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A dedicated hosting service involves renting out a server not meant to be used by anyone else. Operating the server can be done by the client”s own staff or the hosting company can provide full time administrators to run the server at an additional cost. Dedicated servers can help reduce a company”s overhead expenses and increase investment return. There are two basic types of dedicated servers, namely managed and unmanaged dedicated servers.

Dedicated hosting servers are ideal if you want to protect your data. Such servers usually have programs to protect from viruses and regular scans are also carried out. There is also software to protect against hackers and spammers. Choosing the best dedicated hosting service company is crucial if … Dedicated hosting, dedicated hosting service, hosting companie

Web hosting is something that we all need to get our websites online. It’s one of the most important decisions you make for your website because it can make or break your success if you choose the wrong web host. To help make your life easier, I have compiled a list of the top 5 mistakes everyone makes when choosing their web hosting.

1. Choosing Free Hosting Options
Sure, you can’t beat the price tag, but is free hosting really suitable? Often it is the cheaper hosting companies that offer a free hosting plan to entice people to sign up. They overload the server with thousands of other websites causing your site to run ultra slow. On top of this hackers take advantage of free hosting to try and access other sites – it’s not uncommon to read that a free hosted website has been hacked.

2. Buying Reseller Hosting To Host Multiple Websites
Often people run two or more websites. Generally we have our company websites (or many business sites) along with our personal site. What many people don’t realize is the modern hosting accounts can handle unlimited number of add-on domains, which means you don’t need a reseller account to have more than one website hosted. Some expensive companies still try and rip off customers by allowing them to only host one website on the hosting account, but you should shop around looking for unlimited hosting.

3. Buying Hosting Through Your Web Design Company
Many web design and development companies are looking to offer value added services to their clients. Many of the clients may not be technically savvy and the web design firms charge high premiums for basic web hosting – often they are reselling shared hosting accounts which cost them a few dollars. Other design companies are hosting client websites themselves on their own dedicated server. This is a bad choice because they may not have the technical expertise to manage a server.

4. Choosing Hosting Through Domain Registrar
Just like web design companies, many domain registrars like GoDaddy and Namecheap are now offering web hosting services. While they are excellent places to register a domain, many people are complaining about the unreliability of the hosting services. GoDaddy in particular is noted for having very unflexible hosting that is not webmaster friendly. It’s always best to choose a company that is first and foremost a hosting company.

5. Registering Domains Through Your Hosting Company
While many web hosting companies offer a free domain with your hosting (although usually just for the first year), web hosts are renowned for having high domain registration fees. For example HostGator, while it’s a fantastic hosting company, charge $15 per domain whereas you can buy the same domain for just $9 from Namecheap. On top of this web hosting companies try and charge $10 or more for domain privacy, which comes free with many domain registrars.

The key things to take away from this article are to choose a dedicated hosting company for your hosting and a dedicated domain registration company for your domains.

Several years ago buying hosting was simple, but fairly costly. Each website had to be hosted on a different account so if you had ten sites you would have needed 10 separate accounts. Then along came reseller hosting which allowed you to become your own web host and you could put 50 or so sites under one master account but each website had its own control panel. After that came Virtual Private Server hosting which is a cross between a dedicated server and reseller hosting and offered you unlimited hosting accounts. The final revolution came with add-on domains for shared hosting.

Nowadays you have three options regardless of the number of domains you want to host. Virtually every web hosting company offers add-on domains to your shared hosting account. This means that you could in theory have 100 or more websites on one account for which you pay just $5 a month.

If this was the case then why would you need Reseller or VPS hosting?

If you are planning to run a few basic websites, maybe a personal blog or a small company website, chances are that shared hosting is going to be perfect for you. You can effectively use a single shared hosting account to create dozens of low traffic websites for AdSense purposes with no trouble at all.

However, if you are planning to run some high traffic or high bandwidth sites, you may start off with shared hosting but find that you are quickly being pushed by your web host to upgrade to VPS hosting because of the amount of computing resources your site is using. Examples include popular forums, high traffic e-commerce sites, torrent sites (which are probably banned anyway) and popular media sites.

As online video becomes more popular you may find that your host quickly shuts down your shared hosting account if you are hosting some large video files. Sometimes hosts will go one step further and disable video playback altogether. In these situations you need to get VPS hosting because you can set up the system to your exact requirements, use more computing resources and handle higher traffic websites.

There is no real reason to opt for Reseller hosting unless you plan to sell shared hosting accounts to other people, for example your clients. Some people who make a living from flipping websites use Reseller hosting because they like to include several months of free hosting and then start charging the buyer a monthly fee, thereby increasing the lifetime value of the buyer.

Only in extreme cases should you consider a dedicated server, in which case your site should already be making a lot of money each month. A decent dedicated server can cost $150 or more a month, while a VPS hosting account on a more powerful server might only cost $30 but with many of the same benefits as a dedicated server, so think carefully before choosing a dedicated server.

Web hosting is big business and some companies have become more successful than others in acquiring their customers. However, there is so little to choose between the largest companies it’s very difficult to say which ones are best. They all have very good 24/7 support, they are all very knowledgable in their field, they are all known for going above and beyond to help their customers and their prices are very comparable.

As such I’m not going to tell you the single best hosting company, but I’m going to give you 5 hosting companies that I guarantee are the best and let you choose between them.

So in no particular order, here goes:

1. HostGator – From $119.40 per year
HostGator changed the playing field for web hosting. They were one of the first companies to bring affordable hosting to the masses. With a highly trained inhouse support team that’s reachable by phone, live chat or online support desk, HostGator are well known for their above average level of support and high reliability of their servers. However their inode (file) limits are a sneaky way to limit your ‘unlimited’ hosting.

2. DreamHost – From $107.40 per year
A bit more of a quirky hosting company, nevertheless Dreamhost brand themselves as hosting nerds, but that’s not to say they are all about geek-speak. Started in 1997, Dreamhost are one of the oldest and most reliable hosting companies online.

3. BlueHost – $83.40 per year
Online since 1996, BlueHost are quite unique in that they own their own datacenters and build their own servers – most companies lease their servers. On top of that they own their own nationwide fiber optic network making BlueHost one of the most technologically advanced hosting companies around. As with other companies, they provide 24/7 support via phone, live chat and online support desk.

4. JustHost – $71.40 per year
A relatively new comer to the hosting arena being just 2 years old but they are already making waves and winning awards left right and center. One of their benefits is their anytime moneyback guarantee so if you sign up for their 36 month plan and want to leave after 12 months, they will give you your money back, pro-rated for the 12 months you have used. However, JustHost does seem to be run by experienced Internet marketers and the constant upsells, downsells, cross-sells and every other offer can get a bit tiresome.

5. HostMonster – $71.40 per year
Hosting over 750,000 websites and in business since 1996, HostMonster know a thing or two about web hosting. They operate on a one plan fits all model which gives you unlimited space, bandwidth, add-on domains etc. With 24/7 support by phone, email, live chat and online support desk it’s very easy to get answers for your support questions.

If you are on a tight budget or are unable to make an online payment for hosting or live in a high fraud risk country and so can’t get hosting then the only option available to you might be finding some good free hosting. However, before I continue I should say that paid hosting is preferable over free hosting any day.

So what are the free hosting options available to you?

1. Web Hosting Talk
This is a forum where webmasters and web host owners hang out. You will find that most of the web hosting owners are college students or entrepreneurs running this business as a side income, so what you have is a great concentration of web hosts who offer their services for free to try and get customers who will eventually upgrade to a paid service. The amount of space and bandwidth you get on these hosting accounts is likely to be very low, some don’t even let you install a database. The reliability will also be low and you still need to buy yourself a domain, although some do offer a subdomain option.

2. Weebly
Weebly is gaining some ground as a great place for free web hosting and to set up your site for free. They will give you a subdomain so your website address will become http://yourname.weebly.com which isn’t all that bad. They have a number of great options, loads of free templates, a site builder, blog options and more, although don’t expect the same level of flexibility as a regular hosting account, you don’t have FTP access to upload your own files. They claim that you can have unlimited bandwidth and use unlimited resources although I’m sure this is just marketing speak. The great thing is there are no adverts on your site.

3. Google Sites
Not many people know that Google offer free website hosting but they have a number of options for clubs, wiki’s, projects, company intranets, classrooms and even family websites. You will get a nice selection of templates and an online text editor to add your content. With the backing of Google you can be sure the site will have fantastic reliability and bandwidth will never be a problem! The downside is that your address won’t look too nice and is in the following format: http://sites.google.com/site/yournamehere/

4. Blogger
Blogger is also owned by Google and while technically you couldn’t call it free web hosting. The blog platform and ability to completely edit the template to your own design means it’s very flexible to accommodate your needs. There are no ads, you have unlimited storage and bandwidth and you won’t get shut down for using too many resources if your site becomes popular. Your web address is quite short too and will look like this: http://name.blogspot.com

5. Webs.com
This is one of the original sites that offered free web hosting and operates similar to Weebly. Although you can’t programme your own sites, they do have many options like blogs, forums, calendars, shopping carts and even social networking. They have hundreds of great templates to choose from too so getting your site online is pretty easy. You address will look like this: http://yourname.hostwebs.com

You may have seen some hosting companies offering Search Engine Optimization hosting for a much higher cost than the regular hosting plans on their site. So what is it and why does it cost so much more?

To understand SEO hosting you need to have a bit of background knowledge of SEO. Google sends the vast majority of traffic to all websites, so website owners are at the mercy of this search engine and try to do everything possible to make their site come up in the first position.

A large part of SEO is trying to get links from other websites; the more links the higher your website is ranked. A few years back Google realized that it was being manipulated by some clever people who realized that they could just put hundreds of sites on a server and link them all together making it look like the sites were very popular.

Google cracked down on this by looking at the IP address of each website and the IP address of the site it links to. In SEO circles it’s generally agreed upon that if you are going to interlink your sites they should be on different c-class IP addresses to have any effect. If you choose a regular hosting account with unlimited add-on domains, all the domains will be on the same IP, so it’s not useful from an SEO point of view.

A web host that specializes in SEO hosting will have a large number of different c-class IP addresses available and when you add a new domain to your account it will be put on a completely different address.

Now there are three things to bear in mind before buying SEO hosting:

1. This is considered blackhat SEO by Google since you are trying to manipulate their algorithm and if they find out they are likely to remove your sites from their index.

2. Google looks at more than just the IP address, they may look at the registrar of the domain and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (and Google is full of them) to figure out that if 50 domains registered from the same registrar on the same date with the same whois details then there is something fishy going on.

Another point to consider is that SEO hosting generally costs far more than regular shared hosting because it’s still quite a niche service. You can expect to pay 4 or 5 times the amount for SEO hosting than you might do for regular shared hosting.

However, since SEO hosting is still quite new, it would pay to shop around as the prices can vary enormously.