Archive for November, 2009
Almost everywhere you look these days you will find hosting companies layering the internet with their advertisements. It is hard to determine which hosting company is better than the other and which one is the absolute best on the market today. Almost every hosting company on the internet today offers email accounts with their hosting plans, all of which vary in size. It depends on the size of your hosting plan to determine how many email accounts you will get with your plan.
It will be rare to stumble upon a hosting company that does not offer email accounts with at least one of their hosting plans if not all of them. Most plans offer 25, 50, 100, 150 or an unlimited amount of email accounts with their hosting plans. These accounts are perfect for a company that has a couple hundred employees. If you own a company that employs thousands of workers then it might be best to purchase your own server, host your own website, and therefore host your own email accounts as well.
The email accounts that come with hosting plans can be setup with their own email address name and be managed by whoever so chooses. For the most part, these email accounts will have a limit as to how much information, or messages, can be stored in them. If you run out of space you should clean out your inbox, saved messages, sent messages and deleted items to make room for more incoming mail. Email accounts with hosting plans come included and do not cost extra for the most part.
One of the growing hosting companies on the internet today is known as webhost4life. The company has been in business for 9 years and are in the midst of celebrating their ninth anniversary. They are currently offering web hosting for $2.99 per month. That’s right, $2.99 per month with no contract to sign whatsoever. The features of this plan include the following:
- 99.9 percent uptime guaranteed
- unlimited storage
- unlimited bandwidth
- host unlimited sites for free
- unlimited email accounts
- 50 MySQL 5.0 DB
- 45 days money back guarantee
- around the clock telephone support
- daily full backup
- free upgrade
- shared SSL
- Real Audio and Video Support
- Zero wait time live chat
- plenty of other features as well
Straight from their website: “All your files will be stored in High Performance SAN storage. Our million dollar SAN Infrastructure is simply the best in the market. With SAN storage, all your data will be protected against hard drive failures and degraded performance from old hard drives. Also, the SAN solution will deliver your site content much faster than before. You will see great improvement in both speed and reliability.”
webhost4life was chosen by Inc. Magazine in July of 2007 and July of 2008 as one of the 5,000 fastest growing, private companies in the United States.
There are millions upon millions of websites strew across the internet these days and thousands more are popping up each minute from every corner of the globe. The best part about the internet is the fact that anyone can create a website with little to no knowledge of HTML and other internet intricacies. Some of the largest websites out there, ESPN, CNN, MSNBC and Sports Illustrated post so much content on their websites that they need an incredibly large hosting plan to keep their website running 24 hours per day without any problems arising.
Some of these companies do not actually use the every day, normal hosting companies you can find with a simple Google or Yahoo search engine. Instead, these companies purchase their own servers and place them in their business offices. Purchasing your own servers will allow you to monitor your website with ease around the clock and will allow your technicians to fix any problems that can arise immediately without having to wait for your hosting company to fix the problem and get the site up running again.
Owning your own server takes a lot of time to have happen because you need to generate enough money or income to purchase a server large enough to host your website. The good news is that many hosting plans do not cost much so you will not be blowing your money by using a hosting company while saving for a server of your own. Caring for your own server can also be mind rattling if you have never done so before.
If you run a personal or company website then you surely have signed up with a hosting company for some sort of hosting plan or your website would not be able to host as much content as possible. These hosting companies will send their customers email notifications for various items that need to be addressed every so often. Do not worry, none of these notifications will be negative unless there is something seriously wrong with the server your website is hosted on or if the company expects that your site will be down for a prolonged period of time.
The majority of email notifications sent by your hosting company will have to do with an upgrade to the hosting service you have, times when the company will be backing up their servers (which could cause a slow down in loading your website), or other routine maintenance being performed. These companies pride themselves on providing their customers with as little down time as possible for the websites they host but sometimes down time just cannot be avoided.
These email notifications should not be taken lightly, especially if they are sent once a week or a couple of times per month even if they are routine messages that say almost the same thing each time they are sent to your inbox. Instead, read through them to make sure that nothing is wrong with your service and file them away in a folder designated for the hosting company you use for your website in case you need to reference them in the future.
If you are thinking about creating a blog and joining the growing blogoshpere on the internet then you need to consider whether or not you want your blog to have a host company attached to it. This question must be answered to determine what you should do: How much content will I post to my blog? Let us be honest; if you are only going to post a couple of times per week you will not need to pay for a hosting plan. Why? Because you can sign up for a blog with blogger or wordpress and have your blog hosted on their platform and servers for no charge whatsoever. You can still post as much content as you would like as many times per day or per week as possible.
The reason for getting your own hosting plan is if you are running a corporate blog that is associated with a business. You might not want blogspot.com or wordpress.com to be included at the end of your website URL address. This do not make your blog look professional and it might even scare people away if they consider your blog unprofessional. This can extremely hurt your business by driving traffic away from the site, which means that you will not pick up new clients or make money from your blog. If you want to create a blog solely to make money from the content you create you will need to have a hosting company because wordpress does not support these actions.
There are two important things the owner of a website must do, one of which can occur each calendar year. Those two things are setting up a hosting plan prior to the launch of the website and renewing that hosting plan each year, every two years, or every three years. The renewal rate all depends on the original plan that was purchased. Hosting plans can be purchased in all different sizes (server hosting sizes) and lengths (in months or years). If you know that your website will be posting a lot of content on a regular basis for at least five years then you should choose a large hosting site that lasts for at least three years in the first go around.
When you order your hosting plan some companies will give you the option of signing up for automatic renewal when your plan is coming to an end. This means that the credit card information or payment information you entered upon purchase will be used to renew the hosting plan automatically. If you do not want to sign up for this option then do not do so. Instead, you will receive expiration emails from the hosting company as your plan expiration date gets closer to renewal time.
If you do not like the company you are working with you can choose to change once your plan is complete. Many hosting companies will not charge you extra for transferring, which is a nice feature. Also, make sure that you renew your hosting plan a couple of days before your old plan expires so that your website does not disappear from the internet.
There are plenty of details that need to be outlined prior to launching a website live to the internet in order to make sure that everything necessary for the website to succeed is on the site at the time of the launch. One of the details that must be ironed out prior to the site launching, because it is required for the site to actually launch, is finding a hosting company. If a website does not have a host then it cannot go live to the internet because there is nowhere to place the content.
So, if you have not realized it yet, a website needs a host prior to launching so that the site can actually hold content. A site can be deemed live to the internet without a host but the site operator will not be able to post any content to the site once it is live. Make sure that if you are building a website the first thing you should do is find a reputable hosting company for your site, one that will have a plan large enough to host all of the content you wish to post to the site.
If you do not hire a hosting company prior to launch then your site will experience technical difficulties when it does launch. This will make it difficult to view your site and will be embarrassing to people who come across your site with no content on it. Hire a hosting company first and then send the site live to the internet.
Hosting is possibly the most important aspect of running a website these days because it enables the person or company running the website to put as much content on their site as possible depending on the amount of space they have on their hosting company’s servers. When the owner of a website signs up for a hosting company he or she will determine the size of the hosting plan needed to run the site effectively. Not every hosting plan will be 100 percent effective, which means that the website owner will have to deal with technical problems at some point down the road.
The problems encountered by a website owner can include the website being down, certain pages not loading, some content not appearing and the website crashing altogether. If you are the owner or operator of a website you should make sure that you have the contact information for the hosting company on your cell phone or in your email address book for future reference. Every hosting company, if reputable, will have contact information posted on their website for technical support, which should be around the clock because the internet never sleeps.
If your hosting company refuses to offer you help with problems that arise with their service then you should dump them as a provider and move on to another company. If they fix the problem but it keeps persisting then you should consider asking for a refund or threaten to move on to another company for better support and better services.
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