web Hosting
At $100 to $250 per month, having a dedicated web hosting service is definitely an investment that you will need to make. This is the most costly package at DreamHost WebHosting because it also gives you a lot of benefits that will ensure your website’s efficiency. By having a dedicated web host you will have a physical server that you and only you can access. You are the only one who will have access to the server along with all its resources and functions. With unlimited bandwidth, people who browse through your website can do so easily with speed giving them the best experience.

Reasons To Choose DreamHost Web Hosting

If there are two things that DreamHost Webhosting is well known for, it is their quality of service and affordability of their packages. You are assured of 24/7 support should you experience a slowdown in your website, or worse, a crash. You can count on any of the friendly and skilled technicians to take care of your problem right away. If you are a business owner you will love the fact that DreamHost WebHosting works hand in hand with you to give your customers the best browsing experience possible. With the affordable packages at DreamHost WebHosting, you are also assured to have the best value for your hard-earned money.

Web Hosting Companies for Online Business

Searching for Web hosting companies best suited to put a page in the eye of the search engines evades some. It is necessary to find tips that will place a user on the correct path to reliable and low-cost web hosting companies like A2 Hosting for page load speed, HostNine for cheap price, Certified Hosting for great support, Hub for being easy to use, and others .

Support: In the beginning of most endeavors, nothing moves forward without a plan. The key is to decide what is necessary for your Web site. Keep this in mind when choosing a Web hosting company. During this process, it is possible to weed out the sites that have too much or not enough of the things you require. Making a list of what a site offers and comparing it to what you need is a great way to eliminate a more expensive site. Some considerations may be graphics or extensive photo options. Consider how much editing capacity a site provides or if it provides a way to bring in outside elements.

Longevity: Before jumping into a Web commitment, consider how long a site has been in business. Web sites come and go and for those with little experience the site takes their materials with it. Look into a few forums and information on the real practices of a site will be revealed. Certainly a few disgruntled comments will be made but most people can decipher real elements, getting the truth. Fortunately, most reputable sites with a record of accomplishment have history and solid policies that govern their sites.

Bandwidth: Will the site have the bandwidth necessary to carry your information? Most good sites will have the bandwidth but in some places, carriage is notoriously slow. There are places in the U. S. with slow carriage, and compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. is slow in the Internet speed department. The Akamai report shows Hong Kong, South Korea and others having far faster Web movement than many U.S.

Web Space: Growth is a big consideration when choosing Web hosting companies. Serious users will grow, in expertise and in the materials placed on a site. For this reason, it is important to know how much space is available and if there is room for expansion.

File backup: Does the Web site provide a system for backing up your files? Off site backup is necessary. Sadly, it is very easy to lose files. Working with a Web organization smart enough to have a backup system can help a user tremendously.

Quick Page Loading: Working on a Web page when information takes forever to load is an irritant and can cost money if speed is a necessity in a particular business. In some instances, it is critical that a page load quickly. Lag is very destructive for Web users.

Word of Mouth: Many Web hosting companies cost around $10 and work relatively well but this is basic hosting, for more add-ons the price may increase a few bucks. Some sites have an annual renewal fee for hosting. Finding low cost Web hosting is a word of mouth deal with some, people are connected through associations on the Web and off and will tell friends if they find a good deal or a terrible investment. Most do not enter a Web platform without a little investigation.

Customer Service: Trouble with a Web page and no one to call is a terrible feeling for an experienced user and for a novice it is terrible. Waiting for an email that goes unanswered for days is not a site anyone wants to work on. It is important for a site to answer questions promptly and to have technicians qualified to solve any problems.

Using the Web is all about transferring information, photos and documents in swift movement. If Web hosting companies are to provide effective services, they need to be able to provide the necessary interface for promoting your Internet goals. More people are moving to the Web for business and for personal reasons. A Web presence is almost mandatory for businesses while the Internet is offering new ways of communicating services.

It is an unspoken understanding that everyone has an email address. This clearly solidifies the importance of the Web. This in itself insists upon an effective operative Web service. It is important for anyone with a desire to grow in business or in Web communication to be involved with competent Web hosting companies. Searching out BBB-rated companies offering the interfaces necessary to maintain your Internet presence is the best way to find low cost and reliable Web hosting companies.