Technology Metro

In todays internet world, almost everyone has a site they call their own and to do that, you need some web space. There are lots of places where you can get web space, for free and by paying for it. Usually, a newbie web user will search for a free web space as they don’t have to pay for it and they don’t know about web hosting. Free web hosting is not always good as most of them are very very unreliable and their servers are down for a long time. And also, some free hosting providers place some kind of ads or links on your site because they are providing the web space for you, free. Well, if you really are serious about it, paid hosting is the best option but here again there are many problems. Lots of web hosting companies on the web are not reliable either and some charge huge amount of money for a web hosting.

Today, one of the most popular web hosting company is BlueHost. I almost got a hosting account there but there were some things they wanted me to do, like provide them with photocopy of my ID and Utility bill. Because of that, I chose a different web hosting company and till now (its been about almost a year now), there has been very little problem with it. Their pricing is affordable to. They are not a big company so, not everyone will trust them. Well, there are other trusted web hosting companies that provide web space for relatively cheap price and with very less hassles. IMhosting.com is one of them. They are an award winning web hosting company and they provide Affordable web hosting to customers all around the world. They have grown to a massive scale because of the service they have provided to their customers and this surely will and has increased their profile in the web hosting provider market. They now have a reputation for being very reliable and they also have great customer service. Here is a specifications for their most basic shared web hosting

• 2,500GB of web space
• 20,000GB of premium monthly bandwidth
• you can host unlimited domains to a single account
• Get a free domain for life

You can try their web hosting mega deal and if you are not satisfied with it, they guarantee a 30 day refund. The above hosting package only costs $6 per month. That is a very very cheap pricing if you consider the space and bandwidth you are getting. They are one of the most affordable web hosting companies around. Here are some of the features you will be getting with IMHosted.com:

• PHP, MySQL, CGI-Bin, Perl, SSL, FTP
• SSH (Secure Shell), WebStats, FrontPage Ex.
• 2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts
• Multiple Mail SPAM Protection + Webmail
• cPanel + Fantastico (for easy software and script installation)
• 99.998% Network Uptime

They have a great support team and you can talk to them if you have any problems or need any information 24/7 via live chat or via phone. Check them out and if you don’t like they, you can get your money back, Guaranteed.

There are not a lot of places where you can get web space for hosting sites for free. There are a few but most of them don’t allow users to use their own domain or they restrict some file types. Some even provide free web hosting with cpanel. Some free web hosting providers allow use of only particular extensions with lots of restrictions and those kind of hosting is almost of no use ( particularly for me). I have used free hosting from many sites and at last decided it was better to pay a small fee than to get web hosting for free. I used free hosting from awardspace (which only allowed use of subdomain eg: test.awardspace.com) . I found one that allowed free hosting of sites which included a cpanel. I used it for quite a while but after some time, they collapsed. It was not the best hosting but was pretty good if you consider the price, FREE.

After that, I decided to purchase a hosting plan but that failed horrendously two times. Now, I found the perfect hosting for my sites. It is pretty cheap and has a damn good server with no downtime till now. Well, if you can’t afford to pay for hosting or you want to just try it out, you can find few good free web hosting providers. I think Hostbot.com might fall into one of them. They don’t have Cpanel but you can have access and manage your site’s file using a pretty good control panel. They also allow free php web hosting, not a lot of sites allow php files on their server ( for free service ). Hostbot also doesn’t want anything in return for the free hosting space and bandwidth. Some of the free web hosting providers force the users with links and ads that are placed automatically at the footer (usually). With Hostbot, there is no forced ads. Their free hosting plan includes:

• 20GB Disk Space
• 10GB Bandwidth
• Full FTP access
• Supports Php5 and SQL (You could host sites that require a database like wordpress)
• They also offer quite a few useful pre-installed scripts which you could use to make a site
• Get access to traffic data with the help of Awstats which is also available for free

Awstats is a very useful tool for analytic traffic and visitor data. I use it all the time and it is the best analytic software available. Awstats even shows when search engine spiders (bots) have accessed your sites. Well if you want more disk space and bandwidth than currently provided by hostbot, you can upgrade your account by paying a small monthly fee. I would have loved to see Cpanel on it. What do you expect, the service is provided for free with no forced ads and also allows SQL database, PHP etc. You can try it, its free and if you don’t like it you don’t loose anything. If you want to operate a business website or anything important, you might want to go for a paid one that offers Cpanel.

It can be quite a hassle if you were to maintain your own server and host your site from it. For one, you will need to monitor the server 24/7. So you will have to dedicate a lot of time for that. Another hassle you will encounter is paying the electricity bill and subscription fee for an active broadband internet connection. Basically, you can give all these responsibility to others if you get a dedicated server. You won’t have to worry about paying and managing electricity and internet connection bill and also manage the server as the dedicated hosting provider will take care of it all.

Well, a dedicated hosting will be quite over the top if you have a fairly small site with some traffic. For these kind of sites, you can use virtual private servers which is basically an server divided into several virtual parts. They use some kind of software to allocate memory, CPU usage to a VPS.

If you have some time to dedicate into server management, you might want to get a Colocation Hosting. Colocation hosting means you will be renting a space where you will be able to place your server. With server colocation, you are buying a physical space. With this option, you will have to manage the server but every other thing will be done by the provider. You provide and manage the server, they will provide a space to place your server, get their data center, electricity, bandwidth and routers. Colocation hosting is the next best thing if you are willing to provide the server and manage it by yourself. If you don’t have much experience or can’t spend a lot of time managing the server or want to buy a server computer, dedicated hosting or a VPS is the best option.

With IntraHost, you can get all the things i mentioned, from a dedicated server to a colocation hosting. They provide service for Virtual Private Server and also provide application hosting if you need them. The price of all these service is very competitive and you will be satisfied with it. Colocation hosting at IntraHost costs £35 per month for the first three months of service. You don’t have to worry about electricity bills, data center or internet connection bills. Everything will be taken care of by IntraHost. All the data centers are located inside the United Kingdom so this should be best suitable for companies or webmasters who reside in the United Kingdom. Check out their site for more information.