Low cost hosting

There doesn’t seem to be an end to the number of companies offering web hosting solutions. To make things even more confusing, they all offer different packages with varying features and costs.

If you’re new to the Internet, you may be confused about which hosting company to choose, and what type of features your site will require.

Since different types of websites can have vastly different needs, web hosts offer a variety of features. For example, a site dedicated to storing images and media will need a hosting plan which emphasizes storage space and bandwidth (the amount of data your visitors can download from your site in a given time period).

Similarly, if your website will receive high traffic, you would require a server that efficiently balances the data load and keeps your website available on a consistent basis.

Depending upon these features, the cost of each hosting plan is different. When comparing web hosting providers, you will see that their price structure normally depends on the operating system, storage space, security options, availability of a dedicated server, the number of email addresses, and dozens of other features. Your decision to choose a hosting plan depends on how many of these requirements you want, and, of course, your budget.

If you have decided to buy a hosting plan for your website, you can often save money by getting domain registration and web hosting in one package. However, this is not a necessity, and many people choose different companies for both of these services.

For small sites, don’t be oversold or wowed by big numbers. You likely won’t use anywhere near some of the storage and transfer limits offered by many hosts in their premium packages. Stick with the basic package and upgrade if it becomes necessary.

For sites with higher performance or security needs, a virtual private server is recommended. While a VPS is more costly than other hosting plans, it ensures that your site will not share as much of the server with the hundreds of other sites that may be hosted there.

For enterprise level sites, a fully dedicated server is recommended. Sites on a dedicated server do not share any resources whatsoever with other sites.

Regardless of the size and type site you plan to host, look for things such as customer support forums, optional phone support, and reasonable prices. Remember that rock bottom pricing is sometimes a signal of poor quality, and opt for hosts which offer reasonable service at a fair cost.

The Pros and Cons of Managed Hosting

Managed hosting is a type of internet hosting using a dedicated server. For you, the client, this means that you have the server to yourself and you do not share digital space with anyone else. This is also called a dedicated hosting service. Using a dedicated service like this will enable you to have complete control over the programs, operating system, the hardware, and other specifications. The server administration is usually provided through the hosting company as an add-on service. In many cases, a dedicated or managed hosting service can have fewer overheads and can cost much less to run or purchase for a company.

It is ideal for large online corporations, as the extra room allowed by the exclusivity of the server can enable more programs and computer to run off the server.

Another ideal feature for larger companies is the ability to perform updates and patches to programs, whereas a shared hosting service would prevent that. In addition to this, the availability of high powered networks from multiple providers enables server providers to secure massive amounts of bandwidth, thus providing for a lower price for its clients.

There are on the other hand a few downsides to this hosting.

It does come at a price as most managed servers will cost significantly more than unmanaged servers. They can mean different things to different companies, so you must be clear on these differences before committing.

Problems can still occur on your server, so you must feel you can trust the company that is supplying this service to you.

And lastly you will have less control of your server, so this is maybe not so much of an option for the technically minded that prefer to have more control of their server environment.

In this scenario you can see the pros really do out way the cons.

Shared Hosting – Weighing up the pros and the cons

In sharp contrast, shared hosting means a simple partition is placed in-between companies programs and services. Often, programs or services may even be shared. This allows for viruses and bad code to easily be shared across the partition. This allows bots and other harmful malware to creep across the partitioned platforms and destroy your data. Even though shared hosting may be cheaper than dedicated hosting, in the long run it really isn’t. Shared hosting is also improbable for most companies in other respects, since it is not large enough to hold most the programs a large corporation would take. Additionally, you the client cannot use the programs you want. You are forced to use the hardware, programs, and operating system that are provided by the host of the shared server.

On the plus side, it can provide reliable web presence without having special technical skills.

It can be divided into 2 subtypes -Free and Paid.

Free Hosting allows you to try new ideas without the expense. It provides you with everything necessary for your floating site.

You should however NOT expect the best conditions for your site as Bandwidth and Disk space is limited.

Web statistics are also poorly provided.

Paid Hosting provides features that free hosting doesn’t such as multiply e-mail, MySQI and PHP which are all supported. Whether you want to host a small, intermediate or large professional business website, this can be used.

Using shared hosting you get a very good chance of hosting your site on a powerful, well administrated server at a low monthly cost.

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.