Web Hosting blog

Picking the right domain name for your website may be a little more difficult than you think, especially now that everyone has caught on to the internet craze and have put up sites of their own. This means that they have also taken a lot of domain names that others wish they had. When picking a domain name, you may have to pay for that name for certain periods of time so it is good to choose carefully. But here are a few clues to how you can pick the right domain name for your needs:

Dot extension

Your domain name should have an extension like .com or .net or .org which generally should reflect what sector of society you hail from. A .com address usually connotes that the website is one for a business. A .org on the other hand may point to an address of an organization with a special interest. Overall, the rules have become more flexible over the years and more people take up the .com addresses faster than others.

Short and sweet

The best way for a domain name to be remembered is to keep it short and unique. Keeping it under a 7 character length is ideal. The maximum you can register is up to 63 characters.

Don’t use names that are trademarked

You have probably heard the horror stories of cybersquatting where people register domain names of famous people or brands and demand that the same people or companies pay them millions to get their domain names back. This has ended up in a lot of lost court battles for the cybersquatter, so better avoid it before getting into trouble.

With this advice, you can pick the domain name that is suited to your website. Just make sure you register it now so that it is not taken by the next person in line. Having a domain name is having a unique address. The more unique and memorable your address is, the better the chances you’ll get more hits on your site.

A web hosting company is one that provides a specific service in storing webpages and making them available on the internet through the necessary software and hardware. Usually a web hosting service will charge customers a fee for them to store their information on an allotted amount of server space with an accompanying bandwidth to enable Web users worldwide to download and see their webpages.

Choosing a good web host to house your website is probably one of the most important things to consider when setting up your site. Here are some tips in choosing a good web hosting service:

Smooth and consistent downloading presence
Look for a web hosting service that offers services that are not full of glitches but allow your site to be present consistently for regular and smooth downloading. If you are a business site that relies on revenues, a small glitch can affect business opportunities dramatically.

Proper billing and records maintenance
Choose a web hosting service that has a consistent and organized billing and payments system. A good web hosting service reflects its professionalism and capability through the organized billing and records system they implement.

Proper security measures and programs
A web hosting service that is attuned to the different malware that exists out there, will keep customers informed of the latest threats that could attack servers and to have updated security applications. Their job is to maintain your website space and to keep it safe from any threat or attack from malicious software and viruses.

So, the next time you are out looking for a good web hosting service, don’t forget to get one offering smooth downloading capabilities, has a proper billing and payments system, and good security measures and apps. This reflects on a web hosts professionalism and competence in providing you with the right services.

Web hosting is the technology that makes web pages available on the World Wide Web. It involves what is called a technology stack, so named because a layer of technologies is required when serving out web pages. Special computers that are used for web hosting are called web servers. The most common stack used for web hosting is called LAMP, an abbreviation that stands for the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database and PHP scripting language. Roughly 60 percent of web servers worldwide use this open-source technology.

Shared web hosting
It is common for web sites to reside on a common server. This type of service is called shared hosting and is appropriate for small personal web sites, blogs and brochure sites. Part of a shared hosting package includes a control panel for managing the data in the web site. Shared web hosting is usually the cheapest way to make your content available on line.

Free web hosting packages
Of course, free web hosting plans are available but this package is constrained in some form. For one, the amount of hard disk space allocated for such plans is very small. To recover costs, server administrators inject advertisements into your web pages which may or may not destroy the look of your web pages.

Dedicated web hosting
Dedicated web hosting packages are also available. In this setup, only one website is hosted by the server. This type of hosting plan is perfect for e-commerce sites because it allows secure socket layers (SSL) connections. SSL strongly encrypts important e-commerce information including credit card information and personal data that such as addresses and telephone numbers. This type of hosting plan is more expensive but the owner of the website has more flexibility in using the server’s resources.

Web hosting is a type of service that utilizes a technology stack to make web pages available on the World Wide Web. There are different kinds of web hosting plans available. Such plans differ in the amount of server space, allocation of CPU cycles as well as server memory. Shared web hosting is the most affordable package; while dedicated hosting plans are more expensive but is required if a web site is used for e-commerce.

Choosing a platform
There are quite a few considerations when you want to start your own web hosting company.  The first thing is to choose a platform that you will run your servers in.  You have a choice between Unix and Windows.  Of course, going open source is the way to go these days because you don’t have to spend so much.  Both of the operating systems will run the usual software you need anyway like Perl, PHP, and Flash.  But if you want ASP, .NET, and MS SQL, you will need to invest in a Windows set up which could set you back some money.

Developing a website
Of course, once you have the hardware and software set up, you can’t expect your web hosting company to thrive immediately.  You need to advertise and have a one-stop online shop to get people buying your space.  Talk about yourself and your business on your own website and watch the customers start to flow in.

Support
After sale support is essential in every business and you need a way to communicate with al your customers.  This can be 24/7 support by phone or live chat. Or you can keep in touch with your customers through email but this is not advisable since customers will expect that you have support every second of the day.  Give hardware and software support for all the services you sell and you should be fine.  Otherwise, you may want to re-think your web hosting strategy.

Remember that web hosting companies are not for everyone.  You need to have the technical know-how, the hardware, and even the drive to constantly keep a company like this alive and kicking 24 hours, 7 days a week.  And as long as you have the passion, you are sure to succeed in any business.

The internet is a network consisting of more than a million computers. All of the computers identify themselves to each other by numeric names called IP addresses which is a number that gets as big as 4.3 billion. To make identification and administration of computers that participate in a network easier, domain names are used instead of IP addresses. It should be noted though that domain names are just there for human convenience because in the mechanism of the internet, all computers talk to each other using their IP addresses.

Functions of domain names

Domain names are not just the names of each computer in the network. It is part of a hierarchical system that is used for routing network traffic. This hierarchical system is called the domain name system (DNS) and it can be quickly defined as the internet’s phone book. Given a domain name such as exampe.com, DNS translates this into its IP address which could be 208.77.93.53. Aside from labeling a computer, its domain name is used to abstract changes in IP address on network management. When a time will come when example.com changes its address, its effect is not visible to humans thus shielding us from the complexity of the internet. When example.com is typed into the browser, we do not have to know that it has a new IP address, the domain name system takes care of this for us.

Parts of a domain name

Domain names consist of a top level domain (tld) which is the familiar .com, .org or .net endings. With the rapid expansion of the internet, it became obvious that more top level domains were needed and so country code top level domains were made (cctld) and examples of such include .uk or .cn tlds. The local host name is appended to the tld so if we have server named example, when it connects to the internet, its domain name becomes example.com

Domain names are used in making the job of administering computer networks easier. Computer addresses change frequently and it would add to administrative overhead if such changes involve human intervention. Domain names are part of a hierarchy starting from a top level domain and ends at the computers who serve as web hosts.