Dont Get Fooled by the Web Hosting Wolves in Sheeps Clothing!Are you looking for web hosting? If you want to set up a personal website, or a modest commercial one, you are probably in the market for an inexpensive shared hosting plan. Those entry-level plans may cost $5-10 per month, and often boast very generous features for that modest prize. However, the strong competition often causes the companies to oversell, and then have difficulties living up to their promises. And how do you go about telling the good ones from the bad?
Maybe you go to one of the many web hosting review sites. Those places may offer extensive listings of various web hosting companies and their features; which is certainly helpful. But be aware of the fact that these review sites are out there to make money by referring new customers to the hosting companies! Therefore, they tend to praise those companies that pay them the best. I used to be naive about these things, trusting the review sites. That was until I began some serious research on the subject myself. Were they really so good, those much-praised web hosting companies? Soon, I was able to uncover large amounts of customer testimonials that told a different story. It became clear that several very large and well-known web hosting companies had surprising amounts of negative customer ratings against them. There were many angry customers that related stories about incompetent or non-existent customer support, billing disputes where the company kept charging ex-customers after they had cancelled their accounts; and more. One may say that any company with many customers is likely to have a few that are hard to please. But in these cases, there were scores of reviews, and the majority was negative! Since certain hosting companies are known to prosecute those who have criticized them in public, I will not mention any names here. In conclusion: I advice anyone looking for a reliable and honest web hosting provider to be very careful and not put too much trust in the web hosting ratings commonly found at hosting review sites and similar places. Also be aware that the customer feedback published by the web hosts themselves on their sites is of course filtered - and may even be faked. I am a researcher, an artist, and a web developer. On my website, www.TheHostingFinder.com, I have gathered some information on the good type of web hosts - the kind that has a majority of happy and satisfied customers. I hope this may be of some help to people looking for good web hosting.
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The Domain Name Game
Jason Shpik
The Domain Name GameThe Widgets Corporation decides to start a Web site and naturally wants to name it Widgets.Com. But much to the consternation of its management, it discovers there already is a Widgets.com. Someone else has registered the "domain name" and Widgets is stuck. It happens every day as the battle for the best domain names grows. But what in fact is a domain name and what are the issues surrounding their use? Domain names are simply the addresses of the Internet. Without the domain name, a computer would have no idea where to look for a Web page, and e-mail routers would not be able to send e-mail. Domain names are divided into hierarchies. The top-level of the hierarchy appears after the last dot in the domain name. In "microsoft.com", the top level domain name is .com. The .com name is the most common top-level domain name, and is used to indicate that the domain name is owned by a commercial enterprise. The disputes that arise over domain names involve "second level" domain names directly to the left of the top-level domain name. For instance, in the address "www.microsoft.com," the second-level domain name is "Microsoft." Two identical second-level domain names cannot coexist under the same top-level domain. For example, even though both the Delta Faucet Company and Delta Airlines would like the "delta.com" domain name, only one Delta company can have delta.com. Unfortunately for both Delta Faucet Company and Delta Airlines, that Delta company is Delta Financial of Woodbury, New York. Instead of using delta.com, Delta Airlines uses deltaairlines.com, while Delta Faucet Company uses deltafaucet.com. In order to register a second-level domain name under a top-level domain, a request must be made to the organization that has the power to assign names for that top-level domain. Prior to December 1999, a company called Network Solutions Inc. ("NSI") was almost solely responsible for the registration of second level domain names for the most popular top-level domains, including .com, .net and .org. As of December 1999, the ability to register.com, .net and .org domain names was spread out among many registrars. These registrars are accredited by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or "ICANN"), a non-profit corporation formed specifically to control Internet domain name management and similar functions. NSI continues to assign domain names, but now they are just one of many domain name registrars. All of these registrars assign names on a first-come, first-served basis, and do not do any checking before assigning a new domain name. Because of the increasing popularity of the Internet, companies have realized that having a domain name that is the same as their company name or the name of one of their products can be an extremely valuable part of establishing an Internet presence. When a company finds that the domain name corresponding to their corporate name or product trademark is owned by someone else, the company can either choose a different name or fight to get the domain name back from its current owners. When a dispute over a domain name occurs, the parties can always turn to the courts. While courts and judges have the authority to award control and ownership over domain names, the judicial process is notoriously slow. Consequently, many parties have avoided the courts and turned to the domain name dispute policies of the domain name registrars. In response to intense lobbying from trademark owners and famous individuals, Congress passed the Anticyber-squatting Consumer Protection Act in November of 1999. This act made it easier for individuals and companies to take over domain names that are confusingly similar to their names or valid trademarks. To do so, however, they must establish that the domain name holder acted in bad faith. One portion of this Act related to famous individuals. This portion allows individuals to file a civil action against anyone who registers their name as a second level domain name for the purpose of selling the domain name for a profit. The more general portion of the statute protects companies against persons who, in bad faith, register a domain name that is the same or confusingly similar to an existing trademark.
Submitted by HostingChecker.com - for help on all your hosting needs. http://www.hostingchecker.com
Article may be republished if this portion is not removed.
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How Much Hosting Space Do You Need?Many web hosts try to sell you a large amount of web hosting space that then costs you a lot each month. However, you may not need this much space. Have you ever calculated just how much disc space (MB) your web site uses? Do you really need an expensive hosting solution for your web site?
For my first web site, I purchased 20mb of disc space and wondered if this would be enough as I added pages to it. Well, recently I checked the size of this site which had grown to over 20 pages. To my surprise the size was only 3,269KB. This means it only uses a little over 3Mb of disk space.
Most of my friends sites also only use 2-3Mb for their sites. Therefore it is not necessary to purchase a large amount of space for a small site (if 20 pages = 3Mb, then 20Mb = 140 pages approx). Are you paying TOO much for the actual space you need?
How Do You Calculate The File Size Of Your Web Site? 1. First you need to understand how file size is measured. The smallest unit on a computer is a bit. One bit is one electronic on or off pulse. 8 bits strung together make one byte. One byte of information can put a letter, such as "B" on your screen.
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