Web Page Hosting

Don't buy web hosting before you read this review!

Hosting your web site with reliable web hosting provider is the most important part of launching, running and maintaining your web site on the Internet. Web hosting for your page must be capable of delivering quality services in accordance with your needs. There are so many hosts and not all are trustworthy.

After carefully examining all the information provided by various web hosts and a number of review sites, after reading about disk space, bandwidth, FTP protocol, T3 lines, reliability and price, monthly data transfer, windows and unix operating systems, colocation, dedicated, managed and shared hosting, even experts in web hosting field would have difficult time deciding on the best host.

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Having your site hosted by quality, customer-sensitive hosting provider will make your online experience pleasant and your time serene. Signing up for unreliable and incompatible web host will surely mean never-ending, time-consuming problems once your site has been published. There are numerous examples of troublesome relationships between web site owners and hosting providers.

With all these facts taken into consideration, the main purpose of this site is to help, to point the way to those hosts that are really capable of providing quality services and to lead you to your very own reliable host. We'll show you reliable and proven web page hosting appropriate for your needs.

What is web page hosting?

First we have to explain some basic terms.

The Web is a network of computers all over the world.
All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other.
Web servers are computers where web pages are stored and are highly connected with the rest of the internet.
Web clients view the pages with a program called a web browser such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox
The collection of all your web pages is called your web site.
To let others view your work, you must publish your web site.
To publish your work, you must copy your site to a web server.

Once you have organized your web site, your next step is to have somewhere to place it so it could be seen on the internet. You need a place to have your site hosted.

A web host is a company that provides you with server space for your web site. This includes all of the files associated with your web site. When your web address is typed into a browser, the web host displays your pages. Web hosts provide servers, computers that have high connectivity with the rest of the internet community and where your web files are stored. Web hosting providers also offer all kinds of internet services such as domain registration, email accounts, web site design, server side programing scripts and other. You can use your own PC as a web hosting server but remember that web hosting requires time and overall internet technology knowledge. Using a server from a web hosting company has some crucial advantages:

Most web hosting providers have very fast connections to the Internet
Service providers often have many powerful web servers
Internet Service Providers are specialists on web hosting which results in high security and stability

Web page hosting agreement - typical agreement between you and web hosting provider where all the rights, obligations and services related to hosting your web site are described.

Companies which are specialized in providing web hosting services have advanced technology and equipment which allows them to meet more sophisticated internet needs. They have the experience and know-how. For all these reasons we don't recommend hosting your site on your own PC unless you're willing to invest considerable amount of time and money in hardware, software and education.

How the web site is hosted - Click on the image to enlarge.

Things to consider when deciding on web host for your page

Support - you should check whether the specific host really has fast and competent support service. All of the hosting companies claim to have excellent 24/7 support but only few really do. In order to find out what kind of support service the host has, you might first try their support options for yourself: call them, try live chat or send an email. Also hear what other customers are saying about their experience with the particular host's support. Fast and competent support is extremly important if you want to have your web site problems and missions solved.
Traffic volume - A small or medium web site will consume between 1GB and 5GB of data transfer per month. You can calculate this by multiplying your average page size with the number of expected page views per month. If your average page size is 30KB and you expect 50,000 page views per month, you will need 0.03MB x 50,000 = 1.5GB. Larger, commercial sites often consume more than 100GB of monthly traffic.Web hosting companies have various restrictions regarding traffic your web site has. The most important is to find out how much you'll have to pay if your web site's traffic exceeds the specific limit of your hosting plan. This way you'll avoid paying large sums of money if your site suddenly becomes popular.
Bandwidth - The amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. Web hosting providers usually set the limits on monthly basis. Publishing pictures or broadcastind video or sound requires more bandwidth. You'd want to know approximately how much bandwidth you'll need.
How Much Disk Space - A small or medium web site will need between 10 and 100MB of disk space.If you look at the size of HTML pages, you will see that the average size is very small. But if you look at the size of the images (button, gif, banner, jpg) used inside the pages, you will often find images many times larger than the page itself. Expect each HTML page to take up between 5 and 50KB of disk space on your web server, depending on the use of images or other space consuming elements. If you plan to use lots of images or graphic elements (not to mention sound files or movies), you might be needing much more disk space.
Daily Backup - Make sure your service provider runs a secure daily backup routine, otherwise you may lose some valuable data.
Content Restrictions - You need to know if there are some restrictions for particular content such as adult, gambling and others. Is broadcasting video or sound available etc..
Email Capabilities - You certainly need email boxes, autoresponders and other email features when running a site. Make sure email capabilities you need are available and also check with other customers of the specific company whether email features are running smoothly. This is important because lots of reports of email not working with various companies have been filed recently.
Front Page Extensions - If you plan to use FrontPage to develop your site make sure your provider fully supports FrontPage server extensions
Specific Application - If you intend to use some specific application such as ASP, PHP, ColdFusion and others make sure your host supports it's use.
Upgrade charges: Does the company charge setup fees for upgrades?
Best value for your money: Compare prices on 3 to 4 services to make
sure you are getting the best value for your money. All this one has to bear in mind when deciding on the right hosting company but remember the most important thing is reliability and competence of the web hosting company. Find the company with such qualities and the chances are that all other issues will be easily solved. We recommend providers listed on HostingLair's main page.

data_center Description: Data center with servers hosting web sites

Domain name registration, web site design and hosting service

If you intend to have a web site one of the first things you should do is registering a domain name. A domain name is a unique name for your web site just like google.com or hostinglair.com. When domain names are registered they are added to a large domain name register, and information about your site - including your internet IP address - is stored on a DNS server. A DNS server is responsible for informing all other computers on the Internet about your domain name and your site address. Domains can be registered from domain name registration companies like GoDaddy.com or Dotster.com. There are different domain extensions such as .biz .info and .us. The most popular is .com. We suggest to allways register a ".com" name first. That's because everyone remembers ".com" before ".net" and all others. If you want to protect your site from loosing visitors to the sites which may choose the same name you might consider registering other top-level domains like ".net" and".org" Couple of tips when choosing a domain name:

make it short
make it relevant to the content of your future web site
avoid selecting a name that is difficult to spell or pronounce
make your domain name as similar as possible to the terms relevant to your site's content that people search for online. This way your site will get better exposure in search engines' result pages.

What are subdomains? Let me show you by example. The famous "www" of the World Wide Web is the most common example of a sub domain. Another examle of subdomain is http://support.microsoft.com.If you intend to have any kind of a serious web site we strongly recommend you to always register your own domain name and avoid all other options regarding the domain name for your site. You should avoid letting others register your domain because they might register the domain in their own name which would make them the real web site owner.

When you're ready, go to one of the domain name registrars' web site and register a domain. In order to do this you must have a debit or credit card so you could pay for your domain by entering credit card information online. Don't worry your information will be protected and save with security protocols registrars use. Remember you don't need to have your web site files ready at this moment nor the web hosting provider. Your site will be parked untill you design your site and find a host.Once you complete domain name registration the next step in going online is web site design.

You have two choices: either you'll design the site yourself or you're gonna hire someone to do it for you. We recommend doing it by yourself. This way you'll have complete control over your site. With HTML editors we have today, designing a web site has never been easier. The best web design tool is Dreamweawer which is also the most expensive solution. If the money is relevant than we think CoffeeCup will do the job for far less money. There is much more affordable software which can help you create your web site in no time such as webeasy professional. Free solution web design solution is NVU.

How to transfer domain from registrar to web host? The last step in publishing your site but at the same time the most important part is hosting service. Hosting providers we recommend are listed in the HostingLair's categories page. Once you found the right host you'll need to point your domain name to the servers of your host. In order to do this you need to go to the site where you registered your domain, log into your account and then change the name servers information with the information provided by your host, probably in a welcome message. Enter the name server information you got from your host, save and exit. Now your site is pointed to the servers of your hosting service. Note that approximately 48 hours will pass before this information is updated on the net. This is so called propagation period. Once the period has expired all you need to do is to upload your web site files to your hosting service servers.

Now you're free to search for your best web page hosting! Explore different web hosting categories placed at the top of this page, on the right side.

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