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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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

Brand: 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!

Brand: 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.

Cloud VPS means our hosting server is configured in cloud environment over all major features like storage, memory etc. While all services are cloud based, we still be able to manage it professionally via popular management panels like cpanel or plesk etc. In case you're in need of such service and looking for quality providers, let's go ahead and review more.

What's good of cloud vps server?

Cloud vps is actually the most popular form of cloud hosting services. Unless we have sufficient budget and ready to go with a cloud dedicated server plan, cloud vps will be perfect choice. The cloud vps server advantages are mainly about the comparison over traditional vps servers. If you have experienced with regular vps, the advantages will be easy to pick out. Here's quick view list of the spotlights

• High performance and reliability
• Multiple geographic locations
• Guaranteed RAM and uplink connection
• Scalable server configurations
• Cloud storage redundancy

Unlike a single dedicated server that could be virtulized by any technology, cloud server has advanced requirements for performance and stability.  By using leading techs & optimized server structures, cloud vps simply drives the best performance for your web app.

Best cloud vps hosting provider

The actual difference among all cloud vps services is the cloud degrees. A decent cloud hosting is configured through multiple global nodes & devices. Only big groups with powerful financial backend be able to offer such service. Microsoft offers windows azure hosting which is considered the best windows cloud solution. However, they don't have any other hosting offer. The rest choice turns to other giants in hosting industry like rakspace and softlayer, but their services are simply too expensive to deal with. With our research and evaluation, Bluehost is ranked the best cloud vps hosting for plan features and pricing.

Bluehost cloud VPS hosting features

Bluehost truely understand what people needed and designed multiple hosting plans to choose from. We are able to select a starter server for only $18/mo with all necessary tools like cloud server control panel and ssh etc. Bluehost manage all services including hardware and software on their own data centers where available resources are more than enough for hosting requirements.

Bluehost cloud vps server will be instantly setup upon order verification. Your resources are guaranteed to be available at all times and server expansions are competitively priced and enabled without requiring admin assistance.

What really makes bluehost outstanding is their powerful management panel. Its GUI interface is fully featured to show up server working states and statistics. You can always access to it with any mobile device as long as internet access is activated!

• Self-healing hardware
• Scale with demand
• Stellar Server & Network Uptime
• Isolated, Secure Environment
• Guaranteed Resources
• 30 Day Money Back Guarantee
• Full root access
• 99.9% Uptime SLA

How do we think about?

VPS is powered by one of the largest hosting group – UK2 who has been majoy play in hosting over 10 years. They're running global business with leading service/customer support.  No matter if we need shared hosting or dedicated server solutions, there's always a good one from UK2 company. In case you need a decent shared hosting service, westhost is mostly recommended brand under this group.

Go to http://www.bluehost.com for cloud vps hosting plans details

Cloud VPS Hosting FAQs

What's the best technology for cloud vps virtualization?

The best platform and technology for cloud vps creation is KVM on Openstack. Other technologies are also popularly used such as VMware, Hyper-v and Xen etc.

What if I go over my data limits?

You will be notified at the earliest time for such case. Then you need to purchase extra resources for your vps server to keep it online.

Can I get my own VLAN/Private network?

Yes you can. With the cloud interface, it is easy to activate additional network cards, which can only be used for private traffic.

What if I want to change the server OS?

You just need to load another OS template from your control panel. Please keep in mind all your existing data on server will be cleared.

What if my cloud vps broken?

You can either do quick restoration from most recent backup or load a completely new installation.

How's cloud vps comparing to traditional vps?

Comparing to tranditional vps server, cloud vps is flexibility and scalability. The most important feature is the great uptime. In logic, you won't get downtime for cloud vps server because all service failure will be taken over by another healthy device.

Mailing list Introduction & Hosting

Mailing list is a collection of email addresses by people and send out bulk emails to all user addresses in the list. The user list can be added manually or via website subscription. Most of the time, mailing list is called "email marketing" by people. A mailing list supported hosting service will provide clients the needed software and list management tools.

Why mailing list?

The purpose of mailing list is for newsletter announcement and business marketing. Mailing list has probably the longest history for online marketing promotion. No matter if we want to send out news update to communities or advertise our latest products to people, mailing list is always most efficient method. An honest and well designed letter will return more than expected.

Best Mailing list Hosting Provider

A mailing list is always composed by thousands of subscribers, once we started the broadcasting, it will cause busy data transition on server & network. Also, if we're trying to send out less quality letters and caused user reporting, the entire server will be blocked by major providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo etc.

Because of this, the mailing list feature is strictly limited by most hosting providers. Normally, we can send about 2000 mails per month via shared hosting service. If we want to send out more, we have to use dedicated mailing list service or setup our own mail server to handle it. A mailing list hosting plan is relatively expensive than regular hosting solutions as it needs to ensure the inbox success. If you're looking for quality mailing list hosting service plan, it's recommended to check out following

Godaddy – Godaddy is leading service provider of web hosting, domain registration and email marketing. If you need quality email hosting plans, godaddy offers economy, deluxe and premium packages for different levels requirements. We're allowed to send additional amount via extra costs. Godaddy mailing list plans come with

• Easy Email Editor
• 20,000+ images to customize campaigns
• Easily add sign-up forms to any website
• Real-time campaign statistics
• Unlimited list segmentation to tailor your offers
• Post campaigns on social networks

Another leading brand for mailing list solution is WebhostingHub. Their iContact list server is fully capable of handling large amount email sending. The iContact established relations with the major ISPs and have been whitelisted with email giants like AOL and Yahoo. Here's more about what's included

• Message scheduling
• Open and click through tracking
• Built in WYSIWYG Editor
• Advanced Analytics
• Bounce-back handling
• Automated Subscription Management
• Sign-Up Form Generator
• List Segmentation
• Multiple Message Autoresponder
• Integrated Surveying

We can also get a dedicated server and install our own email softwares for email marketing purpose. The main problem is about IP whitelist. It's easy to get a server and configure the service but more complex to have it working as expected because of more and more spam control.

How to use mailing list successfully?

How to start successful email marketing? Several tips to follow up

Pay attention to quality
Regardless any good mailing list service, If we just send out useless broadcasting without considering the message quality, even it got to users' inbox, it will be ignored or marked as "SPAM".

Know your audience
It's not suggested to send broadcasting to people that's not in our community unless we're pretty sure they'll be interested.

Give out choice
We should provide an unsubscribe link in the end so in case someone don't like to receive future mails. If we continue to send mails to somebody that not interested with our information, they will blacklist us and report our accounts. In that case we loose a lot!

In a word, mailing list marketing is not just to send out an email to people but to build confidence between audience and ourselves.

Mailing List Hosting FAQs

How can i send out list mail?

With a mailing list hosting service, you always need to send out the mail from management center. If you manage your own mailing list server, you can send the list mail from email account directly.

How many emails Can I send out per list?

The limit can be daily basis or monthly basis, you have to confirm with your service provider.

Is dedicated server better than mailing hosting service?

Depends. A dedicated server will work much better if you're skilled in list server configuration and the related setup. In case you use the list incorrectly, your entire server will be blacklisted. A mailing list service has many restrictions to ensure the server health and much easier to use because everything is pre-configured. Hosting support be able to fix problems at the earliest time.

How do I monitor the mailing lists stats

You can view the list stats from management center where you can see the number of sent mails, subscribers & unsubscribers.

How long will the list server send out my list mail?

Normally, with a mailing list hosting, the list server will pre-check your email contents to determine if your email is legal or if there's any virus etc to ensure the server security. It might take up to 24 hours.

How to identify a good mailing list hosting provider?

A good mailing list hosting must be configured by leading mailing list softwares and powerful server. It must be trusted by major mail providers like gmail, hotmail and yahoo etc.

In case we have a busy traffic website, we have to consider higher hosting solutions like dedicated server or cloud hosting or other service like content delivery network(CDN). Cloud hosting is scalable but expensive service, unless it's a MUST, we always need more affordable service. Today we're going to compare the CDN and dedicated server solutions and find which is actually better.

What's CDN?

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDN networks serve almost all web contents like text, urls, videos etc.

How will CDN help with our website?

With CDN service, there're multiple internet nodes configured to share the web contents so once our website is browsed, it will send out data from the nearest datacenter to users. In this way, CDN reduced the latency or failure that's caused by webserver or network etc. Some CDN networks use P2P technology to cache files on as more devices in order to generate best performance.

CDN vs Dedicated server

Since CDN is already so nice, why should we need dedicated server? What would be the CDN weakness comparing to the traditional dedicated server? Well, let's read below.

Performance
Logically the CDN be able to ensure 100% uptime since it's served by multiple servers/networks, however it's quite possible to get slowness because of network configurations. With dedicated server, performance will rely on server hardware configurations and datacenter network. Because there's dedicated bandwidth allocation, we won't see too much latency.

Reliability
There're many CDN service providers on the market, however their service quality varies a lot. A CDN can be setup via 3 or 30 nodes. A decent service have datacenters on multiple locations on the planet like Microsoft azure, however it's not doable for most CDN providers, they just recent some servers from different DCs and don't have too much access to the network stuff.

A Dedicated server is fully handled by our hands with full access to any side configurations. We have full control over resource allocation as well as security updates/protection. In a word, we just play with our wish from dedicated server, but it requires professional management skills or it's easy to product problems.

Security
This could be the most concern for CDN service. Since it will send our website data on multiple servers/locations, it's hard to get everything protected especially when there's sensitive information on website.

On the other hand, a dedicated server will provide us top level security over any data because everything is stored on a single device. As long as the single server is protected properly, we don't have to worry data leaks.

Support
When problem does occur, the CDN support will have to track every nodes for fixing and the process might take a long time depends the complicacy. A dedicated server is actually supported by our own, as long as the server is up and we have access to it. Means, unless it's a MUST, we don't have to bother our server provider for problem fixing.

When should we choose CDN or dedicated server?

Normally, a decent dedicated server is far more expensive than cdn services especially there're more and more free cdn providers like cloudflare. As above comparison, we should have learnt a dedicated server actually performs better than CDN as it's powered by dedicated resource.

When for CDN? If you have limited budget and website visitor locations vary a lot, we could consider a cdn service. If we have a heavy traffic site with sensitive data such as shopping cart, we should consider dedicated solution or at least a decent VPS server.

Who offers best CDN service? Microsoft Azure is probably the best since they have over 24 global DCs to serve. If we need affordable cdn, the cloudflare might be good to try out and they offer free integration for personal sites. If we need affordable and quality dedicated servers, we highly suggest hostgator, they're powered by leading datacenter provider "Softlayer"