Do you have a strong hosting username and Password?

One of the crucial yet simple ways to protect your website from getting hacked is to have a strong password for your hosting account. A strong password has:

1. more than eight characters
2. no dictionary words
3. a mix of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols

Here's the diff erence between strong and week passwords:

1. Good Password—t1U9r6K3e#Y
2. Bad Password—sparky

Hosting account passwords are oft en assigned to you automatically and if it doesn’t meet the criteria just listed, you should change it. You can do that through your hosting control panel.


Don’t change a strong password to something simple because it’s easier for you to remember. Simpler also means simpler for hackers to break in. If you’re not sure how to make a password strong, most control
panels have a password strength indicator to guide you along.

Don’t be tempted to use the same password for both your domain management and for your hosting account. Both provide access to key components of your online presence, so why make it easy for hackers to
access both?


Something that’s oft en overlooked is the username for the hosting account. In many cases, the username is automatically generated and cannot be changed later; just as oft en, it’s far too simple, like your domain name without the extension.

If you start an online signup process and you don’t have the option to choose your username, call the hosting provider and check if you can choose your own non-obvious username.

How Much should you Be Paying for Web hosting?

Like storage and bandwidth, the price of hosting has dropped so much that it’s almost irrelevant these days. However, if you’re paying more than you need to, it’s quite relevant, so this question is designed to make
sure that you don’t pay too much.

Because most readers of this book will be going the route of shared hosting (your site is on a server with hundreds of others), that’s what I’ll be talking about here. The bottom line? For an average website, you
shouldn’t need to pay more than $10.95 per month for quality shared hosting.


Still, be sure that you’re not comparing apples and oranges. For example, a web designer who has set up hosting for a client might be charging $19.99 per month, but they personally handle tech support, set up client e-mail, and do things such as back ups. In other words, the client isn’t just paying for hosting, but for services as well. You might do everything yourself and pay only $5.99 per month on a multiyear contract, but you can’t compare the two rates.

Here are pricing basics for some other types of shared hosting:


 E-commerce hosting—If you’re hosting your own shopping cart system, you’ll want a package that off ers things such as added security. So you might be paying $14.99 per month and upward, depending on all the features you want.

Video hosting—There are lots of free video hosting sites (the most popular is YouTube). They generally work very well, and the price is right, but you might want to consider how long smaller startups are going to be around. There are paid services, such as Amazon’s S3 hosting, which typically charge by the amount stored and the amount of traffic.


Specialty software hosting —If your site needs to run JavaServer Pages (JSP)—fi les with a .jsp extension—or some other special soft ware, you might find that prices are a bit higher for those types of hosting accounts, say in the $12.95 range and upward.

Turnkey websites or hosted applications—If you’re gett ing a special website system, such as for Realtors or travel agents, the cost of hosting will be part of the monthly system fee. Expect to pay a bare minimum of $29.99 for these types of site management programs, more likely $39.99 and up.


When you see advertisements for web hosting that’s only $4.95 a month or even less, they’re likely based on signing a multiyear hosting contract. Assuming that you’ll get all the features and services offered by a company that charges $9.95 on a month-to-month basis, make sure the contract terms are reasonable.

What are the penalties for leaving early? Multiyear contracts usually have penalties if you terminate early. Find out what the host’s policy is. Can you terminate if it violates uptime or other guarantees?

If you choose to leave, will you get back some portion of the money you paid up front, and on what is that portion based?

how Much storage space and Bandwidth Do you need for your site?

storage:


Websites are made up of fi les: HTML fi les, image fi les, video fi les, document files, and so on. How much storage you need on the web server depends on the types and amounts of files you’ll have on your site. You
want to make sure you think ahead—you might not have many files now, but they can add up quickly.

Suppose that you have a blog in which you’re planning to upload lots of photos and some videos. Let’s do the math for one year’s activities:

1. Blogging software and database = 20MB
2. 5 × 1.5MB photos per week = 390MB
3. 1 × 5MB video every two weeks = 130MB
4. Total after 1 year = 540MB (about half a gigabyte)

From this rough calculation, you’d want a web hosting account with at least 1GB of storage space. Fortunately, these days that’s a fairly basic starting point for storage limits, even for low-priced hosting. Often
you’ll get much more for the money.

Bandwidth:
Whenever people visit your site, they’re downloading fi les (such as HTML fi les, images, and so on) so their browser can display the site. Web hosting providers track all this downloading based on the number of bytes of data, and the monthly total of all this traffic is referred to as your bandwidth.

In the blogging example, with all the photos and videos, each visitor would use a good deal of bandwidth when viewing the site. You want more visitors coming to your site, but keep in mind that this means you’re using more bandwidth. So you want to make sure that your hosting account has sufficient bandwidth to meet your needs or projected needs.

As with storage, bandwidth costs have dropped dramatically in recent years, so you can get plenty of bandwidth for very little money. For a basic business website without a lot of images or documents
such as PDFs, and several thousand visitors per month, you might get away with 1GB or so of bandwidth. But of course, the more you can get for your money, the better —you never know when your promotional
eff orts will pay off and you’re swamped with visitors.

Having lots of bandwidth doesn’t mean your site can’t get overloaded with traffic. That’s because the bandwidth everyone talks about is actually a total data transfer limit over a one-month period. Technically,
bandwidth is the rate at which data can be transferred at any given moment.

If you think of data fl owing through a pipe, bandwidth is the diameter (the bigger the pipe, the more that can fl ow through in any given moment). But any pipe has a limit. So if your website is featured in a national media outlet, and tens of thousands of people flood your site all at once, it won’t matter how much monthly data transfer you’ve got; you can overload the bandwidth (pipe) and slow down your site or crash the
server.

Does your Website have specifi c software requirements?

Knowing which operating system you’ll need for your hosting account is a start, but you’ll probably need to be more specific to ensure that your website will function properly. For example, I mentioned that if you have soft ware that runs on PHP (the most widely used scripting language on the Internet), you’re best off with a Linux server. But does the soft ware require PHP5 or PHP4; even more specifi cally, does it require a minimum of, say, PHP4.3? These are the kinds of details you’ll want to get.

You don’t need to know what any of this means; you simply need a list of the requirements that you can show to potential web hosting providers or give to the person who’s arranging hosting for you.


To use another example from this list: You know that WordPress requires a database. In particular, it needs a type of database called MySQL, and furthermore it needs a version of MySQL newer than version 4.3.

Here are some examples of other types of soft ware hosting requirements:

1. Special graphics capabilities for scripting Q languages such as PHP or ASP.net
2. Nonstandard modules for the server soft ware (Apache, IIS, and so on)
3. Running special services such as Ruby on Rails, Front Page extensions, JavaServer Pages, and so on

Again, you’re not expected to know what any of these requirements mean, but I just want to make you aware of asking these questions of web designers, developers, and anyone assisting you with your website. If someone’s suggesting that you use certain soft ware for your website, they should be taking care of ensuring that requirements are met—but now you know to ask the question as a double-check.

What type of server and Which operating system Do you require?

Web hosting providers off er a wide range of server types and operating systems, but for most users the choices are pretty simple.
Types of servers:

Web servers fall into two broad categories:

1. Shared servers
2. Dedicated servers

In a shared hosting environment, your website is on a server with hundreds or even thousands of other websites. Dedicated servers host your content exclusively (there are a number of diff erent types of
dedicated servers, but those aren’t important in this context). Hosting a website on a shared server costs a lot less and off ers all the features most websites will need, so choosing a shared server makes sense for
the vast majority of sites.

However, there are two factors in particular that can affect the performance of your website on a shared server:

1. Overcrowding 
2. Lax security

It’s important to check what policies a web hosting provider has to deal with each.

How many sites a server can support depends on the size and power of the machine, and in each case web hosting providers have to balance service with profi tability. They need enough sites to make their money,
but too many sites will slow down the server and leave less room to cope with spikes in traffi c. Poor-quality providers will sacrifi ce service for profitability.
 
The other issue is how good the provider’s security measures are. If another website on the shared server gets hit with a virus, you don’t want it to infect your site or bring down the entire server. With adequate
security in place, these issues can be avoided—that’s what separates good web hosting providers from the poor ones.

Operating systems:
Just like your computer at home or at work, web server hardware runs on an operating system. The two most common systems off ered by web hosting providers are:

1. Linux/UNIX
2. Windows

Both will run HTML fi les just fi ne, so the key in deciding which one to choose is whether your website requires soft ware such as a content management system.

Generally speaking, if soft ware uses a language called PHP, you’re bett er off on a Linux operating system; if the soft ware runs on a language called ASP or ASP.net, your site belongs on a Windows machine.

If your website needs to interact with Microsoft products such as Sharepoint or Access, a Windows system is required.

Does the Web Hosting Provider Have a Good Hosting Control Panel?

A hosting control panel is an interface that makes it easy for the average user to perform tasks that, in the past, had to be performed by the web hosting provider’s staff. For example, anyone can easily create a new e‑mail account with just a few clicks using one of these panels.

If a hosting provider does not have a hosting control panel, that’s a good sign to move on.

There are two qualities to look for in a hosting control panel:

Comprehensiveness —The panel should allow you to control much more than just e-mail accounts and fi le uploading. Even if you’re planning on having someone else do some of the tasks for you, you want to have control over as many aspects of your hosting account as possible.

Ease of use —Are the various areas of the panel easy to navigate?
Does the panel provide good instructions, and are the inputt ing and report screens clearly laid out? Is there good help available right there in the panel (text or video help)?

Hosting control panels generally are third-party soft ware, although some web hosting providers have created their own systems that are as good or sometimes bett er. The two most popular third-party packages used by providers are cPanel and Parallels/Plesk.

The most common tasks you’ll probably perform through a hosting control panel are :

1.  E-mail management (creating accounts, auto-responders, and so on)
2. File uploading
3. Viewing your site’s statistics
4. Accessing your web mail.

These functions generally are very straightforward and there’s not much you can mess up. Tasks that you might want to have handled by someone who knows what they’re doing include sett ing up or modifying
databases, creating sub-domains, or sett ing up redirects.

Whether or not you’re the one who’s going to be using it, a good hosting control panel is a must. It will save you a lot of time, money, and frustration.

What kind of support Does the Web hosting Provider offer?

Whether your website is down or you can’t fi gure out how to add a new e-mail account, how easily can you get support from a web hosting provider? There are fi ve key types of support to look for:

Direct support—Whether by phone, live chat, or even e-mail (as long as they get back to you within minutes), this is your ultimate form of tech support because it allows you to pinpoint your exact problem and hopefully reach a resolution quickly. At the very least, you’ll want direct support from 9 a.m.–5 p.m. in your time zone, but 24/7 is always best.

Video tutorials—Being able to see how to do something is the next best thing to being walked through the process in person, but these do tend to cover general topics only.

Contextual help screens—Instead of reaching a general help page, clicking these help butt ons gives you information based on where you are or what you’re doing. Look for good detailed information, though, not a two-line description that’s thoroughly useless.


Knowledge base —A comprehensive, well-writt en set of articles covering all aspects of the server’s features is important, especially one that includes troubleshooting articles. Some knowledge bases will ask you if the problem was solved by the articles you just read; if not, it will offer other suggested articles.

User forum —In a sense this is an extension of the knowledge base because it features real-world troubleshooting and often contains information that hasn’t made it into the general knowledge base because it’s very specific. User forums can be particularly helpful for keeping up with very immediate issues and for
spott ing recurring issues. But a user forum is highly dependent on the quality of the users. There’s nothing worse than someone reporting the exact problem you have, posting “it’s been solved,” and not telling anyone how it was solved. Oft en there’s a forum section in which the hosting company posts the latest information
about its servers; how proactive are they in lett ing users know of potential issues?

how reliable is the Web hosting Provider?

A great website is useless if no one can get to it, so the reliability of your web hosting provider is vital. Having said that, you need to understand that absolutely no provider can promise that your site will be available
24 hours per day, 365 days per year. There is no such thing as 100 percent uptime.

It’s just a fact of operating web servers that they need to be maintained, and doing so might require going offline (downtime). Of course, providers try to keep this planned downtime to a minimum, and they try to schedule it for overnight or during other low-traffic times. What you want to know is that the web hosting provider is working to minimize unplanned downtime as well as drastic slowdowns in the loading time of your site.

These accidental outages or drops in speed will happen to any host at some point, so the real questions are these: How frequently do outages happen, how long do they last, and when do they happen? If your site is down accidentally for a couple of minutes, two or three times a year, even if it’s during prime traffic periods, that probably won’t affect you much. However, if the site is unavailable for 10 minutes once a week during peak visiting hours or very slow to load for a few hours each week in the same time frame, you’ll develop a bad reputation, not to mention lose revenue.

Are uptime guarantees of any value? Check the fi ne print to understand what kind or amount of downtime qualifies for the guarantee— most don’t include planned downtime. Then there’s the question of
compensation if the guarantee is broken. If you’re paying $9.95 per month for hosting, will a free month of service make up for your loss?

All other things being equal, if one host has an uptime guarantee and the other doesn’t, you might as well have the guarantee to give you at least something to point at during a dispute.


unplanned Downtime or slowdowns:
One of the most common causes of unplanned downtime or server slowdowns is poor security. Most sites are hosted on a shared server (multiple accounts on a single server), and if one of the other sites is using
an unsecured piece of soft ware, it can let in hackers who use up the server’s resources. If the hosting company isn’t on top of things or has a poor security system between hosting accounts, your site can be slowed down or knocked out.

Another common cause of server disruptions on shared servers is the attempt to squeeze too many sites onto one server without leaving some breathing room for unexpected bursts of traffic. Ask the hosting provider what its policy is for limiting sites on any one server.

Happy Holi

Happy Holi.  Time to enjoy, celebrate, have a feast, meet friends &wellwishers. Wishing all my Friends, clients and well-wishers.

What is the Difference between a Web hosting Provider and an ISP?

An Internet service provider (ISP) is the company that enables you to get on the Internet (via DSL, cable, satellite, and so on); a web hosting provider manages space on the Internet for storing and accessing websites and other files.

This distinction oft en gets blurred in people’s minds because ISPs also offer varying levels of hosting services. In particular, ISPs provide e-mail hosting, and for many people the e-mail account they get from their ISP is the only one they have. It’s very common for an ISP to also provide free or low cost web hosting when you sign up, although this isn’t always well publicized.


ISP hosting:
Web hosting accounts from ISPs generally are meant for personal web space. They have web addresses (URLs) such as http://members.your provider.com/yourname and typically don’t have features that a business
website needs: databases, large amounts of storage space, handling large numbers of visitors, or the ability to use your own domain name. In fact ISP hosting accounts can be very restrictive.

Even when an ISP does off er useful business features, you need to assess its support for hosting services, online hosting interface, and all the other questions about hosting being raised in this chapter. There’s
a lot to being an ISP and supporting that side of the business: Do they have the resources to adequately support hosting as well?

The other important consideration is search engine visibility. If you host your site with your ISP and use its domain name, and then a year down the road you want more features, get your own domain, and move
to a web hosting provider, links to your site will no longer work and any search engine ranking you’ve built up will be lost because your web address will have changed.

Do you need to find a Web hosting Provider for your site?

For most people, the answer is yes, but not if you’re planning to use the growing number of what I’ll refer to as turnkey website services. These are sites that you can have up and running within a very short time and then start entering your own content. With these sites, which fall into two general categories, the web hosting is included as part of the service:


Free turnkey solutions—There are many types of websites that can be set up for free, and part of the “free” includes the hosting of the site. If you want a blog, for example, you can easily sign up with services such as WordPress.com or Blogger. Or if you want a community website, you can sign up with social media sites
such as Ning or Spruz.


Paid turnkey solutions—These range from basic site builder programs to shopping carts to specialized platforms for real estate sites or travel agencies, for example. The idea is that all websites need certain basic functions, as do sites in specific industries, so the service provider includes them, along with design templates
and a content management system for a monthly fee. Because the services are all on the provider’s servers, you don’t need to think about hosting.


There are two situations for which turnkey websites can be well suited:

1. Simple sites which require no branding, such Q as personal blogs, hobby sites, or small organizations like clubs. 
2. Complex sites with common technical requirements, such as real estate sites or online stores. Building a database and administrative interface from scratch would be cost-prohibitive, and even the setup and maintenance of self-hosted programs might not be worth the time and energy. 

Whatever the situation, if you’re considering a turnkey solution there are some questions you need to ask:

1. How much control do you have over design and layout? Switching the look of a site is no trick at all because of the use of templates, but within a particular template, how much can you switch things around?

2. Can you have diff erent page structures for diff erent areas of your site (different sidebars or a special home page structure for example)? 

3. Are you able to use Q your own domain name?

4. Are you able to install your own scripts to create new functionality on your site?

5. Are there limits on the fi les you can upload: limits on type, size, and so on?

6. What exactly can you take with you if you leave? Not the software that runs the site, but what about designs, and so on? 

Again, it’s likely they belong to the provider.