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 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.

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.

Why Disk Space Importance in a Web Hosting Plan ?

If you have decided to go for purchasing a web hosting plan for your website, you need to see whether it contains the basic features or not.

‘Disk space’ is one such feature that needs to be considered while hiring a web hosting service provider. In every hosting account the user is offered fixed amount of disk space used for storing files. Selection of disk space differs from one host to another. Therefore you should have clear idea as to what files and amount of files you want to store in the given disk space.

Take out the exact estimate of requirements needed for every task. Find out how much space would you need to store in your log files, web files, emails and databases. When you divide the usage pattern it becomes easy to track down the total space you should opt for.

Your plan contains web accessible files during the calculation of the disk space usage. Some hosts commit the mistake of accessing the total disk space by the number of emails and log files in their quota. This has drawback of giving idea of space needed for storing web files because emails and log files number changes over a certain period of time.

Some people may say that a web host should have all types of file storage in their quota, therefore see whether you can switch off the logs or exit any specific information. If such option is available you would save on disk space especially the site that has continuous traffic flow. Many hosting plans also offers statistics package, here you have to allow few logging to be done.

If your email settings and in boxes are included in your disk quota, it might be an idea to set the maximum size of each mailbox if it is possible. This will save you from storing too much mail on the server and inadvertently going over your limit. If the disk space quota includes email settings and in boxes than choose the maximum big size of the mailbox. This step would avoid storing excessive emails on the server, thus not exceeding the limit.

In case you include the logs, you cannot erase it from the log file unless and until the server has stopped writing on it. Logs of daily basis can be managed easily if you log in, download it and delete it regularly. You may experience problems in monthly logs if the log space requirement is not accurate and thus file cannot be deleted till month end leading to extra charges.

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The Difference Between Linux And Windows Hosting

One of the most confusing decisions someone new to web hosting will have to make is which platform their server should be on. There are a number of different choices out there but the main two are Linux and Windows web servers. There are also a lot of sources of information about hosting, but the majority of them are tainted by the author’s biased personal opinion unfortunately confusing the issue. Having just put in some solid hours researching the topic I have come to the conclusion that in general it quite probably does not matter which server you use. For the majority of people it will be far more important to choose a really good web host than to worry about the server-type that they implement.

Microsoft developed and owns the Windows operating system. Linux is open source and generally free. This means it can often be more expensive to set up and run a Windows server. However, this fact doesn’t really affect you unless you are actually setting up a server for yourself and if you’re reading this article then I’m guessing that it’s safe to assume you’re not. This article is going to offer information for those trying to decide which hosting company to go with. The cost involved in running a server does not affect the cost of a web-hosting package as much as you may think. Despite the general opinion that Windows servers are more expensive to run, buying a Windows hosting package can often turn out to be just as cheap or even cheaper than an equivalent Linux hosting package.

Some people naturally assume that because their PC runs Windows they need to buy a Windows hosting package. This isn’t true. Access to your web account will most likely be through FTP or a control panel and both servers support these methods. The main difference is that some of the FTP commands are slightly different between Linux and Windows and some FTP programs will be designed with one or the other in mind. This means you may occasionally find that when you try and get your FTP program to do something it returns an error message, but it won’t happen very often.

Your choice of server platforms should be dictated by the use to which you intend to put it. The majority of web features run fine on both platforms including PHP, mySQL, POP3 etc. If you intend to create your site using ASP, FrontPage, the .NET environment, Windows Streaming Media, Access, MSSQL, or any of the other Microsoft proprietary technologies then you probably need to use a Windows host. There is limited support for a number of these technologies in Linux, but they can be expensive and are usually lacking in features. It is probably worth considering the fact that if you use server specific technologies and then change hosts you’ll have a much harder time of it than if you use technologies that can be run on any system. Having it run generic technologies removes the need to focus on specifics and allows you to focus on the quality of service itself.

The reliability and stability of the different platforms have been the topic of many long arguments. The main reason that Windows is seen as being insecure is that it is the most widely used operating system for home PC’s. People spend more time looking for flaws in the most common system. With Linux being the most common server type, it has a surprising number of successful hack attempts made on it. In the end the security of both platforms comes down to the competency of the system administrators. If you are security minded then you’ll do better to make sure that the hosting company is reputable and highly skilled than to worry about the server they use.

In terms of performance there’s not a huge difference between the two servers. Linux reportedly performs faster because Windows (as usual) attempts to offer an ‘all in one’ package instead of the extendable Linux implementation. You’ll generally not notice a difference but if performance is of utmost importance to you then maybe this will influence your decision.

I’ve come to the conclusion that unless you are specifically using features that are unique to one platform or another your time will be much better spent looking for a really good quality host than a really good quality server. Developers are constantly improving both Linux and Windows so they should be fairly close in terms of features, security, and reliability for a long time. It’s the people implementing them that you should be basing your decision on.

What Does Unlimited Hosting Mean ?

The sky is blue and gravity pulls you down to the earth. What else do you need to know? Oh yeah, the amount of storage involved in unlimited hosting. Did you hear that? Unlimited hosting! Did you understand that? Keep reading. But what does it mean when a hosting provider gives you unlimited hosting?

Unlimited hosting definitely cannot be equated with infinity. No web host service can provide an infinite amount of storage with an infinite degree of bandwidth to an indefinite number of clients. Infinity times infinity equals, well, infinity. No server exists on the planet that can power an infinite amount of web storage or handle an infinite amount of bandwidth. Besides, an infinite amount of bandwidth does not even exist. A band can only be so wide! Unlimited cannot mean infinite.

Neither does unlimited hosting mean that any number of users can use the service, in general, or at any particular moment in time. If every member of the human race opened an account with one particular web host service, that service would immediately become limited in its hosting services. What is the limit for a service? Ask them. Ask how many clients they currently serve. Find out what their capacity is. Ask them when they last upgraded their servers. If you need a lot of bandwidth and major storage, these questions become crucial to your search for a provider that offers the unlimited hosting to meet your needs.

Be smart. Don’t let false advertising pull you into a service that is overpriced or that will not provide sufficient customer service. A company that offers unlimited hosting needs to also offer top notch service and server reliability at a reasonable and affordable cost to you. Unlimited hosting is a great service but not one that just anyone can offer.

When a provider advertises unlimited hosting, the expression can be thought of “as much as you need.” How much can be provided? “As much as you need.” How much can be offered? “As much as you need.” What does the expression unlimited hosting refer to? “As much as you need.”So the next time you see a site advertising unlimited hosting, think of it as the provider enthusiastically and without condition or hesitation offering to meet your needs, whatever they are. You can see the importance of knowing what your needs are before beginning your search. A good provider will be able to offer unlimited hosting to many, many customers, but not to 100% of every potential client seeking the service. Know what you need before you begin your search. Be confident that you have found a service to host your website sufficiently, meeting your needs in an unlimited way, before signing on the dotted line.

Remember, everything has a limit. Including unlimited hosting.

Web Hosting

We at Trusstechnosofts offer both Windows and Linux hosting services. Our web hosting services includes shared hosting, virtual dedicated hosting and dedicated hosting through different servers, such as application server, database servers, transaction servers, streaming server, content management servers & hosting servers.

Our Hosting Packages include:

1. 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
2. India hosted servers to reduce number of hops required to reach your site
3. Unlimited Data Transfer
4. Dual Xeon – Dell Servers
5. 24*7  Telephonic Support
6. 24*7 CRM Support