Monday, October 4, 2010

web hosting support

The most common web hosting problems

There has been a rapidly rising demand for web hosting services and many of the part-time basis-basement operations have found it virtually impossible to meet the new quality and service demands of web sites. Many who had previously gotten away with shoddy services and a technical service department that was just an answering machine where all callers including clients with emergency situations left their messages.
You may be unfortunate enough to still be using a hosting service like this one. Our advice is that it is too costly in today’s net environment. Here are the 3 most common complaints against hosting providers:

1. Poor Technical Support

This complaint is by far the one that is mostly heard. Many hosting companies outsource their technical support and the result is often total chaos. Clients get answering machines or voice mail systems when they call. Sometimes you can even get non-English speaking technicians. Other times trouble tickets go unanswered for days without resolution.

2. Reliability

Reliability is another major complaint with sites being down to many times or being too slow at certain times. All this impacts negatively on the performance and revenue potential of the site.

3. Delays after signing up

When people sign up for web sites, they are often anxious to go ahead as quickly as possible. Nobody wants delays. But with many web hosts, after signing up it takes days for the account to be ready.

How to avoid hosting problems

Being aware of the problems is the first step in avoiding them. There are other things we can do to keep hosting issues from becoming last minute disasters.

Carefully choosing a reliable hosting provider

Try to read as much reviews of other peoples about a hosting provider and made sure you won’t be next victim of bad provider, also try to figure out are they the best place to host your website application, for example HostGator seem to be great for almost kind of PHP web app, but Godaddy seem to be always have problems even with popular open source app like WordPress, Magento,…

Get the technical contacts to talk to each other directly.

If we can get the technical contact at the client to discuss these issues with our system administrator early on in the process, we can usually discover and address all these issues before they become problems. If the two technical contacts work together during the DNS modification stage, errors are less likely to occur. Our agency partners can be helpful in this regard by simply making inquiry into who the technical contact is and making the proper introductions.

 


 

How do I get my own domain name?

It's important to realize that domain registration is separate from web hosting and normally these two services are provided by two completely different companies. You can register your domain name with any of the ICANN-approved domain registrars and the registration does not tie you to any particular web host. Furthermore, you can change web hosting providers while maintaining the same domain registrar or vice versa. Read more about Domain Names.

 

Can I host my web site myself, in my home or office?

Yes. If you already have a DSL, T-1, or, in some cases, cable connection in your home or office, you can dedicate one of the computers to be your web server and run it yourself. In this case, you don't incur any extra charges for web hosting (of course, you still have to pay for your connectivity). However, this has often been shown to be the least efficient method of hosting as it puts heavy additional requirements on your office connectivity line (with DSL, for instance, you will realistically have to use the more expensive symmetric DSL (SDSL) variant), exposes you to security risks, requires a dedicated computer which can not be turned off, and so on. But yes, this is possible. Read our article on Web Hosting on DSL/Cable/T1 for more information.
If you're new to buying web hosting or running a web site, this page could answer some of those nagging questions. We'll take you from the very beginning and work up to some fairly advanced concepts - but don't worry, everything on this page is suitable for absolute beginners.

What is web hosting?

Think about the files and folders on your computer. They are stored on the hard disk of your desktop or laptop computer, ready for you to access them whenever you like. A web page is a file, just like your word processing documents. Just as your word processing documents require your computer to store them, all web pages require a computer to store them.
The difference is that web pages are generally intended to be seen by the general public. To enable this, the computer on which they must be stored must be of a much higher specification than your desktop PC, and must be connected to the Internet through a very powerful link.
A computer on which web pages are stored is called a web server (because it serves pages, on request, to users on the Internet). Collectively a bunch of web pages is a web site, and collectively all the web pages in the world form the World Wide Web (WWW).
The job of making web sites and web pages available to many users is called web hosting. We sometimes like to call the product we offer web space, because we are selling "space" on the Internet for you to host your web site. Web space is measured in megabytes, in exactly the same way as the space on your desktop PC is measured.

Why do I need web hosting?

It is technically possible to connect your desktop PC to the Internet and have it serve pages. But it is not practical since generally a home-based Internet connection is not powerful enough to serve many users at the same time.
For this reason, web hosting companies exist. They own and maintain very powerful web servers which house your documents. They also connect their web servers to the Internet by very powerful connections, enabling many web users to access your web pages at the same time.
If you want to run a web site you need web hosting because unless you've got unlimited funds you would not be able to afford the web servers and connections necessary.

What else do web hosting companies do?

As well as providing web space web hosting companies invariably provide a number of other "value-added" services. The extent of these varies from company to company but there are some key services provided by nearly all. These are the registration of domain names (see below) and provision of email services. They may also provide technical support either through their web sites or by email or telephone.

Are there different kinds of web hosting?

Yes, of course! There are many different varieties of web hosting, designed to meet different needs. A two-page web site set up by an individual will need far less robust web hosting package than a multinational high-traffic site set up by a company. There are a few key differentiating factors between the packages web hosting companies provide.

Amount of web space

This means how much web space the web hosting company will allow you to use for your web site. This can vary but usually starts at around the 50 megabytes mark, and can go all the way up to 100 or 200 megabytes. For all but the biggest web sites, 50MB is more than adequate. Some web hosting companies offer much more space - they are able to do this because they know that the average web site comes in at less than 50 megabytes.

Number of email addresses

This means how many email addresses the hosting company will permit you to have. For budget accounts, this is usually somewhere between 1 and 10 email addresses. Some higher-end packages permit say 250 addresses. Here at UKcentric we like to go one further whenever possible of course, most of our web hosting packages come with up to 100 email addresses.