Web Hosting Guide

If you have been using internet for some time now, you must have browsed many websites. You must have found lots of useful information on these websites. You might have even done shopping online using your credit card and must have felt amazed how much more options you had to choose from. Your local store probably won’t give you that many options to choose from. Buying online is also less time consuming. If you want to buy a mobile phone, its so much easier and quicker to find a handset model which suits you perfectly according to your liking, features etc. You can get detailed information about a handset model on websites. In your local mobile phone store, you probably won’t ask that many questions and he might not answer to all your queries correctly. After you have spent enough time on internet, you realize the enormous power of internet and websites. You might even be wondering whether you yourself can start a website. The reason is simple websites are currently the most powerful way to communicate with large population. Communicating your ideas to others is a basic human need and websites help people communicate and share ideas with others.

If you want to start a website and you are just a basic computer user, don’t feel discouraged. Starting websites are very easy now. Your website will be up in minutes and you can start adding content to it. If you think starting websites are a costly thing to do, you are wrong. Nowadays starting websites is quite cheap. You can start even free website if you want. If you want to start a free website, you may have to part with some of the features which make your website look more professional and trustworthy. For a beginner, this may be fine if you are just interested in sharing ideas with the world. But, if you can spend few dollars its best to start with your own domain name and paid shared hosting. You can start with a free sub-domain, but it won’t have same effect as your own registered domain name. If you want to make your website look professional and you yourself want to appear as a master of your website topic or theme, start with your own domain name. There are many website building tools available which can help you create your professional looking website. Some of these tools are free and some may ask for a nominal charge.

Usually, as new webmasters we all start with shared web hosting which is the cheapest option. It is not secure and it can’t handle any major traffic but it is good for testing the waters and starting your new websites. Some of the websites may start doing good. If a website starts attracting major traffic, it is better to pay serious attention to it and move it to a vps server. A VPS or virtual private server is not a real server. A dedicated server may house several VPS accounts. It is much safer than shared web hosting environment where thousands of websites are pushed on a server. VPS accounts on a dedicated server don’t interfere or affect workings of each other. So, it provides flexibility and control much like a dedicated server without the costs of a dedicated server. Many cheap vps options are available in the online web hosting market. You can choose a vps according to your needs of disk space, RAM, operating system and other needs. Costs are a fraction of dedicated server costs.

A vps hosting gives more control on the hosting environment. You can reboot whenever you want. You can install operating system, scripts, applications etc. When choosing a VPS, keep in mind several things like location of VPS server, uptime, are they well priced etc. May be you would want to read several reviews before buying one. Best is you can ask in forums because webmasters in forums can provide you the most unbiased opinion as they are actual users.

Dedicated servers are needed for major websites with very high traffic. Such websites with very high traffic also need more security and they may be helping create great wealth so webmasters should be particularly cautious about security and robustness of such websites. Visitors buying costly products on a major e-commerce website won’t expect downtime and other network issues. Downtime and bad browsing experience may leave a negative idea in the mind of new visitors and they may never return back. That will be a great loss to business. That is why we need a dedicated server for a serious website with high traffic and high earning potential.

Dedicated server hosting means an entire server for a website. Entire disk space and bandwidth is available to your website which results in a very good experience for visitors browsing the website and buying things. Secondly and very importantly, your website is much more secure simply because you don’t share disk space with other websites which saves many problems. In shared web hosting environment, other websites which share space with your website on a server create many problems. Many of them run malicious codes which cause frequent server downtime. In dedicated hosting, you have full control over your server and your website and hence, more security. Web hosting provider is responsible for hardware maintenance and installing operating system. Rest of the necessary things, you can choose to do yourself like installing scripts, applications, anti-virus, firewall, maintaing website etc. For that, you should have good knowledge about server security and websites.

Few months ago, my friend who owns several websites with very good traffic recommended me greengeeks. I own several websites and I try to host them at many different web hosting providers for various reasons. I took his advice and hosted one of my good sites there. The website was building traffic at a fast rate day by day. I must say I am more than happy and satisfied with greengeeks. After experiencing greengeeks hosting for 3-4 months, I think I am ready to provide Greengeeks Review. Some webmasters may argue that 3-4 months is not enough to rate a web hosting company but I believe no web hosting service can be perfect as sometimes downtime can occur even under an excellently managed web hosting as they are like accidents. I must say greengeeks is providing an excellent web hosting service as my website with 10,000 unique visitors every day and increasing has never seen a single downtime in last few months. that too, on greengeeks shared hosting.

Now coming to the features that greengeeks web hosting has to offer. It is like any other regular unlimited web hosting plan where you get unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth and you can host unlimited domains. You also get a free domain name for life. The main features, which I believe are very important, are North American Support and well, it is green hosting. Getting North American Support is a privilege because most web hosting companies and other companies too outsource customer care phone support to third world countries which is very annoying. Asian people are not able to communicate properly with us because they mispronounce words and don’t understand American accent. Second important thing is greengeeks is green web hosting which means they use green technology which keeps environment pollution free and by using their web hosting services, we are doing our bit for the environment.