Review of different hosting companies & services side by side with our continous testing/monitoring over website performance, customer feed backs and overall industry reputation. We host sample website and do necessary testing on some crucial features to ensure our recommendation is perfect.

Free Website Migration Hosting

Free website migration hosting

Free website migration hosting means support will move over your website from other web hosts. You just need to provide necessary information of your old hosting and then wait till the migration completed. Since it's manual work and pretty time-consuming sometimes, most web hosting providers don't offer this service.

Best Free Website Migration Hosting Providers

Who can provide quality and free website migration hosting service? Depends your website tech requirements, we highly recommend to check out the Arvixe hosting service. No matter if you're currently with a shared, VPS, reseller or dedicated server hosting, the arvixe support will transfer over everything and do needful problem fixing with their knowleges.

Unlike all other hosting providers who just give out a tutorial or simple guidance on how to move over your service, arvixe will simply handle everything on behalf of you. Especially when you're dealing with a big size account that contains sensitive data. If you have a slow network connection, you're in risk of loosing files during downloading/uploading. Arvixe will handle the process on server end directly which is pretty fast with GBs network connections. Here's a list of services that arvixe will transfer for you.

  • Free Website Files Migration
  • Free Mysql Database migration
  • Free Ms SQL database migration
  • Free cpanel Accounts Migration
  • Free Email Accounts Migration
  • Free VPS/Reseller/Dedicated Server Migration
  • Domain registration transfer assistance

Once your have signed up arvixe hosting and you're in need of such service, just send a request to their support team, they will contact you and request the needed details to process the migration.

arvixe free migration serviceGo to www.arvixe.com and view hosting plans!

More about Arvixe migration service: http://www.arvixe.com/ftp.php

How to Migrate Website Manually?

It's actually not so hard to transfer your website to new server space. If you're hosted with a cpanel service, everything can be simplified by a single downloading/uploading. With a cpanel service, there's account backup selection, just click it and it will generate a backup of all your account data including website files, database and emails etc. Once you get the backup package, just upload to your new hosting space then request a support to import the backup. So easy right?

What if I'm using other control panel softwares? No matter what kind of hosting control panel you're using, you can always follow the traditional steps to move over your data as listed below

  • Download all website files from old account
  • Generate backup of your database if there's any
  • Setup Email client to download your emails

Now you should have received all your old account data, now just follow the below steps to move over

Connect your new server space via FTP client such as filezilla

  • Upload your old website files
  • Create new database in new control panel and import backups
  • Edit your website configuration files to work with new server

Tips about the migration process: You can only move over emails after you pointed domain DNS records to new server so you might have to wait till DNS propagated. Also, you might not need to edit DNS records to new server too fast because you need to make sure everything is working properly there. Most hosting providers will offer a free temp url to test out your domain before DNS change. Once you verified everything working properly you can change DNS to work on new servers(you need to pick up a good time to reduce website downtime)

More about Free Website Migration Hosting Service

Free website migration service is helpful if you're busy in doing other work or not very familiar with the process. Hosting support will transfer over everything to their space. However, since your website is your property, it's the best if you can handle the data move by yourself because you're not sure what's going on and the migration team might not awared what needs to be handled specially.

Conclusion: if you don't want to be hassled by website migration and need to guarantee everything will be moved over properly, free migration hosting service is quite helpful. However, if you have lots of sensitive data and want to protect everything as much as possible, it's better to migrate everything by yourself.

Visit http://www.Arvixe.com and view hosting services

Best Cloud VPS Hosting 2013

Best cloud vps hosting 2013

The best cloud VPS hosting awards 2013 goes to VPS.net(http://www.vps.net) for both personal and medium to large business application. No other hosting company be able to offer cost effective and high quality cloud vps service like VPS.net till present. Handled by UK2 group, vps.net cloud servers are powered by over 10 top datacenters on multiple continents including Asia, Europe, Austrilia and United States. After several years' development, vps.net now offers leading cloud vps hosting with the cheapest possible price!

VPS.net Cloud Hosting Features

VPS.net will setup your server with pre-optimization right after payment is confirmed. You can easily deploy your applications to cloud server with lots of available tools. Their powerful tech support is always available for zero waiting contact. In short, the VPS.net cloud vps servers are offered with following advantages

  • Stellar Server & Network Uptime
  • Full Root Access
  • FREE R1Soft Daily Backups
  • Guaranteed Resources
  • 99.9% Uptime SLA
  • 30 Day Money Back Guarantee

All-inclusive VPS solution with all advantages of Cloud hosting! You will get guaranteed resources, typical for the VPS technology, together with the redundancy of cloud storage. You're allowed to fully customize your VPS features such as disk space, memory, bandwidth etc to fulfill your application requirements.

vpsnet cloud vpsGo to www.vps.net for cloud VPS plan details!

More about VPS.net Cloud VPS Hosting

When comes to Cloud VPS, most server providers just set up their service via multiple dedicated server as private cloud. It's a costly solution to deploy the cloud service from multiple datacenters especially for thoese small groups. The real cloud hosting service is available from major players in hosting industry such as Rackspace and Amazon AWS. However, their cloud service is mostly configured via dedicated plans and pretty expensive to deal with, though you indeed receive the money values.

Things are different with VPS.net service. They're powered by UK2 group who is managing several leading brands in web hosting business. Their business purpose is trying to offer the best service with the cheapest possible price. In order to archive this goal, they setup or co-operate with over 20 world class datacenters from most major areas to guarantee your best server connection. Side by side features as listed below

  • Over 100 OS choice If you are prefered to any server OS, it can be demanded from vps.net service since they have prepared over 100 pre-optimized server os for both windows and linux server. Most services are pre-installed such as web server, database etc.
  • No rebooting upgrades Once there's upgrade fix for server system or any service on your vps server, the hot fix will be applied automatically from the cloud system so you don't need to reboot your vps server and cause any service interruption.
  • World wide DC support The VPS.net cloud VPS servers are powered by over 20 datacenters in each corner of the world. No matter if you're from US or EU or Asia you will get the nearby datacenter connections with fastest response. For example if you're from China, your cloud vps will be connected from HongKong datacenter to guarantee the best network connection.
  • Professional and Friendly Support The VPS.net cloud engineers are pretty smart in cloud development and problem fixing. They're also trained on how to offer friendly with quick response. They're available 24×7 and ready for contacting any time with your convenience. If you're transfering from other service provider, their support will help handling everything if needed! Best of the best in the business.

VPS.net Cloud VPS hosting coupon

Are you going to save some money with VPS.net service? Congratulations! VPS.net support now offers $60 credits in your VPS hosting account by using coupon code "APRIL2013". When you order your VPS server from vps.net site, click the "Got A Coupon" and enter the code above. Once your Account is activated you will receive $60 available balance from account summary section.

Note: This VPS.net coupon code will be expired in the end of April. You will also need to use the credits within the first billing cycle or else it will be cleared in the next contract. You can use the $60 credits for any service purchasing on vps.net site such as account renewal.

Visit www.vps.net and view cloud vps plans!

VPS.net Customer Reviews

We have gathered lots of vps.net clients' feedbacks from online and made a survey to collect the real user experience. Over 95% people are satisfied with their server speed and over 90% are satisfied with their tech support. 100% people are satsfied with their price. If you're tired trying your existing server provider, VPS.net will give you fresh air and help move over everything from your current provider. Don't hesitate to contac their support for your concerns, they will offer you the best experience in the business.

Visit http://www.vps.net/

A Small Orange Reviews

A Small Orange Hosting Reviews

About A Small Orange Hosting

A Small Orange or ASO in short, was founded in Atlanta in 2003, backened by about 38 working staffs and serving more than half millions websites around the world. Their business philosophy is pretty simple: provide the best quality service and support to customers at an affordable cost. The ASO group provides award winning customer service and support 24×7 via multiple channels.

A Small Orange Hosting Plans

ASO provides a full range of web hosting solutions including shared, VPS, cloud and dedicated server hosting. Each hosting solution is configured via multiple hosting plans, exact server resource you can utilize. Based such limitation you will be able to chose the right service plan according to your detailed website requirements. For quick view over their overal features and pricing, check this comparison list

Shared Web Hosting

  • Tiny: $35/year, 250MB Space & 5GB Data transfer
  • Small: $5/month, 1GB Space & 20GB Data transfer
  • Medium: $10/month, 5GB Space & 100GB Data transfer
  • Large: $20/month, 15GB Space &  300GB Data transfer
  • Super: $30/month, 25GB Space & 500GB Data transfer

Business Web Hosting

  • Startup: $20/mo, 10GB Space & 100GB Data transfer
  • Small Business: $40/mo, 20GB Space & 200GB Data transfer
  • Enterprise: $60/mo, 30GB Space & 300GB Data transfer

Reseller Web Hosting

  • Small: $15/mo, 3GB Space, 30GB B/W, & 30 hosted sites
  • Medium: $25/mo, 5GB Space, 50GB B/W, & 50 hosted sites
  • Large: $35/mo, 10GB Space, 100GB B/W, & 100 hosted sites

As we see, there's wide range choice for all kinds of website hosting requirements. If you just want to support a small personal blog or family website, it just costs you $35/yr with all support sources. Need higher hosting solution? They also got cloud VPS and dedicated servers with very good price.

Visit www.asmallorange.com for hosting details!

The Truth of ASO Hosting

Honesty is absolutely the spotlight of ASO hosting service. Unlike every other hosting who gives you most service unlimited and force you to pay extra when problem occurs, ASO tells you how much you can use exactly and notify you when you outgrowed the service. Besides all their efforts in offering you best service, their service also comes 45 day money back guarantee and 99.9% uptime to make their service worry free. The best price trick from many hosting companies is, you aren forced into a 1-year, 2-year or even 3-year contract. If you want to pay monthly, the price is pretty high! On the other hand, A Small Orange allows you to sign up monthly or yearly with the same price.

About A Small Orange CEO

A Small Orange CEOThe guy on the right is the ASO CEO "Douglas Hanna"

"A junior at Duke University, works in the office—when he doesn’t have to go to class. "Basically if I'm not in class or sleeping I'm probably working or doing something related to it," Hanna says. He puts in about 40 to 50 hours a week toward the business, which he calls a priority over school. Hanna understands this mindset might not be good, but he's focused on the long run with his business, which he plans to stick with after he graduates in December of 2012."  — quoted on inc.com

A Small Orange is actually purchased from another company which was doing mediocre for many years. Hanna worked with his old boss Brent Oxley to buy A Small Orange in March 2010. After that, the venture became formally known as A Small Orange LLC.

About ASO datacenter

ASO is powered by the datacenter AtlantaNAP that with over 12 years in the internet business. With a 10 foot razor fence, keycard entry, and a security system that includes redundant security camera servers, biometric handprint scanning, and armed security guards, the NAP datacenter services are the safest in Atlanta. Take a quick look of the datacenter outlook

A Small Orange Datacenter

A Small Orange Hosting Promo Codes

Yes! ASO offers coupon codes for their service. If you're fans of ASO and would like to save some money, make sure to take the advantages of the following promo codes.

  • FACETWEET: Save 25% off your first month for any hosting plan
  • PCATX10: Save 50% off the 1st month on all cloud based products
  • MAR1337: 15% off your total order for shared hosting

Go to www.Asmallorange.com for hosting plans!

Best FREE SSL Hosting

Best free ssl hosting

SSL is a MUST for secure data transaction on website especially for those shopping cart sites. Only after you enabled ssl connection on your store site, people be able order safely and pay the service/products. If you haven't got one or not sure how to choose, we're going to introduce the best FREE ssl hosting provider as well as free ssl service to secure your business.

Best FREE SSL Web Hosting

The best free ssl hosting awards goes to Hostgator for fast and reliable server with FREE SSL support! If you're looking for reliable and costive ssl hosting solution, hostgator is absolutely perfect choice today!

Hostgator FREE SSL hosting details

Dedicated SSL is offered for business plan and enterprise plan(windows) only. The starter or baby plans does not offer free ssl certificate. The business or enterprise hosting plan is the highest shared hosting solution by hostgator. The plan comes with following leading supports

  • Linux /Windows 2008 R2 support
  • Unlimited Ms SQL /Mysql database support
  • Multiple domain names hosting support
  • FREE Domain Registration opportunity
  • SSH /Remote IIS manager support
  • >>Check more features

While we pay about $100/yr for the service we will get dedicated 256 bit ssl certificate which actually costs us another $100 if purchase separately from ssl provider. Furthermore, SSL installation will require a static IP address which normally costs us $2/mo or more. It's offered completely free via hostgator. Totally we have saved $120/yr at least with their service. The best of the best is we can also take advantage of this hostgator coupon "review25off" for additional 25% discount by signing up hostgator hosting!

Hostgator free ssl hosting

Go to www.Hostgator.com and view free ssl details!

While Hostgator offered free ssl via shared hosting plan, another top hosting brand Arvixe also provides Free ssl support over business class hosting plans. The arvixe business class hosting is simply semi dedicated server based where we just don't have root access to hosting server. If you have outgrowed the shared environment and need higher hosting solution but don't want to manage a server by yourself, this service is absolutely the best choice. While you can get same or even better service than VPS server, you leave all server end tasks to support team and enjoy the best hosting service. Take a quick look from this screenshot

Arvixe free ssl hosting

Arvixe will renew the SSL certificate for your account as long as your keep the hosting service with them. Also, no matter if you purchase SSL from Arvixe or anywhere else, their support will install on your site for free! In same cases, it can be installed instantly!

Go to www.Arvixe.com for free ssl hosting plans!

Dedicated SSL vs Shared SSL

Almost every hosting providers offered free shared ssl to their clients. It doesn't require separate installtion over your account and enabled as default. Since there's already free shared ssl why do we have to purchase a dedicated one? The answer is about authority and professionality.

Shared SSL is installed on hosting providers' website as wildcard certificate for example on *.hostgator.com. That's how they can offer shared ssl service to every clients. In order to use this certificate, you have to use https on this url(It's known as tem URL) instead your own domain names. In this way you have to change your code to work with another domain address and in case your clients have notified the address change when ordering, they might hesitate to make payment. You're in risk of loosing business by using shared ssl although it's functional the same as dedicated ssl.

Dedicated ssl certificate will keep everything on your own domain so you don't have to make further change. Once installation is completed you can use https address for your secure site.

FREE SSL Provider?

Is there any free ssl certificate service? Yes there indeed has some free ssl providers like startssl. You just follow their policy and verify your domain ownership and complete the registration, then you can get a one year free certificate for your website. We personally have not used this service. Based their feedbacks, it looks like their certificate is best for personal site security. The free one is offered on 128 bit which is not suitable for business purpose. If you have a big website with lots of online transaction, you need 256 bit ssl at least for reliable encryption.

More About SSL Certificate

SSL is short for Secure Sockets Layer, it's a protocol that provides communication security over the Internet. The SSL protocol was originally developed by Netscape. Version 1.0 was never publicly released; version 2.0 was released in February 1995 but "contained a number of security flaws which ultimately led to the design of SSL version 3.0." SSL version 3.0, released in 1996, was a complete redesign of the protocol produced by Paul Kocher working with Netscape engineers Phil Karlton and Alan Freier. Newer versions of SSL/TLS are based on SSL 3.0. The 1996 draft of SSL 3.0 was published by IETF as a historical document in RFC 6101.

Read more about SSL on Wikipedia.

West Coast Hosting

Best West Coast Hosting

West Coast Hosting Overview

When choosing a web hosting provider, the actual server location is pretty essential for best connections. If your website audience are from West coast or nearby west coast then you should find a hosting service in that area, the vice versa. When referring to west coast, it's mainly about Los Angeles, California. Here're we're going to find out who's offer the best west coast hosting service with the best deals.

Best West Coast Hosting Awards

Los Angeles is probably one of the most crowd place for datacenter groups. Many popular datacenter providers are headquatered there or set brancch/office in that area. Not because of the nice environment for hosting servers but also for the good business to connect both civil and oversea clients.

Best West Coast Hosting for Business – Inmotion

Inmotion Hosting is Awarded the best west coast hosting provider for business. Their Los Angeles datacenter is setup by following state-of-the-art infrastructures with max speed zone enabled. Inmotion group has teamed up with some of the world's largest ISPs and peering exchanges to create direct data connections. The end result is a noticeably faster connection. Technologies being used by Inmotion West coast datacenter

  • Servers housed in Category A, PCI compliant data centers
  • N+2 or N+1 power systems with multiple battery and diesel power sources in case of public utility failure
  • BGP4 network to prevent downtime in case of loss of hardware
  • N+1 Configurations on all servers using RAID 5
  • 24x7x365 System Administrators on hand
  • Backups created every 36 hours up to 10GB

Inmotion Los Angeles hosting plans are setup to meet your side by side business requirements such as free domain registration, multiple domain/database support, up to 90 days leading money back guarantee and 100% satisfication guarantee.

inmotion LA hosting plans

Visit www.inmotionhosting.com for LA web hosting plan details!

Best West Coast Hosting for Individuals – WebHostingHub

Webhostinghub is awarded the best west coast hosting for individuals! Whub is simply the sister brand of Inmotion which is focused in offering best web hosting service for individuals and small to medium size websites. While Inmotion is 100% optimized for business website hosting, webhostinghub is completely prepared for personal website purpose. Besides all other leading features from regular hosting plans, webhostinghub offers extra bonus for cheap hosting plan such as suPHP and 90 days leading money back guarantee. You can not expect better offer from any other hosting providers.

Webhostinghub Personal hosting plan details

  • Free domain name registration
  • Unlimited domain hosting support
  • Unlimited Mysql database support
  • Latest PHP support
  • Softaculous installer over 200 scripts
  • 90 days money back guarantee
  • 99% uptime guarantee!

Regualarly, the webhostinghub service is configured at $4.95/mo, however if you sign up through our website directly it will auto cut one buck off for monthly price so the actual price decreased to $3.95/mo. With this price, webhostinghub is absolutely leading among all cheap hosting providers on the globe.

webhostinghub west coast hosting

More about west coast hosting

A decent west coast hosting service must be configured via the best datacenter providers. Previously when we worked with the hosting company, all hosting servers are placed at Alchemy which is the most famous ISP in that area. Alchemy data centers provide redundant power, cooling, and network solutions to ensure that your business stays connected 24/7/365 to the rest of the world. Alchemy Colocation facilities are located in Downtown Los Angeles and directly adjacent to the LAX airport.

With our personal experience in working there, the connection speed is pretty fast and all equipments are protected through 3 layers security checking, outage or damages can be notified at the earliest time.

Alchemy official site: www.alchemy.net

Another leading ISP in that area is Peer1. This ISP actually manage multiple datacenters through out USA. Peer 1 Los Angeles is located in the area Los Angeles, USA (America), and the colocation data center is carrier neutral. It's powering lots of famous hosting groups vary from shared, VPS and dedicated server and even cloud hosting service.

Peer1 official site: www.peer1.com

In case you would like to check other popular world class US datacenters, you can check out our previous introduction on http://www.webhostpark.com/world-class-datacenters

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