Host Wars! The Battle of Space (Disk Space)
Just recently, I received an email from one of the twenty hosting companies that I’m affiliated with and before I even opened it I knew what it was going to say. Pretty much the same thing that the last five emails from other hosting companies have said. “Dear Affiliate, we’re happy to announce that we’ve included more disk space to our basic hosting plans which now offer over 20,000 Mb (mega-bytes) of disk/storage space to your customers.” And the Hosting companies battle on!
Now don’t get me wrong, from a marketing and advertising viewpoint, offering my customer 20,000 Mb of disk space instead of 5 or 10 thousand is something that just “sweetens the pot.” Why not have extra space? Sometimes more is better. But unless you’re the only person on an island with an internet connection and a hosting account thats going to be used by a small third world nation, or unless you’re Ebay (TM), I don’t see where the average company, even with a website that has 100 or more pages with many graphics, is even going to come close to using 20,000 Mb of disk/storage space per month.
My modestly small website wbwebhosts dot com has twelve pages that get a total of around 200 page hits a day. Last time I checked I was averaging 2 Mb of disk/storage usage per month. Naturally, I’m sure that if everybody who was hosted with a certain company was somehow able to use 20,000 Mb of disk each month, the hosting company would run out of server space.
But thats OK though! Advertising all that storage space is a “Hook” to lure people in. Nothing wrong with that. As I said above it’s better to have too much storage space then not enough. But look for other things that the company offers they may set them apart from other web hosting services. Is the set-up and Domain free? Where are there servers located? C-panel control (very easy control panel for beginners)? Price per month? Transfer (monthly traffic allowed)?
Well the Host wars will continue! Maybe by this time next year they’ll be offering 30,000 Mb to attract new customers. To most unsuspecting people this will seem like a great deal and will be happy and feel lucky that they have found such a hosting company. By offering more disk/storage space, the hosting companies will lure more customers and affiliates, affiliates in turn will gain more customers and the customers will be happy with the excess of space. Oh well, as long as everybody is happy…..
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Don’t Forget About Email Requirements When Choosing A Web Host
One of the factors that many people forget about when they are looking for a web host is email. The types of accounts offered along with sizes and limitations are as varied as the web hosting companies are themselves.
Every web host should provide you with the ability to have several email accounts, most will offer up to 10 with a basic low end account. Another feature to look for is a company that offers an account that will accept and hold any email sent to your domain that does not match an email address. This is due to the fact that many people misspell names and such and therefore emails get lost.
You basically have three different email services available to you. The first is probably the one that most are familiar with, the POP or post office protocol works like a normal inbox such as your Outlook Express. You will be given a certain amount of storage space you are allowed but generally can only access from one computer.
The second choice called IMAP or internet message access protocol will allow you to use your email account on many different computers so that you can access it at work and home.
The third choice you have is a web based email which is of course the most flexible, allowing you to access your email from anywhere on the planet with a computer and an internet connection though a web browser. I like having all the options.
The next consideration that you have is on the size limit of storage you have. Nearly every web hosting company will have some sort of restriction on the size of account you can have as well as on the size of messages that can be sent. This is especially crucial if you are using your email to send pictures or documents. One key thing you want to do if you are using outlook or outlook express is to select the notify option for when your email is opened so that you know it was received. Many times if a file is too large you will have no other way of knowing. If you don’t get the notification then you know they didn’t receive your message.
Now, back to actual storage space, you should pick a web host company that offers a reasonable balance between the bandwidth limits and the size of the mailbox storage. For example if you have an account that offers 500MB of bandwidth but only a 3 MB data storage for email accounts.
Another important issue to look for is outgoing email limits. If you are using your account for business you may need to send emails out to a large number of people several times a day, if the system automatically flags that as spam you will not be able to send them. Check the limitations on outgoing mail and be sure it suits your needs.
Gregg Hall is an author and internet marketing consultant living in Navarre Florida. Find more information on low cost web hosting at http://www.lowcostwebhostingpackages.com
Tags: cheap web hosting, reliable web hosting, Web HostingHow To Decide Between Free Web Hosting And Paid Web Hosting For Your Blog
There are many choices for web hosting companies available and for blogging there are many free choices offered as well. The question that comes to mind to me is, “Is free webhosting cheap?” What I mean by that is what is it going to cost me in terms of functionality and accessibility. Let’s take a look at some of the comparisons between free web hosting and paid web hosting.
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of years then you know that blogging has become a formidable force on the internet and has allowed many people to get an online presence that may otherwise have been unable to do so. Many of these people are making their living by blogging and some like Jason Calcanis have become wealthy from it. Jason built a network of blogs over about eighteen months and sold them to AOL for nearly $30 million! That’s a pretty good ROI. Anyway, I digress, back to our discussion on web hosting.
If you have decided that you want to operate a blog your next choice will probably be what blogging platform or software you want to use to accomplish you blogging. Relax, it’s easy. Most of the blogging software out there today is open source which means it’s, you guessed it, free! In this instance free is not a bad thing, I use Wordpress almost exclusively, it is free and has more options that I care to learn or use. There are other blogging software options available, but I won’t go into them here because this article is about web hosting.
As far as web hosting for your blog you can choose free web hosting or paid so let’s take a closer look at our choices. First off, you can choose Blogger which is owned by Google. Blogger is a good program especially for beginning bloggers because it is easy to use, it is web based, and the price is right. It’s free. With that said however, if your intention is to blog professionally and possibly run a large number of blogs with automated content then Blogger is not for you. I have seen Google shut down many blogs because they considered them to be spam. If you want control over your own destiny then you want to use paid web hosting and have your blogs on your own server, or at least a shared server.
Still in the realm of free web hosting you also have a fairly new option from Wordpress who now offers a free web hosting for Wordpress blogs at their .com site as opposed to the .org site where you get the software and plug ins. The problem is that like Google, they are very restrictive with what you can put on your blogs and how you update them.
Another big issue with free web hosting is that you will usually have to display advertising of some sort which “pays” for your web hosting. This is great for the web hosting companies because it gives them tons of virtual real estate out there with their name on it, not so great for you. If you are blogging professionally, and if you are trying to make money for it then you are blogging professionally, you do not want any distractions on your site that leads visitors away from your site unless you are being paid for it like you do when someone clicks on an Adsense ad or affiliate banner.
My recommendation is that you pay for your own hosting because it gives you a wealth of choices, much more storage space, and takes almost all restrictions off of you within reason. There are still some web hosting companies that will not allow you to host gambling or porno blogs but other than that you are pretty open. Paid web hosting is not that expensive. You can get an account that will host as many blogs as most people will want to deal with a few bucks a month. So for the cost of a domain name and your hosting you will probably be around $100 a year. That is a pretty cheap investment for something that enables you to plug into all the ways of earning money on the net.
Gregg Hall is an author and internet marketing consultant living in Navarre Florida. He operates over 500 websites personally and therefor has a lot of experience dealing with web hosting companies. For more on inexpensive Web Hosting or other web hosting issues go to http://www.virtualwebhostingplus.com
Tags: blog hosting, cheap web hosting, hosting for my blog, reliable web hosting, Web Hosting