A Newbies Guide To Web Hosting Shopping

A Newbie`s Guide To Web Hosting Shopping by Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd
A Newbie`s Guide To Web Hosting Shopping
Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd All Rights Reserved.
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A Newbie`s Guide To Web Hosting Shopping by Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd This Ebook is intended for free distribution of potential webmasters! The entire material is endorsed and protected by Mahabalix software solutions limited. Disclaimer: This material is to be used as a guide only. There are NO references to any third parties or companies whatsoever. Any such inferences do not all under the responsiblity of Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd.
Contents
Foreword Introduction Getting started Getting your hands dirty
3 4 5 7
Domain name Hosting/Disk Space Bandwidth Subdomains, Add-on domains and parked domains MySQL databases, PostgreSQL Email Features
Add-Ons
7 9 13 14 15 16
17
Dedicated IP & SSL Script Installations

More advice Conclusion
17 18
19 20
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Foreword
This small guide is dedicated to making potential webmasters who are looking to buy or even renew their web hosting accounts. This material is for beginners and laymen, so chances are that, should you be an experienced web hosting account holder or web designer, there isn`t much useful material for you here.
I would advise you to skim through the pages once before you actually start reading it. Also, keep in mind that this booklet is a compilation of expert opinions and advice. You may or may not take everything seriously. There is a good chance once you become a webmaster you will form your own judgments with your experience! But till then this guide might come in handy!
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Introduction
If you are reading this book, I take it that most probably a layman looking for a web hosting solution. You might be a college student, or a business CEO..it really does not matter.
When you go out shopping for web hosting, chances are you will be baffled and amazed our vast this ocean of web hosting is. A simple Google Search will yield you a million web hosting providers and each of them might be good in their own ways. It might be quite overwhelming for a person to embark on this endless adventure of buying hosting. I have seen people spending months doing this.
This booklet intends to help you expose to the variety of web hosting solutions that exist. It does not make any reference to any professional web hosting companies, but will allow you to judge to some extent, the web hosting solution that you will require for your blog or your enterprise website.
Once again, this booklet does not have anything related to web designing. It has minimal technical references to even web hosting!
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Getting started
I assume you have the following to start: An internet connection A credit card or a PayPal account or globally acceptable method of payment.
*Note that it might be illegal for you to be buying hosting if you are not an adult(below 18). Please check with the Terms and Conditions of your provider
Allocating a budget for spending

Hosting solutions exist from completely free to thousands of dollars per year and given huge market, it is quite easy to get duped into buying low quality hosting for a high price or even vice-versa. Typically, you need to have a minimum of $50 to get started. You might avail hosting for free with only a domain name cost of $10 dollars, but further add-ons in the future may easily cause you to spend your money like water. To facilitate things, I have allocated the following minimum spending budgets per year for you.
Minimum spending budgets/per year - hosting only

Student/Individual - small website for blogs $70 Heavy hobby sites - $150 Portals -$220 Small business -$300 Big enterprise -$600
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A Newbie`s Guide To Web Hosting Shopping by Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd Note that these prices have been deduced following the trends of quality web hosting providers. It may happen that actual prices differ drastically (Mahabalix Hosting Services are much cheaper). These spending budgets have not been biased towards any company.
Some basics about web hosting

To build a website you are need of two things:
A domain name
A domain name is something like "www.google.com". It is an address that identifies your website and is the only means through which your website can be accessed through the internet.
A hosting space
A hosting space is just disk space that sits on a high end computer known as a server somewhere. It is in that space that all the files you build in php, jsp, html... reside.
The computer is known as a server because it actually serves the pages (technically the server is the name given to the piece of software running on that computer but even the computer is referred to as such)
With these we will delve into the depth of web hosting features that will determine the best hosting for you.
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Getting Your Hands Dirty

Domain name
In most companies and hosting deals, you will find that web hosting is often sold in the form of packages. Each package has its own features in limited extents. Often a package may include a free domain. (Mahabalix does not include it as keeping domains as separate entities allows you to have more control on your recurring payments, transfers etc)
Even separate billing for domains is ok.
But here are some things you should be careful of when you are going to buy your hosting:
Subdomains are for free and should be unlimited for standard packages
There might be exceptions to the rule i.e. For e.g. free deals may not allow subdomains. Smaller deals may place a limit on subdomains, but typically subdomains should be unlimited. A subdomain is something like "john.google.com" The name just before the domain name part determines the uniqueness of a subdomain. It can be basically anything except www which is the default for the primary domain name pages. The .com part in the complete domain name is known as the TLD or Top Level Domain. .com and .org are the most popular ones. Each TLD has the function of indicating the nature of the site it is associated with. .com signifies commercial website while .org refers to organization. This is the norm- however the .com TLD is nowadays used in a less rigid context. There is also a popular myth going on that .com websites rank better.
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A Newbie`s Guide To Web Hosting Shopping by Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd The domain names you buy are registered with your retailer, which may be in turn registered with a reseller and reseller and so on-until finally the domain name reaches the ICANN registration board where all domain names are registered.
Domain names typically vary between $10 to $200 dollar per year - the price changing with the type of the TLD.
You cannot use domain names registered by someone else. i.e. wikipedia.org has been registered by Jimmy Wales so you cannot use it. However wikipedia.com can be registered by you! But this is something very improbable because of two reasons:
1.When a website becomes famous, people often try to buy domain names that are similar to those which are viral. For e.g. when facebook.com became popular, people started buying facbuk.com, facebook.co.in, fcaebook.com and so on. This was just a way of making money through traffic - is a user-misspelt facebook, he would be directed to another website.
2. Because of this malpractice domain name owners started buying all the related names themselves and started putting redirects towards the main url.
If you are the owner of a major company or organisation you are advised to do it. But if you are just a web enthousiast or want to build a personal website you might not want spending extra bucks on extra domain names!
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Hosting/Disk Space:
This is often the most important criteria while choosing a deal. And to allow you to make an efficient choice, here is how I tried to break it down.
Shared vs private/dedicated/server
Shared hosting means that your website files lie next to files of other websites in different folders but in the same drive/server. In case of dedicated hosting the files lie on only one server space/drive. (You might like to think of it as drive - if you are more experienced: dedicated hosting may might mean that the website is running on another copy of the server software and its folder) Interpretations are many but you can be abstracted from these details. Most of the time you need not worry about them as long as you have chosen a good deal with a reputed host. The headache is for the provider. Shared hosting, because of the way in which it is organized, is actually cheap - which is a good thing. You get more space and features for your bucks and it`s all jolly and merry.
Dedicated hosting is good only businesses and organizations. You may get paranoid at the beginning and may even want to invest in servers if you can afford them - but if you are planning to host only a simple website, then it is not worth it.
Another key thing is a trend that we see in our consumer market. People often buy hosting when they are still in the process formulating their idea of building a website. The idea has not quite taken shape yet - no website files exist and that is commonly when the hosting shopping is made. As a result the actual usage of the space may take place on average after 4 months to 1 year. Sometimes the space is never used and goes to waste.
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FFMpeg vs the others

FFMpeg is a server feature that allows you to run videos on your website. I myself consider each a very trivial feature as it is something like the radio in a car. Unfortunately you will find that may cars in the web hosting world, even limousines do not have in built stereo. My advice to you is to BUY FFMPEG hosting - you will be in need of hosting a video, somewhere sometime...even for your personal blog. You might want to upload the video directly to your site without having YouTube as a mediator, so as to keep it more personal.
PHP vs JSP,ASP & others

Servers come in varied flavors but 99 percent of them are Apache based and have PHP as well. To be able run ASP and JSP etc you need to have extra modules so you might want to search for a server that offers that(this might be more relevant if you are a business). However PHP is good to go.
**Curl,SQL rewrite etc

These are features that you might want to search with Google. These are more relevant if you plan to use CMSes or web applications etc. However most servers today support Curl so you need to worry about it.
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Here are some stuff you might want to watch out:

Joomla Hosting, Wordpress Hosting, CPanel Hosting etc...
DO NOT BUY INTO THIS CRAP
CPanel is just a server management control panel.(Mahabalix offers CPanel) However by experience, I can assure you that all server management control panels end up having the same features(though CPanel is common)
Any server that supports PHP, MYSQL and other features such as Curl(not a must) can support by default any such CMS i.e. Joomla, WordPress and so on. Joomla and Wordpress,etc are just a bunch of PHP and some config files. The purpose of using Wordpress hosting, Joomla hosting is only to increase sales. So do not buy into marketing gimmicks.
Unlimited Hosting!!
Remember the Shakespearian story - The Merchant of Venice, where the contract was written to give a pound of flesh - as a result of which a single drop of blood could not be taken?
The situation is not very different here. A large number of hosting companies provide hosting deals including unlimited space at a very cheap space. Here are a number of reasons why you should look out for them:
Missing FFMPeg
It happens often that a consumer buys unlimited hosting that cannot play videos and has to switch to another provider. FFMPeg is a software or module that is installed on servers to allow support for playing of videos. Most server providers, especially unlimited hosting providers do not provide this feature as due to an increased load on the server. Increased load equals increased costs and so on.
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Size and bandwidth "suffocation"
"Suffocation" is just a term I coined myself to allow you to understand the problem better. Often these big unlimited hosting providers provide unlimited web hosting. But hey, unlimited hard disk space does not exist! As this possibly defies a fundamental rule of physics! What happens is that the website resides on a very large disk space alongside other websites which is perfectly ok. Unlimited hosting space is provided with the confidence that despite the option, the consumer may never use large amounts of hosting space. As a matter of fact, even large websites for e.g. a University website may only be around 600 Mb which can be easily stored. Suppose if you built a website that spread as virally as when facebook was first conceived, the bandwidth chokes up and the website shows erratic behaviour such as crashing of databases, the server itself- or slows loads etc- Which means that you have to change your provider or buy your own physical servers for hosting.
So do take care when you are going for unlimited space. It is probably prudent to buy a hosting space with a higher price but which provides quality hosting than buying unlimited for cheap.
After all what would you do with a ton of salmon if you are a vegetarian right?
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Bandwidth
The bandwidth of your account simple refers to the amount of data transfer that can take place in a particular second between you server and every other computer connected to it. For e.g. if your account had a bandwidth of say 700mb/s, someone connected to the server could download a movie of size 700mb in a second. If it was 1400mb/s, 2 people could download the movie simultaneously. This is possible if the visitor has the same internet connection bandwidth of something if higher speed.(My internet connection is faster implies it has higher bandwidth) If suppose Jim were to download a movie of 700MB. Your bandwidth was 700MBps, but his only 1 MB - it would be limited by his connection, so only 1MB/s will be used. This means that other people can also simultaneously download from the server.
But here`s the thing- the bandwidth specified by your provider is the maximum bandwidth will be available to your account. If your account had a 700mbps bandwidth and suppose Jim made an arrangement such that 700 of his friends would try to download the movie at the same time, together with Jim it will be 701 people, each with 1Mb/s connection. i.e. the requirement is 701Mbps but the your account has been allocated only 700mbps.In this case several things might happen. The server might refuse an extra connection. Or the account may simply be suspended until you purchase more bandwidth or till the number of connections decrease.
Several hosting deals have "unlimited bandwidth" - this means that your account will never go down, even with an infinitely large number of connections!
However speeds might start choking after a while - say you intended the website to be used by a thousand people, but if it used by a million people-speed reduction is inevitable.
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Subdomains,Add-on domains and parked domains

Sub domain
Lets say your domain is mysite.com. You install a Message Board and put in in a directory called mysite.com/board/. You can turn the directory board into a sub-domain by adding it as a sub-domain from your Control Panel. Now you can access your Message board as either mysite.com/board OR board.mysite.com This costs you nothing and is free.
Parked Domain
You have two domains mysite.com and my-other-site.com. mysite.com is the domain of your website and you want to add my-other-site.com. You want them both to go to the same place. In other words, when someone types either www.mysite.com or www.my-other-site.com they will go to the same page(s) on your website. In order to have additional parked domains you need to purchase them from a registry/provider/reseller
Add-On Domains
You have two domains mysite.com and my-other-site.com. You want the two domains to be totally separate/independent websites. In order to have additional add-on domains you need to purchase them from a registry/provider/reseller
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MySQL databases, PostgreSQL

A database is a form of storing data. Lets say you have a set of school student records to manage such as their name etc, you put them in a database. A Google search should be able to teach you more than you need. In case of websites MySQL databases are typically used to store data from CMSes. If you are using a CMS or script like Joomla you might need a CMS in 90 percent if the cases. PHP and MYSQL have always been used together. My advice in case you are looking for a cheap hosting deal and there is a limit on 5, it should be enough. Even full-fledged websites nowadays have less than 5 databases. If you are prepared to spend however, go for a deal with unlimited databases.
*PostgreSQl is another form of MySQL but do not worry if your provider does not give PostgreSQL - you might probably never use it.
FTP accounts
FTP refers to File transfer protocol is a way of uploading files to your account. You might learn more when you actually build your website, but here are the basics for you to do your shopping. Normally you would use an FTP program known as an FTP client to do your uploading. FileZilla is a good example of that. You need to use it to connect to your hosting space on the server where you can upload your files. But you need some form of restriction to prevent everyone on at random uploading stuff to your server. Therefore your hosting provider requires you to create something known as an FTP account which is nothing but a username and password to verify your identity.
For an average website even a small business site up to 5 accounts for FTP for enough as you can share the username and passwords with your staff(unless you run a big company and have lots of staff)
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A Newbie`s Guide To Web Hosting Shopping by Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd So if you are just planning to open a personal website and you have come across a good deal but are uncertain about the number of FTP accounts, you can take it.
Email Features
While at this stage you do not need much detail-POP3 email accounts refer to plain simple email accounts that you can have.(POP3 is a name for Post Office Protocol which is a fancy name for an encryption communicated service for emails) For e.g. if you have a domain name called johndoe.com, you could create an email account myname@johndoe.com. You might want to consider SMTP features in your web hosting account. By default all providers provide SMTP(Simple mail transfer protocols) - which is a more secure way of exchanging emails - this is particularly relevant if you want to connect for e.g. your Gmail account or your Microsoft Outlook to your website email account so that you receive all your mail at one place(yes you can do that!)
If you are opening a small blog, 3 email accounts suffice.(usually under free web hosting deals) Email accounts however can increase i significant numbers once you open up a commercial or heavy traffic website.
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ADD-ONS
Dedicated IP and SSL
If you are planning to open an ecommerce website or a very large social network, this section might be relevant to you. Otherwise you can skip this part. SSL refers to Secure Socket Layer which is basically encrypting information sent over the internet. So if you are particularly worried about your users private data- which is the case in ecommerce where you may have to transmit your credit card numbers or banking details, it is recommended to check if your hosting provider gives you such facility.
To allow SSL to be installed, you need to have a dedicated IP for your account. An IP is just a number that identifies your hosting account on the internet like 213.34.22.11. In fact domain names are used as replacements for IP addresses which are so hard to remember. If you typed an IP address for a domain name instead of the domain name you would access the same website.
However the IP address for a hosting account might not be rigidly fixed. It may happen that accounts on shared hosting are copied or transferred to some other drives or machines, as a result of which a different IP is given - this is not a problem at all as the DNS takes care of it and your website is still accessible when you type a domain name! For SSL however you need to have one IP address/number for all times.
If you are likely to require these features in the future do check with your web hosting company if they are offering these(Mahabalix offers these features - you can check our prices by visiting the portal)
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Script Installations
This is not an absolute must but may be helpful if your hosting provider gives you some script installer in your account. Fantastico, Softaculous are the dominant ones (Mahabalix provides Softaculous). What they essentially do is that they install a script such as Joomla for you. Most of the scripts are provided are open source- with an installer you have a few added benefits that it does the installation for you. Besides you mayget lots of scripts which are generally not available for free if looked for separately.
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More advice
Payment
Whenever you decide to buy a hosting account, if you can afford it at the time of purchase I recommend you to buy a deal lasting about one year because that`s a standard Domain Registration period. It is generally a bad idea to pay monthly as it would definitely be more expensive. You might think that you will buy the hosting period for one month and decide whether you wish to continue with the same provider or not. Statistics say most people tend to renew their accounts with the same provider. Of those who change their hosting companies, they tend to do so after a period of one year(Note that you might not even have a functional website even after 6 months of buying hosting). As such it is better to make a purchase for a longer term.
But I also recommend that you do not buy for extremely long periods, such as 4 years. It is a waste of money if you want to change your provider later on(You never know what will happen to the company next, the company policies may change, product features may change and evolve, better companies may come up)
Also it is a small headache to each time edits the DNS to associate your domain name with hosting from another provider.
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Conclusion
The number of features available today in typical web hosting accounts, and the number of features advertised are really endless, but this small guide should cover all the really important features that you should not miss while shopping for web hosting accounts.
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A Newbie`s Guide To Web Hosting Shopping by Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd Copyright@Mahabalix Software Solutions Ltd 2012 Mahabalix Software Solutions is a software company based at Curepipe, Mauritius. www.mahabalix.com
You can download this EBook for free by registering at hosting.mahabalix.com. Visit Mahabalix.com for your hosting needs, business solutions and custom operating systems requirement.
Do write to officedesk@mahabalix.com about the ebook! Suggestions article contributions etc are welcome. (You will be added as co-author!)
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