Friday 24 February 2012

Domain Web Hosting

Domain web hosting is a term used to describe what people are looking for, when they decide to use a web hosting company, where you add a domain name. Some people have the misconception that when you want to use a hosting company, you need a company that also supports domain names. In fact if it is paid hosting, the hosting provider has to be able to have the function to add on domains.

When you buy a domain name, you buy it and register it with a domain name registrar company, usually for one year, but you have the option to buy for up to ten years if needed. You have the option to make the Who is private on the domain name, which means that if someone done a search to see who owned the domain name, this would be hidden.

Now you have your domain name you have two options, you can either park your domain name, or turn it in to a website, using web hosting. With parking you have to set the name servers from your domain name registrar, to that off the parking company. Domain parking is a good idea if your domain name gets a lot of direct type in traffic. What this means is, if you have the exact keyword dot com, with a good amount of searches per month, and if a user were to type that in to Google, then it would usually go straight to your parked page. Or alternatively you can set the name servers to a web hosting company.

In the long term it is much better to turn your domain name in to a website, because you have lots of different options for developing your site. Usually with a parked domain name, all you would get is a static page, that is just full of ads, and it does not look user friendly.

Using web hosting you have hundreds of different templates to choose from to design your site, this could be in the Wordpress platform, Joomla, design your own template with html and so on. Basically you can design the web site the way you want to, so you are not restricted to how it will look. It is also much better in the long term for your site in terms of search engine optimisation, ranking is made easier with multiple pages on a site, not just one static page like a parked page.

All this is possible because of the features you have within your web hosting account. They offer multiple domain names that you can add to your account, multiple email addresses for the different domain names that you have. Most companies have the Cpanel which helps the novice user get used to working with hosting.

Another great aspect of most domain web hosting companies is they use a program called Fantastico  which lets you create your website from scratch, building the database and all the necessary files that are used to put your website live on the internet. And do not forget the twenty four hour live telephone and chat they provide, if you do not find this in a company, I would look elsewhere.




Wednesday 22 February 2012

Cpanel Web Hosting

When designing a website you need a good hosting provider, and once you find one that suits your needs, you should use a company that has Cpanel web hosting. So what is cpanel and why do some many people use it.
Cpanel is an easy to use interface, or graphically desirable view that lets you manage your hosting on a unix server. In other words its user friendly, so that you can navigate around the panel with ease.

When you open your hosting account you will come across your cpanel straight away, and basically it lists all the available options for managing your domain name and website. The first thing that you would need to do is add your domain name to the system. Once added you would initiate a task to create a database for your website. This is all done through your interface using a program within called fantastico.

Fantastico creates your sites database and everything else needed to start up your website. To do all this manually would be very difficult, if impossible for the novice user. Apart from creating your site there is other things you can do in cpanel.

Most businesses use a email address from there hosting and most hosting providers allow multiple emails within the account. You also have autoresponders within the cpanel, to automatically respond to any emails you receive. The cpanel also uses the file manager, which is an important feature for uploading and downloading files.

Most people would use a file transfer protocol site for uploading new themes for example, but all this is possible straight from the cpanel. Another very important feature is the ability to backup your files. imagine your host going down, or something happens to your computer, and you lose all your data. It is crucial to backup your data always, and once again you can do this with ease.

Cpanel web hosting is not for everyone but it certainly has thousands of satisfied users all over the world.
Ive been using cpanel through my hostgator account for years, and it has always made the process of adding a domain name to creating the website, a really easy practice. One thing that I may add, there is video tutorials to help you if you are completely new to all this, but even if you do get stuck, hostgator and all the major hosting companies, usually have live support.

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Low Cost Hosting

If you are thinking about getting low cost hosting then you are most probably new to the internet, and new to designing websites. When people first start out they think that they should look for the cheapest option for them to get started. This is by no means a bad idea, as we are all trying to save money in this economy. But you have to take many factors in to consideration when you want to develop a site.

There is basically two types of hosting, paid and free and a lot of people that start out go down the free route. Free hosting gives you the option to upload files to the host server, but it is limited to how much you can upload. The speeds of the server will be a lot slower than a paid host, so for example, if you have a few pictures that you have uploaded to the server for your site, it might take a little bit longer for them images to appear on your website.

Because you use free hosting you do not get a domain name from a registrar, so if you were to start a new business, you would be greatly hampered in trying to compete with other sites in your niche. Customer support is non existent in free hosting also, so if you were to ever have problems, you would basically have to try and work it out for yourself.

Free hosting works if say you are a person that wants to share files to friends or family, or you have a hobby and would like to share to people, you do not mind the restriction that free hosting serves. But if you are serious and want to make a real business online then paid hosting is the way to go.

It is the old saying you pay for what you get, and within the hosting business this term applies exactly the same here. It comes down to what you get for your money, so you need to look in to this very carefully before choosing a provider. What you should be looking for in a provider is the following.

  • Unlimited domains: You need to know if you can have as many websites as possible on the hosting package. It is pointless having the host, if you can only say have five domains, so you could only build five websites.
  • Unlimited Disk Space: This is also very important, say you have a photography business, and you want to upload hundreds of photos on to your site. You need a good host that has unlimited disk space.
  • Unlimited bandwith: You need a host that has good speeds and this depends on the bandwith.
  • 24 hour live support. I consider this to be very important, if they do not offer live support like this then I would not use the company.
On a final note all the big hosting companies offer different types of packages to suit the individual. They offer packages such as Baby plan, hatchling plan, then they go more advanced with options like reseller hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers and so on.

Low cost hosting is only as low as what you are prepared to give to your website, there is some great packages out there right now, ranging from $4 a month up to $10 a month. It is up to you the consumer to make your choice.