best web hosting reviews

We have some exciting news, in our effort to make our site more customer centered, AlreadyHosting.com has incorporated a user-review feature on all of our review pages.  Prior to this change users had to manually send us an email (snail mail ) with their rating.  With the new change users can instantly rate their web hosting provider using a 5-star system and leave a comment about their experience.

Allowing users to activiely participate in our site should drastically improve our site’s effectiveness.  We are always looking for ways to improve our visitor’s experience and we want to do everything possible to help you find the best hosting provider.  Please let us know what you think of the latest change and please feel free to offer any suggestion that you may have to further improve our service.

Take a look at our top 10 web hosting reviews & ratings at AlreadyHosting.com!

You are at the top of the search results and getting great search traffic; all a result of your search engine optimization and promotion.  Your visitors are increasing by the day and your business is flourishing.

In this scenario, what happens when your servers and site stop functioning or issues start cropping up?  Your being on top of the search results is not going to help if your visitors cannot get to your site or have other issues.

A website needs to be protected from hackers, viruses, worms, hardware failures and several other problems that could put your business at risk; especially for medium and big businesses.  Internet connectivity and database management is crucial to the success of your business.

This is where the Website monitoring companies prove to be useful.  They specialize in server, site and email monitoring.   They take up the responsibility of website monitoring and ensure that the website is functional at all times and the performance is not affected. Email monitoring is done through ensuring the SMTP servers are in order to process emails in a perfect manner.  Where server monitoring is concerned, it is the performance and functioning of servers such as FTP etc. that is maintained.

These monitoring services follow different ways of ensuring their clients’ websites are performing fine.  They themselves connect to the server or site frequently to verify the operational status.  Some of them use ping to check for a response from the server.  Others use different methods such as checking the database connectivity, web page code etc.

When hiring a monitoring service, site owners have to first understand how the service is going to monitor the website.  If they are only using ping to check for the status, this may not be the perfect way as ping does not always guarantee that a server or website is operational.  A good monitoring service also has to provide statistics to website owners to reassure them that everything is being done as per the agreement.

When you hire a monitoring service, some of them install software on your server. This is done very rarely these days as most services have the capability of checking sites and servers from their end.

You should also find out the “monitoring interval.”  This is the gap between every site check or how often the site is checked. The packages can range anywhere from two minutes to one hour.  If you have a site which needs to be checked every two minutes as it is crucial that there are no problems, you will need to subscribe for that package.

But for any monitoring service is be used most efficiently, it is important that you are in contact at all times.  For example, if you pay for monitoring every two minutes and you set up things to be sent via email notification, and you only check your emails once a day, the purpose is lost.  So you have to carefully understand how you are going to be notified and then decide based on that.

The rates of these monitoring services usually depend on the monitoring interval.  They are usually in the range of $50 or $60 per month, which is not too bad for the security of your company.

Monitoring can be valuable to businesses where their websites are important for the business. Having a monitoring service from outside your office is a great idea and ensures you have everything in place, such as firewalls and other security aspects of your website.

For professional web hosting check out AlreadyHosting.com!

Why do you think there are so many web hosts around and increasing with every passing day? There must be a good reason for the huge competition in the world of web hosting.  The reason is money and profits.  Do these words seem familiar?

Web hosting can be an excellent business with the potential of huge profits.  But starting, managing and maintaining a hosting company is not easy.  It needs a lot of effort, money and knowledge of server management and several other technical aspects. In short, you can liken it to starting a big business.

You don’t have to be disheartened as you can enjoy all the pleasures of owning a web hosting company and profiting from it without having to go through the grind.

The magic word here is “Reseller hosting!”

You can become a hosting reseller and offer your services to webmasters. As a hosting reseller, you are the business owner and you can charge webmasters whatever amount you choose to.

The hosting space you would be selling webmasters is located at the web host with whom you sign up for a Reseller Hosting account. What you will be doing is distributing this hosting space to other webmasters.

You will be a middleman offering your services of server space on the Web host’s server to others. There are several reseller hosts around and if you check out a few you would understand how the best reseller hosts are going about their business.

There are some well-known Reseller Web hosts who are so professional in their services, that webmasters don’t even realize that they are dealing with a reseller and not a huge Web Hosting company.  The best part is that resellers are given the option to choose their servers by their web host, and this ensures they provide the best services to their customers.

Let’s get down to the earning potential of a reseller host. If you buy around 1000MB space from your web host for a fee of $25/month, you have 1000MB space to redistribute to the various webmasters.  If you sell 25MB space for about $5/month to webmasters, you will be able to sell 40 such hosting packages, and the income would be $200/month with you making a profit of $175 after deducting your Web host’s monthly charges.

There are some Web hosts that allow their resellers to oversell the space without charging anything extra but they impose restriction on the usage of the reseller account, which is usually 1000MB.  This works to the advantage of the reseller, as most webmasters hardly use even half the space they buy, which means the reseller could easily sell the allotted 1000MB to double or triple the number of webmasters.  This increases the income to $400/month or $600/month or more.

Web hosting income is something that keeps coming in regularly as long as the services of the reseller are good.

You can enjoy the benefits of being a Web host without actually owning the hosting company. There are some Web hosts that take care of the customer service for their resellers for a small fee.  How much better can it get?

Another way of profiting from being a reseller web host is to sign up more resellers through you and earn commissions from your main web host, on their monthly sales.

You need no expertise, no technical knowledge, no investment other than the small monthly fee and you’re in a profitable business set up for years of steady income. You also have the option of changing your web host for whatever reason, without your customers ever knowing.

Walmart is not the only company offering big sales for Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year!  Several web hosting providers will offer you EXTREME discounts on web hosting this weekend!  If you have been looking to start your own website for your business, church, corporation, or even your own blog… This weekend is the time to purchase hosting.

Some of the web’s best web hosting providers (listed below) have contacted me informing me of their specials.  Perhaps the best specials are coming from Hostmonster, Bluehost, FatCow, Justhost, and iPage.  Believe it or not web hosting accounts are now being given to people for Christmas!

Check out these web hosting black friday specials:

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Hostmonster (ranked #1 on our site) will be offering unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domain hosting and a free domain name for life, if you use our exclusive Hostmonster Black Friday Link you can get hosting for only $3.95 a month!

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Bluehost (ranked #2 on our site) will also be offering unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domain hosting and a free domain name for life, if you use our exclusive Bluehost Black Friday Link you can get hosting for only $3.95 a month!

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FatCow is offering web hosting at an incredibly low price ($3.67 a month).  Just like the hosts above FatCow will give you unlimited web hosting but only for $3.67!  To activate this promo you must click on our exclusive FatCow Black Friday Link!

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Justhost is perhaps one of the fastest growing web hosts on the web!  Justhost.com is promising customers (this weekend) web hosting for only $3.45 a month (the cheapest)!  To activate this promo you must click our JustHost Black Friday Link!

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We LOVE iPage for many reasons including: incredible pricing, great customer support, but also because the offer great web hosting!  This weekend only you can get hosting for $3.50 a month if you use our exclusive iPage Black Friday Link!

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We hope you can utilize these Black Friday links to save big on web hosting this weekend!  Make sure to click on our special links (listed above with each host) or click on the banner to activate the special discounted pricing!   Enjoy, have fun shopping!

Just another short update to let you know about the recent web hosting reviews that we have added to our web hosting directory.  About a month ago we decided that we were going to try to complete 500 web hosting reviews in 365 days!  So far we have completed right around 75 reviews (15% of our goal).  Please let us know if you would like us to review your web hosting provider, otherwise please enjoy our new reviews:

1. WebHost4Life
2. Hosting24
3. HostExcellence
4. ChaseHosting
5. EthicalHost
6. CirtexHosting

Once again, we appreciate you visiting our site and we hope that our web hosting resources can help you in your research.  We are always open for feedback so if you have any suggestions for our site please feel free to contact us.. Thanks!

Email hosting in simple terms means web hosting companies agree to perform email functions for their customers.  They can be just the basic functions of receiving and sending emails or advanced functions that entail database processing.  Further, the host also undertakes the responsibility of maintaining the security of client email accounts as well as the reliability of the servers on which these email accounts are stored.

Through email hosting, you can have a personalized email account on your own domain.  Why would you want to do that?  Well, for one thing, it projects your company as professional and can prove to be a big plus for your business.  You must have received experienced feeling confident about companies that have emails like admin@marketing.com and feeling just the opposite with emails like hotdude@gmail.com.

While most web hosts offer email hosting as an additional feature, there are times when a big organization with several departments need dedicated email hosting.  These companies can either set up in-house servers for this or outsource their email hosting.
The three different ways of using emails under your own domain name are:

• Using the email hosting service offered by your web host, which is usually an additional feature that comes along with your hosting package.
• Using an email hosting specialist to outsource your email hosting.
• Use of in-house servers to host your company emails.

In-house email hosting

While managing in-house servers is certainly the best option for large organizations, it requires a lot of effort, and may not be a feasible solution for the smaller businesses.  If you are thinking of outsourcing your email hosting, research is important as you need to find the right one.

Email hosting companies

Companies that provide email hosting are many, and this facility is offered by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google too. They use email hosting as a way to get users to sign up for their other services. Yahoo and Microsoft take the lead and offer a lot of services that can actually meet all of your Web-based needs in one place.

Email hosting offered by web hosts

There are several web hosts that offer email hosting as an additional feature.  But how do you find the best one?  How do you know who offers the most security for your emails?
Here are the basic things you need to look for:

Spam emails: It is important to find out how spam emails are managed. There is no dearth of spammers looking to attack your domain by sending hundreds of junk emails, which can be extremely painful. You must ensure that the web host has a good spam filter that is easy to use.

Email forwarding: Email forwarding or email redirect is one and the same.  If you have an email account such as “support@internetmarketing.com, and you want all the emails that are addressed to this to be delivered to Terry@internetmarketing.com, you will have to set up a redirect. Check if this is possible before signing up with a web host.  This helps you keep a professional front and receive all your emails to one or more emails of your choice.

Autoresponders: Autoresponders allow you to send a pre-prepared message as a reply to some specific emails or questions from your users. If you have a contact page on your website with different categories, and users send in some questions through a particular category, you can set up an automated pre-written message that sends out the required information, based on that category.

Mailing lists: This helps when you have a huge number of customers you need to send emails to.  If your company has many departments, the message can be set to be sent to all the departments using a single email address. The mailing list contains the emails of all the employees that should be receiving messages.  Find out from the web host if you are allowed to create and edit email lists on your domain.

While it is difficult to pinpoint which is the best email host, you can check out the reputed ones and get answers to all these questions.  Find out from other similar companies about their email hosting and you will ultimately find one. Even if it takes time initially, this research will help you fulfill all your email needs without any hassles.

The word “catastrophic success” holds a lot of meaning here. It means an unusual surge in traffic that can bring a website to a complete halt. You have been successful at bringing traffic to your website but it proved to be catastrophic.

This happens due to unanticipated levels of interest when thousands of users visit the website, but the webmaster is unable to cope with them. Sometimes, the service may not go down but gets so slow that it becomes non-responsive. Such problems can be overcome.

Other causes of website failure include DoS attack (denial of service), which can also cause congestion and overload; poorly configured system components and out-of-date updates and patches on web servers.

The occasional outage is understandable and happens to all, but frequent downtime can cause delays in business. As we begin relying more on Web applications, Internet uptime is becoming more critical.

But there are things you can take care of to ensure you pave a smooth superhighway to your company’s website.

Content delivery networks (CDNs)

The public internet depends on content delivery networks to handle large amounts of media on huge sites like Amazon.com. Microsoft recently launched a free CDN to improve website performance. CDNs are made to route traffic onto private networks, thus removing the burden from the public website. In the absence of a CDN, sites with massive media files will be down immediately.

Better caching

One of the best and most popular ways of dealing with internet problems is to cache data that is frequently accessed. You can use Memcache or anything else and you will find several CMS packages that support this. But you must ensure you are careful with dynamic data.

Internet caching is similar to your computer memory caching, which holds the most popular content in a cached storage on the server to provide faster access. There are tier-caching products that help cache content within the website by making sure the content from the database is available even with there is a huge surge of traffic. This is one of the ways Twitter and Facebook deal with traffic surges.

Better programming

One of the new methods of dealing with traffic is to use better programming to withstand the sudden traffic spikes. Experts say that most websites cannot withstand any unanticipated traffic due to poor programming.

Using HTML5

Your website downtime is not always related to the hardware. HTML5 and other new standards have built-in mechanisms for increasing the reliability of websites. These involve advanced programming techniques. HTML5 is considered to be an important advance in browser capabilities.

Content optimization

You can optimize your static content by compressing images in order to make use of every kilobyte, but all the while making sure the visual quality does not get affected. You can also compress the content delivered by your web server. You can optimize your content management system by reducing the number of database calls you need to make for each page request. In Drupal, this is very simply done by disabling some of the modules. It is also advisable to separate the read and write databases.

Expires

One of the most important things is to add “expires” headers to content to ensure the same files are not downloaded continually as a user browses your website.

There is certainly no guarantee that your site will never go down. You will just have to find the right balance and implement what is necessary to ensure it has a high percentage of uptime.

Matt Cutts of Google has announced that Google Caffeine has gone live on 1 data center and this has been confirmed by other members of the Google team at PubCon.

Here at AlreadyHosting.com, we enjoy having fun “webmaster related” contests.  We are going to give $50 cash (in form of a Paypal payment) to the first person to confirm which data center Caffeine is currently live on and offer support to why they think this.  ** Maybe we can get Matt Cutts to confirm our winner **   .

This is information a lot of webmasters would like to know so this could end up being a very fun post.  The only way to win is to post the correct answer (via a comment) on this post.  This contest is sponsored by AlreadyHosting.com!  Make sure to register for an account (with a valid email) so that we can get a hold of you if you win.

P.S.  Matt Cutts you are eligible to win if you would like to enter

The problem with affordable web hosting these days is that most of the hosts require ads to be placed on your personal or business web site.  This is the technique that hosts use to make up for the expenses they lost by providing web hosting for free.

Fortunately for you, the top professional web hosting providers (that do not require ads) have been in a price bidding war for the last few months.  Currently the top 10 web hosting providers are offering web hosting with no ads for under $5 a month, which is very affordable.  Bluehost.com (see banner above) for example offers web hosting for only $3.95 a month and is known to be one of the top web hosting provideres on the internet.  This host will also give you a free domain name with your purchase.

In our honest opinion it is worth spending a few dollars each month to get no ads web hosting.  The three host below would all be a great solution for you if you are looking for profession (but affordable) hosting.

Web Hosting No Ads:

1. Bluehost – In our opinion this host and Hostmonster are the top web hosting providers on the web.  The offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, and a free domain name for life.  All for only $3.95 a month if you click on our exclusive link (Above).

2. Hostmonster – Just like Bluehost you will not get any ads placed on your website and you can get professional hosting for only $3.95 a month!  One again be sure to click on our link to get the special promotion.

3. iPage – iPage is one of the newest web hosting providers and are owned by the same company as FatCow.  iPage.com is a great web hosting provider and VERY affordable!

WordPress has come to be known as the best blogging platform even for beginners building their first ever website. The Web is abuzz about WordPress sites.  But for the uninitiated, building a WordPress site is nothing less than a challenge.  No, it’s not because the process itself is complicated, but because of lack of necessary knowledge.

Just leave all your fears associated with building a website behind and read this.

You don’t need to know HTML, database management, FTP or anything else.  You don’t need Dreamweaver or any other WYSUSYG software.  It’s free to use with excellent easy-to-use features, SEO friendly and very well supported.

There are two WordPress websites you can go to based on your need; WordPress.org and WordPress.com.  There is always confusion as to what is different here.

WordPress.org has everything related to the software, such as documentation, download links for the software and it is here that you can also find support.  On the other hand, WordPress.com is a place where a free blog can be hosted online using WordPress software. Since these are free blogs, they will have wordpress.com in their URL, just as blogger blogs URLs have blogspot.com.

Your WordPress website is supported by the backend system, templates and plugins that make life easier.  A template is a design code for your website and comes in css and php files.  A plugin is a functional code that provides extra functions for your website.

WordPress Templates

In WordPress, the design of your website has no connection with the backend system. The website appearance is based on files named templates or themes. The files in the template folders can be modified to get the exact website design you need, without going anywhere near the WordPress backend. Once the stylesheets and template files are configured, the design will show up on your site. The design remains consistent throughout all the pages on the website, without you having to work on each page.

You can either make these templates yourself or use the ones provided by WordPress for free or even buy them.  In fact, there is such a huge variety of these templates that you won’t have to create your own, unless of course you wish to.  Since the free ones are easy to use, you can use them initially instead of spending money buying them or creating them.

You can find these templates on WordPress themes gallery sites or on the official WordPress site in the “Themes Directory.” If you search Google, you will find hundreds of websites offering these templates.

WordPress Plugins

A WordPress plugin increases the power of WordPress and can be used to do almost anything, such as use polls on your website, establish rating systems on the site, auto-generate XML sitemap, add SEO features and many more.  There are thousands you can choose from.  Just like the ready-made templates, you will not have to create any plugins.  There are several volunteers that keep developing these plugins and sharing them for free.  These plugins help you get anything done on the website.

Installation

WordPress can be hosted with almost any hosting provider and installed on all computers with Unix/Linux system.   Just download the WordPress installation file and follow instructions.  It is advisable to go with a web host that allows auto-installation of WordPress, which will greatly help you if you are new to this. There are several such good web hosts around that offer auto-installation using Fantastico or some such program.   Once you sign up with a web host, just look for WordPress option and click on that.  Things should be simple after that.

There you go; using WordPress for your websites can be wonderful in terms of ease of use as well as for SEO purposes.  A WordPress site ranks faster too and with the right plugins, you will find yourself on the first page of Google within no time.  Even if the first website takes time because of the learning curve involved, you will find yourself breezing through websites after that.