Which Is The Better Server Operating System, Unix or Windows?

Anybody who decides to get a web hosting service or facility for their website will also soon be faced with the tough question of what server they will need. Will their website be run by a Windows server operating system or will they prefer to go for a Unix system?

Typical Windows servers will run on Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP, while Unix servers could be Linux or Open BSD to name just two. The truth is that both systems have there pros and cons.

If site stability and uptime are critical for you and your new website, then Unix should be your choice because they are generally thought to be superior in stability. Windows have the disadvantage that they usually require rebooting much more often. Still Windows are miles ahead when it comes to ease of use. A Windows server operating system will generally be much easier to operate and administer than its’ Unix counterpart.

On the other hand, Unix, even with its’ stability may not end up being so user-friendly, especially for non-techies. There is also a price to pay for the extra stability which is evident in Unix systems. Usually Unix machines will require their software to be updated on a very regular basis. All in all, Unix server operating systems are favored over windows as they are widely considered to be more stable.

Still if truth be told, when both systems are correctly installed, there is really very little difference and they will give you basically the same results. In effect this does not make this an easy decision to reach. In fact this is the main factor that complicates the issue, causing even more confusion and making it very difficult for the webmaster to make a decision either way. However for many, the final answer to the question of which server operating system is preferable, is quite often made by analyzing and comparing the costs of both and going with the more affordable option.

Steps to becoming a web host reseller

You’ve decided to get a reseller web hosting account to resell web space. What now? Here’s a step-by-step guide.

1. Choose the platform you want to use.

More open source software programs are available for Linux than for Windows, which makes Linux less expensive. While most programs (Perl, PHP, Flash, etc.) run on both platforms, a few run on only Windows or Linux. A site that requires ASP or MS Access, for example, requires a Windows platform.

2. Choose the control panel you want to use.

Control panels for websites range from very basic to loaded with features. As a reseller, you’ll also have a control panel for you to set up and control hosting accounts.

In Choosing Your Hosting Automation Software, we compare several control panels, all of which offer good features for web host resellers.

3. Choose your web host.

The web host company that you choose for your reseller account is a key decision — your business success depends on the quality of your host. Factors to consider when choosing a web host for a reseller account:

The platform and control panel

Account features

The company’s reputation — search for online reviews by clients

The record of server uptime

The level of support — how fast does tech support respond to support requests, especially time-sensitive ones?

Flexibility — does the web host have packages that allow you to upgrade when your needs increase? Will they customize plans if necessary?

How long the web host has been in business — while a new web host may be very good, many web hosting businesses fail within the first year

Price — consider what is included in the price

Get Started with reseller hosting. http://www.websitesource.com



4. Set up your hosting plans and prices

Divide your bandwidth by your disk space to find out the ratio of bandwidth to disk space that you can offer. Take into account any ratios that differ if you upgrade to a larger package, and then base your packages on that ratio.

For pricing, consider what competitors charge, but also factor in any additional services you’ll be offering.

5. Develop a business website

You have three main choices for website development:

Create a website using an existing website template http://www.websitesource.com/clientarea/reseller_website_templates.shtml

Hire a designer or a design company to design your site for you http://design.websitesource.com/design/elements_custom-work.php

If you have web design skills, design your site yourself



Include all the information that clients will want to know about your services and company.

6. Make your site e-commerce ready

To be able to accept payments for hosting accounts, you’ll to set up:

An SSL certificate

A merchant account

A payment gateway



7. Set up a helpdesk

A helpdesk allows clients to contact you with support requests and you to track and respond to those requests.

8. Set up billing

With an automated billing system, clients are billed and payments are registered with little effort on your part. Most billing software licenses are priced per month or per year, with some billing software companies offering prices for lifetime licenses.

Some popular billing and payment processing systems:

How to Choose a Right Web Hosting Service?

Indeed, choosing a right web hosting service for your website is not an easy task especially when there are thousands of web hosting providers all offering almost identical web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before you start your web hosting search. Below are three major criteria for web host seeker:

Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important consideration to start finding a host for your site. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) Server platform and hardware requirements
If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.

Likewise, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any web hosting plans that support Unix/Linux platform should be sufficient to meet your hosting requirements. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best web hosting plans for your need. For more information, you can read "How to select a web server and server platform?"

b) Disk space & Bandwidth requirement
Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before selecting a web hosting plan, i.e. disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), then the disk space requirement may not be a big concern to you. In general, a disk space with 200MB to 500MB should be enough to meet your hosting requirement. In contrast, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, mp3 or video files, then you should consider a web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB to 1,000 MB.

Similarly, the bandwidth requirement will depend on your site traffic estimation. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly bandwidth allowance very fast. If so, you will need to find one web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with 40 GB to 100 GB per month. Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the monthly disk space and bandwidth allowance.

c) Other hosting features
While the above requirements are utmost important, there are other hosting features that you have to consider too. Can web hosting provider support video clips on your website, if you have? Is the web hosting service compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? Can the host support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? On top of that, you may also want to find out the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistic software (analyze your web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your web hosting account), database and scripting languages supported and etc.

Reliability and scalability

A first-class web hosting provider offers reliable server uptime and fast Internet connection. You should only choose a web hosting service that guarantee at least 99% server uptime with high-speed Internet backbones using at least OC3 (Optical Carrier) lines (155 Megabits per second) or above instead of T1 or T3 lines. A reliable web hosting provider usually invests heavily on their data center infrastructure with high performance servers, high speed multiple backbones providers with fail-over redundancy, backup power generators and firewall software protection in place to ensure they meet the uptime guarantee specified in the terms of service.

Similarly, you should choose a web hosting service with hardware facilities that designed for scalability, so that they can grow with your business. For example, if you need to increase more disk space, bandwidth or number of mySQL databases, you should be able to upgrade as needed without any problems.

Customer service and support

The last major consideration in choosing a web hosting service is to find a web hosting providers that offers excellent customer service and support. You should always search for a web hosting provider that offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week technical support that fielded with highly experience technicians, so that any web hosting problems will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time. You may also want to consider to test how responsive is their customer support by sending few inquiry emails to the web hosting provider. In general, any response in less than 24 hours is considered acceptable. It is a sign of poor customer support if they take more than one day to response.

In addition, a web hosting provider with excellent support should also provide multiple support channels, such as toll-free phone support, 24/7 email support, live chat, online knowledgebase, Interactive flash tutorials and FAQ.

Above are few major considerations before you choose your web hosting service. In addition, how long has the web hosting provider in business and the number of customers that they currently have are also a good indication of the quality of their hosting products as well as the stability of the company. Even though cost of the web hosting service is also important but it should not be your major consideration. Because the price of a web hosting service has been declining over the years due to competition, as a result, the price of most of the web hosting services offering quality hosting features has been converging to less than US$10 per month. If you can't afford less than $10 per month, you probably isn't in the online business for the long haul. Therefore, price should not be a major deciding factor.

On the other hand, it is more important to ensure the web hosting service that you choose is able to meet your website hosting requirements, guarantee your website is always accessible with satisfying speed, provide scalability to grow and expand your website as well as offer excellent customer supports.

Webhosting - Methods

Web site hosting means providing place for a personal web site on a certain hosting companys servers, that makes it viewable on the Internet.You are probably asking yourself why you need web site hosting. Well, imagine that you have created a personal website, and you want everyone to see it; imagine that you want to develop an e-commerce web site and you want to have as many visitors as possible. This is the moment when you most need web site hosting. The web hosting industry has grown over the years and with all the competition in the industry finding out who is the best web hosting service is very difficult and definitely a task.There is no doubt that you can get better service with web hosting companies now than you could get 10 years ago.
There is no doubt that you can get better service with web hosting companies now than you could get 10 years ago. The market for web hosting companies has opened up so much you have to know what you want in a hosting company before you can decide which is the best web hosting company Knowing the features of the best web hosting plans is essential to your business success.
After all you will not want to pay for something that you are not getting or will not need with your hosting plan. When looking for a web hosting plan you will want to make sure that they offer email support 24 hours a day and are available seven days a week. Live online web hosting support is essential to your web hosting account.
Offering a variety of different options, either type of web hosting plan may be what you need. Now keep in mind that not all software can be used with both types of web hosting plans, so knowing which is the best web hosting plan for you, is a requirement.
Typically to choose the best web hosting plan will be to make sure that you are getting all the features, have enough space and can grow if you website needs to.Several types of web hosting as follows First, there is the free shared hosting. This is mostly beneficial for small personal web sites. If you are a beginner in this area, a shared hosting with no fee is perfect for your non-commercial web site. Unfortunately, you can not expect to have the same technical support, disk space, PHP support or bandwidth that other people pay for. Paid shared hosting is one of the most popular types of web hosting. Small, medium or large professional sites, they all use shared hosting. A whole server will cost too much, and a site will have no need for the whole space, so shared hosting is ideal for them. Besides the low costs, the sites will also have proper technical support, and some other features such as e-mail, PHP or MySQL. For a large e-commerce professional web site, the dedicated server is the most reliable solution. This will provide you with all the necessary software; you will have a lot of space and bandwidth and all the other facilities that your web site needs.
The only disadvantage appears if you are inexperienced in server administration. Just read a web site hosting review or a forum before you make the final decision. A good web hosting review would not overlook the co-location. This sub type of dedicated server is not so popular, and it is designed for everyones personal needs.
Also, because you will be the only one using it, the costs will also be supported by yourself. The last of all the web site hosting types is the virtual private server. This is a type of web site hosting that is mainly based on dividing a physical server into several small virtual ones. It will give the same possibilities as a dedicated server but the advantage is that it will cost less. Well, that all depends on what your website is going to need.How many visitors do you expect to have? Are you going to have lots of large graphics on the site? Do you have a lot of articles or products that you want to put in a database? Do you want to have an email address at your website (yourname@yourdomain.com)? On and on it goes.
Each host you look at will offer you different combinations of features at different price points, and finding the one that's right for you can be quite a task. Here's a technical-to-English guide to what you should be looking for MB storage. The more MB of storage you have, the more you can put on your website. For most websites, this number can be really very small without it being much of a concern - the pages would be too big for anyone to download and see before they'd be too big to store. You only really need to worry if you're planning to put something apart from plain pages on your site If you want to make a gallery for your digital photos or let people download ebooks from you, for example, this number needs to be higher.GB bandwidth per month. This is a limit on how much data your website can transfer each month. For small websites, you don't need to worry too much, but as you get more visitors the amount you need will increase sharply, especially if each one looks at lots of pages or downloads large files from the site.
The amount of bandwidth your site needs is generally considered to be the deciding factor in how 'big' it is, and how much it will cost you. MySQL databases.
The number of databases your website will have to store things in. It will make it much easier for you if you have one. Don't pay more to get extra, though: one database is all you need. It's worth noting that if your host may offer some other kind of SQL instead of MySQL (for example, PostgreSQL). You should usually avoid anything apart from MySQL, unless you know what you're doing. PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby. These are all scripting languages, used to write your website. You should make sure your host offers the languages that any software you plan to use is written in. If you don't have specific requirements, then you should be fine with just Perl and PHP. Subdomains. These allow you to split your website into more sections than just 'www' - you might decide, for example, that you would people to be able to go to 'shop.yourdomain.com' and 'news.yourdomain.com' and see pages there. You don't really need these, though, as doing the same thing with subfolders ('www.yourdomain.com/shop') is usually just as effective.
FTP accounts. An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) account is what you'll use to upload your website to your host. You'll always get one of these. The only situation when you'll need more is if you want to let someone alter things on your site without giving them the master password POP3 accounts. POP stands for 'Post Office Protocol', which is just fancy-speak for email. The more POP3 accounts you get, the more email addresses you can have: useful if you want to have sales@yourdomain.com for new customers and support@yourdomain.com for existing ones, for example. go for more info : www.webhostingboom.com www.webhostingboom.com

Top 3 Free Web Hosting Services

Nowadays, there are many free webhosting services available on the Internet. Sometimes it can be difficult to choose which one is best for you. First of all, you need to bear in mind free wehosting usually have some limitations such as not allowed email accounts, no mysql databases, no perl etc. It varies from each web host.
There are sometimes hidden cost as well for free webhosting. For example, you need to register a domain name from the web host before you can have free web hosting. Other place restriction on bandwidth, disk space and if you exceed them, expect to pay some money.
Another type is some web host will place banners, text links etc on your webpage. Some only occupy a small amount of screen space while others can be as large as one-third. Geocities.com is an example of a free webhosting service that places banners, text links on your webpage.
With that said, if you really have no money, then there is no choice but to get free webhosting. It is also useful if you are new to web design and can use it for testing purposes. I still have one hosted on geocities with my first designed personal webpage.
There are literally thousands of free webhosting services out there but I will recommend the top 3 which I have used before.
#1 Champshost.com
Champhost is in my opinion is the best free webhosting service. They give 1000MB diskspace, no ads on your webpage and allows php, cgi, perl. The only thing they ask for is you contribute some post to their forum which isn't so hard.
#2 - 100webspace.com
100webspace get my vote as the second best. They offer 100MB space, all full features as a paid web hosting, that includes, email, ftp, php, mysql etc. The only thing I did not like they have ads on your webpage but it isn't too big to be a distraction.
#3 - Neopages.net
I like neopages because they are actually one of the few webhosting services that do not make any kind of money from offering free webhosting. They offer 150MB space, no ads as well as PHP, cgi, mysql, email, ftp etc.
The only issue is approval is on a case by case by members voting and you must have an existing website published already. It is pretty hard to get in since they only allow 3 each week.
As you can see, these 3 are just my favorites and there are a lot more free webhosting services available. Do remember to read the terms and conditions carefully to make sure you are actually getting free web hosting
Also, once you have some money do consider upgrading to paid hosting as they offer a lot more features and better support. You can go to any web hosting or webmaster forums where from time to time, webhosting companies offer big discounts for web hosting.