Web Hosting Blog Review

TORONTO — April 30, 2008 — Hostingplex, a leading provider in web hosting services announced today that it has launched its clustered hosting service.

The proprietary cluster technology is unique as it makes use of the well-known control panel by cPanel. The company claims customers will still be able to enjoy the benefits of a cPanel web host, while taking advantage of a robust & scalable clustered web hosting infrastructure.

“We’re really excited about our clustered web hosting service,” says Kevin Moonlight, Senior Systems Administrator with Hostingplex. “We’ve invested a great deal of time and money into this superior infrastructure and now our customers will be able to benefit from that” adds Kevin.

The clustered hosting service starts from $7.50 per month and is available immediately to new & existing customers.

About Hostingplex:

Hostingplex, an Inverdigm company founded in 2000, is a world-wide leading web hosting solutions provider, helping small businesses create and maintain their online presence. With fully-featured, attractively priced hosting plans, backed with our unconditional 30-day money back guarantee and strive towards providing industry leading customer satisfaction, Hostingplex has become a trusted name for small businesses. For more information, please visit http://www.hostingplex.com

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It’s one of the easiest things related to web hosting, changing DNS. There are two ways to change DNS on domain names.

 1. When you purchased your domain name, some registrar’s will provide you with a domain username/password to manage your domain name. Simply log into the domain management area. Usually the name server settings will be labeled as “Change DNS”, “Edit Name Servers”, etc. From this screen, you’ll be able to edit your primary, secondary and possibly more name servers for your domain name. That’s it.

2. Simply contact your domain registrar and provide them with the name servers given to you by your web hosting company. They should be able to change it after some verification to ensure that you are the domain owner.

Allow 24-48 hours for the domain name servers to take effect.

How to Transfer Your Web Site to a New Web Hosting Service 

There are various reasons why an online business owner like you has decided to switch to a new web hosting providers. Your old web hosting provider probably has very poor technical support, or their web server is always down, or may be your old web hosting provider cannot meet your hosting requirements anymore or you could have discovered a cheaper web hosting service?and etc. Regardless of the reasons, now you have found a new web hosting service and you need to transfer your website from your current web host to the new web host. Below is the step-by-step guide that you can follow in order to achieve a painless and error free of moving to a new web hosting provider.

Transfer Schedule
Ideally, you should plan the transfer one month before you terminate your old web hosting plan in order to have sufficient time to perform a smooth transfer. Doing the transfer in less than one month time frame will put your website in risk of inaccessible.

New web hosting service registration
Now, sign-up your new web hosting service once you have decided the termination date mentioned above. Depending on your new web hosting provider, your new web hosting account usually will be set up within 24 hours.

Files Backup
While waiting for your new web hosting account to be created, it is time to backup all your web files on the old web hosting provider. In most cases, you already have all the files of your website on your local computer. However, it is still a good idea to backup all your files from the old web server. In addition to the normal HTML files, you may need to backup any script files, databases files, and even server logs files if it is necessary. You should create a directory structure that is similar to the directory structure on your web server and download the files into the respective directory.

Files uploading
Once you are notified that your new web hosting account has been created, you will receive a notification email from your new web hosting provider. In that email, it contains all the information required to set up website, this including the FTP server information. With that FTP information, you can now FTP to your new web hosting server and upload all your files. You should start by first creating the directory structures on the web server, and then upload all the files to the respective directory.

It is the time to install any script files or databases if there are used in your website. Likewise, it is a good time to set up all the email accounts through the administration panel.

Once you have finished uploading all the files and installed the script files or databases, you can now use the temporary URL to test your site. The temporary URL can be found in the notification email from your new web hosting provider. The temporary URL could be in the following format: http://viola.lunarpages.com/~your-webaccountname

Testing
Using the temporary URL directory, you can now test your web site online. Due to the fact that different web hosting server may require different server environment to execute. Therefore, you need to verify all the scripts (such as CGI, Perl) are working accordingly. In addition, you should test all the hyperlinks in the normal web pages if possible to ensure no broken links. While you are testing through the temporary URL directory, your website hosted on the old web hosting provider is continue operating.

Transfer domain name
Once you have finished testing your new website on the temporary URL and verified it is working perfectly. The next step is to contact your current domain name registrar (i.e. the company where you register your domain name) to change the old DNS (Domain Name Server) to point to the new DNS of your new web hosting provider. Usually, the DNS information is sent to you through email after you register successful with the new web hosting provider. Alternatively, you will be able to find the DNS information from the website of your new hosting provider.

Domain name servers control how a domain name is resolved. Typically, the domain name servers are in following format:

NS1.YOUR-NEW-WEB-HOSTING.COM

NS2.YOUR-NEW-WEB-HOSTING.COM

Some domain name registrar requires the IP addresses of the DNS. In this case you have to provide the IP addresses of your new DNS. For example:

NS1: 216.193.194.212

NS2: 216.193.207.106

Typically, it will take about 24-72 hours to get the DNS record to change and propagate through all the WHOIS servers. You can use Whois tools on the Internet such as whois.com to monitor the status of the DNS transfer. Once the transfer is completed, you will notice the change to your new DNS. Alternatively, you can make a minor modification to your home page (for example, adding a new image or symbol) and upload to the new web hosting server. When you access your home page through the normal domain name (www.your-website.com) and you notice the new home page, then you are sure that the DNS has been transferred successfully.

Final Testing
Now, your website on the new web hosting provider is officially transferred and online. You should repeat all the tests to ensure it is fully functional. Once you are confirmed the new website is working correctly, you can go ahead to terminate your old web hosting account.

Visit HostingPlex Now!

Price Value: 5 / 5 Reliability: 5 / 5 Control Panel: 4.5 / 5 Customer Service: 4.5 / 5

Visit Hostingplex Now!

HostingPlex Web Hosting offers affordable web hosting solutions. They provide customers with a great deal for their money. HostingPlex Web Hosting is an excellent choice for those with a personal website or a small business website. The hosting plan is affordable and reliable. HostingPlex offers several customer support and customer service options. Customers can save money by signing up for a one or two year term. Also, if they sign up for a 12 or 24 months, they will receive a free domain name!

Pricing & Features  

HostingPlex offers customers a good value for their money. Their hosting plan includes 200GB of web space and 1000 GB of space. This is above industry average for the price range. The plan costs as little as $7.95 when a customers signs up for 24 months. HostingPlex’s hosting plan if packed with features and applications. The package includes: Unlimited domain hosting, FTP accounts, MySQL databases, CGI library, site statistics, Anonymous FTP and much more. Customers also receive ecommerce features and site promotion help.

Reliability

HostingPlex provides reliable hosting services. Their services are located in a data center provided by MCI, with state-of-the-art infrastructure. This is a multi-million dollar facility. The office of HostingPlex is only a couple minute drive from the data center. Should there ever be any problems they can be resolved quickly. Customers do not need to worry about power failures. The data center has battery backup and two diesel generators.

Customer Support

HostingPlex web hosting services provides several methods of customer support. Their support is prompt, reliable and available 24/7. They offer live chat support. Customers or potential customers can also call a toll free number. Current clients can also submit a support ticket. Their support section includes self-help guides and manuals.

Web Site

They website is very professional. It is easy to navigate through the site. Customers and potential customers will not have any difficulty finding what they are looking for. The website includes a thorough explanation of the hosting plan and all the features and applications included. Also their entire web site is seamless through from order page, account manager, and cpanel. You never really leave their site to accomplish tasks.

Conclusion

HostingPlex offers an affordable web hosting solution. Their plan is an excellent value for the money and very competitive with other hosting providers. In fact, there plan includes more bandwidth and disk space than many other plans of a similar price. HostingPlex also provides reliable hosting services. Their servers are located in an MCI data center. This is a multi-million dollar facility with top notch equipment.

Visit HostingPlex Now! 

Clearing DNS, Flushing DNS in Windows XP

I have found that a lot of people are confused when it comes to DNS works. I have found that it refreshes relatively fast, however the standard is 24 to 48 hours for the DNS to fully resolve to the new IP’s across the globe. If you want to learn more about how DNS really works, then visit the following link: http://webhosting.devshed.com/c/a/Web-Hosting-Articles/What-is-DNS-propagation-and-why-does-it-take-so-long/

Flush DNS

After changing the DNS with the registrar, I would suggest waiting about an hour, don’t type the domain name into the browser, it will only delay things. Once the hour is up, follow these instructions:

1. Click “Start”.
2. Click “run”.
3. Type: “cmd” without the quotes. You will be entered into Command Prompt.
4. Type: “ipconfig /flushdns” without the quotes. That’s all. Exit out of there.
5. Try to access the domain name. You should be able to hit the new server

If it doesn’t work, don’t bite your web host’s head off, chances are it hasn’t updated on your ISP’s DNS servers. It has been said that it normally takes 8 hours in North America, and 24 hours world-wide. Just stay relaxed and calm, just ensure the actual changes have been made and you should be fine

Bandwidth Or Data Transfer - Which is Which?

Too often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the same breath but truth be known they are different although very closely related. Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at a time and data transfer is how much data is being transferred.

Think of it this way. If bandwidth were a bridge, then the bigger the bridge is the more vehicles can pass through it. While data transfer is the number of vehicles allowed on the bridge in say a month. In essence, data transfer is the consumption of bandwidth.

How It Affects Your Site

The less bandwidth you have, the slower your site takes to load regardless of the visitor’s connection type. If you have more visitors, some of them will have to wait their turn. The least data transfer you have, the more often you’ll find your site unavailable because you’re reached the maximum allowed until a new month rolls by or you upgrade your account.

Determining Your Requirements

Usually when a host talks about bandwidth, they are referring to your transfer. So you need to figure out what is sufficient for your site to function. You’ll need to gather some information; fairly easy if you already have a site. Most of this information is available from your traffic history. If you don’t have an existing site, provide an optimistic estimate if you intend to heavily promote the site. Then get ready for some math.

Find out the daily averages of:

• Number of visitors / expected number of visitors
• Page size including the graphics of the page
• Page views / expected pages viewed by each visitor

Then, multiply them as follows:

Visitors x Page size x Page views x 30 days = Monthly Website Transfer

You should also throw in a small margin or error there to take into account email traffic and your own uploads to the server. If you offer downloads, then you should add the following:

Average/Expected downloads x File Size x 30 days = Monthly Download Transfer

Unlimited Plans

Bandwidth is very expensive. All hosts are limited by their own allocations. Thinking back to the bridge. What happens is each visitor to your site will be given a smaller lane to transfer the data, creating many tiny lanes therefore “unlimited”. The more visitors you have the smaller each lane will be, which makes each visitor wait for the page to load.

More often than not there is little choice over your bandwidth as your host controls this. Some hosts may limit the number of simultaneous connections so in affect slowing down your site and refusing some visitors. This is called throttling.

If you’re concerned about this, you should ask the host how they control bandwidth usage or purchase a package with more data transfer. If you use HostVoice.net (http://hostvoice.net), this information is easily obtainable with one request.

Reducing Transfers

On the other hand, you can reduce your transfer amount by building simpler, more efficient websites and optimizing your graphics. Refrain from fancy flash presentations or streaming audio. Use CSS, call JavaScript externally instead of embedding in every page.

Remove unwanted tags, white space and comments. Limit your META tags to those absolutely necessary. Having too many keywords is not search engine friendly. Besides many search engines will only review the first few and ignore the rest.

Another good idea is to cache your website but you might want to set an expiry date in the HTTP headers so the browser will refresh the content after a certain time. Use mod-gzip. It could save you as much as 40% of your bandwidth. Out of control robots can also suck down your bandwidth like a black hole. So use robots.txt to keep spiders in check.

Author: http://www.cyberindian.com/web-hosting/

First thing first, get you own domain name – one of those yourcompany.com things.  They provide the best kind of insurance possible.Insurance?  Sure.  If your Web address is anything other than www.yourcompany.com (i.e., yourcompany.therecompany.com, therecompany.com/yourcompany, or something of the like), and something goes wrong with your provider, you are up a creek.  You are stuck because the bad guys own your address.  If you own the domain and something goes wrong, you can move.  If your provider doesn’t provide the service they promise, you can move.  If you just feel like being snotty, you can move. Get the idea?  Get your own domain name and find someone who will let you host your own domain name as well.

Second things second, get yourself hooked up with a provider that provides FrontPage Extensions with their hosting.  We say this for two reasons: 1) it is going to save you hours of messing with FTP and 2) it proves that they are committed to the degree of hosting that you are looking for.  If you are a FrontPage user, there is going to be a degree of professionalism that you are going to look for from your provider.  Providing FrontPage Extensions should be the first step.

Thirdly, pay what you need to pay.  While we at FrontPage World understand as much as the next guy (or gal) the need to save money, we recognize that our Mom was right when she said that you get what you pay for.  In short, if the pricing schedule seems to good to be true, it probably is.  While it is safe to say that 90% of the Web sites out there shouldn’t spend more than $100 a month for hosting fees, it is also safe to say that you should pay enough to make sure the thing works.  Does your ISP have a history and a client base they can point to for reference?  Does your ISP have an uptime guarantee?  Why not?   If you are running a professional Web site, don’t you want to have the speed and uptime that says you’re are a professional?  There are a lot worse ways you could spend your money. 

Lastly, I would recommend VistaPages for Front Page web hosting. They have proved to be very reliable.

August 09, 2006 - Web Hosting provider VistaPages, Inc. (www.vistapages.com) announced today that it has launched its dedicated hosting service.”Offering dedicated servers has been in the works ever since we opened our doors,” said Kaumil Patel, President of VistaPages. “After receiving so many requests for dedicated servers from our customers, it further confirmed our decision to offer this service.” Patel added.

Our product line ranges from Celeron 2.4Ghz to Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz servers and also includes servers with Dual Core processors. Prices start at $174.00 with server management and include a cPanel license. Unmanaged servers are also available at request for those who wish to have Plesk, Helm or no control panel.

About VistaPages, Inc. VistaPages, Inc. is a privately-owned organization located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At VistaPages, we understand that our customers’ web sites are important and they require reliable services to ensure that service is not interrupted. We have established a solid foundation to offer a reliable, easy to use and low cost web hosting solution for small-to-medium sized businesses.

What would be your company’s main strength?

I would definately have to say that our company’s main strength is the ability to provide and maintain a top-notch level web hosting service to our customers, this includes both the reliability of our service and the effectiveness of our customer service.

What makes your company different than other web hosting companies?

We don’t just offer a service, we offer multiple services. We’re able to scale with the growth of our customers, and that’s key in the success of this marketplace. We understand that customers will eventually outgrow their “shared hosting” service, and so we offer multiple avenues in which the customer can grow into. Being able to offer our customers everything they need for hosting seamlessly, is what makes us different.

How would you define “Web Hosting”?

A lot of people ask me this, and I would have to agree with how you put it in of your own articles. It’s a lot like an apartment building that rents out apartments. The web host builds the space, and the customers rent space.

What is your target market?

We primarily target small-to medium-sized businesses, and of course the individuals looking to create a web presence for their own personal use. We do however take on several corporate customers that require high-end hosting for their demanding applications. We scale all the way from the simple web site all the way up to the complex hosting applications.

What is one thing that keeps you up at night?

Ideas! You know, I am always thinking of ways to improve the service that VistaPages offers, from making the existing services better to creating new ones. You’d think that I would be fast asleep, infact I have hard time sleeping every night because my mind still keeps on crunching out ideas, does it bother me… nope!

As President, what value do you bring to the company?

Experience and strategic business contacts. Those are probably why VistaPages has grown to be a succesful web hosting provider in today’s competitive market, but that’s not all, it would be selfish for me to take all the glory. Our team has contributed countless number of hours helping customers and looking for ways to improve on providing an overall better service to our customers, it’s because of them that this company is still around — if I did it alone, it probably would not have lasted this long.

Could you give us an insight as to what is coming in the future for VistaPages?

We’re listening to our customers demands, and we’re going to try and meet all of them, which includes Windows-based hosting, adding a larger array of customer support representatives to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction, all-in-all, just listen to the customer and work to improve every day. What will come from VistaPages is what our customers want.

The World Organization of Webmasters and HostingCon 2006 have issued a call for participation regarding WOW’s Iron Chef of Information Security Contest to be held on July 18, 2006 on the exhibit floor of the HostingCon 2006 Conference and Tradeshow. HostingCon 2006 will take place July 17-19, 2006 at The Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This event will challenge Web Administrators and Network and Security Specialists to evaluate and fix the security vulnerabilities present in an Internet DMZ architecture.

The event will occur live during the HostingCon 2006 conference and give the audience a first-hand look at how security professionals perform their jobs. The competition will be a head-to-head format with each team competing against the clock and the other teams

“This is a one of a kind event that will allow the best and brightest in infrastructure security to show off their talents,” said George A. Roberts IV, Executive Director of HostingCon 2006. “We’re extremely pleased to be able to partner with WOW to bring the Iron Chef of Information Security to HostingCon 2006.”