Posts Tagged ‘Company’

What to Look For in a Web Site Hosting Company

There are thousands of web site hosting companies available at your beckon call. However, not all are created equal. In fact some are really bad and cost a lot of money, and others which charge very little are excellent. Do not equate price to quality when it comes to a web hosting company. Make sure you follow some of the advice below so you are not paying for things you do not need.

Advertising
Many webhosting companies will place ads on your side in a top, bottom or side bar or insert Kontera code that makes certain keywords in the content of your website become clickable ads. They do this to help offset hosting costs by offering you a lower cost. If you are ok with ads on your website then this is a good option only if the host is free. If you are paying for hosting then there should be no forced ads.

Space
How big is your website? If you have a simple 4 or 5 page site then you probably don’t need gigabytes upon gigabytes of space. Most hosting companies offer a variety of packages based on your needs. Make sure you choose a package for the space size your website requires. There is no need to pay for more than what is required.

Transfer Data
Each hosting company will allow you, up to a certain amount, to have data transferred from your website to a visitor’s computer. This can be the website pages themselves, data, pdf files, video, images and things like that. If you have a website like YouTube make sure you pick a package that offers a large amount of transferrable bandwidth. Also make sure you check into how much they will charge you per megabyte you go over your monthly quota. It could be a few pennies to a few dollars.

Interactivity
Is your website going to be interactive? In other words will you have a guestbook to sign, a newsletter that visitors can register for, do they need to log in to your site? If so then your web host must be set up for CGI, common gateway interface. It’s a fancy way of saying interactivity over the web. The two most common are Perl and PHP, although you could use ASP, Java, Flash, ActionScript and many others. If you already know what your site is going to be developed in, then make sure you choose a host that accommodates.

Price
How much are you looking to spend? I have a couple of websites where I pay about $4.00 per month and for that low cost I get everything I need. Some hosting companies charge per year, some bi-yearly and others monthly, as is the case with my websites. Know the budget of what you want to spend on your website. Most hosting companies will allow you to upgrade as your demand for space and speed increases. So if the cheapest package will suffice for now and is within the budget, then that is probably what you should go with.

Hopefully before you make the plunge and settle on a web hosting company you follow some of the advice above and make a decision based on what you truly need and what your website really demands.

5 Things to Look For in a Hosting Company

Let’s face it, there are literally thousands of web hosts out there these days. Some have a huge share of the market and host up to 2 million domains while others think hosting is a get rich quick scheme and offer lacklustre support to their 10 customers.

When you are looking for a hosting company, you don’t just want to go with the most popular or even the cheapest. In fact, you should avoid using those criteria at all costs. instead, I’ve decided to put together a list of five things that you should look for in a hosting company.

1. Uptime

What difference does it make whether your hosting costs $5 per month or $50 per month when your website is never online? Nobody likes spending money for the fun of it so you should make sure the hosting company you are thinking of using actually have a good record of keeping their sites online.

Even a huge company like mediatemple who host tens of thousands of websites had an outage recently which left their customers without a website for almost a day. Can you live with that happening? Most people can’t.

To get a companies uptime statistics you can search for it on a major search engine like Google or you can send them an email and ask for their figures. If they don’t respond then they are probably not the type of hosting company you want to be with anyway.

2. Live Chat

Live Chat, to me, is without a doubt the most important support feature a host can have. If I have a database error or my site gets hacked, I don’t want to wait hours for a company to reply to my email support ticket. Additionally, if you’re not in America or a problem doesn’t conveniently happen at 9am – 6pm then you can’t phone for help either.

The simplest way to find out if a company has live chat is to go to their homepage and it should be prominently displayed. Although you shouldn’t overly bother them, test out the live chat to see if the reps are responsive and they give you good advice.

3. Social Proof

There’s a reason that some company’s host websites for over 1,000,000 people: they know what they are doing. If any company can proudly state they have been around since 1996 (like Bluehost) or say that they host 800,000 members then there’s a good chance they know what they are doing.

After-all, if they had no clue, then 800,000 people would not continue to pay a monthly fee for something that is useless. Of course, just because a lot of people use something that doesn’t always mean that is the best option. If you take shared hosting with a larger company then there’s a good chance that you will be stuck on a server with not tens, but hundreds of other websites.

If you do get speed issues though, then you either need to upgrade or talk to them about that.

4. Web Mentions

Besides social proof, it’s still a good idea to see what people are saying about a particular host. Whether people are happy or unhappy about a service, there will be somewhere online where they are expressing their feelings.

Most people will simply go to a search engine and type in ‘company name review’ and then decide from there whether a company should be trusted or not. And, despite the fact that I run one of these review sites myself, don’t trust all of them. Most of them will be getting a commission if you sign-up through their link so they say good things in order to get you to spend your hard earned money.

Instead, you should go to Google Blogsearch and the Twitter Search Engine and type in the name of your company. Blogs and Twitter are two places that people give their honest, personal experiences with companies and this way you can get the most legitimate feedback.

5. Affiliate Program

Unlike most guides, I’m not recommending you check if a company has an affiliate program so that you can make money. Instead, I’m recommending you check because this links in very closely to social proof. If a company has an affiliate program that generally means:

They had people asking for this feature
Their customers want to promote their service
Happy customers promote a service they like

Don’t eliminate a company from your options if they don’t have this, but an affiliate / partner program is usually a good indicator that a company is getting a lot of praise and support from their current clients.

Tips on how to choose the best domain name for your Business or Company

So you have decided to put your business online? Making your business available in the World Wide Web awaits big opportunities. World-wide exposure, low cost marketing, and real-time information transfer are among the advantages of placing your business online. But before you go online and make a website for your business, the first thing to do is to choose the best domain name for your business. Domain name is what internet users type in the URL address bar of an internet explorer to access a certain website. Example, if you need to go to Google to search some information, you need to type Google’s domain name which is in the URL bar of an internet explorer.

A domain name (dot .com, .net and .org) cost about 10$ for a one year registration. You can take a look at NameCheap and GoDaddy, two of my most favorite domain registrars. It’s pretty much affordable to purchase a domain name for the benefits that you can get out of that name. Choosing your domain name at its best is very important since it will become your business’ identity in the web. This name will be the one which will be remembered and used by your potential visitors and customers in the cyber world. So let us choose the best and if possible the perfect name for our business. The following are tips on how to choose the best domain name for your business.

1. It must be short. Internet users love to type short word in the URL address bar. Short domain name are also easy to memorize. A one-word to two-word domain name is acceptable. But since one word domain names are not already available for registration, you need to brainstorm a short two-word domain name – unless you can invest enough money to buy a one-word domain name from a certain owner.

2. It must be easy to remember. A short domain name doesn’t absolutely mean it is easy to memorize. You need to choose a name which will mark people’s mind. You can choose names that are brain catching and names that will stick in the minds of people wherever they will go.

3. It must be clean. Beware of domain names that were used in the past as porn sites or blacklisted sites. You do a research on the history of the domain you intend to use. You can go to Archive.org and search for the history of any domain name.

4. It must be a dot com. Dot com domain extension is the most valuable and precious domain among the top level extension available for a domain name. Of course, you must use what is the best domain name.

5. It must not be trademarked. Never register a domain which is already trademarked by other companies – although they are still available. This is to avoid any legal liability in the future.

6. It must be align to you business. This is the most important consideration you should take. Your domain name must describe what is your business is. It should be the name of your registered company or a name which is very near to it. You can also choose a name which your industry belong. Example, if you are a restaurant entrepreneur, you can choose a domain name which contain a word” restaurant”, “food” or “dining”.

The above should be met to attain a great domain for your business or company.  But if possible you can also consider the inherent value of a domain name for marketing purposes. You can consider a domain name which is rich in search engine results. This domain names have great potentials of driving traffic to your website and therefore increasing prospective customers.

Victorino Q. Abrugar is an information entrepreneur. For more business and information entrepreneurship tips, you can visit him at . You can also submit your business links for free at .

UK’s popular web hosting provider- webhostie

Why Choose Webhostie as Your Hosting Provider

We provide customers with a 99% Uptime Guarantee and also conform to industry-standard privacy practices. All cables, routers, power systems, and peripheral equipment has been carefully selected for maximum uptime. We know your busy coding beautiful applications, earnest php, asp or .net code, and websites that serve the a purpose in this world.

As an technology provider we want to see you succeed without a bunch of fine print or hard to understand hoops to jump through. We have teamed up with software vendors, hardware providers, worldwide datacenters, and developers to provide you what we like to call the Webhostie Hosting Platform. 

Our hosting platform and recipe for success starts with 9 essential ingredients with of course our own secret sauce. These ingredients by themselves are simply tools, but when combined in the correct portions provide a reliable, secure, and safe place to host your websites.

10 Reasons You’ll Like Webhostie:

FREE DOMAIN NAME FOR LIFE

01

Your domain name is the most important part of your website. Like your personal name, it uniquely identifies you—and like your own name, it should be permanent enough to establish a brand recognition in the minds of your visitors.

Our web hosting service offers a free domain name for life. With our hosting service, there are absolutely no charges or renewal fees with your domain name, and it’s yours to keep forever.

24×7x365 SUPPORT

02

Forget long holds, busy signals and non-responsive customer service. We pride ourselves in resolving problems quickly and taking care of any issues that might arise right away.

Our web hosting service offers 24×7x365 Support with a four-hour response time guarantee and our average response time is a mere 4 hours. Should you face a problem with your website, our experienced and thorough technical support representatives will get you up and running right away.

99% UPTIME (UPTIME IS MONITORED BY INDEPENDENT THIRD PARTY SERVICES)

03

Reliability is one of the most important factors for a hosting service. If you run a business, your website’s reliability may mean the difference between lost sales, or increased profits. That’s why our web hosting service guarantees 99 percent uptime, monitored by independent third party services. Day or night, you can be confident in the knowledge that your website will be completely uninterrupted by outages or downtime.

MONEY BACK GUARANTEE

04

We stand by our commitment to your satisfaction with our hosting service. That’s why we offer a solid, no questions asked 30-day money back guarantee. In the unlikely event that you are not satisfied with our service in any way, just let us know and your money will be cheerfully refunded, with no haggling and no hassles.

WEBSITE BUILDER

05

Imagine having your own professional, polished website drawing thousands of visitors each month. Don’t know HTML? Not a problem—our hosting service also offers you a wizard driven website builder that will produce a slick looking web site in mere minutes. Your site will stand out from the crowd and have visitors asking for more.

INSTANT ACCOUNT ACTIVATION – NO WAITING

06

When you decide to sign up for our hosting service, you will have instant account activation. There will be no waiting, and no delays. Just as soon as you are ready, your website will up and running and begin drawing visitors to your site, day in and day out, and you can start building your online business and start generating revenue.

MULTI-LANGUAGE USER-FRIENDLY CONTROL PANEL

07

The Internet is worldwide, and so is our web hosting service. Language will never again be a barrier for you in choosing a web hosting service, as we provide a multi-language user-friendly control panel. Languages supported are English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian.

PREINSTALLED SCRIPTS

08

Not only can you have a website with no HTML knowledge whatsoever, but our web hosting service also comes with preinstalled scripts. Scripts bring the power of e-commerce right to your fingertips.

Imagine having your very own blog, forum, eshop, image gallery, chat and much more, drawing visitors and sales each and every month. No knowledge of PHP needed. Just use our control panel and your scripts will be installed.

MULTIPLE EMAIL ACCOUNTS WITH SPAM FILTER

09

Our hosting service offers you the ultimate convenience in email. Each person in your business can have their own email account or use a control panel to create new email accounts instantly. When travelling, just use or web mail feature, or create catch-all email accounts such as anything@domain.com which will capture all emails, even those with misspelled addresses. And our spam filter and SPF protection will reduce the junk mail.

TWO WAYS TO UPLOAD YOUR FILES

10

Our hosting service makes it easy to upload files to your website. If you’re comfortable with command line Internet tools, you can use FTP to load your files. On the other hand, if you prefer a graphical user interface then just use our web based file manager. Either way, updating your web site will be a snap.

dominic edy

Web Hosting?Choosing Between Managed Hosting Or Dedicated Hosting

Best Web Hosting Companies and Web Hosting Plans

After Roman Empire grows, you’ll get to a point where you will want to automate as much of your business as possible. At this point, it’s important to begin to look for products and services that can dedicate themselves to doing the tasks that you don’t need to focus on in order to grow your business. This is where deciding between managed or dedicated web hosting comes in.

While dedicated web hosting allows you the comfort and freedom of total control over your entire web presence, maintenance can become a full-time job in and of itself. This is where managed Web hosting can come in very handy when trying to expand and grow your business. Managed Web hosting Has developed a strong reputation for being hassle free and very cost effective, however, you must be careful with what you hear because there are many rumors out there.

Although it’s true that managed Web hosting usually costs more than dedicated web hosting, at least in terms of money, it’s important as a business owner to look at more than the immediate dollar cost. Managed hosting becomes a lot more advantageous over the long run, due to its ability to cut down significantly on the amount of resources will need to contribute to your business.

To start with, managed hosting allows you to cut back on your staffing requirements reducing your operating costs by lowering staff and office space necessary in order to make your business run on a regular basis. It also gives you the luxury of saving time, due to the fact that no management or problem-solving time suckers will be required on your part, as the management company will deal with all of that for you.

Your job as a website owner, is to continue to develop and create new ways of increasing your bottom line and profit margin. The more time you have to devote to necessary daily tasks, the less time you have the focus on those tasks and items that will increase the money flowing into your bank account. Managed Web hosting allows you the freedom and time to focus on these tasks instead of tasks and management requirements that take your focus off of the lifeblood of your business.

Stay focused on what is important to your business, and murder outsource and abdicate those tasks which do not serve. Managed web hosting will allow you the freedom to do exactly that.

Multiple Domain Web Hosting?Think of the Future

Businesses around the world are no longer built as they once were in brick and mortar shops. They are looking to the newest thing available out there: the internet. This is now the best place to start your own business, and enjoy some success.

There is no significant business around the world today that doesn’t have a website of its own. This is because the information reaches the customers and viewers faster than it used to through normal marketing channels like television or radio, and above all it is there 24/7. Anyone who is interested can view the website anytime during the day, anywhere in the world.

However, your website needs to allow all those interested people to view their information. For this any company needs to find a reliable business website hosting provider in order to be sure that people can be reached through their website.

Any successful company grows in time, expanding their fields of interest. Therefore a larger public needs to be reached, which in turn means that other features need to be added to the business website hosting that was first chosen.

First of all, companies that provide business website hosting services have several plans that need to be presented to their customers. The ones with lower prices include less server space, less email accounts, lower bandwidth and so on. If you are interested in benefiting from more services you should consider applying for a higher priced, yet more comprehensive plan.

There is also something you should be aware of. While your business is growing and your fields of interest expanding, you might consider adding other websites that address what you need. There is a solution so you can include this feature into your business website hosting plan of choice.

This is called multiple domain web hosting. Even though the expression sounds a little too complicated, the explanation is relatively simple. If you select this sort of plan right from the start, you are allowed to add more websites to your already existing account.

The first thing you should know is that a lot of companies offer a single site web hosting option. This means that for each website you want to post on the internet, you need to have a web hosting plan, with all the fees implies by the first. The multiple domain web hosting option gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to posting numerous websites for the same price.

Another financial advantage you benefit from with multiple domain web hosting plans is that they are very similar in price with the single website hosting plans, so you get a lot more benefits for relatively the same price. It will turn out to be a better option down the road.

I can go on and on and explain all the additional features and benefits a multiple domain web hosting plan has for you, but I think you have got picture by now. If you are interested in a provider of such services, be sure to visit the website lincwebhosting.co.uk.

Top 3 Cheap Business/Ecommerce Web Hosting Companies – Best Hosts

Are you looking for a reliable web hosting company to get your business website online? If so, you should know that besides the common features which all web hosting services provide for their customers, a business web host must offer two additional important features. These two features are mentioned below:

Shopping cart:聽 With Shopping Cart, you can accept PayPal庐 and credit cards via your site. This software allows online shopping customers to place items in the cart.聽

SSL Certificate: People are getting smart about online security. Today most of them are looking for the padlock icon and “https” prefix in the address bar of their browser before submitting personal information online. An SSL Certificate helps your customers do their online transactions under a secure service. If your Web site doesn’t have an SSL Certificate, visitors may leave before making a purchase or creating an account. 聽

Take into consideration that web hosting is a global service. It does not matter what country you are located in; US, UK, Canada, Australia or India. It is good to note that the cost of hosting services in most countries is generally a little more expensive in comparison to the same services in Canada and the United States. Specifically, American web hosts offer a much better value for money than any local hosting. 聽

First try to choose a reliable business web hosting provider which is uptime. Hosting uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet. It is very important your service be uptime (functioning and available for use). It means you can access your account whenever you want to update your web pages, and聽customers can enter your website whenever they refer to your site address. If your hosting service is not uptime it can be catastrophic!

There are many websites which display a couple of companies as the best business web hosting providers and leave people confused without being helpful. To make things even more confusing, some hosting companies are cheating and lying to their customers!

Threehosts.com聽is聽a reliable website to help you have the best choice.聽Their experts have been evaluating business web hosting service providers for years, and now they provide you with the most reliable results. 聽There you can reach the three reputable companies that are leaders in the E-commerce web hosting industry. They fulfill all your requirements to sell online or do any online transaction via your website. By using each of them, everything you need for your business website is provided in one eCommerce Hosting Package.

business

Learn How To Pick A Web Host – Choose The Best Website Hosting Service (Company/Provider)

Are you looking for a reliable web hosting company to get your website online? If so, you should know that any bad web hosting service would trouble you for a long period. At first, try to pick a reliable service to get rid of the subsequent problems. For most people, the problem with buying web space is that they don’t really know what they’re looking at when they buy it. They simply buy what sounds like the “biggest” package that they can afford on their budget, or they buy the first package they see, thinking they are all alike.

Here are some important features which must be considered when choosing your web hosting company:

Reliability and uptime: Hosting uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet. It is very important your service be uptime (functioning and available for use). It means you can access your account whenever you want to update your web pages, and users can enter your website whenever they refer to your site address. If your hosting service is not uptime it can be catastrophic!

Disk space: Web hosting space is the amount of room that the web host provides to store your HTML, graphic, video/audio and other files. This figure is most commonly stated in gigabytes. If you don’t know how much space you need for your website, you can choose a web host with unlimited disk space, which allows you to build as many web pages as you want.

Bandwidth: Bandwidth (or data transfer) refers to the amount of data that is accessed by your visitors. Web hosts define bandwidth as the total amount of data access from your server over a month’s time. This figure is most commonly expressed in gigabytes. If you don’t know how much bandwidth you need for your website, you can pick a web host with unlimited data transfer, which allows you to support as many visitors as you want.

Ease of Control Panel: It is important that the control panel is easy to use and all information can be accessed easily.

If you are a beginner it is generally hard to you to pick the right web hosting service. There are many websites which display a couple of web hosting companies as the best and leave people confused without being helpful. To make things even more confusing, some hosting companies are cheating and lying to their customers!

Threehosts.com is a reliable website to help you have the best choice. Their experts have been evaluating web hosting service providers for years, and now they provide you with the most reliable results. They present the information in an easy to understand format that helps the consumer make the best choice within just a few minutes. This is their purpose, to help you make the right choice the first time.

There you can reach the three reputable companies that are leaders in the web hosting industry. They are all easy-to-use and affordable.

Watch Out These Top Web Hosting Company Options

Don’t you want the very best web hosting provider that can be found to meet your business needs? There are so many business web hosting options available that it is often difficult to navigate through the many in order to find the one web hosting company that is best suited for your specific needs. When searching for your next web site hosting company you must understand that there is a definable difference between cheap web hosting and affordable web hosting.

StartLogic hosting has much to offer when it comes to small business web hosting. Service with StartLogic includes both a free domain and marketing credits for advertisements. Don’t overlook the power of the winning combination presented with the easy website building tool and low cost web hosting of StartLogic. It is a good idea to select a service like StartLogic that can handle multiple needs such as virtual web hosting, .NET hosting, Windows hosting, dedicated web hosting, and ASP web hosting.

With Yahoo! Hosting you have the option of Windows or Linux web hosting for your small business. It is the builder that receives accolades by those that are inexperienced website builders. Yahoo is an excellent example of reliable web hosting but if you look around it compares well with other less expensive web hosting companies.

When it comes to the HostMonster Host you may very well be looking at one of the most popular low cost web hosting services available. When you need affordable web hosting for your small business HostMonster web hosting has plenty of wonderful features to offer. See for yourself how HostMonster web hosting can meet all of your customer service and technical support needs while filling all of your requirements for multiple domain web hosting, SSH access, and countless other Internet web hosting needs.

You will also want to consider iXWebHosting while you are checking into suitable small business web hosting services for your business. It is true that iXWebHosting doesn’t have quite the reputation as StartLogic hosting or HostMonster web hosting when it comes to providing easy to use tools but it meets their reputation for technical support, reliability, and customer service. Make sure that you devote a good deal of time when looking for Internet web hosting companies to making sure you choose a reliable web hosting company. It’s a shame that all discount web hosting services can’t seem to match the quality of service and features that iXWebHosting offers.

Some Important Things About Free Web Hosting

Free hosting – is it charity?

“Free hosting” is most of the time offered in exchange for placing advertisements on your website, meaning that the host will automatically place an advertisement at the top and sometimes at the bottom of every page of your website. Sometimes they don’t use banners they use pop-ups.

No matter what they ask you to do in exchange for free hosting, you have to do something in exchange, so you’re not being offered free hosting! They give you hosting in exchange for placing ads on your website. They call it free because you don’t give them any money, but you do pay for it.

They claim and even convince you that they’re doing you a favor: they give you free hosting. They know that if you think the service is free you’ll not complain for downtime, unresponsive support teams. But you’re not getting it for free! Now, even if they would offer it for free, the service should be at least acceptable. But it usually isn’t.

Now, even if they would offer it for free, the service should be at least acceptable. But it usually isn’t. If one offers free lunch for the poor, that food must not be rotten. It’s just common sense!

What these free hosting services always seem to forget to mention is the fact that they’re not charities. They’re businesses and they’re always looking for ways to make a profit.

I find it deceiving that they use the word “free” when the right name for it should be “barter hosting” or “trade hosting” or “ad-funded hosting”. But, as strange as it might sound, the world doesn’t revolve around me , so the so called free hosting will remain “free hosting”. Too many people in the hosting industry use this term and too many regular people look for “free hosting” for it to go away.

Common problems with free hosting

It should not be a surprise that free hosting is not as good as paid hosting. The problems that are common in the paid hosting section of the hosting industry are almost a rule in the world of free hosting. Timely is almost out of the question with most free hosts. Excessive downtime and slow servers are almost the norm rather than just common problems.

That isn’t to say that free web hosting can’t be acceptable in terms of quality. There are some companies that offer reliable free web hosting. Don’t get it wrong, reliable here doesn’t mean paid-hosting-reliable, it means reliable according to the free hosting standards (whatever that means).
Free hosting without the ads

Yes, you can find free hosting that doesn’t require the placement of ads on your pages. That doesn’t mean the company isn’t there to make a profit! The free account will give you only a small amount of bandwidth and space. What the hosting company does is give you free hosting while you’re starting your website/business and/or your needs are low.

They figure (bet) that you’ll go for their paid version (most free hosts have paid plans too), as soon as your website will outgrow its account in terms of bandwidth and/or space.

Some free hosts allow only the use of sub-domains or directories, which means that your website’s URL will look something like this: yourwebsite.yourhost.com or www.yourhost.com/yourwebsite. That means that if you move your website you’ll lose all those hard earned links that point at it, people will send you emails that you’ll never read etc. You are stuck with that host!

What’s in it for the host in this case? Well, the host gets brand awareness because it gets to be published in the countless of free hosting directories. Also it gets its name in your URL and in the URL of lots of other websites. Branding again! Also, if the service is at least acceptable it will get a good reputation, which often is worth more than pure gold. All those ultimately mean more business for their business.

It happened and it still does, that some hosts start their business with a great “free hosting” offer. Their name soon gets published all over the Internet. After a while (usually a year or more) the company stops offering free hosting. Some of their “free” clients will agree to become paying customers, while others will decide to see their work vanish into oblivion, but not pay. By that time though, the host gains immense brand awareness. It might also get quite a few clients as soon as they turn into a paid host because of those clients that were hosted for free and decide to pay to keep their websites up and running.

Unlimited bandwidth/space?

Unlimited space/hosting are a no-no in the paid hosting arena. In the free hosting arena it’s even worse. It basically spells out that the servers will be overcrowded. Although you might like the idea of having as much space and data transfer as you need, please resist the temptation. Unlimited space/bandwidth is an illusion. It’s like when you’re seeing water in the middle of the desert. A mirage. You are promised, but you will not receive.

Secret backdoor to quality free hosting

Actually it’s not that secret, just not widely known. As I said in the beginning of this article, free hosting is most of the time nothing more than a barter.

Now here’s the idea: why settle for lousy “free hosting” when you can barter for quality hosting instead? All you need to do is find a few good paid hosting companies and then ask for hosting in exchange for placing ads on your website.

Your greatest advantage is that you’ll be able to make those ads fit your website perfectly. They will not be automatically added to your pages at the top or bottom. You’ll have complete control over your website’s design.

Sure, you’ll have to negotiate where to place those ads. It’s normal for the host to ask for the ads to be placed so that they’ll get high chances to be noticed by your website’s visitors. As long as they don’t ask for a big banner to be placed on your pages I don’t see a serious problem. I would suggest you though to go for a text ad. It’s usually much easier to make a text ad blend-in nicely so that it doesn’t scream “I’m an ad!”.

This solution for getting great hosting without giving money out of your pocket is not for all websites though. First, the hosting company will want a suited audience. Targeting the right audience will bring them the best results in terms of sales volume.

So your website’s audience should have a rather high interest in buying hosting. Web programmers, web designers, webmasters, search engine optimization specialists and web business owners are among those who might be interested in hosting offers. If your website attracts such people, you have significantly better chances to trade ads in exchange for hosting.

One thing to notice is that your chances to barter for hosting are considerably smaller if you’re just launching your website. That’s because you can’t get something for nothing. If you offer advertising and have no audience you’re basically offering potential audience and ask for hosting in exchange. The only chance you’ve got is to convince the host that your site has great potential. That you have a good plan to get visitors.

You might think that if it’s just starting your website will not consume lots of resources. After all, the activity is near zero. However there is more to hosting than just that. You will need some support, which costs the host quite a lot.

One thing to notice is that hosts will prefer to barter hosting with text based websites. Websites offering big files for download are not likely to be accepted.
Conclusions

Free hosting is not free – at least in the form in which it exists on the internet today. I have yet to find a free host that is a real charity. As strange as it might sound, look out for free hosts that seem to be completely free (charity-like). A host must have funding! Ask them how do they cover or plan to cover their costs. Is there a foundation behind that host? It’s highly unlikely, but who knows!

All hosts have to pay for the servers, bandwidth and staff. If they don’t have a good plan to cover the costs, the future for them is grim and services will soon degrade due to under funding.

The best option if you don’t want to spend money for hosting is to barter for it with a respected, serious, honest web host. But don’t ever trick yourself into thinking that you’re getting something for nothing. Ads are a form of payment so you’re paying.