Android Corner

What Do I Want to Accomplish Right Now?

Choose a web hosting service that has you covered!

You'll have to decide what it is you want, before you even start looking at web hosting services and their plans. What you're looking to do will greatly affect what you should or shouldn't sign up for! (All of these links zoom down to their respective places on the page)

• What kind of site(s) will you be managing? A blog? Small business site? Video sharing site? Social networking site? Online gaming site? Web directory? An affiliate store? Or, are you looking to get into the hosting business, yourself?
• Are you moving an existing website over? Or are you simply looking to create new websites from scratch?
• What's the most you're willing to spend, per month? $5? $25? $100? $250? Nothing? Or is money not an object?
• Do you need your own server? Or, would you mind having your websites reside on a server box with dozens of other customers, to save on cost?
• Do you know how to install a website by yourself? Or, would you prefer using a program that will do it for you?
• Do you need someone to manage the server for you? Or, are you a quick learner, and good with computers on at least an intermediate level?

What Do I Want to Accomplish In the Future?

Think ahead, and save yourself from a potential headache

As in a chess game, it's important to think ahead when choosing a web host. Things change. With high success comes high profile issues, and higher operating costs. What will you do?

• Do you know how to restore a website and database? Do you have an immediate solution in case your website goes down, is corrupted, or is hacked?
• When your site gets real big, will you be financially able to take on a more expensive monthly hosting plan? (...mainly because you'll be forced to!)

What Kinds Of Sites Will You Be Managing?

Some kinds of websites use more server resources than others. Two major resources you'll need to know about are bandwidth (the data rate outputted by your site, measured every time someone views a page, watches a video, hears an MP3 or downloads something), and disk space (the total amount of data saved to your hosting account).

While disk space is usually not a problem for most commonplace sites, bandwidth can tend to be the first thorn in your side as a site grows. Here's a good rule of thumb: if your site typically involves the download and/or upload of many large files like videos, music, print-ready graphic files, or allows for user-uploaded and downloaded content - your bandwidth is going to crank into overdrive if it gets popular enough.

Here's a list of various kinds of websites, with an approximation of how resource-intensive they are. Find the category your site is in, and you'll have a better idea of where your site is headed:

• Low Bandwidth Sites: Blogs, personal or mostly text-based web sites, small business sites, informational text-only sites, affiliate sales sites, online stores, web directories, small to mid-size forums.


• High Bandwidth Sites: Social networking sites & all user-submitted content sites, video sites (like YouTube & Vimeo), Flash gaming sites, large forums.

Are You Moving An Existing Website Over?

Perhaps you've 1) purchased a fully-functional website through a private sale or auction, or 2) have had a freelance web developer create a site for you. You're now looking to choose a web hosting service that can move it from their sever account to yours.

If you have the first scenario -- find out the current bandwidth rate (per month) that the site outputs, and simply go with a plan that covers it. So, if the site used 1 GB of bandwidth per month, you'll know that a plan offering a maximum of 3 GB will do just fine.

If the latter scenario applies to you, you'll most likely want to find the lowest plan out there. Brand new sites always start off utilizing very little bandwidth, simply because they have little to no activity...unless you become the next overnight internet success, that is!

What's Your Monthly Budget?

The only choice for any legit, serious website is paid hosting. Plans can range from around $5 per month to hundreds per month, depending on what your sites require! It's up to you to create a quick annual budget, check them against your income, and determine what the most you can spend will be.

I'll be repeating this statement many times: it's insane to start off with a new website and NOT choose the cheapest, smallest web hosting plan.

Web hosting services always charge extra for, well, "extras." These may include a cPanel interface, additional e-mail addresses, sub-domains and IP addresses -- even hardware specs including the type & brand of processor chip your server has, additional memory, and much more. The most expensive of these "extras" is typically memory. A good rule of thumb is to always start off small, monitor your usage, and upgrade your plan only when you need to.

Do You Really Need Your Own Server?

There are two main categories of hosting, shared and dedicated. With Shared hosting, you'll be "sharing" space on a server box with other customers. It could be dozens of other customers - the limit is set by the web hosting service themselves, and they usually stop adding customers to a server when they believe it is 'full enough.'

There's one more form of shared hosting, called VPS. With VPS web hosting, a large portion of a server box is dedicated to you, the paying customer. VPS typically offers more resources and also comes with managed services, so that you won't have to get up at 3 AM when your server goes down. Almost all VPS providers even upgrade the server software for you -- something you'd have to do on your own if you had your own box. Read more about finding the best VPS host for your purposes, if this route interests you.

Dedicated hosting means the entire server is yours, and yours alone. You don't actually own the server hardware, nor will you ever see the box in person - but you're the only one who uses that box. You have the option of managing the box itself through an administration panel (for an extra price). All of the resources being used on the server box (memory, disk space and bandwidth) are only being used by your sites alone.

You may have already thought that "shared" hosting sounds pretty awful - but in actuality, a site running on a shared server and a comparable one running on a dedicated server may have an unnoticeable performance difference! It depends greatly on the hardware you're using, and in the case of the shared option - how much its resources are already being used by your colleagues.

The only practical time to get a dedicated server is when you are running a massive site, especially a video hosting site or any other high traffic + high bandwidth site, that is a resource hog. Otherwise, you will be spreading your profit margin very thin, as the cost of dedicated hosting typically starts at approximately $2,200 per year! Determine how long it will take to break even with such a cost, if you intend on doing so.

Do you know how to install a website?

If not, you might want to look into a web hosting service that offers a program called Fantastico. This server-based tool for cPanel will allow you to instantly install one of many popular website content management software packages, including Wordpress and Joomla.

Do you need someone to manage your server?

It doesn't stop at simply shared or dedicated servers - there's yet another option for dedicated server subscribers: managed servers. If you choose to go with a managed service, all of your administrative issues will be taken care of by a representative of the web hosting service provider, at the cost of a significant amount of extra money per month. So, if your server box goes down or experiences other service interrupting errors, an administrator will notice and fix the situation for you. Otherwise, it is up to you to monitor your own server, and address or fix issues as they arise.

These issues are simple if you have access to cPanel, or any other backend administrative login. However, if this admin login fails, your hosting company should still be able to restart your server for you (usually after you've submitted a ticket, and waited for a response).

It's a good practice to go with managed server service if you're computer illiterate, or are scared of having to fix server and site-related issues in the heat of the moment. You can always stop the managed service after a pay period, too. However, if you've used for computers for years and get the 'gist' of how things work, managing your own server isn't rocket science.

One more thing, there are "semi-managed services" these days. It's practically common with higher-end hosting packages, such as VPS and dedicated. With semi-managed, you'll have 24/7 support ticket access where a representative will be there to help out with minor server issues that are over your head. Be sure to choose a web hosting service that has semi-management, because everyone should have a backup plan if something goes terribly wrong -- such as a hacker attack, data loss or a runaway script.

Do you know how to back up a website and database?

Things don't always run smoothly. There absolutely will be instances where your site or server goes down, for whatever reason. Therefore, it's important to know how to backup your site! Thankfully, this is a fairly simple process. If your web hosting service allows you to do so - you can set your website for daily automatic backups, and simply revert to the most recent backup in times of a disaster.

Alternately, if you have no other options - you can backup your website files to your server via an FTP program (which becomes tedious for sites that have hundreds of videos or other large files).

Manually backing up a database is done through phpMyAdmin - an interface that lets you browse through, edit, delete or copy databases. Through this service, you can copy your databases directly to your desktop as a raw text file, or a ZIPped file.

When your site gets real big...will you be able to afford it?

Many webmasters would call this a "good problem," unless, of course, we're talking about a site that uses a lot of traffic but pays out very little. While web traffic does not always equate to big payoffs, it may result in big expenses.

The three categories of websites that are infamously known as being expensive to upkeep and difficult to monetize are video displaying or sharing sites (similar to YouTube), social networking sites (similar to MySpace) and gaming sites (similar to PopCap). All three, when well developed and heavily visited, will surely result in high operating costs just for the bandwidth alone. Don't forget, if your RAM isn't what it used to be, you'll be paying a very hefty amount for an upgrade.

Can you afford it? That's the question of the day. The best way to handle a situation like this is to take the web hosting service you've decided upon, and look at all of their pricing tiers. Calculate the annual cost of each plan, as compared with the annual revenue from your sites, and see if you're happy with your current profit margin. Do the sites pay for themselves, or are you going into the red? Can you kick in the cost through any of your other income sources?

If your site is using more bandwidth than you've been contracted for - you'll assuredly get an immediate email from the hosting company.

In these cases, you'll have to either remedy the issue (which is usually impossible to do), or be forced to upgrade your hosting plan to the next tier...or else.

This is the fate that has befallen anyone who has unexpectedly achieved a first page ranking on Google for a major keyword, or has been mentioned on a major news source that has resulted in many days of residual traffic and exposure. In other words, it can happen anytime, any day! So, before you choose your web hosting service, make sure their bandwidth limitations can cover anything unexpected like this.

What's the Catch with "Unlimited" or "Unmetered" Bandwidth or Disk Space?

Unmetered bandwidth...sounds awesome! Right? Wrong... as your intuition may have suggested, there's no such thing as "unlimited" anything, as it all comes from somewhere and does something once it becomes "too much."

One of the biggest trends in webhosting was the "unlimited bandwidth and disk space" hook. While this may be true, there's a good deal of fine print behind it, as there are OTHER attributes being monitored and limited. For instance, unlimited providers will typically cap off the number of "inodes" (files) being accessed per month. In this sense, a "file" is being defined under Unix lingo as "any file, directory or file system object." As you might have imagined, you'll be using an awful lot of these things, as your entire site is made up of them, and is being accessed constantly, multiple times, by every visitor who visits your site every day.

Another attribute that is secretly being limited in an "unlimited bandwidth" plan is your CPU usage. Most hosts will throw a red flag if you're using around 20-25% of the shared server's CPU for more than a minute, up to a minute and a half. If you're using a decent host, you'll get fair warning. Many others will simply shut your site down, and you'll really be in hot water.

This, of course, is all food for thought, and hopefully explains the "red tape" over the attractive word known as "unlimited."

Important Web Hosting Terms & Features

These are the "need to know" terms when researching a web hosting service, along with several must-have services:

• Bandwidth: The rate of data transfer. Your bandwidth goes up when someone downloads something from your site, watches a video, listens to an MP3, or even loads a page. Bandwidth increases as more people visit your site, and perform more of these actions.
• Disk space: The available space on your server's hard drive, which is where all of your files are stored.
• Domains: All hosts let you know how many domain names are allowed for each account. Domain names, in this case, are essentially individual websites that you're managing. They get their own partitioned space on the server.
• Uptime: Most hosts claim "99.9% uptime." This means that they are pretty certain that your sites will be up and running 99.9% of the time.
• Parked Domains: Parked domains do just that - sit there, parked. People who have no time to develop websites for some of their domain names will simply "park" it, and possibly display ads, hoping to get a few unexpected clicks for some extra money. Some hosts allow for parked domains, depending on your account.
• Subdomains: Subdomains are like a "prefix" before a domain. For instance, in "test.mysite.com," the domain name is "mysite.com," with a sub "test" before it. Subdomains are considered to be entirely separate from the domain they're attached to. In the previous example, you'd have two domains/accounts: mysite.com, and test.mysite.com. Some hosts limit the number of subdomains you can have, depending on the account you've subscribed to.
• MySQL: MySQL is database management software. You'll need this to create databases, and it's a necessity if you're looking to create a site based on a platform like Wordpress, Joomla, or most other CMS's. Virtually all web hosts have MySQL as a standard part of their hosting packages.
• phpMyAdmin: This software resource makes things easier when creating, modifying, deleting, downloading or uploading MySQL databases. Although complex, phpMyAdmin is a big help for those who don't know a thing about database management or editing - and is highly recommended for anyone seeking web hosting!
• PHP: This server-side scripting language is also included in basically every hosting package you'll come across. It's also necessary to run CMS's, blogs and other such website installation software.
• Apache: An HTTP server software that assists in sever-side support. You might not have much interaction with it, but one of its most favorable features is "mod rewrite," which allows yourself or downloaded website software to "rewrite" the URLs of a website, to be search engine friendly.
• cPanel: cPanel is an administrator's control panel that helps tweak and access various areas of the server and its accounts. cPanel is always an extra cost on top of your monthly fee, and is vital if you have a dedicated server. It lets you create or delete new accounts, tweak site and user settings, check the server status and resource usages, reboot the server, and perform dozens of other functions. Without cPanel, you can perform these tasks through shell commands.

What's the Best Web Hosting Service?

The answer to this question is subjective, and it depends on many factors like customer service & response time, quality of service and obviously what you get for your package.

Shared hosting has become extremely affordable these days, with the most notable providers being Hostgator and BlueHost shared hosting plans. with pricing starting under $7 a month.

Shared hosting only gets you so far -- once you've hit a glass ceiling and need a new level of responsiveness and 24-hour support, it's always best to consider the next step up from shared hosting, which is VPS hosting.

What Other Options Are There?

There's a dizzying number of other web hosting services out there today - ranging from Fortune 500 companies to privately-owned "basement" services. A few things you'll want to look for are uptime and reliability; that is, having a service that is up and running all the time, getting the best "bang for your buck" -- the most options at the lowest cost, and good customer support -- a web hosting service that cares about you as a customer - and not just a dollar sign.

Some web hosting services have notoriously been known for poor customer service, unexpected account closings and other issues. While I hate bad-mouthing any service of which I have not experienced myself, I have heard nothing but complaints from customers about services like 1&1, Yahoo and GoDaddy Hosting.

To Sum It All Up...

When looking to host brand new websites, choosing a web hosting service and plan is a simple task: get the smallest shared web hosting plan with the smallest price (anything less than $10/month would be ideal), and simply upgrade only when absolutely necessary!

If your website(s) require more muscle, VPS or ultimately dedicated hosting is the way to go. Use your site's existing server data to help decide on a plan that is financially and technologically feasible for your means. As always, never go for "overkill" in terms of server requirements. Only pay for what's necessary, and upgrade when you have to!

It can be hard finding a reliable web host that offers the features you need for your site. There are so many choices in companies and levels of service, it can be difficult to pick one that works for you. Use the information this article provides to help you make an informed decision.
Before registering your domain name with your chosen web host, ensure that the provider accepts popular, secure payment methods. Payment services like PayPal can ensure that they can’t charge you without you knowing about it first.
If you plan to upload a lot of information, look into your potential host’s upload method. It’s likely that you would benefit from using a server with FTP capability. If you have no experience with FTP servers, make sure you can use a software to manage your uploads.
Take the time to call and email the customer support team for a web host before making any decisions. You have to know that they will help you in a pleasant, professional way. Excellent customer service will save you much time and frustration in the future.
Find out which plans are offered by each potential web host you’re considering. Some of the free sites may merely offer static pages. This would mean that you could not add your own scripts. This will limit the scope of your site, so you may want to upgrade to a paying host.

Think twice about going with a free web hosting provider. While free sounds great, it might not be such an awesome deal later on. If your site is growing, you might be stuck with a web host that can’t grow with you. Switching to a new web host can be a real hassle, so you may do well to pay for a reliable one.
Find out what kind of server access a potential web host provides. FTP-based servers are commonplace, but demanding of users. If you are a novice, you would do well to seek out a web host with a simple control panel. If your website contains only a few pages or is limited to basic content, a simple control panel is sufficient. However, complex and advanced websites may necessitate a more complicated server.
When selecting a web host, look for a company that offers you detailed site statistics and traffic information to your website. Include a visitor counter on your site, and use it as a comparison to the amount of traffic that your web host says you get. If you have an online business, use this information to adjust your methods to your audience.
If you have a computer that operates on a dial up connection, you need to avoid doing your own website hosting. A reliable connection is necessary to ensure that a site is available all the time. Anything less than that can result in too much downtime and decreased user access to your website.
As mentioned earlier, it can be difficult to find the right hosting service. With so many different things to consider, it can be daunting to narrow it down to just one company. Make it easier by keeping the above tips in mind, and you’ll find the best web host for your site.

Although the modern Internet community is moving towards social networks and clouds, there is still some space for traditional free web hosting that enables to publish a custom web page, or custom blog, or other “manually” build website on the web at absolutely no cost.
In this article we provide an overview of the most desirable and the best free web hosting features as well as suggest top 10 free web hosting providers that in our opinion offer the best free hosting services in terms of offered features and customer support.

Free web hosting no ads stands for a web host service or provider that does not add any adverts (banners, pop-ups, text links, etc.) to free web pages and website that they host for free.

Free domain hosting stands for webhost services or providers that enable clients to host their own domain names (registered at 3rd party domain registration service) on webhost’s servers at no additional cost.
And free domain hosting can also refer to website hosts services that provide a free domain name included with their free webhosting plan.

Free PHP MySQL hosting stands for the web page hosting service or provider that offers the popular PHP scripting and MySQL database support included with their free website hosting plan.

In regards to the best free hosts, we can suggest to check the following list of the top 10 free hosting providers that we’d recommend to consider using to host your free web site, weblog, community forums, image gallery, etc.:

1. Biz.nf (PHP, MySQL, WordPress, Joomla, Free .co.nf domain, No ads)
2. Free Hosting EU (Blog / Site builder, No ads, Free .eu.pn domain)
3. AwardSpace.net (PHP, MySQL, Email Sending, No Ads, Free subdomain)
4. Biz.ly (Website & Blog builder, Photo album, Free .biz.ly domain)
5. FreeHostia.com (PHP, MySQL, 1-click Scripts, No Ads, Free subdomain)
6. Wix.com (Easy Flash website builder + mobile sites, blogs, etc.)
7. ByetHost.com (PHP, MySQL, PHPbb, SMF, Wiki, Free subdomain)
8. x10Hosting.com (Support cPanel, PHP, FTP, No ads, Free subdomain)
9. Yola.com (Visual website builder, add videos, photos, shopping cart)
10. Webs.com (Easy site builder, blog, forms, polls, Free subdomain)

and also see visitor’s reviews of best free website hosting providers.

Almost Free Web Hosting

And in case you’d like to host your lovely website with much more reliable and customer focused web hosting provider that a free web host can not afford, and if you do not mind to pay few dollars for the advanced service, you might be interested to consider the following website hosting providers that offer quite cheap (almost free hosting) service:

1. HostGator
2. iPage
3. JustHost

and also you can take a look at top 10 web hosting list at PRchecker.info site.

Before discussing free domain name registration options let’s first define the meaning of the domain name and what that domain names are all about. According to a short definition and not going into very technical details the domain name is a “string of letters and numbers that is used to name organizations, computers and addresses on the internet“, so basically, the domain name is the easy to remember name of web address or website.

Fast development and deep penetration of Internet into all aspects of our life motivates businesses and even many individuals to go online i.e. to create their business or personal websites that all should have their own domain name to make their sites easier to locate the web.
We should also note that nowadays domain name is not only a name of the website but it more and more often becomes a well known brand (e.g. Google.com, Yahoo.com), a trade name, or identity of a well known Internet resource (e.g. PRchecker.info, the domain name of this site).

So that it becomes quite important to choose a proper domain name that is short, easy to remember and represents the website very well. No doubt large companies can afford to buy even very expensive short names from the current owners, however, that’s not the case for personal or even small business sites owners who do not want to invest too much making their first steps on the Web.

Although that is not so expensive to purchase a domain name with such most popular extensions like .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, etc. there are still cases when the site owner does not want or cannot afford to buy a domain name even at quite low price, and in this case there is such option as free domain name that we discuss in this article.

Please note that there are a lot of free domain name scams on the web that trick Internet users offering free domains and making them fill in dozens of web forms, sing up for tons of “free offers”, etc. however, finally they never give away a promised free domain. Be aware. You’ve been warned.

In this article we propose to consider the following option to register a free domain name, whose that are not scams and can be used safely:

1. A completely free domain registration
2. A free domain name included with purchase of some service

Such completely free domain services are usually powered by companies that provide free and low cost web services (such as free website hosting, unlimited shared hosting, VPS hosting, low cost domain registration, etc.) and thus they are able to pay the costs of free service offering extended/advanced services for a small or not very small fee. Such totally free domain services are recommended for small personal website owners, or for those who just start on the web and thus do not want to spend money at first.

You can check list of free domain providers that we recommend to consider at the best free domains page where we provide some extended information about the best domain name free services that we personally tested and can assure they are legit and solid services.

As for the second option, there is a number of quite well known and reputable web hosting providers that offer to register a free domain name in case the customer purchases a yearly paid web hosting plan.
In case that is required to save on domain name registration and also to buy a web hosting plan at a reduced yearly price, that might be a good idea to check and carefully consider the following web hosts that are listed in PRchecker.info best web hosting list and thus probably worth some attention:

• JustHost – Just one hosting plan, Anytime Money Back Guarantee;
• iPage – Green web hosting, Drag and Drop Site Builde included;
• HostGator – Unlimited web hosting plans, cPanel hosting control panel;

However, when it comes to a web site for the online business we do not recommend to become attracted with the ease of registering a free domain name, but we’d suggest to spend some time learning the matter and to buy a cheap domain name yourself e.g. via Godaddy or perhaps to buy not cheap but a perfectly matching domain e.g. via Sedo domain name marketplace.