Is Cheap Domain Hosting Right For Your Business?

Cheap domain hosting is easy to find online these days. There are many different web hosts out there that offer you the ability to have your own website online for just a few dollars a month. But do you know if cheap domain hosting is really right for you or if you need something more? And how do you choose between all the hosts out there with all their confusing plans and promises?

First of all, it helps to understand the difference between the types of hosting that are available. The cheapest type of domain hosting is usually shared web hosting. There are also things like hosting on a virtual private server and hosting on a dedicated server. A virtual private server, commonly known as VPS, is more expensive than shared hosting and dedicated server is the most expensive of all.

A dedicated server means that an entire server, which is a physical machine that holds the information just like your computer does, is dedicated just to your domain. You're essentially renting the entire machine just for your website. Naturally, this is the most expensive kind of hosting. This type of hosting is best for large business websites that get of traffic or that have to hold huge amounts of information like customer databases. Most people won't need a dedicated server for a website. Most people can use cheap domain hosting quite successfully.

A virtual private server is a server that's partitioned into different virtual segments and your domain is hosted on one of those segments. Shared hosting means that your domain and a number of others also share the same server. The chief difference between a virtual private server and shared hosting is that on a VPS the segment your domain is in is somewhat protected. It's like a virtual environment all its own so it's protected against things like viruses or other problems that can happen to other domains on the same server.

Shared hosting offers no such protections. If one of the domains encounters a problem that causes a server hiccup, everyone's domains will go down on that server. This is pretty rare however, which is why shared hosting is so popular even for many business websites. It's cheap domain hosting that tends to work just as well as other types for most people.

Choosing cheap domain hosting is a little bit tricky because there are so many hosts out there and so many different plans. They'll have one plan for this much data transfer and another plan where you can have so many gigabytes of information on your website, and it can be a bit overwhelming.

Choose a web host that offers you the most flexible plan with things like unlimited data transfer and gigabytes. Unless you have a website that explodes with traffic, chances are you're not going to violate any limits of your shared hosting. Even with cheap domain hosting, make sure the web host will be available to help you 24/7, and don't be fooled by super cheap plans that require two years of payment in advance. You want the ability to change your cheap domain hosting from month-to-month if you get service that you're not happy with.

For more information on cheap domain hosting and learn about different hosting options, please visit the web hosting package page.

Online Business And Web Hosting Outages

What do you do when your web hosting provider has an outage that you are unaware of? Well since this just happen to me today I'm still thinking about how I can prevent this in the future (failover). I tried a live chat with the support desk and didn't receive a chat response but I did get an email which stated that my website loaded fine. They even sent me a screenshot of my website to show that it launched with no issue. It is very disconcerting for a newbie like myself (over 1 year in the game) to experience hosting downtime that is totally out of my control.

Here is how I found out, I logged into Google this morning to check my indexed pages and AdSense earnings. While in the webmaster tools under sitemaps I noticed that no pages where indexed, then I looked at the dashboard and all sites needed to be verified... [reason: server timeout.]

Prolonged website downtime for me means that the hundreds of articles I've posted with links back to my home page and pages within my website will not work. This could lead to me having to resubmit the articles after the website comes back up. So far I've not received any emails from article directories stating that my links don't work so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I tried to bring up my URL and it timed out, I tried to log into my host's control panel and it timed out. So I did a Google search on the hosts control panel IP and found a hit on WebHostingTalk.com and somebody said the host had been down for 6 hours.

I checked the host's forum and didn't find anything regarding the outage. I also checked their support update blog and the last entry dated 2/27/08 was regarding their phone support outage. Nothing on the page indicated they had an server or router outage.

So, I kept refreshing the Control Panel URL and it started to load, then I opened a separate tab (in IE 7) and the home page for one of my sites came up. So I went over to Google and revivified my websites (I already had the meta tag on the homepages so it was a simple process).

Although I am a Network and Systems Admin by trade I don't have any experience with web servers or hosting (which is why I outsource). But what I do know is that if this was a server outage then failover to another server is doable (clustering) according to precisioneffect.com/features/. But, I'm willing to bet if this occurred as a result of a router failure there may not be a failover option. I sent a reply to my hosts support this morning to see if they have any logs that an outage occurred.

For the record, I have been very happy with the service I receive from my hosting provider although I've found others who have not been so happy. I currently run 4 websites so maybe I haven't out grown them yet.

I suggest to anyone running an Online Business using a hosting provider to carefully go over their failover options in case of an outage, read their forums and support pages so you know when scheduled maintenance or anything else may affect you. Also, shop around and compare companies to your needs and maybe get references of others who outsource and run a similar number of websites.

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