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This comparison is about the top 3 magento hosting providers – Arvixe, Inmotion & Bluehost. We brief view of the three webhosts' support to magento script and compare their advantages side by side. The purpose is to provide our readers correct hosting guidance for any size shopping cart site on magento platform.

Ebay acquired Magento with big money, However seems people's favor are never affected by this acquizition because of the outstanding design for ecommerce website. The number of magento users are still increasing day by day. Indeed, magento is by far the most powerful ecommerce system for large business solution. As far as we can tell, magento will still occupy the high-end market for a long time in ecommerce.

Magento Hosting Server side Requirements

As from Magento commerce official site, your hosting server must meet the following minimum requirements in order to run magento website properly.

• Linux x86, x86-64
• Apache 1.3.x+
• PHP5.2.13+ with following extensions:
• PDO_MySQL
• simplexml
• mcrypt
• hash
• GD
• DOM
• iconv
• curl
• SOAP (if Webservices API is to be used)
• Safe_mode off
• Memory_limit no less than 256Mb (preferably 512)
• MySQL: 4.1.20 or newer
• InnoDB storage engine

SSL:

• If HTTPS is used to work in the admin, SSL certificate should be valid. Self-signed SSL certificates are not supported

Server – hosting – setup:

• Ability to run scheduled jobs (crontab) with PHP 5
• Ability to override options in .htaccess files

TOP Magento Hosting Providers

If you search around the web for magento hosting you will find the following names are frequntly mentioned: Inmotion, Bluehost and Arvixe. have you ever heard any of them? They're all certified magento hosting provider with side by side tech support and rich feature hosting solutions. They provide up to date hardware installation and more than enough bandwidth supply. All of them are cloud based service after multi class upgrades. Especially for inmotionhosting, it's recognized standard choice for high performance business sites because of their strong network.

Inmotion vs Bluehost vs Arvixe

Here's a basic table list of their hosting features and advantages for magento hosting plan

InmotionHosting is top choice for any size magento website. Not only because of its affordable plans but also its high performance server and extremely reliable networking. All inmotion servers are enterprise grade DELL production by SAN and NAS configuration. The company has multiple data centers support from both east and west coasts. Plus, they have co-operation with lots of internet providers on the globe for CDN service. In this way, each customer can get fast loading speed from nearby network.

Furthermore, inmotion hosting is partnered with magento project for development support. The inmotion hosting technicians are actually developers for this software and provides hosting environment for magento directly. Because of this, their people know how to optimize their server for max performance and ensure the best security for client properties.

Bluehost. a huge name from web hosting and rule maker. The company managed their own data centers that are setup for the next ten years IT requirements. Not to mention its advanced hardware structure, the available resource is more than enough to support regular web hosting requirements. There's more than 20% space left for scalability.

Bluehost has a huge support team with multi class degrees. Their developers are not only from some famous open source projects but also program their own products. Bluehost cloud platform are prepared by their inhouse developers with leading technologies. For magento site owners, they can easily deploy to bluehost server on different plans. There's step by step guidance and tutorials for worry free process.

Arvixe is most well known for its developer friendly hosting environment. Their people are trying to configure the server to meet as many peoples' requirement as possible as long as the server is not overloaded. Arvixe provides multi class hosting solutions for either personal or business clients. They provide very affordable price so you don't have to worry about tight budget.

Everything from arvixe is standard offer from the platform itself. For example their hosting control panel provides all available functions from cpanel software from account root access. For small to medium magento site, their shared server be able to serve you a high performance and sucessful business.

A basic comparison among arvixe, inmotion and bluehost tells us they're all perfect choice for magento hosting. The difference is bluehost service is more about cloud, Arvixe is for developer and inmotion focus on business. If you need up to date tech support especially cloud support, bluehost will be right, if you manage a development group with frequent testing for your sites, arvixe is the way. If you already have the site ready and just focus on promotion, inmotion hosting will be your choice.

Check out inmotion hosting business plans http://InmotiongHosting.com

Unlike 10 years ago you need to pay a lot for hosting with limited features, people now have more and more options when need to put up a website, choices from traditional shared hosting, vps and dedicated server hosting, cloud hosting and cluster hosting would be the most popular choice by nowadays webmasters. But what's the difference between cloud hosting and cluster hosting? Which is better choice?

What's Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is a term comparing to traditional hosting service that is based on cloud computing. Just think your website is down because it's being visited by many people with high cpu/memory usage. Such issue wouldn't happen to a website that is hosted on cloud hosting evironment because your website a distributed on many servers and all server end services are being shared among all server equipments on multiple networks. Once there's a server failure, the second will take over the work and doing a good loop to ensure your service is always online.

What's Cluster Hosting?

Cluster hosting is a specialization of clusters where a load balancer is used to direct incoming traffic to one of many worker nodes. Server farm is the main technology used by cluster hosting. A web farm tends to have very specialized machines dedicated to each component type and is far more optimized for that specific task.

Cloud Hosting vs Cluster Hosting

As from above explanation we have learned that cluster hosting is actually small size cloud hosting that is used to separate web services on different servers. Cloud hosting always relies on third party technologies such as CDN to deliver the website files based on end user locations. While cloud hosting servers are setup through multiple networks on multiple physical locations, cluster is setup centrally by server admin for load balancing purpose. Cluster is relatively more easy to setup because it doesn't include network configuration. Cloud computing is by far the newest technology for multi concurrent tasks/services. Because of the sophisticate configuration and big investment

Is Cloud Hosting Better than Cluster?

If you have learned the basic structure of cluster hosting and cloud hosting you will realize that cluster hosting environment is best choice for larget enterprise website that requires high performance and less down time. Cloud hosting would be considered mostly when you expect 99.999% website uptime and fast response. Basically, if you're not sure which one to choose from, cloud hosting is your primary consideration because it's more affordable and popular.

Best Cloud Hosting Provider

As about 3 months before, Sitecloud would be the most recommended one for shared cloud hosting. But since the shared environment is not suitable to offer this service, this hosting brand is finally closed and you have to use vps server at least for cloud hosting. For quality and affordable cloud vps hosting, Vps.net vps is highly recommended. The VPSNET cloud VPS is fully customizable with your side by side requirements. More details can be found on this cloud vps review posting.

Visit http://www.vps.net for cheap cloud hosting plans!

WordPress is one of the most popular software to create a succesful website for it's user friendly GUI design and powerful plugins, more and more people even use wordpress for ecommerce solutions for enterprise business. So is wordpress good choice to promote your products? How could you optimize wordpress based websites? In this article I would like to share personal ideas for wordpress SEO.

Wordpress is absolutely right choice if you would like to reduce the time for website internal optimization because wordpress itself has very search engine friendly structure, plus many free to get seo plugins you can optimize your wordpress site easily.

How to optimize your wordpress site?

The website optimization is much the same, however wordpress has built in solutions for internal optimization. if we can make good use of the available technologies from wordpress, our website will rank high on search engine fastly. Here're the most popular methods for wordpress optimization.

Configure SEO permalinks for your wordpress site

In short words, the shorter your website address is the more seo friendly your website will be. For wordpress parmalinks configuration, please login to your wordpress admin > Settings > permalinks. Personally we recommend using "/%postname%/" through our experience. Here's screenshot about the configuration

Note, the permalinks may not working if you're under windows hosting server. please visit this wordpress permalinks configuration article for solutions.

Remove your wordpress category names

The wordpress "Category" is useless and has some negative effects to your wordpress SEO, webmasters always want to remove it from your website address. The best method to remove the "category" name is to enter a dot from the "category base" under "permalinks" section, once you saved the configuratinos the "category" will be disappeared.

Install google xml sitemap plugins to auto update your wordpress sitemap

Sitemap will help search engine to crawl your website smoothly, the wordpress "google xml sitemap" plugin will auto create the xml sitemap and update it instantly once there's new update on your website.

Configure proper 404 error page

Always configure 404 error page for your website no matter if it's wordpress or other cms based. Incase you change themes or website migration, it's possible to create some 404 errors. Instead of creating all kinds of "page not found" errors, you can design a customized 404 error page to guide the search engine and website visitors properly.

Install wordpress all in one seo pack

This is a MUST plugin for all wordpress website, you can set keywords, meta tags, description etc easily for each pages/posts. you can also let the plugin to auto generate the configurations based on your post content. screenshot as below

Another plugin called "SEO Yoast" which is highly recommended by seo professionals. It's 100% compatible with all in one seo and migration tool is available. From my personal testing, there're more configurable options like instant SERP preview, SEO analysis of your current article etc. It's highly recommended if you like to control the optimization as more as possible, especially you're doing SEO job on wordpress site.

Install wordpress related posts plugins

Related posts plugin will add your referring posts to the end of your article, it will help search engine to crawl all your pages and guide your website visitors to read more if they're interested in your posts.

Add google analytics to your wordpress site

Google analytics will help your website traffic analyzation for future improvement. Just sign up an account from google and generate the analytics code from google webmaster tool.

Set up seo images on your website

Although this is not so important comparing to other seo tips, it's always good to pay attention to small factors and optimize your site as more as you can. For example you're writing something about cooking and need to add a picture for explanation, you can name the picture as "cooking tips" etc to attract the search engine.

Always update your website regularly with fresh content

Make sure you update your website with fresh contents regularly to introduce google to crawl your website, Your website will be recognized as healthy in search engine's eyes.

Interact with your website visitors by commenting

Add questions or voting to your articles and communicate with your visitors efficiently.

Of course, there're many other options to optimize a wordpress site, feel free to share your ideas

Many business are put online nowadays and the number of websites is increasing every minute. While you're preparing the website stuff and trying to promote the service/products, are you aware many websites are causing legal issues? Have you ever considered the law part when you start business online?

Common legal issues with Web Hosting

There're many factors on website could cause legal issues especially for ecommerce website. Generally, legal issues could be classified in following categories

Copyright issue – Copyright would be one of the most popular issues for ecommerce websites. There're many pirated products with unbelievable low price to attract customers. Everyone knows piracy is illegal in all countries but there're still lots of people doing so because of the huge profit. Such website domains are always changing over and over again in order to avoid punishment.

Website content – There're two factors for website content that cause legal issues. You might have used some copyrighted materials on your website or your website content is prohibited by your government law, the tipycal example is adult website. Adult website is prohibited by many countries government. The hosting with adult support will always have to introduce into lots of efforts to deal with ddos attack and high traffic issues. It's actually challenge to both website owner and service provider.

Domain abusement – In order to get high rank in short time, many webmasters like to register some domain name which is very similar to some popular ones. For example there's a famous site called apple.com and you register a new domain called apple.net, the apple.com could sue you and take down your website for brand protection purpose. For such case, if you're going to open business and build brand online, make sure to register all related domains so other people won't be able to disturb it.

How to avoid website legal issues?

As you see, it's really not so easy to put up a website just by what you think of. You have to follow your country and state's laws. The best way is to read over your service provider's TOS, it actuall includes all aspects of their services. Most people just ignored this important section and always submit complaint to support once problem occurs. So make sure to read the hoster's TOS before your sign up, it will reduce you a lot of time for webhost research. Especially when you're in need of some special hosting services like adult website hosting you have to check over and over again to make sure the hosting will be compatible with your contents.

Some serious legal issues may catch the FBI attention and result in terrible actions. A good experience can be found on this article. Just think you would like to operate a long term business, you should always consider such issues side by side and doing correctly.

Web hosting Support Overview

When we choose an quality web hosting service, support is one of the most important elements in our list. As long as you get into any problem with the service you always expect quick and professional response. Quality web hosting support will give us less trouble in using the service and actually help the hosting business growing faster.

What should be included in web hosting support?

For quality web hosting service they must have Live chat support, Ticket support and Phone support.

• Live chat support — They mouth of your service, it's absolutely the best option for everyone to contact support instantly, especially for people who're not good at speaking, they always like to type more on keyboard. The best advantage with live chat support is it's easy to launch it for 24×7.
• Ticket support — It's absolutely the most popular option for every web hosting company, It's ideal choice if you like to discuss some complex questions or problems. For some time consuming tasks, ticket is a MUST for perfect solution, you can focus on the issue without being disturbed by clients.
• Phone support — Phone support is good way to hear about the actual hosting sound directly, you can discuss everything over the phone without typing. In some degrees, phone support will give faster and better response. Also, phone support approves you're running an actual business but not something virtual on internet.

Email is also the most popular support channel for all hosting groups. For some hosting service, email support is primary choice and will be addressed with higher priority. For example winhost.com uses email as standard support.

Best Web Hosting Support Software

For Live chat, there're several top rated softwares in the industry — Liveperson, Livezilla, Sightmax and Kayako. Liveperson has long history in live chat solution for online business and is by far the most popular one for web hosting companies.

If you would like to manage everything by yourself such as the chat server and software system etc, sightmax is the best choice. You can purchase the license according to your actual team size and save your money as more as possible. The best of the best with this software is you can track your website visits lively and analyze the traffic side by side.

If you don't fee happy to pay, livezilla will help setup your chat system in minutes. Livezilla can be compared with any available chat system.

In ticket support part, the mostly used solution would be the WHMCS as well as Kayako, this package is designed for billing, knowledge base and ticket management. if you search around the hosting support section, many industry leaders even use it to communicate with clients. Of course there're also many other good ones, you should choose the solution according to your actual business requirement.

How to define a quality web hosting support?

For quality web hosting, they always have full time support with all above service types. If you are interested with some new service and hesitate if it's worth of a try, you can check their support directly to check if they're fast to response with professional knowledges. Some support will not be happy to serve you if you state not going to buy but just asking something; on the other side, a good hosting support will always clear your doubts patiently and try to serve everyone in good attitude.

Which hosting offers quality web hosting support?

Since the web hosting industry introduces more and more new members, the service level is never stopped increasing in order to get more customers. If you're not sure which hosting could offer quality support. You can check out the Top 8 webhosts list and find the quality webhost quickly.

Email spam knowledges

E-mail spam, also known as junk e-mail or unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE), is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. Spammer always send bulk emails for advertisement since it's the cheapest method among many other marketing services.

I bet 99.99% people would hate spam emails for the useless information, some harmful spam emails even contain some kind of virus which will terriblely infect your computer. In this article I'll disscus how to reduce email spam side by side.

Some free email service providers like yahoo, hotmail and gmail has strong anti-spam system configured which is out of our topic, here we'll mainly focus on the email accounts created under your own domain names.

6 Tips on how to reduce email spam

1. Choose the right email software – This is the most important task to reduce any potential spam. An outstanding email software will simply filter half of the incoming spam emails and secure your email account. Free email system is never advised for business email purpose. Smartermail is by far the best web mail software we experienced. Simple and clear web interface, smartermail has every aspects of an email system.

2. DNS Control – The Sender policy framework(SPF) is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. It will not just reduce the spam posibilities but also avoid spoof emails(stop your email accounts being used by spammer). When your sign up a hosting service you should contact presales to make sure customize dns records is supported and SPF is available.

3. Remove your crucial email addresses on website – This will greatly reduce the potential spam emails coming into your email account. you can use a web form on your site for contact method and make sure captcha is enabled.

4. Configure spam filter and content filter – Configure the spam weight and keywords filter to avoid according spam emails. this is the most common method to reduce spam.

5. Whitelist and Blacklist – Add your important contacts to your whitelist and blacklist some spam-like addresses or domains

6. Email alias – The good of email alias is it's not an actual email account but just a forward, you can setup email alias and publish on website and forward those incoming emails to some free email service provider such as yahoo and gmail, they have strong anti-spam system configured and will filter most spam emails. So when you sign up a web hosting, make sure email alias is supported.

How to choose the right email hosting?

If you're looking for a cpanel hosting provider, Horde would be the best which is configured by default via cpanel.  You can refer to this horde mail hosting page to learn more about horde.

We highly recommend hostgator for horde mail hosting since hostgator is doing the best in linux hosting.

read more on this hostgator review

signup hostgator with 25% off for any hosting plan!

If you're looking for asp.net hosting, we highly recommend Smartermail for your email service. Smartermail is simply the best web mail software which is considered as best alternative of windows exchange. You can refer to this smartermail hosting for more details about smartermail

Since smartermail is quite expensive to purchase, not so many hosting providers offer it. Hostgator.com windows hosting plan is the best choice for smartermail hosting till present.

Check Hostgator smartermail hosting!