Author Archives: Kenny

About Kenny

Kenny is owner of webhostpark and has been working in hosting industry since 2006. We provide unbiased hosting reviews and release the latest promo news. Follow me on Google plus

Secure Email Hosting

Secure email hosting

Secure Email Hosting introduction

Secure email Hosting is mainly referring to email data protection from hosting provider. It includes both hardware and software configurations to deal with common problems like Email spam, Email virus and hacking attempts etc. Secure Email hosting is suggestted if your business highly rely on it. Here let's going to check who's offering such service and the best way to get secure SMTP/POP3 server.

Logically, all web hosting servers should have installed some kind hardware production for data security such as the Cisco products. Software level protection for email should be also installed for antivirous and spam. Most popular software solution would be Norton and Mcafee products. Meanwhile, SSL should be provided for basic setup as well. A decent email hosting provider should have prepared for all. However, since most of the time we use email client for email sending/receiving, secured SMTP/POP3 or IMAP server is desired mostly. As most hosting services are cpanel based, we're going to check how to use SSL for your email account.

cPanel Secure email settings

Normally, we access the cpanel directly through http://yourdomain.com:2082 and SSL version is on https://yourdomain.com:2083. But have you ever noticed there's an SSL version for webmail? It's by default setup on https://yourdomain.com:2096. Generally, the POP/SMTP might be different from different hosting providers, normally both are setup to "mail.yourdomain.com" address, but please make sure to check out with your hosting support for the actual address. OR you can also use the server IP addres directly for POP/SMTP servers, the IP address is provided at the left bottom after you signed in cpanel account(Most web hosting providers will not tell you doing this because you can send email using their email service no matter if your MX records are pointed to their server)

cpanel ip

What would be the secure SMTP/POP3/IMAP ports in cpanel? Standard ports for SMTP, IMAP, and POP are 25, 143, and 110. Standard ports for the secure versions are 465/ 993 /995. If your hosting server has alternative settings, make sure to check out with hosting support to make the proper change.

How to use Google Secured SMTP server?

Google offers the most reputable free secure email service at the moment, in case you don't want to bound your email from hosting provider for best security, you can take advantages of gmail smtp server. What you need to do is to edit your domain mx records to work with google mail server. Let's take cpanel hosting for example on how to make the canges

  • Step 1: In cPanel look for the option MX Entry and click it
  • Step 2: Select Remote Mail Exchanger
  • Step 3: Hit the Change button
  • Step 4: In the 'Add New Record' area you must make the following entries with the stated priorities, It should be something like the following:
MX Records Priority
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 1
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 2
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 3
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 4
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 5
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 6
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 7

Different hosting providers might have different priority settings, check out this google documentation for your exact hosting provider.

Google Secure mail server SMTP port is on 465 or 587

Best secure email hosting recommendation

The best secure email hosting should be equipped with leading hardware/software for best email data protection. It should also be configured with good policies to deal with hacking attempts and email virus. Last but not least, the server should have fast loading speed. Based such rules, we highly suggest check out Hostgator, Inmotion and Arvixe for best secure email hosting service.

Arvixe and Inmotion are offering standard cpanel email service with shared SSL support, just follow above standard SMTP/POP3/IMAP information to setup your email account and it will be working fine. They both are recommended for fast and secure email solutions.

Hostgator offers standard email service plus Smartermail service. If you need the email service to be configured on different servers, hostgator smartermail is the best choice. Smartermail is well-known for the best alternative choice of exchange server and very powerful built-in functions to meet your business email requirements.

Go to www.hostgator.com for secure email hosting plans

Yahoo Web Hosting Review

Yahoo web hosting review

Yahoo Web Hosting Overview

Yahoo web hosting site is part of Yahoo's Small Business portal, it's targeted to offering hosting services for small business specifically. If you're evaluating their services for website hosting. Let's go ahead to check if it's good choice or if there's better alternative.

What's included for yahoo web hosting?

Yahoo Web Hosting is a 100% shared hosting based service with several other products including sitebuilding, ecommerce wizard and business email solutions. Via multiple web hosting plans, their pricing structure is little complex for new users and not sure how to choose from.

Let's go ahead and check what's being offered by their hosting plans.

Basic Hosting Plan supports one domain, 250 email addresses, a site builder for up to 10 pages, 100GB of disk space and 1,000GB of bandwidth. From the overall features, basic plan doesn't support PHP/Mysql or any other dynamic scripting languages. Means you can't use anything other than Yahoo Web Hosting's own site builder. It doesn't support ftp, file manager and all other common options for regular hosting service.

Advanced Hosting Plan is more like a standard hosting that support various scripts like php/mysql and other linux technologies. It's also supported for a single website with up to 500GB disk space and 5,000GB monthly bandwidth. With advanced plan, and site builder pages are unlimited.

Premier Plan is most advanced one for yahoo web hosting. It offers unlimited space, transfer and pages, 1,000 email addresses and all other stanard features for web hosting service. There you'll be able to use all functions to host your website with shared ssl support.

Besides above shared hosting solutions. Yahoo web hosting also provides ecommerce wizard starts at $29.96/mo. There you'll be able to setup an online store with user guidance and once published it will be ready for business operation. For example money receiving, products shipping and invoice management etc are all included.

No matter which hosting solution you choose, you can only host a single website in hosting account. Extra domain hosting is not possible for any plans.

yahoo web hosting features

What's actually good of yahoo web hosting?

The advantages with yahoo web hosting would be their long history in offering hosting services. Yahoo is the 4th largest website on the globe. They have been leading in search engine for very a long time and it's still considered a good place for marketing. With yahoo web hosting service, each account will receive $100 credits for yahoo ads and $75 for Bing ads. If you like to promote your website on yahoo search, this credit is absolutely the best offer.

What would be the weakness of yahoo web hosting?

Well, except for above mentioned advantage, I don't see any good reason to deal with their service. With about $5/mo starter price, you only get a single website hosting opportunity with build-in sitebuilder. There's no support for php and mysql, you can not upload your own website because FTP and file manager is not available. At the meanwhile, many other smaller web hosting companies will give you everything needed for website building/hosting and support various scripting languages for different website purpose. They provide cheaper service with more features because they rely on the word of mouth to help promote their service.

While most web hosting services are powered by standard cpanel/plesk today, yahoo still utilizes their old inhouse developed control panel. The functions are pretty straight and simple, just sitebuilding, website and email managing categories. you need to dig further for some buried functions. It's just too simple for advanced users.

How about yahoo web hosting uptime?

The Yahoo web hosting guarantees 99.9% uptime. Although there's no much stats to show how it's going, it's easy to evaluate. Because yahoo web hosting is setup purposely for personal and small business website and there're many restrictions in using the service, it's hard to overuse the available server resources.

What's the best alternative choice of yahoo web hosting?

As we learned from above review, yahoo web hosting is really prepared for novice who're less skilled in web developing. We need to pay about $80/yr for single domain hosting, it's easy to find a better hosting solution with less cost. We highly suggest take a look at the TOP 8 hosting list or simply go with Arvixe for best rated hosting provider. With only $4/mo you get unlimited disk space and free domain name plus free installer over 100 php/mysql scripts. In case you're not satisfied with arvixe service, you can get full refund in first 60 days!

Go to www.arvixe.com for best web hosting plan details!

Best Lightswitch Hosting

Best lightswitch hosting

Lightswitch hosting Awards

Best lightswitch hosting 2013 goes to Arvixe windows hosting plan for it's unlimited features, affordable price, great reliability, friendly tech support and leading server platforms after evaluation over 20+ popular lightswitch hosting providers.

Arvixe (http://www.arvixe.com) was Founded in 2003 and located in San Luis Obispo, CA. Arvixe prides itself in providing web hosting with a rare combination of unmatched reliability, quality and affordability. Arvixe is setup for personal and small to big business website hosting purpose and serve over 500,000 wordwide domains from world class datacenters! Go ahead and give Arvixe a try, and you will experience first hand what we call the Arvixe Advantage, the advantage of working with the best!

Arvixe Lightswitch hosting features

Arvixe offers lightswitch support via personal class & Business class windows hosting plans with great standard hosting features including unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer, SQL databases, email addresses, FTP accounts and sub-domains that 100% meet the basic demands of lightswitch websites building.

For those who have been MS developer, arvixe offers super developer friendly hosting solutions from windows hosting plans. They have been ms golden partner and setup to offer the up to date microsoft technologies. Arvixe windows server is now setup on windows server 2012 with IIS 8.0. All newly signed up accounts will be placed on the newest platform.

From our previous arvixe review article, we learnt their windows hosting service is configured on websitepanel control panel that brings lots of great features like sql server management, asp.net management and free installer over lots of popular asp.net scripts. Besides the support over MS technologies, arvixe windows servier is also configured to support PHP, CGI & Perl scripts. Means you can use the arvixe hosting for many website purpose so it's absolutely the best developer friendly choice!

arvixe lightswitch hosting feature

Lightswitch Introduction

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is a extension and framework specifically tailored for creating line-of-business applications built on existing .NET technologies and Microsoft platforms. The applications produced are architecturally 3-tier: the user interface runs on either Microsoft Silverlight, HTML 5 client or as a SharePoint 2013 app; the logic and data-access tier is built on WCF Data Services and exposed as an OData feed hosted in ASP.NET; and the primary data storage supports Microsoft SQL Server Express, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SQL Azure. LightSwitch also supports other data sources including Microsoft SharePoint, OData and WCF RIA Services.

LightSwitch includes graphical designers for designing entities and entity relationships, entity queries, and UI screens. Business logic may be written in either Visual Basic or Visual C#. LightSwitch is included with Visual Studio 2012 Professional and higher.

The user interface layer is now an optional component when deploying a LightSwitch solution, allowing a service only deployment.

Some Features of Visual Studio LightSwitch

  • Build Business Apps Quickly LightSwitch provides downloadable starter kits and flexible deployment options that help customers create and easily release custom business apps that look professional and polished, without hard core coding.
  • Get More form Your Data Collecting, analyzing, and reusing business information from a variety of sources is easy with LightSwitch, and you can also export data into Microsoft Excel for simpler sharing and reporting.
  • Extend Apps without Redesigning Easily expand your LightSwitch Apps functionality by adding extensions and components from third-party vendors.
  • Impress Users LightSwitch includes customizable templates and so you can write custom business logic that applies to your organization’s specific needs, helping you create an experience that your users will be impressed with.

Best lightswitch hosting selection tips

Lightswitch is part of visual studio & asp.net technologies. Means there're lots of windows hosting providers be able to support this framework. However, you always wish to be hosted with the best service provider. In order to select the perfect lightswitch hosting service, following tips are suggested to follow

  • Server platform – A decent lightswitch hosting should be configured on the latest windows server platform, server 2008 is minimum requirement for today's windows hosting service. 2012 should be your final attention since it's the latest OS.
  • Hosting Features – It must come with most essential functionalities such as multiple asp.net frameworks, custom trust level support and sql server support etc. It should also come with sufficient disk space and data transfer abilities for different websites requirement.
  • Tech support – Tech support is the most essential point when looking for the best lightswitch hosting provider. You can't tell when you will need assistance from the support team or some basic urgent assistance such as data recovery.

Claim best lightswitch hosting @ www.arvixe.com for 20% discount today!

Best Student Web Hosting

Student web hosting

Student web hosting introduction

Student web hosting is a type hosting service that's prepared or suitable for students' website hosting purpose. It's well known for students caring and affordable service. Looking for the best student web hosting provider? Here're few quality suggestions either for moneytary or service level considerations.

Best student web hosting - WebhostinghubBrand: WebHostingHub Price: $3.95/mo Rate: A+

WebhostingHub offers leading web hosting service that's affordable by students. $3.95/mo hosting comes for unlimited website support, mysql database support, mailing list support and ecommerce support.

The advantage by choosing webhostinghub for students is simply for their industry leading customer support and super stable hosting server. Plus their up to 90 days money back guarantee, it's absolutely risk free to join webhostinghub.

Webhostinghub does not advertise directly for student web hosting offer, it's initial launched by their sister brand Inmotion hosting. They offer various discounts for student use purpose including shared, VPS and dedicated servers. However, Since we get more shared hosting feature via webhostinghub via less cost, the inmotion hosting offers under shared accounts has no advantages any more.

Go to www.webhostinghub.com for promo details!

Best student web hosting - iPageBrand: iPage Price: $1.99/mo Rate: A+

iPage is leading budget hosting provider with over 1000,000 domains served. $1.99/mo is the best price over all other hosting providers.

Why is ipage perfect choice for student? Let's take a look their offers. With $1.99/mo price we get a free domain name registration, unlimited space & databases, unlimited emails as well as ftp accounts. Basically, ipage offers all their services as unlimited with pretty low price. When you like to host a personal website or multiple websites with limited budget, ipage is absolutely the best choice! Still hesitate? There's 30 days full money back guarantee!

Go to www.ipage.com for $1.99 today!

Student web hosting vs traditional hosting service

So what's the difference between student web hosting and all other traditional hosting plans? Well, there's no real difference for hosting features. The student web hosting term is more about pricing and further service caring to the specific community. Normally you need to scan your student's ID and send to hosting providers who offer such service then they will offer some discount for their plans. As about further technical support, you're just treated the same as other clients.

How do we think about? It's definitely good offer for students since it will reduce your costs for website investment. Beyond the low cost, there's another service type called "non profit hosting" which is almost dedicated to students and educational institutes. Such service is offered to show their giving back to society as they said. However, in most competitors' eyes it's a kind of business trick to attrack users' eyeballs. You always like to tell your friend or roommates for the great offer so hosting providers will get potential business there.

Tips to choose the right student hosting service

Normally, a student's website is more about a personal blog or project site that's for testing purpose. Thus it has very few requirements to hosting server. As long as the server is up and loading fine then it's acceptable for most people. However, since there's great improvement in hosting industry and it's actually a competitive business. Many service plans already offered more than expected. Instead giving out your money with no clue, let's read below tips on how to choose the correct service.

Reputation is always the first thing we need to check out. No matter how cheap the service is, if it's not trusted by most clients then we should avoid it or else we're purchasing problems to ourselves. Just search reviews over the brand and read how people think about.

Service features. Make sure we will get what expected for our website. If we need windows platform then there's no need to check linux, regardless how good it is.

Customer service. Because we're students so there's need of technical or other support in using the service. A quality service support should be available 24×7 in multiple connection tunnels such as chat, ticket etc.

Lastly, the service should not be too expensive. Furthermore, it should come with students caring policy on several sides such as price, support, service features etc.

On customer end, since we have claimed the best offer from host service. We should follow their TOS strictly and avoid misusing the service. The hosting provider already given us the most promotional offer, we should be thankful and in case there's any chance we should report our opinions on how to improve the service.

Best Web Hosting Support 2013

Best web hosting support 2013

Best web hosting support Awards 2013

Who is offering best hosting support for 2013? We're proudly to announce the champion – Arvixe! Yeah! Arvixe is ranked the best for web hosing support this year! Follow me and learn our experience with their guys in the past 24 hours.

Just from last day, I'm running some tasks on our website and need some changes in Mysql database. However, since it's a big operation and requires to be done locally. I exported the sql to desktop in few seconds. Yeah! Few seconds! You can't expect faster server response. So I followd the schedule and ran some queries to the database locally. I thought everything would go as planned which is pretty streight. However, I never expected there's little chance something will go wrong! I imported the database once the operation done on local. Here the problem go up. I lost 90% Data from my database! What a huge loss!

Soon after problem occured, I opened an urgent ticket via arvixe support center then logon their live chat support immediately for urgent assistance. Their support Babara kindly transfered the chat to uplevel support for better assistance. Sreath quickly verified my ownership for the hosting account then offered about 10 days latest backup choice. I asked to restore the most recent one and he did as requested.

However, there's some data crash and old data is not recovered. You can feel I'm a bit worried because it's my years' working treature for that database and if there's no way to recover, I would be desperated! I then checked with him and ask if there's a better backup for restoration. Finally, there's a good backup with only one article missing. Everything appears to be perfect after restoration. I would like to give my thankfulness to all their people through chat. However seems they're handling a large volume support requests at that momnet so I decide to contact later.

Impressions for arvixe support

Since we have dealt with arvixe for over 3 years and have been satisfied all the time. This data recovery definitely impressed us mostly since it's really really a big help. The past hours will kept in my memories forever because I passed a dangerous period safely through outstanding support! Here're sportlights with our experience

  • Arvixe handles urgent requests very fast (Our experience is 1 minute)
  • Arvixe will recovery account data for free! (While it's a costly service from many providers!)
  • Arvixe support is patient and professional in dealing with problems
  • Arvixe support is the best with all our past experience!

I always suggest my guys to backup all essential data frequently in case any disaster. However I'm just saying but not doing by myself!! I didn't backup schedulely and lost my data for back action by my own. If I'm hosting the website/database anywhere else, I can't tell what would be the final result. Fortunately I'm dealing with arvixe and everything being supported professionally and friendly. From now on I'll make a good schedule to backup my data!

Based all above experience, arvixe is selected to best web hosting support 2013 by WHP. If you're looking for a decent hosting service with decent support, arvixe is the best choice. We'll continue to host with arvixe for another 3 years!

Like to learn more about arvixe? Read our arvixe reviews as well as arvixe hosting faq.

Lastly. Go to www.arvixe.com for best web hosting plans!

Inmotion Hosting Updates 2013

Inmotion Hosting updates 2013

Inmotion Hosting Just updated their official website yesterday with new looking as well as new hosting plan structures. In case you're their fans, it's highly recommended to check out the new interface and learn about their new offers. Like it? or dislike it? Just feel free to share your thoughts.

What's changed on inmotion hosting site?

In short, the inmotion hosting applied a new skin to their site and re-designed their hosting plans. The new interface is designed via HTML5 technologies which is more friendly to new devices. The home page is composed by image slider with their hosting service spotlights. They also introduced customer testimonials and new technologies in supporting clients and the communities. Furthermore, the provided more free credits in search marketing including google, yahoo, amazon etc. Total amount is over $250!

What's improved exactly?

The new site actually got improved in several sides and those improvements were expected for very a long time.

Firstly, they simplified the home page with easier navigations. We will learn what exactly being offered by this company and how people think about their service. We don't have to dig more for such info like we did before! They showed their service plans and hardware equpments as well as security protection over the entire system.

inmotion hosting features

As we see, they also highlighted their support over the popular open source scripts such as wordpress, joomla. Because almost 1/3 users use those scripts for their website development and search the actual hosting support for those directly when there's need. By introducing their advantages on home page, further business burst is expected for inmotion.

Furthermore, they are more caring about students for educational website hosting purpose. They offer 50% discount and free linux hosting account for existing students. Just contact their support @ (888) 321-4678 and their team will guide you for the setup! There're no much hosting groups managed doing so, especially when the market is so competitive nowadays.

Finally, the best of the best improvements are their web hosting plans re-design. They simplfied everything to make sure everybody be able to choose the right service without learning too much as before. Before the changes, there're multiple hosting solutions under every categories and they're thought too complicated for users to learn about. Now, please refresh your memories as everything got simplified! They merged all shared hosting plans to the 3 business solutions that's most popular to us. The old ones such as cheap personal hosting is not available anymore. By doing this, inmotion support be able to manage their service more professionally.

How do we think about?

Our thoughts are absolutely positive. Not everybody be able to apply the latest web design technologies for their business site. But it's a requirement to catch up with the new web devices like smart phones, table pcs etc. Did I mention inmotion people offer web design service? Don't be flooded by the idea they're only professional in web hosting service, they're actually a full functional IT group that offers various IT solutions. Their web design service vary from all categories including food, health, legal etc. Just click the web design tab on their site and view more!