Best Hosting Blog

Up until recenetly, finding out who visits your website, where did they come from and which pages did they visit was a difficult task. Free services such as the Webalizer gave partial results, not very usable or deep enough. Other services, which provided real insights and analysis, were more costly and webmasters were usually required to purchase them in addition to the costs of shared hosting accounts.

 And then came Google. The giant search engine bought Urchin in March 2005, one of the main stats providers, and it released a new free version dubbed as Google Analytics in November 2005. The service allows you to find out very interesting things about people who browse your website - for example, you can tell which pages were viewed by users from a distinct source (such as MSN search). You can alos set up goals (such as online purchase of a product) and then have the ability to slice and dice the data related to that goal.

This service is highly recommended. Easy installation and you will be ready to go! Don’t pay the hosting companies for statistical information - there is a better free tool in town. 

When you look at the different packages that hosting companies offer, remember that most chances are that you are not going to use most of the features. The average shared hosting account will do well with any package that offers more than 1GB of sapce (almost any respectable hosting company these days). Bandwith should not be an issue to most sites as well, as even some of the sites I support, who have 50,000 unique visitors per month and hundreds of thousands of page views load up nicely on a simple shared gosting plan.

Today Midphase announce they increase accounts size from 25GB to 200GB, and traffic was doubled to 3,000GB of bandwidth a month. Obviously, they would not offer these “deals” if people would actually take advantage of it. Since almost no one reaches these limits, they can keep increasing them as a marketing tool.

So unless you plan to open the next YouTube, disregard space/bandwidth info when you choose a host.  

When it comes to hosting services, you usually need to choose between hosting your website on a Unix based server (58% of the world’s servers run on Apache), or on a server that runs Microsoft platform (IIS). Usually, Unix shared servers are cheaper, and their majority run on free platforms like Apache.

If you just began building websites, you may be better off with IIS. These servers work with the ASP language and support MS Access databases. However, for those who feel comfortable with PHP programming as well as MySQL databases, go for a Unix account. If you need to use ASP on the server, there is an open source project called Mono, which supports ASP / .NET on Unix servers - see if your hosting company offers/allows you to install it.

I’m currently working on a new system that will allow users to vote for dedicated hosting services. In the meantime, I received some inquiries about which web hosting companies are offering reasonable priced and reliable servers. I tried several different companies, and am currently using LayeredTech. They specialize in dedicated servers and have a large selection of programs. It take them a few days to set up a new server, but they will install all the extras that you can ask for (in it’s open source) without charging you more for most applications.   

As GoDaddy’s customers experienced last weekend when millions of websites were unavailable for hours (hopefully this is an isolated event, they are usually very reliable), you may wake up one day and find out that your website is down.  There are several different error pages that may appear - I’m talking about the 404 message “The page cannot be found”.

If this is your first time to see this message, do not panic.  Your website is usually intact, but cannot be reached via browser. Try to see if you can access it with an FTP program. Then call/chat (if it’s not urgent you can email) with the host tech support. Some hosts have a network status page which lists current network problems.

If you work with a reliable hosting company, they would resolve the matter within hours. If you see that your website is not back online within a day, it’s a sign your host sucks. Do not waste time - start transferring your site to a reliable host. Regardless of how long it would take for the site to be up again, you want to make sure that your website will not experience further downtime. From my experience, if your host didn’t fix the problem within a day, they are not professional enough ad soon a second problem will emerge.   

Some companies, not all of them of course, advertise different Money Back guarantees. From my experience, it’s not always so simple to get your money back, even for products/services that you did not use. If you are not sure that the hosting package that you have found is right for you, or if this is the first time that you pay for hosting services, please check our best hosting comparison table.

We continuously update the information in the table. If you had a great (or a negative) experience with one of the hosts, please leave a comment and we’ll add it to the database.

One last tip - even if the first conversation with the customer service rep does not help to get your money back, wait a few minutes and call again. Especially in large companies, every rep has a different approach, and some of them are more flexible than others.

When you go to buy pizza, you may prefer that special sauce and the personal attention of the hot cashier at your neighborhood pizzeria, rather than calling Domino’s and asking for a delivery. The hosting market also offers a variety of service providers, some of them are gigantic while others will server only a few clients - their friends and family members.   

From my experience, you better go with a large host. The bigger the better. Here’s why: companies like GoDaddy (1.2 million users) make so much money from hosting services, that they can operate a 24 hours phone support center, plus their sys admins create many layers of software and hardware to ensure that website stay up and running - otherwise their credibility and even their existence in on the line.

These companies tend to use less shady marketing techniques - if you’ll take a look at our best hosting services comparison table, you’ll see that the tricks these companies employ are nothing compared with smaller hosts. From my experience, their billing department is also more flexible than the smaller companies. If you feel that you should receive a refund, you have a better chance to get it from a billing person who works for a large company, than to try to get it out of the cousin/brother of the small host’s owner, who happens to answer billing inquiries - as well as sales, tech support and other questions… 

After trying so many web hosting services over the years, I think it’s time to start a blog that would reveal the hidden gems and dirty tricks of hosting companies. On the quest to find the best hosting provider, I had my share of disappointments: websites that went down for days, waiting for hours to talk to uncooperative tech support reps, as well as crazy stories which I’ll share with you in the future. The bottom line is that it is almost always better to choose a company based on service and servers uptime, rather than price. When your website is down or you can’t get anyone to help you to fix a bug or restore a database, you curse the moment you chose a cheap web host. I’ve been there…

Based on my experience, I will show you what to look for and what to beware of in the different plans that each company offers. I will also post updated information on specials, coupons, and tricks that you can use to reduce the price you pay and get free stuff, such as Google and Yahoo text ads. 

Please feel free to contact me at webmaster at besthostingblog.net with questions, comments and information on special offers.

Sincerely,

Matthew Prevel.