Affordable Web Site Hosting Services
This tutorial is a review about Hostmonster, a web hosting provider - the benefits and services they provide.
Let’s start the current tutorial:
I use Hostmonster for all my web site hosting. Hostmonster is an affordable web site hosting services provider.
Key points you should consider before choosing a reliable and a low cost web hosting service:
- There are a number of web hosting companies in the market. Before selecting one think of the long term. You might currently have one web site. But very soon you might actually have a couple of more and then a few more…So select a hosting provider that hosts unlimited domains.
- The hosting provider you choose should have the ability to host databases as well. Your website might not need a database currently but you might add one in the future. And when you do decide to add one you don’t want to go hunting for a new web hosting solution provider.
- Should have email support - basically you should be able to add email addresses with your website address easily. Your hosting service provider should provide this facility. Example of an email address ’support@xyz.com’ (where xyz.com is the website address).
- Should have FTP access (explained below).
- If you plan to have a blog then wordpress is the undisputable king of blogging platform. So your hosting provider should give you the option to add wordpress easily.
- The hosting space - you don’t want to get a call from them every couple of days saying you have exceeded your disk space.
- Good support
- And finally should not cost you a fortune
The above features are the features that your web hosting provider should offer at the least.
Here is a brief overview of the features offered by my affordable web site hosting services company - Hostmonster…(the first two columns has the basic features. I have also added a third column with some description of what some of these features mean. I have not given elaborate explanations in this third column but have tried to make it as simple and easy to understand as possible.)
If you are not interested in getting all technical then just ignore the third column and focus on the first two columns alone.
Low Cost Web Hosting Service:
| Disk Storage | 600 GB | All the files of all your websites take up disk storage space. This denotes the space offered by the hosting provider. 600 GB is huge amount of space and much much more than the industry standard. |
| Host Unlimited Domains | Yes | You can host all your websites under one package with hostmonster. You basically pay one price and host multiple domains (multiple websites). It is a very inexpensive web hosting plan. |
| Free Domain Name | Yes | Every account should have a main domain name. All your other domain names come under that one. The registration and renewal for this main domain name is free. With HostMonster your renewal fee for the main domain name is zero. |
| Support International Domain Names | Yes | This Hosting Provider can host websites with international extensions (eg ‘.com.au’ etc) |
| POP3/POP3 Secure Email Support | Yes | POP3 is ‘Post Office Protocol 3′. This is the process of downloading email from your internet server to your computer. This web hosting provider offers unlimited email accounts for each of your domain names. What this means is lets say you use this web hosting company to host a site called www.XYZ.com. You can set up an email account suuport@xyz.com, sales@xyz.com etc…(as many as you like).
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| IMAP/Secure IMAP Email Support | Yes | IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is the method of accessing email that resides on a IMAP server from any computer. For example: Lets say you normally use your desktop in your office. You use this desktop to check your mail. Now lets say you use your laptop when you are traveling. Since your mail is on the IMAP server you can still access your mail using your email client from your laptop as well.If you are interested here are the differences between POP3 and IMAP:
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| Forwarding Email Accounts | Unlimited | For your website xyz.com you might actually want to create 25 different email addresses example - sales@xyz.com;support@xyz.com;info@xyz.com;products@xyz.com etc etc. You can then decide to forward a few of these email addresses to one address may be mr.alpha@xyz.com and a few to ms.alpha@xyz.com…Or you may decide to forward all to ms.alpha@xyz.com. With this affordable web hosting company there is no limit to how many email addresses you can have and there is no limit to how many forwarding email addresses you can have. |
| Email Autoresponder | Unlimited | You can have an autoresponder for an email address. Lets say your subscribers subscribe to your service by sending you an email at a specific email address. If you have an autoresponder set up your autoresponder will send them an instant email acknowledging them of their email. You can set up the text in this email at the time of setting up the autoresponder.So if you want to ignore all the above jargon above POP3 and IMAP you can…Just remember this - with this internet hosting provider when it comes to email you have the best options available in the entire industry. |
| Gigs Of Site Transfer | 6,000 GB per month | Okay to understand this lets start with defining ‘Bandwidth Transfer’. Every page on your website has a size. If you have images then there is a size associated with it. When a visitor visits your site data is actually being transferred to the visitor. The amount of data depends on the size of the page they are visiting. If they download a file from your page (maybe a mp3 or a pdf file) then data is again being transferred.Every web hosting provider offers a limit on the amount of data that can be transferred. You don’t have to pay anything extra for this. Its all part of the package that your web hosting provider offers. Any data transfer above the limit - you have to extra a surcharge. So basically you have to opt for a service provider which allows a high and a reasonable amount of data transfer as a part of the package. If you don’t then you will end up paying heaps and heaps of surcharge….Not good. This hosting service offers 6000 GB of data transfer per month. This is again much above the industry average. |
| Add-on Domains | Unlimited | An add-on domain is a new domain address which also displays exactly the same site as your original domain name. For example - lets say you have a domain name called xyz.com. Now lets say for some reason you decide that abc.com should also point to xyz.com. That is abc.com should also display the same pages as the site as xyz.com. However when visitors type in abc.com in their browser you don’t want them to be redirected. Remember if they are redirected to xyz.com then after they type in abc.com, the browser will change abc.com to xyz.com. So you don’t want redirecting. You want them to think that abc.com is separate to xyz.com. But show the same pages….So in this example abc.com is the Add-on domain for xyz.com. This low cost web hosting service company offers unlimited Add-on domain facility. |
| Parked Domains | Unlimited | When you redirect one site to another site’s home page or to any page on a different site then the site you are redirecting is called a parked domain. Again going back to our above example if when the user types in abc.com and abc.com is redirected to xyz.com then abc.com is called the parked domain.If you are interested in understanding more about this topic here are the difference between a parked domain and a add-on domain:
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| Subdomains | Unlimited | A sub-domain is also called a third level domain. It is the sub-sites of your original site. For example yahoo.com has sub-sites called mail.yahoo.com and music.yahoo.com etc…You might have a kids directory called kidsdirectory.com and then have sub-sites for various cities like sydney.kidsdirectory.com,oregon.kidsdirectory.com etc |
| Additional FTP Accounts | Unlimited | You can have unlimited FTP accounts. FTP is the way of transferring files between your computer and the server. You will design your entire site on your computer. You then have to transfer this to the server. The way of transferring the files to the server is FTP |
| MYSQL Databases | 100 | Hostmonster allows you to have up to 100 MYSQL databases. MYSQL databases are extremely powerful and a large number of websites today have a MYSQL database as their backend database. |
| PostgreSQL Databases | 100 | This service provider allows you to have up to 100 PostgreSQL databases. There are certain features of a PostgreSQL database which are absent in MYSQL database and viceversa. Without going in depth into the differences it is suffice to know that with this provider you can have upto 100 MYSQL and 100 PostgreSQL databases - which is actually a lot (more than what most of the other providers offer). |
| 2 Different Web Based Email Solutions | Yes | You can access your email for your different domains on the web…Hostmonster gives you the choice of two different web based email solution.For me the main point here is that this web hosting provider gives you the option to check your email for all your domains on the web |
| CGI-BIN and CGI Library | Yes | CGI in simple terms is required to make your static pages dynamic. CGI is required when you have forms on your site and the visitor submits some data using that form. Forms is one example, having a guestbook on a site is another example.So its suffice to know that if you ever need this then this web site hosting company can meet your needs |
| Server Side Includes | Yes | ‘Server Side Includes’ are the files that have code which can commonly be used by other pages on the site. Hostmonster hosting facility supports ‘Server Side Includes’. |
| Frontpage 2000/2002 Extensions | Supports | If you design your web site using frontpage then you might end up using front page extensions. These extensions are server-side scripts that extend the functionality of frontpage. Hostmonster supports these extensions. |
| Account ‘Control Panel’ | Yes | This Hostmonster web site hosting provider has an extremely easy to use control panel. It is a centralized location from where you can access all the features and functionality. |
| Shell Access (SSH) | Yes | Not going too much into jargon, this simply is another way to access the files on the server. It gives you lot more flexibility. |
| Override .htaccess Support | Yes | |
| Anonymous FTP | Yes | This is the ability to give others the permission to upload and download files to your website. You might want to give othes access to a certain area of your website alone. |
| Log Files + Site Stats | Yes | You can use this inexpensive web hosting company to read and analyze your site statistics. From the time you install the statistics program, the program starts collecting data of all the visitors to your site. This is a fantastic tool to analyze how your website is performing. |
| Spam Assassin Protection | Yes | Comes with Spam Assassin Protection program. Enabling this will eliminate a lot of email spam. |
| Fantastico Script Support | Yes | This is absolutely fantastic. Fantastico basically makes enabling various scripts easy. What this means is with a click of a button you can install a wordpress blog, ecommerce solutions, forums, content management systems, customer relationship management systems etc…There is also a huge image gallery. |
| World Class Technology | ||
| Quad Processor Performance Servers | Yes | |
| Customized Apache Web Server | Yes | |
| UPS Power Back-Up / Back-Up Generator | Yes | |
| 24/7 Monitoring | Yes | |
| Storage Backups | Yes | |
| OC-48 Backbone Connection | Yes | |
| Bonus Features With All Accounts | ||
| Bulletin Board | Yes | |
| Form-mail Script | Yes | |
| PHP Nuke | Yes | |
| Guestbook | Yes | |
| Web Blogs/Wordpress/b2 evolution | Yes | |
| Mailing Lists | Yes | |
| Image Galleries / Coppermine | Yes | |
| Poll and Survey Software | Yes | |
| Moodle | Yes | |
| Mambo and Joomla | Yes | |
| phpForm Generator | Yes | |
| PHP 5 | Yes | |
| Perl 5 | Yes | |
| Python | Yes | |
| Ruby / Ruby on Rails v1.1 | Yes | |
| Support For Custom PHP.ini files | Yes | |
| Javascript / DHTML | Yes | |
| Flash/Shockwave | Yes | |
| Help Center/Support Ticket | Yes | |
| e-Commerce Features | ||
| SSL Secure Server | Yes | |
| OS Commerce Shopping Cart | Yes | |
| Agora Shopping Cart | Yes | |
| Free Guaranteed Certificate | Yes | |
| Password Protected Directories | Yes | |
| Open PGP/GPG Encryption | Yes | |
| Multimedia Fetaures | ||
| Supports Streaming Video | Yes | |
| Supports Streaming Audio | Yes | |
| Real Audio and Video Support | Yes | |
| Flash Support | Yes | |
| Macromedia Shockwave | Yes | |
| MIDI File Support | Yes | |
| Add Own MIME Types | Yes | |
| Site Promotion | ||
| Search Engine Submission | Yes | |
| $50 Yahoo Credits | Free | |
| $50 Google Credits | Free | |
Other Benefits of Hostmonster:
- It has received the top web hosting solutions provider award a few times.
- Excellent Customer Service
- The whole thing is quite easy to use. The online help is comprehensive and you can basically search for whatever you are after. There is also a forum where you can ask others your questions.
Pricing:
Hostmonster offers excellent value for money…
. The longer period you sign up for the lower amount you pay.
For 3 month sign up it costs $8.95 per month + setup fee
For 6 month sign up it costs $8.95 per month + setup fee
For 12 month sign up it costs $7.95 per month + No setup fee
For 24 month sign up it costs $6.95 per month + No setup fee
Domain Name Registration And Hosting A Web Site Tutorials
To read the tutorial about how to purchase domain name click - .com Domain Registration
To read the tutorial about how to transfer a domain name to web host click - How To Transfer A Domain Name To Web Host
Wordpress Tutorials
To read the tutorial about installing wordpress for your blog - Wordpress Installation For Your Blog
To read the tutorial about installing wordpress theme for your blog - Wordpress Themes
To read the tutorial about understanding wordpress admin panel and start blogging click - Understand Wordpress Admin Panel
Entry Filed under: Affordable Web Site Hosting Services