Linux Hosting VS Windows Hosting
Linux Hosting VS Windows Hosting
If you would like to choose a web hosting you might ask, “Windows or Linux?” This should be an easy question to answer, but it needs quite a lot of considerations. In this article I will help you to comprehend when to use Windows or Linux hosting by giving you the differences on both of them. Hopefully by reading this article, you will never be confused again to choose a Windows or Linux hosting.
Price of server software
Linux server is a lot affordable than Windows server. This is because Linux is based on GNU license which is free to use, and Windows has commercial license. The Linux hosting providers do not need to pay the software. This is the key reason why Linux hosting is a lot cheaper than Windows hosting.
Server’s History
From the very beginning of internet, Unix has been the one and the only option for server. Starting from data server to internet server, most of the people around the world use Unix. Then, what it has to do with Linux?
Linux is the “successor” of Unix. It has all the capability of Unix combined with a user friendly graphics for end user. Windows is not very famous on server history. Only starting from Windows NT, Windows has emerged to the server world.
Even until the moment this article is written, when some people are asked they will directly answer that Linux is more appropriate than Windows for server without thinking.
Programming Language
If you are designing a static website, you will need no programming language except HTML. HTML is offered on both Linux and Windows hosting. JavaScript is also available on both hosting.
However, if you or the one you hire is planning to make a dynamic website, you will need to consider the programming language capability. Those who use Windows hosting normally need ASP or ASP.NET support. Those who use Linux hosting normally need PHP, Perl, or Python support.
This is not a hard fact because Windows hosting may have sufficient support for PHP language. You have to ask your programmer and your hosting company to make this matter clear.
Web Hosting Competition
Linux hosting providers are numerous around the world. The number of Windows hosting providers is smaller if you compare them with Linux hosting provider. This numerous providers of Linux hosting will generate competition between themselves. This is good because you will get the cheapest price available.
Intranet and Internet integration
Some companies need to mix their internal offline data with the ones in the internet. For example is the banking industry. Normally this can be done seamlessly with ASP.NET. Therefore, the need of Windows hosting.
E-preneur support
Whether you are presently starting an online business or have been the heavy hitter, you will find that many free but good quality software and scripts offered out there is in PHP or Perl. Take for example the famous BLOG script WordPress, it is written in PHP. Sometimes you can even have the resell rights for the software. If you are using Windows hosting you will definitely lose this benefit.
Summary
If you are just starting out, always seek to have a Linux hosting as the first option in your mind. Cheaper price may be the major reason behind this. Why should you pay more for all the features that you do not require? If you are going to integrate intranet and internet data of your company and you really need the ASP.NET then, choose Windows hosting. Normal dynamic pages can be built using PHP or Perl. You have to change your programmer if he/she insists on using Windows hosting with no exact reason. Again, always try to have a Linux hosting as the first option in your mind. After all, abundant choices of Linux hosting allow you to shop around for the best price.
www.ProvidentHost.com provides you with reliable but affordable web hosting solution for your online business.
Why Using A Hosting Company That Offers Statistics Can Make You Money!
Wouldn t you for a minute love to be able to follow your online visitors and see where on your website they visit and which page they leave? Just imagine being able to sit down on a chair by them and just WATCH where they go on their computer or better yet, find how they came across your site. Did they find your ad in local newspaper you placed, searched google, yahoo or msn, or was it a link from another website. I don t know about you, but I think that would be real important information. In fact it is such important information that you could even tweak your own site to be responsive to where your online visitors are going. What Can You Learn From Statistics Up until a few years ago when I designed a website, I did just that. I just designed the website then basically tossed it on the Internet. The only way I knew if visitors were coming was either by the emails I received or a silly counter I had installed. My hosting company then didn t offer any statistics features so I eventually packed my bags and all 20 of my sites and switched hosting companies. It wasn t easy but after I got settled in with a good hosting company that offered statistics, it became the best move I ever made! My current web hosting company offers many statistics online programs but the one that I found was the best and not over whelming was Webalizer. Once you enable Webalizer to run, it watches your website for multiple criteria s such as how many visits and hits you receive each day. If your not sure about the difference between visits and hits , visits is measured in how many unique visitors determined by the visitors IP address visits your website. So you could say if you have 1000 visits in a month, then you have had 1000 different people visit your site. Hits on the other hand are how many times your site was visited or hit . If a single person repeatedly visits your site then it s considered a hit. When you first go to Webalizer you will see a graph comparing how my Pages , Files , and Hits you received each month since you started Webalizer. You can see if your site is gaining or loosing traffic per monthly basis. You are also given a Summary By Month showing total Hits and Visits and a daily averages. There are also other monthly figures but I won t get into those as to me they are not as important and this article would be a book long. Here is where it gets real interesting. When you click on the month, you uncover detailed information about your website including hourly and daily website usage, top URLs within your site, top enter pages, top exit pages, top referrals and so on. Converting The Information Into Money Now this is what you re all wondering about. You might have guessed by now but if you haven t then let me explain how you can profit from that statistics that now are in front of you. For the sake of this article I will only be focusing on what I believe are the most important pieces of information you can learn from Webalizer. They are Top URLs, Top Entry Pages, Top Exit Pages, and last but certainly not least Top Referrals. Top URLs Top URLs is the top pages within your website that people visit. Let s say you have a Cat and Dog site. Your cat page is cat.html and your dog page is dog.html. Now you login into Webalizer, click the month you want to view, scroll down to Top URLs and you see that there was more hits for cat.html than dog.html. You now know that more people are looking up cats than dogs. How can you benefit and make more money with knowing which pages are getting the most traffic? Focus your ad campaigns such as affiliate banners, programs or links, Google Adsense and so on to the popular traffic pages. If you want people to visit the less traffic pages, then you can simply market the less traffic pages with banners, links or a catchy paragraph on the high traffic pages. Top Entry Pages Top entry pages are the initial pages people go to when they visit your site. Say we use the same Cat and Dog example and you see that cat.html gets more entry traffic then dog.html. What does this mean? It can mean that there is a direct link to that page from another website. It can also mean a search engine has that page indexed and its being display as search results when someone could be searching for lets say cats. A lot like Top URLs you can benefit from this by focusing your ad campaigns to the top entry pages, thus leading to more sales. Top Exit Pages Top exit pages are the last pages a person is on your site before they leave to go somewhere else. Why is this important? Knowing which page ranks highest as an exit page can help you tweak that page to keep a visitor from leaving. You could put a link and a catchy paragraph at the bottom of the page promoting one of your Top URL pages. The main thing is you want to keep the visitor at your site as much as possible and knowing where you can tweak your page to keep that visitor from leaving will lead to more sales. Top Referrals Top referrals are where the visitors are coming from. You can see if your visitors are coming from direct request (typing in your domain name), coming from a search engine, and find what other websites have links to yours. This feature can be more a money saver than anything. Lets say you have a monthly paying banner ad at mybestcats.com. Using Top referrals you can see how many people are clicking on that ad and entering your site by looking down the Top referral list and finding that website. If after a few months you see that only a handful of visitors came from mybestcats.com then you can make a more valuable decision to keep the banner or not on their site. Conclusion I hope my article has helped you understand the benefits of web statistics and how this information can help you tailor a better website and make you more money. I believe that have the best hosting plan is crucial to website success. If you would like to see what hosting I use that offers Webalizer at no cost for your website and many more important features, please visit http://www.besthostingplanever.com
I been designing websites for almost 10 years and in those years I have learned (mostly the hard way) which companies best suited me for the types of websites I designed and their functions.
Web Hosting Provider
Selecting an Ideal Web Hosting Provider The mind boggling reach potential of the Internet has made many small businesses invest in an online store rather than spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on a physical building. This has created a demand for a good web hosting provider. They take over the technical up keep of the website letting the business owners concentrate on what they do best, running their business without worrying about the technical aspect of maintaining a website. There are several web hosting providers and to select a good, reliable web hosting provider can be a daunting task for someone who has not much experience. Well to help you select a good web hosting provider here are a few tips. Tips For Selecting A Good Web Hosting Provider The web hosting provider > has to offer excellent customer service support. Email, phone, live chat support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is crucial and needs to be provided by the web hosting provider you select. Look for dependability and guaranteed uptime with necessary redundant back up systems to ensure your website is easily accessible. Try and select a web hosting provider who has high speed Optical Carriers enabling fast connectivity The web hosting providermust offer a scalable platform to ensure that customers can grow and expand their business Data has to be stored and managed carefully ensuring no data loss occurs. Select a web hosting provider> who offers enough web space for your needs FTP access is a must to ensure you can design and upload your pages yourself if need be. Check to see if the bandwidth allotment suits your needs SSL service is an absolute necessity if you plan to accept credit cards from customers. PHP, MySQL, SSH Access, CGI-Bin service etc. A good web hosting provider will provide email, pop3 and auto responder facility Check out the features of the control panel and if you can perform basic tasks without waiting and wasting time seeking approval from the web hosting provider. Find out the kind of OS and the kind of server they use and if it is compatible. There are windows, Linux and Unix based servers. Find out the method of payment and the payment plan offered by various web hosting providers. Some offer monthly, quarterly or annual payment options These are some factors that can be considered while selecting a web hosting provider. Research and compare prices and features offered by different web hosting providers and make an informed decision.
Author is the usa based web hosting provider and run a hosting directory http://www.betahosts.com, which offers a wide range of web hosting Providers. Search through our Showcase to find the best web hosting packages and the lowest prices.
ASP Web Hosting Posted By : Ray Lam.
ASP net web hosting refers to Active Server Pages technology. This article will give a review of ASP net web hosting options. These Active Server Pages have the extension .asp which involves using ActiveX scripting. ASP is pretty similar to how CGI scripts work, however, programmers are able to work with the normal tools. When a person requests an ASP page the web page will be sent back with html code. The benefits of ASP is that its users can access databases, interact with objects on a page and can also create database driven web pages online.
Simple Step For Choosing Great Web Host
There are thousands of web hosts around today with thousands of plans to choose from making what was once a simple procedure seems like a daunting task for both newbie and pro alike. Whether you’re looking for your first host or looking to move on to a better one there are certain simple steps you must follow to succeed in choosing a great host. These simple steps include: Right Platform The first and most foremost step in choosing a web host is determining the platform the web server should run, usually a choice between Unix/Linux and Windows. Your choice is largely determined by your website and the technologies used to create it, generally a website created with Microsoft technologies (ASP, VB) will run on Windows servers while most other sites using open source technologies (PHP, Perl, Python etc) will run on Linux based systems. Right Features Once you’ve chosen your platform the next step is determining the features you’ll need from your web host. Take your time with this step as the feature lists of web hosts are getting longer and longer every day and while some plans may look similar on the surface, a good look at the feature lists may tell another story. Only you can determine the specific features you’ll need, but some key things to keep an eye on are: Disk Space Bandwidth Backups Uptime Money Back Guarantee Domains Allowed Databases (Number & type) CGI, PHP, Perl, Python, SSI Cron Email accounts The list goes on and on, just remembers to take your time and make sure your new web host is going to provide you with everything you need. Budget Often budget is the only thing people consider when choosing their first web host, funds are usually tight and on the surface most hosts look very similar. Sometimes you get lucky and choose a good host, but more often than not it turns out to be a horror story. Remember that the cost of your web hosting is more than just the monthly fee, think about the total cost of ownership. TCO includes lost sales due to downtime & slow speeds, downtime rebates, extra bandwidth charges, setup costs, extra feature costs, and your monthly fee. Many hosts will require you to pay yearly to get the best price available though there are some that allow you to pay by the month and still get the best price, it’s really a matter of personal choice as to what payment method works best for you. Customer Service Customer service is another aspect that is often not forgettable while choosing a great web host. You shouldn’t settle for anything less than 24/7/365 service, your website needs to be running all the time so it’s no good if your hosting company doesn’t work during the holidays. Don’t take the web hosting companies word for it, they all claim 24/7 support but few back it up with consistent performance. Be sure to test them out at various times of the day and night via phone, email and live chat if they offer it. Support An extensive knowledge base can be a real time saver as well as being an indication of the level of customer service supports and expertise you can expect to receive. Spend some time browsing the support sections of the website and see for yourself the level of support provided. Longevity Do a whois on the web host’s domain name and find out the creation date, anything less than a year ago and the risk that they won’t be around next year increases. They could be a great host, but considering more then 95% of new hosts go out of business within a year that really isn’t something you should be taking a chance on. Uptime It’s a fact of life that a web host cannot be online 100% of the time, servers need to be rebooted for security and software updates and any web host that doesn’t get updated faces the increased risk of being successfully hacked. 99.9% uptime guarantees are pretty standard in the industry however a guarantee is only as good as how it is defined and the company behind it. Look for no less than a full months free hosting should they not meet their guarantee, a prorated refund based on the amount of downtime is virtually worthless. Say you pay $10 for a month of hosting and your site is down for 24 hours. They will refund you for one day of downtime, which ends up being about 33 cents. Hence, it’s not a rocket science; just a little research and investigating that can save a lot of heartache in the future and can offer you a great web host. REPRINT RIGHTS statement: This article is free for republishing by visitors provided the Author Bio box is retained as usual so that all links are Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.
Author Richa Sinha is associated with a <a href=http://www.vexat.org/host.html>web hosting company</a> Vexat from India. Vexat also provides the <a href=http://www.vexat.org/domain.html>cheapest domain name registration</a>. For more information please <a href=http://www.vexat.org/>click here</a>.
The world of Web hosting business can be bad if you do not know the basics! Posted By : Smit
There are many big webhosting companies that offer a good reliable service. While webhosting services are required for organizations and individuals who wish to set up their website, more and more individuals are focusing on reseller hosting as a viable business option.
