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.

Web Host For Life

web host for life

Looking for a reliable and trustable web host for life? Yeah, I'm sure it's always the primary idea for most web hosting finders and it's indeed an important rule for web host research. I just spent the China lunar new year holiday with my families. I thought there would be less internet business during this period because most workers there are on holiday. However, I find there's huge traffic on my website search terms with such requests. Based on my background, I would like to share my personal experience and opinions when looking for life time web hosting.

How Does Web Host For life work?

Since we're talking about life time service, it must come with high reliability and professional support. Service reliability and products support are actually the most important factors when looking for any online service. Here're explanation about the rules

Service Reliability — Definitely the most important factor for web hosting. When we pay for the service, we absolutely would like our website always online and not affected by any "unexpected issues". A reliable hosting always have everything pre-considered to avoid service inturruption such as power failure, network attack or any other popular internet problems. Reliability is also referring to server performance. a reliable hosting server never running fast at times but always keep the similar performance till the hardware life cycle. Based on today's computing technologies, it's not a hard guarantee for a quality hosting company.

Professional Support — Another most essential point after our paying. There's not a service with no problem, the point is how will their people handle it. Fast and professional tech support will get remedy problems in minutes or seconds with their smart team. But if you're dealing with a $1/yr hosting service, you might have to bear with the timely waiting on call.

Are they all for web hosting research? Absolutely not! Price is also crucial point that's considered by most people when looking for hosting provider. Although the web hosting is more and more cheap because of the tech development, we should always keep in mind we get what we pay for. Never sign up those service who announce to offer you one year's service with several bucks. Just think about the investment on real hosting equiptments, how will the profitable with such price? They're either overselling the hosting server or rubbish reseller of some hosting company. A quality web hosting plan always comes with resonable price and features.

How to find your Web Host For Life?

web host for lifeIndeed, it's hard to locate a life time trustable web hosting service because it's not so hard to setup such business for web hosting companies. Web hosting is already a matured market, more and more people would like to profit from it. That's why we get so many advertisement when searching for related terms. it's  pretty easy to be misguided by the attractive offers. It's not bad to see advertisement because of it's popularity, but it's bad if we don't get what we're looking for. It's always wise to by pass all advertisements and go to the next search result page directly.

If you are not sure where to go, it's recommended to ask your friends or some professional web forums like webhostingtalk, almost every hosting names can be found on that site. Many enthusiastic webmasters are pretty active to answer your questions. you can list out your detailed requirements and there will always be several suggestions to follow up.

Best Web Host For Life

Personally, I have over 6 years' experience in web hosting since from my first job. If you're interested, make sure to read this "About me" page to learn about. When I start this website, I have been testing and trying out various hosting services on some test websites. Till present, I highly recommend the following brands with my personal experience

  • Arvixe – Affordable and reliable hosting provider since from 2003. Arvixe support both windows and linux hosting hosting plans with very affordable price.
  • Inmotion – Fast and reliable hosting provider, their people have by far the fastest server in my experience. No oversale is tested and confirmed by lots of webmasters. Inmotion is also recognized standard choice for business web hosting.
  • Bluehost – One of the largest web hosting companies on the planet, If you need shared, vps, dedicated server and reseller hosting, all set with hostgator.

If you need a web host for life business, the above names are simply on top of the list based their reputation and user experience from the industry.

Top 5 VPS Hosting

top 5 vps hosting

When the shared environment is no longer enough for our website growth, vps hosting plan is the best choice before we have to upgrade to dedicated server solution. However, since vps is being offered by almost every hosting company, it's little hard to determine which service plan is offering quality service. Especially when some super cheap vps server being advertised everywhere, start users will always be misguided. After one year's experience with some popular vps hosting providers, I would like to compare the top 5 vps hosting brands. Generally speaking, each solution in the list will work according to people's different requirements.

Top 5 vps hosting list

Please note, The top 5 vps hosting companies in my list are all offering full hosting solutions including shared, vps, reseller and dedicated servers. The dedicated server companis are not included such as rackspace, softlayer etc. The top 5 vps hosting names in my list are Hostgator, Greengeeks, Bluehost, InmotionHosting, Arvixe. Each in the service names have their own unique advantages. Here I would like to make a basic introduction and introduction. Let's look below for a table list of their service specifications

VPS Brand Arvixe Hostgator Greengeeks Bluehost Inmotion
Server Specs Intel Dual Quad Core Intel Dual Quad Core Intel Dual Quad Core Intel Dual Quad Core Intel Dual Quad Core
Starter Pricing $40/mo $19.95 $39.95 $17.95 $39.95
RAM 1024 MB 384 MB 512 MB 2 MB 256 MB
Disk/Bandwidth 40GB/Unlimited 10GB/250GB 25GB/500GB 20GB/500GB 40GB/500GB
Control Panel cpanel/Websitepanel Cpanel Cpanel Cpanel Cpanel
Virtualization Tech Hyper-V Virtuozzo OpenVZ Openstack Virtuozzo

As we see, all the 5 vps services have their own advantages either in space/datatransfer or pricing. The hostgator is probably most well known by people because of their leading position in the business. However, that doesn't mean there's no weakness with their vps hosting plans. For example they do not offer windows vps solutions.

Actually, only arvixe can offer windows vps in the list. The advantage with Arvixe windows vps is their hyper-v integration. it's officially supported by Microsoft company. Since windows server is also MS product, it's logically to know hyper-v has the best performance with windows vps. Arvixe always keep updated with microsoft. Their hosting server OS is configured on latest server 2012 with newest hardware production!

For start users who do not have too much requirement for server and just want to learn server management skills for simple website hosting, hostgator is definitely the most ideal choice because of their price. Inmotion vps is featured for it's stability and their team officially announced no oversale, their weakness is the high price with the server specs.

From side by side comparison, arvixe is obviously most outstanding in top 5 VPS hosting. Twice more server features with affordable price, you can put your business safe with arvixe!

Go to arvixe for VPS server details http://www.Arvixe.com

Tips when choosing vps hosting plan

Pricing and server reliability are definitely the most important part when we evaluate the servers. However, the price will always not match with the service quality if you selected the wrong type service. For vps hosting purpose, the following factors are considered before you start the service research.

Networking – Speed is always the most important factor when we evaluate a potential service plan. The quality service products are always generated from well-known datacenters. If the hosting provider does not have their  own DC, make sure to choose from the popular DC names such as in this world class datacenters list.

Server Specifications – I'm not talking about the VPS server because we can always choose how much we need. I'm talking about the host server where the VPS created from. For vps hosting purpose, the host server must have at least 24GB RAM with Intel Dual Quad Core plus RAID 10 Disk. Also, try to ask pre-sales support for about how many vps instance they're managing per host server.

Virtual Technologies – There're many virtualization technologies on the market. But not all of them are suitable for hosting environment. Some good names such as virtuozzo, hyper-v, openvz, xen, vmware etc.

Support Availability – Don't choose a service who does not respond within one minute. One minute is enough to your business disaster. Sign up those service who can offer real 24×7 tech support.

Some tips are also available on our previous vps hosting posting.


Dedicated IP Hosting Secret revealed

dedicated ip hosting

Dedicated IP (or called static ip) is a relative term comparing to shared ip. It's also considered as an important feature for web hosting plans. If you're looking for dedicated ip hosting service and not sure where to start. I would like to make a basic explanation and see if it's a must need feature for you.

How does dedicated ip work?

Dedicated ip is featured for it's unique. Just think there're one hundred of websites on same hosting server and all websites are sharing a single ip address. If we assign an extra ip address to the server and configure it for a specific domain name, some third party website analyze tools will consider this website is hosted on dedicated server, though it's under a shared hosting envrionment. So in a word, the dedicated ip makes your website unique among all other domains on same hosting server.

Best dedicated ip hosting plan

Best dedicated hostingDedicated has many good features but it's always expensive to get. Most of the time, a web hosting provider be able to offer you 3 or 4 bucks per month service but you might need pay twice or more for dedicated ip support. Because of the limited IPv4 numbers, the price is going up every few period.

However, that doesn't mean there's not a web hosting plan be able to offer us affordable dedicated ips. Ixwebhosting is the name for dedicated ip hosting provider. Their shared hosting plans will provide us up to 15 dedicated ips for free! The base price of the hosting plan is only $7.95/mo. Plus the ixwebhosting 25% off coupon code, the price is going down a bit! For dedicated ips offer, there's no better place other than ixwebhosting.

How will the dedicated IP offered? You don't have to contact ixwebhosting support separately to claim the IPs. Once you signed up, their system will auto allocate IPs to your account in their IP ranges. When you add a new domain name to account, you have choice to use shared or dedicated IP address.

Go to ixwebhosting for 15 FREE dedicated ip offer!http://www.ixwebhosting.com

Who need dedicated ip address?

There're many services have to be configured via dedicated ips because of the software features. Some popular service such as web server, FTP server, Email server, VPN etc are highly IP restricted. Dedicated ips make it easy to separate all services if you configure them on same server. If they're configured on independent servers, it will let end users easy to remember but not have to deal with dynamic changes every time.

For webmaster, you need SSL certificate if you're running a shopping cart that requires online billing transaction. SSL installation will require dedicated IP address as well.

Dedicated ip vs Shared ip

There's no much difference between dedicated ip and shared ip. Unless you're managing services by yourself with above special requirements, you don't really need it. However, there're few conditions we need dedicated ip in web hosting service.

SSL Certificate website -Dedicated ip is a must for ssl installation on web server. The ssl protocol communicates with dedicated ip addres only. Unless you host a single website on server, it will crash all other sites.

Secured Applications -Some secured applications that're opened for specific locations will require dedicates ip to work with. For example you're hosting an online project and need extra protection to avoid bad effect from other websites on same server, dedicated ip will give a simple solution.

SEO -Although there're many articles saying website ip factor being ignored by search engines, the fact is a dedicated ip based website does get better ranking from SERP. No matter how does the tech document saying, it's still playing an essential role in this industry. Dedicated IP will at least keep your website in safe place in case some websites got penalized on same hosting server.


Advantages Of IIS Web Server Hosting

Advantages of iis web hosting

IIS(Internet Information Service) is one of the leading web server solutions. From the earliest version 1.0 to the current 7.5, the MS team always brings us big surprise with up to date technical supports. Recently, I upgraded my server to windows server 2008 R2 and configured the IIS with all available add-on products. I have to say, it's by far the most powerful system in my web experience. I would be more than happy to share my experience with this product.

What's new in IIS 7.5?

  • Built-in, brand new FTP server and WebDav support
  • Rich IIS configuration editor and scripts for automated configuration management
  • Windows PowerShell snap-in for IIS
  • Quality enhancements with lots of bug fixes
  • Config tracing so you can audit changes to the IIS configuration system
  • Application Warm-Up tech for best web performance

For the full list of IIS new features in 7.5, you can check out this Mai-lan's blog post: http://blogs.iis.net/mailant/archive/2009/10/22/general-availability-of-windows-7-amp-windows-server-2008-r2-with-iis-7-5.aspx

Popular add-on products for IIS

IIS is great because the rich of great add-on products to meet your different web requirements. The add-on products are categorized by production and development sections. You can try out the most recent tech from development release and apply the most stable service on your live site from production category. Although the windows server is costly, all these add-on products are free to download on IIS official site! Here're few of the great products I have tried out.

  • Search Engine Optimization Toolkit -It helps us how to optimize our web site contents and structures for search engine friendly. Robots and sitemaps are supported.
  • Database Manager -If you think you have to install thrid party tools in order to manage a database well, you're out! IIS Database Manager provides the ability to connect to any database on the network. Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL are fully compatible! You can query and view database diagrams in IIS UI conveniently.
  • Web Deploy -A tool to simplify the web server migration/deployment. No matter if we want to synchronize a webserver or migrate from older IIS websites to new one, Web deploy  is working like a charm! It works with single website migration as well as entire server migration.
  • Web Platform Installer -The best one for end website users. The web platform installer is a gallery of the popular softwares installation. The IIS Web Platform Installer makes the process of software installation easy! just click search the wished name then click "Add" button and it will configure the software smartly on your iis server! It works for website software such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. It also works for server end software installation such as PHP, SQL Server and every products available as free.

There're many fantastic add-ons which is available at http://www.iis.net/download/ for free download. Just try and find out more surprise.

Actually, the biggest surprise in my experience is the increase of website performance. Unlike the old version server where I have to configure services very carefully and test out before applying to production server, The IIS 7.5 on server 2008 can be auto configured via the official team experience. The configuration is available from the web platform installer pack.

Best IIS Web Hosting Provider

IIS is the earliest web server and shares about half market on the planet. However, not too many hosting providers be able to offer reliable iis web hosting plans. A good iis hosting service must be affordable and reliable with easy management. Since 2006, arvixe has been our top recommendation for feature rich and affordable iis hosting plans. Starts from $5/mo, you can take advantages of unlimited storage and monthly data transfer as well as free domain name to put up website in quick time!

Visit arvixe for iis web hosting plans http://www.Arvixe.com

Since from the first release of iis, it has brought us positive surprise for each upgrade. It's hard to say what kind of new surprise their team will bring us. However, since the industry is hot for cloud computing and server virtulization, the iis team will probably give more support in this business. Let's just wait for the coming news.

arvixe iis hosting

Best Hosting Controller Web Hosting

Hostingcontroller web hosting

Web hosting control panel is playing an essential role from the industry. A good control panel solution will help with your business success while a buggy one will bring disaster. There're several popular hosting control panel solutions we introduced before such as cpanel, plesk or websitepanel. Today I would like to introduce another popular name called HostingController which has a long history in control panel development.

Hosting controller Introduction

Hosting Controller is web hosting control panel solution. Since from 1999, the hosting controller group has been offering automation solution for web hosts and cloud based service providers. It's perfected designed to manage both Windows & Linux servers simultaneously as part of a single cluster. Plus the powerful add-on tools, you can keep your hosting business in safe hand.

What's good of hosting controller?

The most outstanding feature with hosting controller would be their full solution to web hosting business. Unlike the standard cpanel which requires many third party tools to make your hosting business running properly, the hosting controller get everything included. For example the automated billing & provisioning and sign-up scripts. The system is integrated with the main domain registrars and the most popular payment gateways. The hosting controller also includes a built in helpdesk where you can create your knowledge base quickly.

Hostingcontoller vs Plesk

If you check the latest version hosting controller, you will find the layout is much like plesk control panel. I would like to share my personal comparison between the two softwares.

hostingcontroller web hostingplesk web hosting control panel

Compatibility -Both hosting controller and plesk is designed to work with both windows and linux OS with different level management panels (Admin, reseller and customer). However, the hosting controller would be better choice if you need to manage some enterprise level solutions like MS Exchange, Sharepoint and Ms CRM etc, the plesk is still lack of support with these softwares.

Pricing -The hosting controller is good for the "all in one solution" where everything is inluded the the price such as sign up script, billing system and help desk system etc. The plesk is popular for its modules, you can add/remove services by configuring the modules, however you have to pay extra for the service support.

Add-ons -Both softwares have their own add-on products. On hosting controller end, it has rebuildXpress which is for system backup/restore, The other one called "Click & Install Apps" which is for scripts auto installer. The both add-ons are costly products. However, these features are available for free from plesk.

User Experience -If you're using some  older version plesk, you might have bad experience especially on windows server which have been discussed hotly on plesk forums. Before Plesk 9 released, the hosting controller is always the best alternative solution because of it's windows friendly performance. The plesk version 10 have fixed most of the popular bugs and accepted more by users.

It's hard to say which one has better performance from their newest release. They both are trying to add more and more features to it's management interface with across-platform support. However, based on their prices, hosting controller definitely has more advantages. Especially when you're running a clouding system, the single server license will work for all.

Read more details about hosting controller and  plesk:
http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk
http://hostingcontroller.com/Hosting-Control-Panel-Software/Products-Overview.html

Best hosting controller web hosting plan?

You might find it hard to find a popular web hosting with hosting controller support because most are plesk or websitepanel based service. hostautomate.com is the official recommendation from hosting controller support. If you just want to use web hosting to host your website, it's worth of a try because of the little price. If you are running webhosting business and would like to reduce the investment, the hosting controller would be the right go.


Inmotion Fast Web Hosting Reviewed

Inmotion Fast Web Hosting

No matter if you're running an online business or doing SEO job, the website response speed is always one of the most important consideration. Faster speed means more potential orders on your website while slow response means business loss. However, it's quite hard to find a fast and affordable web hosting plan. Unless you get a vps or dedicated server, most shared hosting plans will be approved not worthy the paying. Based on my last few weeks testing, I would like to share my personal experience with Inmotion.

Is Inmotion fast web hosting service?

Absolutely yes! And I have to say the Inmotion hosting server speed is NO.1 from all shared web hosting services in my list. To check the actual loading speed, you can visit http://www.besthostingcoupon.com website which is currently hosted on Inmotion shared hosting server. Here're few things I tested

a. FTP – FTP is always the first service to deal with before our website goes online. When I download backups from old account, it took me 10 minutes with about 20kb/s. Before I issue the uploading to Inmotion I didn't wish more because it might be my local ISP problems(which is said by the old provider). However things are completely different when the task began. I couldn't tell which file being uploaded because the list is changed every second! The total uploading process took about 4 minutes which has broken my record for file uploading!

b. Database – My website database is not big size so I used the traditional phpmyadmin to import the backup file. The restoration took about 10 seconds on 500KB mysql backup.

c. Website – Finally I can start to browse the website on new server. You guess what? 2 seconds, only 2 seconds to load the home page completely!

Based the operation on my website and several weeks continuing testing. I can proudly tell Inmotion shared hosting is rated NO.1 in my fast web hosting list.

inmotion hosting fast server

How does Inmotion hosting assure the fast speed?

Here're few methods used by Inmotion hosting team to ensure the fast and stable hosting server

  • Servers housed in multiple Category A, PCI compliant data centers. These include several controlled access points.
  • 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.

Inmotion Hosting utilize datacenters on both east and west coasts with max speed zone enabled. Means no matter where you're located you can always receive the best speed! Moreover, inmotion group co-operates with lots of popular global datacenters to

To learn all the inmotion efforts in makeing fast server, please check out this page from inmotionhosting http://www.inmotionhosting.com/fast-web-hosting.html

How to choose the fast web hosting plan?

Every service is advertised to be fast in order to get more business. However, it's quite hard to choose the real fast web hosting plan because we always pay more attention to their service price. Indeed, the price trick does attract many people especially web hosting start users, because better price means less potential risk to escape in case service failure.

To choose the real fast and reliable web hosting service, always remember the popular saying "you get what you pay". Just think about the 2 or 3 bucks per month, how muc we can expect from the service? The Inmotion hosting plan is relative more expensive comparing to many other companies, however you won't be regreted in paying the extra because you get several times more value with the money! Except for the little expensive service plan, the inmotion hosting features never failed to compete with other service plans. The difference is you get better performance and uptime from Inmotion! Better performance means better business opportunity for you!

 

inmotion special price