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Don’t let a bad web host ruin your online business. Get all the essential information you need from a reliable web hosting review and make no mistakes that you will regret for the rest of your life.

Everybody knows that for a website to be visible on the internet, it needs to be hosted. Everybody knows, too, that thousands of web hosting service providers literally exist out there. The challenge now is to choose from among these service providers the ultimate one to host your site.

Indeed, you cannot just simply go for the web hosting company that appears at the top of the search results page. You need to shop around and explore all your options, so you can be sure that you can have your money’s worth, and also, so you will not have to change web hosts unnecessarily. You must be aware of the inconvenience and the potential risks when you have to change hosting companies. You may lose all your data, and starting from scratch really can be very frustrating. If that’s not bad enough, there is also a big tendency of losing customers and opportunities.

Thus, it is only essential that you check all your resources first in order to find the right web hosting service provider, and one of the best sources of information is a reliable review site of web hosting companies. If you are not internet savvy, you will find all these things overwhelming. Looking for the right web host on your own can be pretty confusing. Do you exactly the things that you need to look out for? What do disk space and bandwidth mean? What is meant by uptime percentage? These are only some of the many questions that will clog your brain.

Before you feel like you are in some kind of Twilight Zone, be pleased to know that by simply reading a review of web hosting companies, you will be able to make a smart decision. You can find plenty of sites that offer reviews of web hosting service providers when you make a free search of the internet, but go for one that is not connected with any of the companies being reviewed. This way, you can be sure that the review is unbiased and fair.

Websites that do this kind of thing usually focus on the top web hosting companies, so you can narrow down your choices. A typical review site compares the different companies based on factors like reliability, customer support, disk space and bandwidth requirements, and price, among others.

Aside from review sites, it can also be a good thing to participate in technological forums because these are where you are likely to find the “experts” of the field. Some forum sites of this kind require you to be a member first before you can participate, but that should not be a problem because it usually takes only a few minutes and a few mouse clicks to become a full fledged member of the site. Keep in mind that a good web host can spell the success of your online business.

In scouting for a web hosting company, always ensure the disk space and amount of traffic needed.

Amount of Disk Space

The requirement of a small or medium web site is between 10 and 100MB of disk space.

When looking at the size of HTML pages, you will notice that the average size is very small – smaller than 1K. But looking at the size of the pictures used within the pages, you will often find them several times bigger than the page itself.

5 and 50K of space on the server is the expected consumption of each HTML page which is dependent on the use of images or other elements that may consume disk space.

More disk space is needed for web sites that plan to utilize lots of images or graphic elements (not to mention sound files or movies).

Before scouting for your web host, make sure that you have knowledge of your requirements.

Monthly Traffic

Monthly transfer of data for a small or medium web site will take up between 1 and 5GB.

On the other hand, monthly traffic in larger commercial sites consumes more than 100GB.

Before the contract with the host provider is signed, be sure that the following is checked:

 What are the limitations on monthly transfer?

 Will your site be closed if you go beyond the volume?

 Will you be the billing be higher if the volume is exceeded?

 Will it cover future requirements?

 Is upgrading easy?

Connection Speed

Your web hosting provider should offer a relatively faster connection for your visitors who often connect through a modem.

During the early days of the Internet, connecting using a T1 was considered a fast connection. However, modern speeds are much faster.

One byte is 8 bits long, and that is usual amount of bits used to transfer a character (a letter or a digit). 14,000 to 56,000 bits per second (bps) is the transfer speed for low speed communication modems. The range is within 2000 and 7000 characters per second, nearly 1 to 5 pages of written text.

Before making any deal with hosting providers, research some other web sites on their servers, to have a good background about the speed of their network. Likewise, compare the other sites with your site, to check if you have the same requirements. Getting in touch with other customers is another alternative.

Disk space and the amount of monthly traffic is not the only requirement in web hosting. This will depend on the web site you are planning to put up.

This article provides a detailed step by step process for migrating a website from one web hosting provider to the next without disrupting the delivery of either the website or email services associated with the domain.

A summary of the steps involved in the process are:

Make sure you have all necessary information Request set up of the hosting account with the new provider Replicate DNS with the new provider Re-delegate the domain name Copy the site content Test the site on the temporary domain Configure email services Change DNS records. Migration completed

Before you begin make sure you have everything you will need to complete the migration. This includes, among other things:

Domain password or registry keys Access to the web hosting account on the existing web hosting provider Ability to perform database dumps on the existing web hosting provider All SSL certificate files (if there is one) Checked that the hosting platform is compatible (i.e. versions of applications, Linux vs windows). List of all existing email addresses Setup the web hosting account with the new web host

Make sure that the website hosting account is setup with the new web hosting provider. Setting up the account will not interfere with the operation of the existing live site. When the web hosting account is configured with the new host, you should receive all the access details for adding content to the account.

DNS Configuration

We highly recommend redelegating the domain name to the name servers of the new hosting company in advance of moving any other services, this is commonly referred to as the DNS.

DNS is usually handled by the same company that handles either website or email hosting or both. It is however technical independent and is a service that can be handled by different companies.

DNS is where the change is made made when a website is switched from one hosting provider to another.

We suggest changing the DNS to be hosted by the new provider but set the DNS records to continue to point all services at the existing hosting service provider. Once the DNS records are hosted by the new provider, change the TTL (Time To Live) attribute to reduce it from the standard 24 hours to 10 minutes. This allows us to make changes between providers in as little as 10 minutes once the services are ready to be migrated. This is a big improvement on the standard 24 hours since the level of disruption is greatly minimised and the risk of users being spread between old and new sites is so much lower.

We first need to make sure we have an accurate copy of the records from the existing host. The best way to do this is to request a copy of the records from the current host or DNS provider. If this is not possible, with a reasonable knowledge of the services in use on the domain name, it is usually possible to collect most of the necessary information that you need using tools such as dig or nslookup.

Site Copying

Once DNS migration has been initiated we have approximately 24-48 hours before the domain can be redelegated to the new hosting providers name servers. This will give us ample time to move the content across to the new servers. There are essentially two ways this can be completed depending on what information we have. If you have FTP/SSH details then you will be able to log in and copy the files across. Important things to note:

Databases? Make sure a dump is taken and saved in the home directory Provided you have SSH access, the easiest way to copy the content across is to tar up the entire home directory and then SCP it across.

A simple way of copying an entire website if you have FTP access is using LFTP. Login to the server the account is on as root and:

$ su – $ cd public_html $ lftp lftp:~> user Password: lftp:/> ls (just to make sure you’re in the correct folder, otherwise cd to the folder containing the website) lftp:/> mirror

This will mirror the entire contents of the website into your current folder. You still need to manually copy any databases across.

Without SSH/FTP access you can copy the site using Wget if you keep in mind a few caveats: Wget will only work when there is static content on the webpage, no dynamic pages (eg php, asp, shtml), no databases. If the site contains Javascript or Flash you might find you miss parts of the content.

Site Testing

Once the website has been copied test it on the temporary URL (as provided in the introductory email) for the hosting account setup and compare against original website to ensure everything is working correctly. If anything is not working, make sure it is fixed at this stage.

It is important that you confirm with the new hosting provider that you have completed your testing of the website.

Email Configuration

Assuming that all email services are to be migrated, a full list of email addresses that are required must be provided to your hosting company. If mail services are remaining with the existing host, or they are already handled externally it is important that you let your hosting company know.

Once they have been provided your web host should supply you with new username and passwords.

Note that if email services are to be migrated in most cases you will be changing the username and password details for email services. This change is the one that will have the greatest effect on the end user of the hosting services and it’s important that it is communicated properly. If peoples email breaks these days, it’s often more disruptive to their work than cutting of their telephone.

We’ve found that the best way to ensure no email is lost in the migration process is to leave the existing configuration in place, so that the mail client continues to check the old mail server, then add a new profile that checks the new mail server concurrently. This should usually be left in place for up to 7 days after the change over. It will ensure that any mail that still does make its way to the old location will be collected.

Finalise Migration

Once everything has been checked and rechecked we can switch the site across our servers for web and email hosting (by switching the DNS).

You should contact your hosting provider to confirm a time to make the change.

If the website uses a database it may be necessary to complete a final synchronisation of database immediately prior to changing the DNS.

Complete!

That’s it, you’re all done. You site migration should be complete and all traffic flowing to the new host with a minimum of disruption.