Web Hosting

Business owners, web developers and bloggers often feel that even a moment of downtime for their website can be a life-altering event. That’s why they try to choose web hosting services that have guaranteed uptime, are known for their reliability and are committed to providing top notch service. These days, however, being a top web hosting services may be about more than just customer service – it’s about giving to others as well.

Hosting for Haiti is an initiative sponsored by the American Red Cross and some of the top web hosting providers who have joined together to provide Haiti relief to those who have suffered devastating loss in January 12th’s earthquake. If you are still looking for the ideal web host, why not consider one that gives back to its customers and to others as well? You can help Haiti in a myriad of ways, but one of the easiest ways to help Haiti is to choose a web hosting company that has already pledged its support. Among the participants in the Hosting for Haiti initiative are:

- HostGator
- Rackspace Hosting
- Laughing Squid
- Softlayer
- Peer1 Hosting
- Go Grid
- HostDime

And, of course, once your site is live, don’t be afraid to help Haiti by publicizing the Hosting for Haiti initiative or any other Haiti relief efforts – you may be surprised at how even a little publicity can help raise tremendous funds for this critical cause.

Web applications make our lives easier – they can be accessed from almost anywhere, they are usually cheap or free and they are mostly very easy to use.

Using good web apps can really help you save time, money and effort. If you are a small business owner, web apps can turn things around for you, and enable you access to very sophisticated management tools and other aids.

2009 presented us with some marvelous web applications. We picked 10 of them for you to take a look and enjoy.

10 Great Web Applications – 2009

1. PhotoSnack - PhotoSnack offers a great and easy way to create slideshows. This web app lets you create photo slideshows and online photo galleries for free, and also offers you multiple ways of sharing and publishing your photo slideshows.
2. Adobe BrowserLab - This useful tool from Adobe is designed to make the life of web developers much easier – with it, you can preview and test your webpages on leading browsers and operating systems – on demand. You get full screenshots and can customize your test settings.
3. Office Live - This Microsoft web service enables you to store up to 5GB, share with anyone, and collaborate on a single document. You can view Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from your Web browser.
4. DimDim - A free web conferencing service,  that lets everyone everywhere to communicate using rich media in real time. Dimdim is easy to use and completely free, so web meetings are made available to everyone.
5. Color Scheme Designer - A wonderful tool for designers and web developers. This web app has increased precision and color space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme.
6. PDF to Excel - A very useful conversion tool. Use PDF to Excel to quickly and easily create highly-editable XLS files, making it a cinch to re-use tables and spreadsheets from PDF files in Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, and WordPerfect Office.
7. Creatly - A tool for creating online diagrams. Create fast, professional looking diagrams with Creately‘s large library of objects and easy start templates. Now you can draw anything easily.
8. 247Webmonitoring - Even if you have the best hosting service, you need to keep an eye on your site’s up-time. This web app will monitor your website 24X7 from their servers and notify you whenever your site goes down, so that you can quickly address the issue and keep your customers happy.
9. Preezo - If you can’t afford PowerPoint, this is the solution for you. Preezo enables you to create professional quality presentations using an ultra-fast Ajax user interface.
10. Live Mesh - With Live Mesh, you can synchronize files with all of your devices, so you always have the latest versions handy. Access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file. Very useful for people who are always on the go.

The year 2009 is officially over, and now we can look back at some of the interesting events that took place, regarding web hosting.

There’s no doubt that the major issue of 2009 in web hosting was security threats – spam, phising scams, scripts and hacks were very common, and hit some of the major web hosting services.

Although spam levels are down from this same time last year, spammers and bot creators continued to harass the Internet Many more institutions  and authorities are picking up the fight and are actively attempting to counter the botnet threat, in one way or another.

The competition between web hosting providers grew hotter in 2009. As the demand for cheap web hosting services grew, the prices went down, and hosting services went for as cheap as $1.99 per month.

According to Webhosting.info, the fastest growing domain registrar is GoDaddy, followed by xinnet.com and onamae.com.

Web hosting services such as FatCow showed an impressive growth. iPage is also one of the fastest growing hosting services of 2009.

This year also saw the end of one of the first hosting services of the internet - Geocities. After 15 years of offering people the ability to set up their own website, Geocities has closed down for good. Yahoo acquired Geocities for 3.57 billion U.S. dollars in 1999. Geocities sites are no longer be accessible, but some pages will still be accessible via the  Internet Archive project.

2009 was a very good year for open source CMS. WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal has won the inaugural Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. With this award, Drupal has won two categories this year, the other one being Best Open Source PHP CMS.

Technology-wise, the original promise of cloud computing is finally being realized and implemented by both consumers and businesses thanks to advances in hosting software and technology. The developments in the web hosting arena are quickly meeting the needs of individuals and businesses, and paving the way for more exciting technologies and features.

Creating a website these days is easier than ever. Web hosting has become affordable and sophisticated, and there are many web development technologies to choose from.

Content Management Systems (or CMS) are becoming increasingly popular. There is a larger variety of  CMS to choose from, and you can use these systems to create complex, bit sites, with tons of content.

What is a CMS?

A CMS is a software or we application, for creating and processing documents and other content (such as images, video and audio). A content management system is frequently a web application used for managing websites and web content. Often, content management systems require special client software for editing and constructing articles. There are many open-source and proprietary solutions available.

In short, a CMS enables you to fully control the content of your website, making it easier to manage and update it.

The Advantages of CMS

There are many advantages for having your site built with a CMS. Here are some of them:

1. Full control: With a good CMS, you can do anything on your site: add or delete pages, create a blog, add photo galleries and easily update the content of your site.
2. Access from anywhere: If you are using a CMS, all you need to update your site is an internet connection and a browser. There’s usually no need to install software on your computer.
3. Search engine friendly: Popular content management systems, such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are very popular with search engines, and make for higher ranking sites.
4. Frequent updates: When it’s easy and fun to update your site, you’ll do so more often. Search engine love updated sites.
5. DIY: Many content management systems are very easy to install. You can build your website all by yourself.
6. Great support: Since many CMS are open-source, they have a huge community that constantly updates the system, creates plugins and add-ons and offers friendly support when you encounter difficulties.

Web hosting is always changing and updating. If you own a site, or planning to build one, it’s important to know what’s new in the web hosting services arena. Here’s a collection of news and updates of web hosting, hosting services and web development:

Deutsche Telekom takes over Web Hosting Service Strato

Deutsche Telekom informed it will take over Strato, a German Web hosting company. The boards of both companies had approved the plan but that it still faces regulatory approvals.Financial details were not disclosed.

Telekom claims the transaction would make it a leader in the German Web hosting market with Strato’s products that include and enable email, Web sites, blogs, online shopping and data storage. Strato’s business is primarily aimed at consumers and small businesses.

Strato, based in Berlin operates about 4 million hosted domains.

UK Web Hosting Service Namesco Buys Poundhost

UK domain registrar and web hosting provider Namesco has acquired UK dedicated hosting provider Poundhost. This is the first major acquisition for Namesco since May 2008.

Namesco is currently the fourth largest domain name and hosting provider within the UK. The company will own 100% of the capital of the companies composing Poundhost, including Poundhost Internet, Server Arcade, VPS and Blueconnex.

Poundhost has over 10,000 dedicated and virtual servers and a large high-end customer base, 30% of which resides in the US.

Hosting Service Site5 Plants A Tree for Each New Hosting Account

Although world leaders fail to reach a binding climate agreement this year in Copenhagen, there is still hope and action at the grassroots level. Web hosting service Site5 has partnered with mokugift to plant a tree for every new hosting account.

“Tree-planting with new accounts is a natural extension of Site5′s existing environmental philosophy. Site5′s business was designed around a remote workforce which is the greenest possible option for a company”, explained Ben Welch-Bolen, CEO of Site5.

Cheap, quick and efficient – that’s Just Host web hosting for you.

With an amazing price of only $3.45 a month, it’s really hard to compete with this cheap shared hosting service.

Just Host Shared Hosting Package

So, what exactly do you get from JustHost? Here’s the deal they offer for $3.45:

• Unlimited Space - No need to worry about storage – you have all the room you need for your files.
• Unlimited GB’s of Transfer - Excellent for popular sites with lots of traffic.
• Unlimited Domain Hosting - This means you can build as many sites as you want.
• Unlimited E-Mail Accounts - A nice feature – give an email account to all your employees.
• Unlimited MySQL Databases - Great for CMS users, like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.
• FREE Site Builder - A wonderful feature for beginners.
• FREE Domain for Life - Saves you some money and trouble.
• Anytime Money Back Guarantee - JustHost are so sure you’ll be happy, they offer this guarantee without hesitation.

Just Host Features

Just Host promises 99.9% uptime for your site. Although this isn’t an unusual feature, Just Host are so concerned about uptime that they set up their own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called Just Uptime. All Just Host’s servers are monitored by Just Uptime.

Just Host guarantees reliability through load balancing technology and super fast backbone connections. With load balancing, your site is available from multiple servers, so if one server becomes unavailable, your site will still be online and accessible for your customers.

Just Host uses cPanel, which is an excellent control panel, which makes it simple to manage all aspects of your site. With this control panel, you can upload files, create databases, manage email accounts, create redirections, watch your site stats, manage FTP accounts and much more.

Just Host Customer Support

Customer support is one of the most important aspects of web hosting services. When you choose your hosting service, you need to pay special attention to what they offer in terms of support. Quick response and competent representatives are the most important features of a good customer support.

Just Host will answer your email in 20 minutes or less and they answer the phones after less than 3 minutes – that’s what we call a quick service.

Finally, Just Host employs English speaking experts that will be able to solve your problems quickly and efficiently.

The successful Moo Crew Support Team has played a major role in helping FatCow secure a high ranking among the top ten web hosting providers on Consumer-Rankings.com. We talked to Gary Engel, Senior Vice President of Customer Support at FatCow, to find out how they do it.

Q: What’s unique about FatCow’s customer support?

A: “Our HefferCratic Oath sets us apart from other web hosting providers because when it comes to customer support, we put our money where our mouth is. If customers feel we haven’t kept up our side of the bargain – by answering calls in less than two minutes on average, providing answers to your questions at that time or a firm follow-up deadline – they receive a credit to their account equal to a free month of hosting.”

“All levels of our support team regularly meet with our engineers and network managers to talk through questions from customers. Our follow-up measures also make us unique – if we feel it’s appropriate, we’ll have a support representative at the management level personally check in with customers for feedback on how their questions were resolved. We also survey all customers who contact us to learn how we can improve our system.”

Q: How can new FatCow customers get off to a successful start?

GE: “We’ve designed our control panel so that it’s easy to use, but we realize that some customers need something extra to really get their sites up and running. That’s why we created our JumpStart service, which gives customers one-on-one time with our best agents to get a feel for the tools and services available.”

“Our QuickStart feature is a free service we offer that instructs customers on adding a domain, the options they have in setting up a mailbox, and introduces them to our website building tools. Customers can also refer to our Knowledgebase, a collection of articles offering technical assistance and helpful background information on products and services, and dozens of multimedia tutorials that provide visual step-by-step instruction. And of course, we are available 24/7 to answer any questions they have.”

Q: How do you ensure your customers receive quality service?

A:” We have a vigorous quality assurance process in place to both maintain our policies and identify how we can improve our training. We conduct separate audits of customer contacts – by phone, email and chat – then compare those audits for an accurate assessment, which ultimately drives our training schedule and new policies. We monitor call wait times, the time it takes to reach first time resolutions and the number of tickets that are escalated to tier-two specialists, which provides us with a broader scope of our support performance.”

“We’ve synthesized the information we obtain from this process on our internal Support Wiki. The wiki provides our agents with a searchable written resource that’s reliable and always up-to-date.”

“Customer surveys also play an important role here, because they give our customers the opportunity to “QA” our support staff right along with us.”

Q: How do you actually use the information from customers to improve your services?

A: “We use the information to improve the overall quality of our customer support. We use customer feedback from surveys and follow-up calls along with internal audits to examine agents’ performance on an individual basis. That’s how we identify strengths and areas that require additional instruction, which are then worked into our training process. Our goal is to provide reliable web hosting, and this process plays a major part in fulfilling that goal.”

If you are looking for a fast, efficient, extremely professional web hosting service – you might wanna go with InMotion.

InMotion puts an interesting emphasis on speed, and this is a very important consideration when choosing a hosting service.

While most hosting services utilize a single data center, which means your website and email could be very far from you – and sometimes slow because of that. InMotion allows you to choose your data center location, which makes your site faster and more efficient.

InMotion’s Business Class Offers 3 different plans – from a very basic one for small sites (2 databases, 2 domains, 25 sub domains) to a pro plan that offers unlimited domains, FTP accounts, e-mail addresses etc. The prices range from 6.95$ a month to 18.95$ a month – a very reasonable price for the great package you get. All business class web hosting plans come with a 90 Day Money Back Guarantee – so you can try it out before committing.

The 30 self installing scripts that are a part of all packages are very useful. There is also a choice of 2 website builders from InMotion – most hosting services offer only one. If you are into commercial sites, InMotion offers a variety of commercial features, including different kinds of shopping carts and payment methods.

Cpanel is InMotion’s choice of control panel – which is great. It’s easy to use and offers many professional features for advanced user. It’s also a common control panel for hosting services, which means a lot of people use it, so there’s lots of support and help around.

InMotion has won quite a few awards in the field of customer service. InMotion offers a lot of good tutorials, and a great customer support with live chat option.

Click here for more info about InMotion Hosting

Back in the 90s there was really only one way to build a site for free – that was Geocities. This service, hosted by Yahoo, once boasted millions of users. New hosting technologies and cheap hosting prices have caused Geocities’ popularity to decline over the years.

A few days ago, after 15 years of offering people the ability to set up their own website, Geocities has closed down for good. Yahoo acquired Geocities for 3.57 billion U.S. dollars in 1999 , though the site had been operating since 1994. Yahoo said sites would no longer be accessible from 26th October. However, some pages will still be accessible via the  Internet Archive project.

Many technology sites covered the closure of Geocities. Some, like the comics site XKCD, have made different tributes, in honor of the old web service.

Geocities was a good idea at the beginning of the days of the internet, but nowadays, building a website or blog is cheap and easy for anyone to do, without the need for web programming skills. Even more sophisticated websites for e-commerce and business applications for sales and customer management are available at reasonable prices for small business owners.

A new phishing scam targets the customers of many hosting services. Under the pretext of a system maintenance, the emails are linked to phishing pages which try to collect login information. The emails tell the user, that due to maintenance activities, all FTP data must be updated. Those who take the bait are led to a website formatted to look like a page from cPanel, the widely used website administration program.

The attack is apparently meant to harvest FTP logins for webmasters. Once the logins have been collected, the accounts are then accessed and the sites used to host phishing pages targeting users of online banking sites and other financial services.

Over 90 popular shared Web hosting services have been abused through these automatically generated emails. The message is identical in all of them, but the named company differs.

If you are a webmaster and have received one of these emails, please be sure to contact your hosting provider to reset your passwords immediately. Never give your password or login to a page you don’t recognize. Also, this might be a good time to change passwords and choose some strong ones. Here is a good password generator that will ensure your password is strong.