Hostgator is perhaps the best webhosting company for blogs and websites alike. We host several of our sites at Hostgator and we are truly amazed by their service, uptime and customer support. We recommend it most of the bloggers who ask us for suggestions as it offers most affordable hosting plans for the quality of service that they provide. Read the rest of this entry »

Till last year I did pretty much not know what is a web hosting and how a website is hosted. But with the passage of time, I came to know what actually is website hosting and how a website is hosted. I myself have a couple of website hosting accounts on the internet which are hosting couple of dozen websites. I find myself very relaxed sometimes after looking at the performance of some of my websites. In the meanwhile, when I look into some website, I wonder how they will be managed, as any time the host shut them off due to large traffic requirement, and even once I experienced a downtime of over 3 days for few of my websites.

This resulted in a lots of traffic going away and eventually I had to change the hosting of mine. As the websites begin to grow each working day I have now planned to get adedicated server web hosting for myself but I am unable to choose between a few hosts like the planet, rack space, and others. I am still wondering if I should go for an advanced VPS system so that I do not have to spend lot of money on my hosting bills but you know each managed dedicated server or VPS comes with a 1 hour guaranteed replacement of hardware. So, I would be relaxed in choosing them. If you have any of them in mind be sure to tell me.

Continuing with it developmental efforts the Mozilla group has recently released the Firefox 3.1 beta 2 for download. Out of the several features that have been added to the latest version the most significant or important feature is the private browsing mode that lets you browse without any of your web history being stored locally.

It would be great for people who like to browse internet anonymously for some part while saving their browsing history for the other part, like a person trying to find a new employer at the work place. Once enabled it directs the Firefox browser not to store any of your browsing information.

As far as other browsers like IE 8, Safari, Google Chrome are concerned this is a already regular feature in them. Some other features that you may see added in the new Firefox are designed to increase the performance and the speed of Firefox, one of the areas where Firefox was losing to Chrome.

As I was reading Gizmodo and other technology blogs today, I came across a very good looking headline , and it was

100Mbps Verizon FiOS to (Probably) Arrive in 2009: Hong Kong Still Snickers

It was a very much catchy headline as there are parts in world that enjoy a high average download speed , here in India the best connection we can get is 8Mbps which is of course slower than many of other connections, and the price ~ $300. This is not available for home connections , only business connections with a particular amount of Bandwidth Usage per month. For home customers the maximum speed available is 2Mbps on a DSL connection.

According to the posts mentioned Hong Kong has FIOS (Fibre Optic Service) speeds of 100Mbps and price is just $48.50 a month. I might be somewhat cheaper now but still its a lot cheaper than Indian Broadband where there are 2 Major Carriers of Internet the FLAG and TATA.

The US citizens enjoy a 5Mbps conection for almost $40 per month( Don’t take it seriously if it is wrong) upto 30Mbps for around $140 per month. At least you guys in US have a browsing speed , I have two connections at my home and the speed is 512Kbps each and the price I have to pay for both is approximately $65(Rs 3000) , so imagine I am paying loads of money to keep my computer connected with Internet.

Well, Verizon is promising this 100Mbps FIOS by next year and this might get Indians Service Providers to act smart and raise our Broadband speeds from 256Kbps to at least 2Mbps which will enhance our browsing experience and also let us view high definition videos online which we usually do not watch .

Over and over again I have been asked the question – “What keeps millions of websites in the world running the way they do? “. Today I would like to reflect a bit on the dynamics of a website.

The up and running website that you see in front of your eyes is formed by the perfect symbiosis of three things – domain name, the webhost and the Web CMS. All these three things when presented with compelling and regularly updated content form a successful website like ours. Let’s just look a bit more in their details.

Domain name: This is the web address of any site. It can be a complete name like YouTube or in abbreviated form like that of ours. Domain name is immediately followed extensions which may be a ‘.com’ as in Youtube.com or ‘.info’ as in our domain. Other popular extensions are ‘.net’, ‘.org’, ‘.tv’ and ‘.me’.  From the investment perspective a website owner normally spends 5 % of his overall budget for a domain name.

Webhost: This is perhaps the most important element that forms a website. A webhost provides the space where all kinds of data’s and files are stored. From the investment perspective a website owner normally spends 90- 95 % of his overall budget for a webhost. Since the choices are pretty wide in this field it often becomes hard to buy affordable web hosting. We are using Hostgator as our webhost.

Web Content Management System: CMS is used to create and manage the content of the website. There are lots of options here as well but fortunately 90% of them are open source and hence free of cost. We are currently using Wordpress as our Web CMS.

Hope with this input you would have got some idea about what a website is all about.

Online business owners come across many issues in their professional life, but none of them bigger than the unreliable behavior of their sites on days when sales are at their maximum. You too would hate to see your customers go away due to an error message.

These problems of unreliability can be attributed to various factors; however as a rule 90% of the times it is due to an underperforming webhost. A webhost is like the heart and soul of your website which determines how well or poorly would your site behave in front of the all important customers.

It is therefore necessary that you find web hosting company which is proven for performance. You can do this by going through expert review and rankings available on the web. One of the sites where you can find such unbiased reviews is hostingref.com.  You can go through reviews of all the web hosts like frontpage web hosting and compare it with all the other available web hosts out there. You can find it here.