Lets see what you have to consider before you plan to set up a website. You will either go for buying a web server along with its support equipments and a qualified technician to run it properly or you will pay a monthly fee to a company that runs websites to hold your website on their equipment. A big company who wants to go online can afford to spend this kind of amount but for others, it is better to go for the second option. You don’t need to spend buckets full of money on setting up the required web server infrastructure. So all you need to do is rent a server space from one of the web server companies. If you think it is as simple as it sounds, read ahead.

When you start looking for web hosting services, the number of options available will surprise you. The very first thing that you have to decide is to choose between the shared and the reseller web hosting. Do you know the difference?

The main difference between the two is their scale. A shared web hosting requires you to pay for server space for only website with one domain name. If you want to set up more than one website, you will have to pay additional fee for each website. A reseller web hosting requires you to pay for a server space that can be used for more than one website. You can divide the space to host all your websites and if some space is left, you can even sell it to someone else and become a web-hosting subcontractor. Both options have plus and minus points. Lets discuss them to help you decide which one you should choose.

The simplicity, efficiency and the low cost are the three main features of shared web hosting. If you require it for personal use or for running a small business website then this is perfect for you. Along with one website and one domain name, you will generally be allowed to set up sub domains for different parts of that website. You pay them the rent for the space on their web server equipment and you get their support as well. In a way they become responsible for making sure that your website is not only accessible all the time but also that it is running without any problems. They will be ready with their technical support whenever you require it. This takes care of a very important aspect for any businessperson. This option also requires less expenditure (5 -20 times less than reseller web hosting) as you may have to spend around $5 or even free.

The free web hosting is not the right option if you are running your business on your website. Since they don’t charge you anything so you cant expect to get their support when some problem occurs. If their site goes down, your business goes down as well because you cant be sure when their site will become all right. You can’t rely on them but if you go for a paid shared web host then this problem is solved. The amount you have to pay them is decided by the size of your website and the expected traffic to that site. They will make sure that you get their support 24/7 throughout the year if you face any technical problem. You can use the services of a web hosting company Hotgator and use one of the three packages (varying from $4.95 to $12.95) offered by them. Don’t forget that you will have to buy another shared web hosting plan and therefore spending double amount if you decide you set up another website.

Reseller web hosting is more flexible and has a major advantage of economies of scale. If your business is expanding or you are running multiple businesses then you will have you pay a lot for renting multiple shared web hosting every month. But if you choose reseller web hosting, you will be able to set up as many websites as you require.. Even after they grow, you can relocate the resources among them. You can also utilise the left over space by renting it to other small businesses or individuals. With proper planning, you will realise that the reseller web hosting will prove to be cheaper that shred web hosting on a large scale.

The main disadvantage of reseller web hosting is its cost. You can get Hostgator’s (http://www.hostgatorcritics.com shared web hosting package at the cost of $5 to $13 per month but the reseller web hosting package will cost you $25 to $100 for each month depending on your website’s size and traffic. You can reduce this expenditure if you sell the unused space to someone else but then there is no surety that you fill find someone to but it. You may not find a customer when you want one. It is possible that in some months you will have to pay for all the space even when you don’t use all of it.

Another problem is that when you sell the free space to someone, you have to provide him support whenever there is a problem. Since you yourself have no control over such technical problems, it becomes a major problem. You can provide some kind of administrative help but problems like an Internet outage will not get solved by you without the help of your web-hosting provider. When you are unable to help them, you will end up losing not only the confidence of your customers but the customers too. They will shift to other web-hosting provider and you will ruin your name in the business. This will have adverse effect on the financial conditions of your business.



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This article is useful for understanding the hosting industry and studies its dynamics to know what to look for before selecting a web host.

Firstly it is good to have a proper introduction of web hosting chain. It is termed as chain because here about 3 upstream providers serve the end consumer. First the web-hosting provider, who is in direct contact, then comes the web host’s upstream company who maintains the servers and sells space to web hosts, and above that, the data center that serves the purpose of providing the connection and houses the servers. There are some web hosts who act as the server administrator and liase with the data centers directly.

The growth of the web hosting industry in at saturation point due to the presence of hundreds of web-hosting providers claiming to provide cheaper and better services to businesses and individuals. The reason for this is the availability of resources in abundance and at cheaper costs with reducing disk space and data-transfer prices. Its easy to enter the web hosting business as there are large resellers of server space providing cheap hosting and reselling plans that provides ground to incomers to join the business.

Due to growing number of suppliers with cheaper reselling plans, more and more web hosting businesses are coming up providing web-hosting solutions to business and individual websites due to lower fixed costs and investment. Not only that this increase in supply is not caused by factors in any particular country. As Internet is not limited to the boundary of any country so the data centers present in any part of the world can easily provide the servers and web space for a local hosting company. Due to Internet it is easy to communicate to each other and providers can easily exchange their services in the global space.

Maintaining a proper balance between supply and demand is quite good for the customers. But imbalance has forced several new web-hosting providers to offer extremely low prices for their web hosting plans or packages in order to make them self stand in the tough market. Now it’s time for customers to choose the hosting providers having lowered prices from the vast number of providers.

However, continuous decrease in prices is quite disadvantageous for both the providers as well as the customers. By reduces prices, companies are able to earn nominal profit and are even not able to cover their support costs. Customers suffer by getting less support with their web-hosting accounts. It’s quite obvious if the profits do not justify the costs, web-hosting companies will easily close down and takes their clients’ sites with them.

The following are the factors to consider while choosing a web-hosting provider: -

The most important factor to consider is Support for any individual or small business looking for a web host for their websites. The Internet web-hosting provider who is unable to provide the facility of responding to emails within 24 hours is probably having problems providing fast and reliable support services. One can’t ignore the validity of these services especially for the beginners who needs guidance with publishing their websites on the web hosting account provided. The success of any web hosting business depends upon the relationships between web host and web hosting customers. To make business success, provider should be able to provide services when and where required also its crucial for customers to know when their site is going offline for sake of maintenance.

After support next important factor is Stability. It refers to how much uptime one can expect from the web-hosting provider, which in turn depends upon the providers’ servers and network. If the providers are not having reliable and stable providers, it would affect their servers and cause problems for the website. It is must to have an uptime of about 99.5% in the industry, as there are other external factors, which may be beyond control of the provider.

Third factor to consider is Cost which depends on the purpose of the website and budget. The budget may be smaller in case of Personal /Individual websites and so they opt to go with a cheaper web hosting provider, possibly in exchange for support and stability. But in case of business sites as they need better stability and support they opt for expensive host providers. It is most often observed that cheap web hosting providers are able to attract customers in the beginning by offering low prices but afterwards fails in providing quality support to their customers thereby creating problems for them. Also the large numbers of client sites cause sustained high server loads which leads to server crash thus hampering stability.

Another factor, which is not so important, is Location of the server. It is not considered important as it depends upon a user’s ISP/country’s connection to the data center where the server is located. Pings to the server normally tells the network latency to expect when people can access to one’s site. Lower ping rates leads to loading of site faster.

Last but not least one should take time to identify and contact a web host to check their service. This helps in providing an idea of the kind of support that one might receive and helps in deciding the reliability of the provider.



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