Web Hosting Awards 2014

The 2014 WebHostingGeeks Awards are given to the best web hosting companies in the industry, who have proven themselves to be delivering exceptional service. All of these award winning web hosts have been carefuly examined to be sure you get the best of the best!

Best Budget Hosting

Top quality hosting services at the very competitive price paired with the highest level of technical support, that's what makes Web Hosting Hub stand out from the crowd. Their $3.95 hosting plan backed by the 90-day money back is hard to beat.

Best Business Hosting

InMotion Hosting is an industry leader in offering business customer-centric web hosting packages. InMotion Hosting's innovative software gives you the best speed and efficiency that no other web hosting company can offer.

Best Ecommerce Hosting

With InMotion Hosting's award winning technical support and the 99.9% uptime guarantee, rest assured that your ecommerce website will never go down. InMotion's team of true experts with diverse technical backgrounds is there to help 24/7/365.

Best Green Hosting

Green Geeks, a pioneer in the green web hosting revolution, is committed to help the environment by using energy-efficient servers and the data center cooling system that compensates 3 times the amount of energy used by their servers.

Best Email Hosting

Web Hosting Pad continues to push forward the standards for excellence in affordable web hosting segment. For its superior service and a very competitive price of only $1.99/mo, our Best Email Web Hosting Award goes to Web Hosting Pad.

Best Blog Hosting

Web Hosting Hub is a true leader in blog hosting as their servers are optimally configured to run WordPress-powered blogs with a much higher level of security. Hub's technicians are expertly trained and a part of the WordPress community.

Best Forum Hosting

Fat Cow has always focused on delivering the best value and customer service experience. With only few clicks you can easily install the most popular community forums available: Simple Machines Forum, phpBB, bbPress, PunBB, and Vanilla Forums.

Best Multiple Domain Hosting

In addition to excellent technical support and exceptional server performance, All-in-One hosting plan from Web Hosting Hub comes with a ton of unlimited features, including hosting multiple domain names in 1 account free of charge.

Best Shared Hosting

IPage is considered one of the best shared web hosts because of the high levels of service, quality and value iPage provides to the customers. For a small personal website look no further than IPage, our Best Shared Hosting Award winner.

Best VPS Hosting

Running a VPS hosting account with InMotion is as easy as managing a shared hosting account with anyone else. Plus, they monitor each and every VPS account to proactively resolve unforeseen issues before they affect your website.

Best Dedicated Hosting

Unlike its competitors, Inmotion Hosting does not take the cheapest parts on the market and piece together a server. They only use best-of-breed Dell PowerEdge and Sun Microsystems server hardware to ensure the highest quality of service.

Best Reseller Hosting

HostGator, the industry leader in web hosting reselling services, offers five unique reseller plans that include unlimited domain hosting, unlimited sub-domains, unlimited email accounts, unlimited mysql databases, and unlimited FTP accounts.

Best PHP Hosting

Web Hosting Hub servers run the latest, most stable versions of MySQL 5 and PHP 5. The servers also configured to utilize PHP Caching and maximize available server RAM, reducing I/O requests to the server's hard drives.

Best Unix Hosting

Web Hosting Hub servers run on the latest version of Enterprise Class Linux OS (CentOS) - stable, secure, flexible Unix-like platform with finely tuned configurations so you can get the most out of your hosting account.

Best Windows Hosting

Host Gator allows customers with specific technical needs to get the most out of their Windows hosting accounts. Their highly extensible Windows Server 2008 R2 comes with Plesk control panel, Microsoft SQL, Access Database, ASP, and ASP.net.

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Make Traffic ??

There are several ways to go about marketing your site and generating traffic. However, some of these methods are quite risky and simply not worth the time and effort they require. Marketing companies will attempt to sell you on everything from bulk email campaigns and pop-up advertisements to link farms and banner impressions. While these tools have proven to be effective, most of them will not be well received by your niche market. For instance, many people find mass mailings (spam) and pop-ups so intrusive and annoying that they stay away from anyone that uses them. These methods certainly are not the best way to make impact on your audience and just could be a huge waste of money. The hit or miss aspect of common marketing techniques is all the more reason to consider the search engines for bringing in traffic.

One of the best ways to gain a significant amount of traffic is to base your efforts on relevance, the driving factor of every online search engine. A number of different studies show that an estimated 80% to 90% of first time visitors find a website via search engine. These customers are more likely to lead to sales and conversions because they are already coming in with some level of interest.

On the web, first impressions are everything and you typically do not get a second chance to win over your visitors. Chances are, someone who endured a bad experience on your site will never come back while the exact opposite could lead you to success. If your site is user-friendly and offers the content they are looking for, the visitor will return whether they make an on the spot purchase or not.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo can provide you with a steady flow of targeted visitors. And unlike other marketing techniques, these benefits will do not have to cost you a single penny. The only thing a search engine wants from you is good, clean relevant content that matches up with what web surfers are looking for. Give the roaming spiders what they want so they can do what they are programmed to. If you are able to produce this content on your site, you will be rewarded with quality traffic.

Last Words

Rather than viewing your website simply as a virtual business card, think of it as a piece of real estate that increases in value just like residential property. Research a few keywords that your niche audience is most likely to enter into a search engine to find you. Clearly explain to visitors what is is that you do and how they can benefit. Network with others in the industry to build yourself a fair amount of quality links. Make sure your website is rich with content and optimized for the search engine. All of this will enable you to generate traffic naturally. When designing for both your visitors and the search engines, your rankings will inevitably increase and shower you with additional traffic.

What SEO for Your Site

A well designed site is often one that leads to effective search engine optimization. Genuine SEO can be achieved by a solid website design that is simple to navigate. By making your site rich with content yet easily accessible, you not only provide simple navigation for your visitors, but also the search engine spiders looking to index your site. This approach is one that could lead to long term success at search engine marketing. Instead of trying to buy your way to the top of the rankings and trick the complicated search engine algorithms, you should create your pages with relative keywords and quality links. When the spiders come crawling, they will usually reward the sites with good content and easy navigation.

Spiders?

Search engine spiders or robots, are programs designed to explore the web and visit website pages. These programs automatically read text and click their way through links to view all the pages on a site. A search engine spider usually collects information on titles and metadata and then combs the text on the page via its source code. Most robots function like earlier web browsers, meaning they generally do not absorb frames, Flash content or dynamic scripting, all the more reason to keep your design simple.

Drop-down boxes, web forms and other dynamic creations cannot be comprehended by a search engine spider. The best way to ensure a visit is to use static pages constructed in HTML. If a dynamic script such as ASP is required, there are a few ways to keep your pages attractive. One method is to use the rewrite capabilities of your server to transform complex URLs into simple ones. If you must use Flash to make your pages more vibrant, use it sparingly rather than building an entire page with it. Don’t let this technology get in the way of the search engine robots or your visitors.

Building an SEO-friendly site is fairly easy for anyone with minimal development skills. Your main focus is to eliminate all the flashy content and stick with a simple, solid architecture. Search engine spiders have no trouble comprehending text and have a thing for text links, more commonly known as anchortext. When keeping your visitors in mind, the design process gets much easier. Building for the search engines will increase your visibility on the web and help to bring new prospects in.

The most important you thing need to know about SEO is that search engines are attracted to the text on your website. The more you stay on topic with a decent amount of relative links and keywords, the better the robots will be able to digest it. After getting the information, it is delivered to a database and eventually translated into what you get in the search engine results.

Once your site has been designed, be sure to test it out for validation. Check behind yourself to ensure that no programming errors exist as this will keep your pages from being indexed. By designing with clean code and quality content, you can increase your chances of ranking higher and generating targeted traffic.

Finding the Best Web Hosting Service

Finding the best hosting service for your website can be complicated. There are almost endless options all clamoring to be the top hosts or the least expensive service, and this can make it almost impossible for webmasters to sort fact from fiction. The best way to select a quality web host is to take the selection process one step at a time:

Assess Your Needs

The very first item to address in selecting the best hosting service for your needs is to actually identify what those needs are. What sort of website are looking to host? Small personal homepages will have very different hosting criteria from large company websites. To find the best hosting service for you, it is important to determine exactly what you plan to host now, and ideally take into consideration anything you are planning to host in the immediate future.

Rate

Different hosting companies offer a large variety of rates. Companies offering dedicated servers will be substantially higher than others offering budget hosting with limited bandwidth. Competition from overseas is priced temptingly low for many, but there are many factors to consider. Don't stop at price, and if you plan on using your website in a professional capacity, it is important to move beyond free web hosting. Free hosts are great for small family or fun sites, but are not suited to the needs of internet marketers – even those just starting out. Rate should not be a top determining factor until you have narrowed a list based on other criteria such as:

Reliability and Speed

The best hosting services will offer uptime of over 99%. This should be a guarantee to motivate the company to keep all servers up all the time. Of course, visitors should also be able to access your site quickly.

Data Transfer and Disk Space

Bandwidth requirements grow with your site. Web hosting companies pay for bandwidth, so you, the one using that bandwidth will be billed accordingly. It is far better to pay for the required amount of data transfer upfront rather than get a surprise bill in the mail for having gone considerably over your allotted amount. By the same token, be sure you have an appropriate amount of disk space reserved. Most websites require less than 3GB.

Technical Support

It is very important to be able to reach the hosting company if your website begins experiencing problems. The best hosting support one can hope for is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Most companies know this, so take their stated hours with a grain of salt. Always spot check the companies with email at random times to see if they really have someone available to help 24/7.

Scripts and Special Features

Different websites have different needs, and the best hosting service for you should accommodate those needs. Email addresses should be standard as well as the capacity for a variety of scripts. Be sure to see if other features like shopping carts and secure servers are available or standard.

Control Panel

How much control does the hosting company offer webmasters? It is inconvenient to work through customer service every time to modify a password or to change email addresses. Be sure hosting companies offer some form of a control panel accompanying hosting.

Article by:webhostinggeeks.com

Features of a Web Hosting

Before hosting a web site on a web server so that millions around the world can view your site, a lot of efforts is made to provide the site with a good content. Experts are hired to provide a good and meaningful content to a site. A meaningful content attracts a user and provides him the necessary information. Millions of dollars are spent so as to promote a site. To continuously get traffic to a site, various techniques are practiced.

Advertisements are posted on the websites, and the sites earn a large amount of money from these advertisements. Companies today pay quite a sum of money to increase the ranking of their site. Apart from advertisements and promotions, a quality web hosting server is a necessity. Web hosting is a technique that facilitates the servers to host the site.

There are a number of companies that provide web hosting facility to users. Some of them provide the service for free while others charge you. However, it is advisable that you select a paid web hosting service as you will be provided with customer service and uptime guarantee, which is not the case with service providers that provide the facility for free. Also, if a person requires saving a large number of images and graphics, a free service will not serve the purpose. There are various kinds of web hosting, they are,

• Reseller hosting
• E-mail hosting
• Clustered hosting
• Free hosting
• File hosting
• Game server hosting
• Shared hosting
• Video hosting
• Blog hosting
• Image hosting
• Wiki farms
• Guild hosting
• DNS hosting

Since there are several web hosting companies available, you should select the best web hosting service provider. Narrow down the number of service providers as per your need and budget. The most important point to be kept in mind is not to subscribe for the feature that you may not use. It is advisable that you read blogs and web hosting reviews on the Internet. It will give you a true picture of the quality of the services provided by web hosts service providers.
The sites give rankings to a number of service providers on the basis of the feedbacks provided by the users.

Other factors that must be considered while subscribing to a web service provider are,

• reputation
• server space
• control panel
• bandwidth
• script access
• support

The service providers should be compared on the basis of their customer service support staff, traffic, price and space. The additional features differ from one provider to another. It is recommended that you select the company that suits your needs instead of selecting a top web hosting service provider that may or may not be affordable.

There is a very high possibility that you may face problems in the web hosting process. In such a case, only a company that provides 24 hour customer service will be useful. Server space and bandwidth should be considered as per your usage. It is important to choose a good quality web hosting service provider as it increases effectiveness of your organization.

Article by:webhostinggeeks.com

Beginner’s Guide to Web Hosting

Web hosting is basically an Internet service that allows companies and individuals to create their own space on the Internet. Web hosting companies have servers that act as data centres. Customers will give files to their web hosting companies and those files will be stored in the data centres. They can then be found by anybody who wants to visit that person’s or company’s website.

There are many web hosting services available, mainly these are divided between free web hosting and paid web hosting. Free web hosting is just that – free and the customer doesn’t pay a thing. This is more suitable towards people who are just beginning to have a website on the Internet. A paid web hosting company will charge for their services and offer more features to their customers. This is ideal for small companies that are going to be expanding or for large companies. Free web hosting will only allow for limited space and subdomains for the person’s site.

There are many different paid web hosting companies that can be found online. The prices will depend on what type of services they offer. One can choose from a dedicated server, where one server will be dedicated to only that person’s file, or from a shared server. This is when many people are using the same server. It’s best to start with a shared server to see if the web hosting company offers what is needed. If the individual is satisfied with the service, it is then an appropriate time to move to a dedicated server.

There are many benefits that can be derived from web hosting. The first is that the person or company will get their own web space. This provides the person with enough storage to keep all of their files and data to be published online. These files include web pages, images, audio, and videos. These are just a few of the files that may be kept by web hosting. The average amount of space that is provided by web hosting is 200MB. The more expensive packages can reach anywhere up to 500MB.

Free email is another advantage that customers can enjoy from web hosting. This is much different than the public email addresses provided by Hotmail or Yahoo. This email address will be exclusive to the individual’s website. For example, if the website is called “Music.com”, the email can then be downloads@music.com. These types of email addresses are more than just handy to remember, they are important for serious businesses. It shows customers that they are dealing with a reputable company who is interested in spending money to make their business grow.

Another advantage to web hosting is bandwidth. This is simply the amount of information that is transferred over the Internet. When a web hosting company provides appropriate bandwidth, it is easier for users to view the web page. This is especially true when there are many images, audio, or videos on one page. Users like to have a website that is easy to use so bandwidth is extremely important.

Article by:webhostinggeeks.com

How to Select the Best Web Hosting Company?

WWW works or world wide works forms a base for a web hosting business. The information of the web is saved on web pages. These are files that are saved on computers known as web servers. The computer that reads these web pages is web clients. These clients analyze the pages with a computer program such as Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. WWW or World Wide Web is a network that connects the computers all over the world and thereby the people from different countries. This globalization led to several businesses both small scale and large scale promotes their products online and caters to a wide range of consumers.

So, to make this possible, it is essential for every business organization to have their website. This website to be displayed in the rankings of the search engines, which are to be accessed by Internet user anywhere in the world and thereby place an order for the products offered on the site. However, the designing of site can be done either by the owner himself or he can get it done from some professional. Once this is done, the owner needs to book a space with a public web server so that the site is to be displayed to the Internet users. If the owner is acquainted by the technical concepts, he can do it by himself from his computer. The other alternative is to get it done from a web hosting company.

With so many web hosting companies offering its services, selecting the best web hosting company is not an easy task. One of the key factors that are to be considered during this time is the uptime of the site which is being granted by the company. Going for a company that provides a 99.9% of uptime is the right option available. This is because, only if your site is available for users to access all the time, it will be able to earn more profit. Technical support that is provided by the company is also essential. That is to say, the owner should ensure that the company which he is selecting should have all the software and features that are the prerequisites for your sites. So, all such needs should be analyzed beforehand and taken care off while selecting a web hosting company.
The owner of the site should have a specific budget that he can spend on web hosting of his site keeping in mind the features that are necessary on the site. At times, there are also companies that may claim to provide free web hosting services but make you pay more than the normal expenditure that should have been incurred.

Taking all this points together, will help you select a top web hosting company for yourself. Last but not the least, web hosting reviews can also be of great help in the task. One can search for them over the Internet and select a company that best suites your needs and budget.

Article by:webhostinggeeks.com