Cheap Web Hosting Blog

the only way to choose a quality internet host is to take the selection process one step at a time:. The first item to address in selecting the best hosting service for your requirements is to basically identify what those wants are.

what kind of web site are looking to host? Tiny private homepages will have absolutely different hosting standards from enormous company web sites. To find the best hosting service for you, it’s important to ascertain precisely what you intend to host now, and ideally take into account anything you are getting ready to host in the future. Different hosting firms provide a giant assortment of rates. Companies offering dedicated servers will be much higher than others offering cheap hosting with little bandwidth. Competition from overseas is priced temptingly low for most but there are several considerations. Free hosts are superb for tiny family or fun sites, but aren’t suited to the requirements of net marketers even those just starting.

Rate shouldn’t be a top determining factor till you have narrowed a list primarily based on other factors like. The best hosting services will be offering uptime of over 99%. This could be a warranty to inspire the company to keep all servers up all of the time. Naturally, visitors should also be ready to access your internet site fast. Website hosting firms pay for bandwidth, so you, the one using that bandwidth will be billed in an appropriate way. It is much better to pay for the necessary quantity of information transfer up-front instead of get a shock bill in the post for having gone significantly over your allocated amount. By the same rule, be certain you’ve got an acceptable quantity of drive space reserved. The best hosting support one can hope for is available 24 hours per day, 7 days each week. Most corporations know this, so take their stated hours with a touch of suspicion.

Different internet sites have different wants, and the best hosting service for you must accommodate those wishes.

be certain to see whether other features like shopping carts and secure servers are available or standard. Be certain hosting firms offer some kind of a control panel accompanying hosting.

Many webmasters are looking for a host that provides ffmpeg hosting. I suggest to get a dedicated server because most people want ffmpeg for you tube clones. These sites can get pretty big fast and need more resources than most shared hosting plans could handle.

Affordable entry level dedicated hosting plans where you can install ffmpeg with a vlc player start from $80/month:

Recently I saw that a lot of people seem to get to my site via the search term “Hostmonster sucks“. Well everyone who reads this calm down – it doesn’t. When you google said search term you won’t come across any of the usual horror stories. You won’t find negative blog entries either. Ok one guy complained about downtime in a thread back in 2006. In that same thread someone complained that they had to pay setup fees. Obviously that guy didn’t understand that he has to pay setup fees if he signs up for less than a month. That is clearly stated on the website. I am well embedded in the hosting industry and when I hear negative stories I will tell you about them. Hostmonster does not suck period! For more information regarding Hostmonster please read my Hostmonster review.

HostIcan doesn’t officially award coupons so there isn’t anyone out there in the world wide web who can offer you one. The only HostICan coupon that I am aware of is right at the bottom of the HostICan entry page. Click on the link “feeling lucky” and you will see a “$10 off” coupon for new customers.

Why is this a good, affordable web host? Read my HostIcan review.

So here we go. Slowly, slowly catch a coupon. Today I can give you a coupon code for one of the biggest, most respected hosting providers in the US. There are many coupons for Hostgator littering the web and the problem is that most of them don’t work.

The last man/coupon standing is:

HGC25 – the name is misleading as now it only gives you a $9.94 discount on any plan. It used to be $25 at the beginning of the promotion.

But hey, every little helps! So if you want to sign up with Hostgator anyway you may as well use this coupon and save a little cash.

So coupon mania hasn’t come to an end yet. Here are two Lunarpages coupons that will save you some money if you sign up with this host.

When ordering you will have to type in:

25OffHosting – $25 off any 12/24 months hosting plan
2FreeMonths – will add two additional months to the end of your web hosting plan

You can reedem them now or read my Lunarpages review first.

First of all my previous post about a HostIcan coupon was a blunder and I probably let a few people who wanted to try it down because it didn’t work. First of all I would like to apologize for that and give you some more info on how this mess up came about but first let me give you the new working HostICan coupons :

* 12 months base-host: $95.40 $75.40 – Save $20 with coupon code baseplan-12

* 24 months base-host: $166.80 $116.80 – Save $50 with coupon code baseplan-24

* 12 months tera-host: $143.40 $93.40 – Save $50 with coupon code teraplan-12

* 24 months tera-host: $262.80 $212.80 – Save $50 with coupon code teraplan-24

You can redeem all of these coupons now and they are valid until the 29th of January 2009!

So now some words as to why the previous coupon didn’t work. A guy from HostICan contacted my and offered me a coupon. Of course I was thrilled by the possibility to offer my readers a good coupon from a reliable host and requested one. So we emailed back and forth and the guy said he had activated my coupon and the name was HostIcan-50 and it would give everyone $50 of all the aforementioned plans. That was in early December. A couple of days ago a reader notified me that he had tried using the coupon and it wasn’t working. Quite peed off by this news I emailed HostIcan only to find out that said coupon had never been activated. So I’ve been warned and will double check these coupons from now on. If you try to use the coupon and whether it works or not please leave a comment so that I’ll know about the state of the coupon codes.

Unfortunately this post turned out to contain inaccurate information. Please go up one post and you will find my new working HostIcan coupons.

I’ve got good news for all the readers of this blog who have been looking for a great coupon deal from one of the best affordable hosts around.

This coupon will give you $50 off and expires on 12/03/08 – or 12th December 08 for the Europeans. I.e. it is redeemable until this date.

You can apply this coupon to both the Base and Tera host plans. These are your new prices:

* 12 months base-host: $83.40 $33.40
* 24 months base-host: $166.80 $116.80
* 12 months tera-host: $131.40 $81.40
* 24 months tera-host: $262.80 $212.80

Redeem your coupon here and type in coupon code HostIcan-50 when you order.

I noticed that a lot of companies are very resourceful at finding ever new ways of making money. There are obviously those hosting companies that lure you in through the front door with a fairly cheap flat rate and then charge you extra for everything else you could possibly want from a host. None of those sites are recommended by me. Godaddy is one of those hosts that uses its cloud as the biggest registrar to push its hosting and extract money through offering related services.

It’s become standard practice even for some of the hosts on my site to offer Adwords and Yahoo or MSN Search Marketing Vouchers for which they will bag a referral fee when they refer a client. And you can bet they refer a lot of customers. Other services may include an improved Spam Protection, site templates, Search engine submissions, or other SEO related services.

Hostgator famously caused a storm of protest in the forums earlier this year when they decided to monetize the 404 error pages accross all of its hosted sites. When you hit a 404 on a Hostgator site that doesn’t have a custom error page installed you see a Google Adsense Search box and a Google Adsense Firefox referral link. Personally, I think Hostgator didn’t do themselves any favour by trying to optimize their cash flows on the back of its users. They claim that everyone is free to create a custom 404 page but that requires a certain level of knowledge which I think you can’t necessarily expect. It’s a bit like when you live in a house on a busy street and your landlord decides to plaster the facade with billboards to make some extra cash flow.

Very recently I caught a hosting affiliate program that tried to make a little extra by including a referral link to Paypal. This will work nicely accross a big affiliate base. On the other hand affiliates are by and large pretty web savvy so they are probably more likely to have an account already.

I hope my list of free keyword selector tools is as complete as possible but if you know any that didn’t make it on this list comment and I’ll add them.

Search engines proprietary keyword tools:

Yahoo Overture - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Google Adwords tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Free keyword selector tools:

Aaron Walls – http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ (Ignore the fopen() error and try until it works)
Digitalpoint – http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Keyword Tracker – http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
SlowSeo – http://www.slowseo.com/tools/keyword-selector-tool.php

I had a blogger.com blog previously and one of the first things I did was to remove the navbar. Since then blogger has updated to a new system and I wasn’t sure whether the old css trick would still work. The good news is that it still does work even though your blog may take a while to update. Mine usually takes about 20 minutes to show the changes. To remove your navbar just use the css code below:

#navbar-iframe {
   display: none !important;
}

Just enter that somewhere between the other css # ids. If your navbar is not removed after doing this (and giving it another half an hour to update) please post and I’ll provide a few more methods which are more complicated but work just as well.

For paid blog hosting I would recommend HostICan, Lunarpages or Hostmonster.

WiMax is the next generation wireless technology that will allow wireless broadband access for the “last mile” with DSL speeds. The promise of WiMax is that it will operate over large distances that lie outside the reach of traditional WiFi networks.

Sprint is betting on this new technology and building up a network ahead of the competition. The Reston based telecommunications provider is planning to roll out WiMax networks in Boston and Chicago at the beginning of the second quarter.

Under the revenue share deal with Google Sprint would provide the network access and Google would contribute it’s saech capability and free applications such as instant messaging, e-mail and online calendars.

At the moment nobody seems to be able to catch up with Google’s drive to conquer and dominate new emerging technologies. The free applications only serve as the backbone on which Google seeks to expand it’s ad network.

The CPU quota is surrounded by a lot of mystery, speculations and rumours. Recently, Alligosh, Bluehost’s principal systems administrator dropped into the bluehost forum and gave an exact definition of what constitutes the CPU limits.

The Bluehost CPU quota defined:

The CPU quota is calculated using a set number of runtime CPU seconds over a set number of realtime seconds.

With us, if you use more than 40 CPU seconds over a 60 realtime second period, the cpu quota system will suspend the website until the average over the last three minutes is below 40 CPU seconds. The three minute average is calculated every 15 seconds for the previous three minutes. As soon as your average is below the 40 CPU seconds, you will be unsuspended.

Also, processes are not terminated for going over the quota, as we don’t like killing half done processes. After the process finishes, it’s entire CPU usage is added into the last minute of processes.

If you have 200 processes in a minute that each use .5 CPU seconds, it will get you suspended. If those same processes take two minutes, you won’t get suspended.

Since the last sentence didn’t make any sense Alligosh later clarified that he meant to say .4 CPU seconds which makes sense again.

Bluehost introduces the option to switch on FastCGI in cpanel. This is another step to make Bluehost more competitve and offer their users an ever growing arsenal of useful tools to optimise their websites. In short FastCGI accelerates the apache web server performance hence will speed up your sites. If you want more information about FastCGI you can take a look at the abstract of “FastCGI – the forgotten treasure” by Peter Simmons or if you’re really geeky even read all of it!! If you want to take a look at the other features that Bluehost offers go ahead.

A couple of years ago I heard good stories about this host and always thought about recommending them but then came the first day of researching this host….

It was a couple of days prior to the writing of this post that I googled whether I could find any negative stories about Hostmonster (“Hostmonster sucks”). One of the first stories that caught my eye was this thread by someone who says he is leaving Dreamhost for Hostmonster. Read through this thread. Not everything this guy says is objective or even well informed but you really get the impression that Dreamhost messed up. The fact that Dreamhost is not necessarily brilliant at it’s core business (hosting websites) occured to me earlier when I did a search for “Dreamhost” and found the “Anatomy of an ongoing disaster“. It makes for an interesting read to say the least. This was not a disaster. Dreamhost’s failure to prevent multiple downtimes over extended periods equates to a nuclear fallout in the web hosting industry. What finally prompted me to warn people about Dreamhost is my classic “Dreamhost sucks” query. Now what do we see when we run one of those on a good host? Very few relevant results. A relevant result is when you see your queries highlighted in the main page title and then the description below the title.

Now, the Dreamhost sucks query returns numerous relevant results. Normally you hardly get 3 or 4 good search results on Google’s first page with any other host. “Dreamhost sucks” returns results up to the 4th page (>40 results in Google!). So if up to 40 different people felt the urge to voice their dismay about this web host you should really steer clear. I have to say that I won’t consider to give Dreamhost space on this site anytime soon. If changes for the better become evident I may rethink my decision. But for the time being Dreamhost continues to suck until further notice.