February 18, 2011 - Web Hosting Reviews and Guidance

Best Dashcommerce Hosting

Dashcommerce Introduction

DashCommerce is an asp.net Open Source e-Commerce Application. Built using some of the latest technologies, dashCommerce is focused on providing a robust e-commercce application that is stable and highly usable. In addition, the dashCommerce community is one of the most active communities in the open source / .NET space. DashCommerce has been available since early 2008 and has been used in countless online stores and is wildly successful.

Dashcommerce Hosting Requirements

Windows XP Pro or Higher
Internet Information Service (IIS)
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (Minimum)
ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 3.0

Dashcommerce core features

Order Notification System (email)
Configurable Tax Rates and Shipping rates
Drop-In Themes / Skinning
Drop-In Configurable Shipping providers
Configurable Content Management System (unlimited pages)
Compatible with multiple Payment gateways

Best Dashcommerce Hosting provider

Arvixe.com is awarded the best dashcommerce hosting for both tech compatibility and server uptime. Arvixe is also one of the best Asp.net hosting provider with fully support over lots of popular asp.net projects like Nopcommerce, Dotnetnuke, Asp.net staterkits etc. With Arvixe Asp.net hosting plan you get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited Sql Server database. Their hosting is backend by a professional team that has years experience in Asp.net development.

Read Arvixe reviews
Visit www.arvixe.com

Dashcommerce related articles and resources

Dashcommerce vs Nopcommerce

Both Dashcommerce and Nopcommerce are top rated .net e-commerce packages and there's always comparison between them, so which package is better?

Code project – Open source feature is for both projects, but definitely nopcommerce update more frequently while dashcommerce almost stopped updating these days
Structures – If you have compared the package structure on your website, you will found dashcommerce is much easier and clean, dashcommerce is ideal choice for start user and nopcommerce is definitely better for a large and professional ecommerce solution
Support – Although both official sites setup a discussion forum but definitely nopcommerce doing better and much more famous to people. Since dashcommerce almost stopped the update, there's less and less support available.

Dashcommerce team almost stopped the software further development and support. If you check their official site you should have found there's no newer version update since from the first release. On the other hand, nopcommerce is supported by a huge community and updated frequently for bug fix and new features development. Powered by lots of modules/templates, you can create any kind store site using this platform. From web hosting side, many providers even highlight their service by supporting nopcommerce.

Conclusion, if you're going to setup a large e-commerce store and wish to get fast and professional support, nopcommerce is your better choice. Read Nopcommerce review.

Best Budget Web Hosting

Budget Hosting Brief View

Budget hosting is abut price consideration that a hosting service offered at low cost and applicable by tight budget, Budget web hosting is designed specially for starter websites that're not yet ready for a higher hosting solutions. Normally a budget hosting plan provides limited support to some crucial features such as number of websites, database and disk space etc.

Best Budget Web Hosting Providers

There're lots of budget hosting plans on internet in many areas. Upon evaluation on price, plan features, server speed and customer support service, we picked up the best over 20+ popular brands. Check out following then select the best one that fulfill your needs!

Best Budget Hosting – Arvixe

Brand: Arvixe Price: $2.80/mo Rating: A+

Arvixe is awarded the best budget hosting provider for great technical features and fast web servers. Only $4.0/mo and you get unlimited space /bandwidth plus a free domain registration as well as unlimited mysql database. If singup two years upfront, we get 30% discount using coupon code "clue30", final deal is reduced to $2.80/mo!

Differ all other cheap hosting providers, arvixe setup their hosting server with newest hardware production and host in world class datacenters to generate the best performance. You also get free website migration opportunity in case you're worried about data loss when transfering from another service. Further more, the arvixe support is all over the country to accept your support request.

Visit www.Arvixe.com for budget web hosting plans!

Best Budget Hosting – iPage

Brand: iPage Price: $1.99/mo Rating: A+

iPage is awarded the best budget hosting service with the lowest price. Their people are current offering promotional price $1.99/mo with free domain name, unlimited emails and mysql database plus over $400 free bonus including search engine credits and site building service.

iPage serves over 1000000 world wide websites and thousands of new websites are being hosted with their service. Instead of optimizing on single side service, ipage cares about the overal reliability and keep system health. With their Vdeck hosting control panel, you're able to manage billing, domain registration, database, website and all stuff under the same management GUI.

Visit www.iPage.com for budget hosting details!

Best Budget Hosting – Justhost

Brand: Justhost Price: $2.25/mo Rating: A

Justhost is a featured budget hosting provider for their professional tech support and service management. Justhost people deeply revised the cpanel software to make it a central software for all service management including customer profiles, domain registration, billing, website and email. You can even customize the categories by your preference. Need more? follow this justhost coupon to get up to 50% discount!

Justhost budget plan core features:

unlimited space and bandwidth
unlimited domain hosting
Cpanel hosting with 24 x 7 support
Unlimited email and database support

Visit www.Justhost.com to check the plan details

How do we rate the best budget hosting service?

To rate the best hosting provider is not so easy, especially when referring to something cheap. In order to select the best budget hosting service, following check points are strictly followed

Pricing – Price is absolutely the first view or else it's something beyond the topic. The budget host service should be under $4/mo at least with all necessary offers like domain registration, database support and friendly hosting control panel etc.
Server Uptime – Quality is actually most important consideration for hosting service. When you purchase something you always want to get expected service and support. The server uptime should be guaranteed for 99% at least and support should be available via multiple channels for instant communication.
Reputation – Check if the company offers problematic service. Regardless the cheap, if you can't get a decent service but have to deal with lots of issues such as down time or technical issues etc, you should change to another service.

There're more to cheak around. Generally speaking, you can't really expect too much because of the little paying. In case you run into any problem, check first if you have really outgrowed the service.

Advantages with a budget hosting

Absolutely, you will save a certain money with a budget hosting solution. It's an ideal choice if you're not ready for a higher level plan. For those who just wish to launch a simple website without too much traffic, budget hosting plan is the primary choice.

Secondly, for a start user who is not quite familiar with hosting stuff, budget hosting plan is the perfect way to go, you don't have to spend too much in order to learn hosting stuff and worry about further hosting problems. If you're just use hosting for practicing, a budget hosting plan is necessary.

Disadvantage with budget hosting

The major disadvantage is the reliability and service quality. Generally, you get many limits under a budget hosting plan such as space, traffic and cpu limit etc, when your website is growing more and more popular, budget hosting is definitely not suitable any more. If you like to put up a heavy traffic website such as ecommerce solution then you should not choose budget hosting plan.

Best Cloud Hosting Review

Cloud hosting introduction

What exactly cloud hosting is? Cloud hosting is based on cloud computing technologies that allow unlimited number of machines to act as one system. Traditional hosting solutions (shared or dedicated) are configured on a single server only while cloud hosting service is powered by server farms from multiple network and even from multiple locations on the planet. The cloud server resources can be unlimited such as space or RAM etc to power any size web app.

Theoretically speaking, the website on cloud hosting platform is 100% uptime guaranteed unlike the traditional hosting which is based single server setup.

Best Cloud Hosting Provider

After reviewed a plenty of cloud web hosting providers based price, scalability, performance and editorial live experience, bluehost is awarded the best cloud hosting provider from side by side comparison.

Bluehost cloud hosting uses a highly advanced virtualization system which guarantees dedicated server resources for each website on the cloud. This means even smaller websites would benefit from dedicated server-like services at a very affordable price. Bluehost offers pre-defined cloud hosting packs, which are designed to accommodate any type of web project.

Bluehost actually provides cloud hosting service from each class plans including shared, VPS and dedicated server. For affordable and best price value, the bluehost cloud VPS is the best choice based following advantages

Openstack & KVM technologies
Latest versions of CentOS, Apache, PHP, MySQL
Dynamic server resources upgrade
Instant provisioning
Gigabit uplink with a guaranteed 20mbit connection
Fully redundant network with no single point of failure
Improved cpanel and cloud control panel
Mobile system control

Visit www.Bluehost.com for cloud hosting plans!

Bluehost setup their own data center facilities to have full control on every side. Either the data center hardware or software setup or hosting server setup are based newest program. Each cloud account resources scalable dynamically upon requests.

What really makes bluehost cloud outstanding is their management system. Besides regular WHM and cpanel, people get a cloud panel for server management. RAM/CPU/DISK/IO usage etc are all displayed by graphic view. Customer can handle server upgrade directly without support required. The most important part is about data protection. Even the server is down for some reason, we still have access to its data remotely. The management center is 100% mobile compatible so customer can access to it anywhere with internet access.

Further more, blue host people provides friendly and knowlegeable tech support whenever you call in. In this way, you don't have to deal with a single problem by yourself, you're powered by a great team behind. If you're considering going cloud, bluehost is just the perfect start.

Advantage of Cloud Hosting

The cloud computing technology is highly scalable and extensible. With traditional single server hosting, everything is limited like cpu, memory and disk space etc and you have to deal with all stuff step by step which is very time consuming like migration, upgrading. But you can avoid all of these from a cloud hosting environment, the downtime can be minimumed to zero. Uptime is the major advantage with a cloud hosting. Check below for a featured list view

Highest performance guaranteed
Guaranteed server resources (CPU, RAM)
Redundant data storage
No single point of failure
Website growth flexibility

Cloud technology allows to manage and increase available system resources on the cloud automatically, and this sets cloud hosting apart from traditional hosting providers who are confined to the physical limitations of a server. There're always various limitations on traditional hosting servers such as 10% CPU usage or 50000 inodes limitation etc. In case your website reached the limit, you'll be suspended or warned.

The story is different from cloud web hosting environment because additional resources can be added automatically to deal with high loads. You don't have to worry about service suspension or any kind warning from service provider.

Weakness of cloud hosting

Absolutely, everything has some weakness from the start. The major weakness of cloud hosting is security. Because the data is delivered to the entire network not a single hard drive, it's hard to have full control for its safety. When its backed up on some nodes and the device with weak protection, hackers can easily crack it. Another thing is when transfer to another service provider, the data is still kept on old network which is bad. For further reading on this topic you can refer to this article.

Best Nginx Web Hosting

Nginx Brief Introduction

Nginx is a HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server. Nginx is an Russia project which is originally designed for the 3rd busiest website in Russia – RamblerMedia.com. It has been running for more than five years on many other heavily loaded websites on the globe.

There's very few web hosts announced to use nginx for web server solution since it's not yet officially integrated into the most popular control panel softwares. However, many IT or web hosting companies are powered by nginx from backend for loading balance and security related setup. Nginx and Apache are golden partner for high performance and secure web server configuration.

Nginx official site: http://nginx.org

Best Nginx Hosting

There's no standard nginx web hosting plan under a hosting environment. What you really should look for is a good vps or dedicated server hosting provider. For easy and fast nginx service, A2hosting is the best choice by editorial reviews and experience. The company provides quick nginx setup for live production server purpose with strong tech support. No matter if you just want to use for development or business purpose, The a2 server can support your web requirements side by side.

The a2 company provides a installer for nginx quick setup. Customers don't have to deal with manual operation and worry about any misconfiguration. The a2 installer be able to configure lots of services automatically including control panel service such as ispConfig and zpanel etc.

Besides this unbeatable feature, a2 hosting provides very scalable server solutions to meet with your different hosting requirements. Your server specs can be upgraded/downgraded easily with no data loss. The VPS provides multi choice for server OS, DC locations and other crucial server setups.

Why Nginx Hosting?

Being one of the most reputable web server softwares, Nginx is well known for many sides comparison among competitors.

Light weight – Nginx has pretty small size like the most popular web server software apache. Besides the small size, nginx is very user friendly with the configurations, it has less configuration files and all other stuff.
High performance – Nginx is developed to deal with heavy traffic websites that consume lots of server resources. When you got a such site, nginx is simply the only choice comparing to all other solutions.
Stable – Nginx is approved to be stable and reliable web server after several years' live server deployment. With loading balance support as well as proxy support, you can keep your server in healthy state professinoally. Especially when you're running an busy E-commerce website, such features will keep your business always online!
Open source – Nginx is open sourced and compatible with most modern OS including windows and linux. Downloads/docs are all available from official sites in multiple languages.

From a survey, Nginx is used by over 25% of the top 10,000 busiest sites, including Netflix, Facebook, Groupon, LivingSocial, TechCrunch, Dropbox and WordPress, as well as by over 12% of the entire Internet web sites population. They're either used directly for web server solution or load balancer.

If you're considering to use nginx, there's a good installation guidance for CentOS server. Check out this rackspace page for details.

What would be the weakness of Nginx?

The only disadvantage with nginx is it's still not deployed into the most popular hosting control panel such as cpanel thus it's still mainly running on vps and dedicated server. If you like to get nginx running under cpanel or such you will have to debug yourself, there's no official support available yet. I think this is why nginx still not accepted by most hosting providers.

There's a cpanel plugin for Nginx called "nginxcp" which is dedicated for nginx and cpanel integration. From user experience, it's approved to work perfect but there's still some work to be done in order to have it running on hosting server.

Best Tomcat Web Hosting

Tomcat Introduction

Tomcat is a web server project by Apache group. It's most well known as Apache Tomcat or Jakarta Tomcat. Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. It is intended to be a collaboration of the best-of-breed developers from around the world. Tomcat implements the Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages (JSP) specifications from Sun Microsystems, and provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java code to run.

Best Tomcat Hosting Provider

Tomcat web server is mostly available from VPS and above hosting solutions where people have root permission to configure system level services. For shared tomcat web hosting, arvixe and mochahost are the best by editorial experience. No matter if you are concerned for price or quality, you can find perfect solutions from the two web hosts.

For a cheap and reliable tomcat web hosting, Mochahost is the best choice. The mochahost service is fully tomcat compatible with low priced plans. The Mochahost tomcat hosting features go as following:

Full support frameworks and applications such as Sping, Struts, JSF, Hibernate, JavaMail and all popular applications!
Heap size max memory sets to 1024MB(1GB) which is more than enough for any type JSP web applications
Tomcat restart tool available in you hosting control panel.
Hosting fee starts $2.45/mon! 30 days money back guarantee and 180 days risk free!

Mochahost offers multiple tomcat hosting plans vary with your different hosting requirements. Via the start plan you are hosted under shared JVM while it's private from uppler plans. Mochahost even got windows server support for tomcat if you're not comfortable with linux!

Visit www.Mochahost.com and check tomcat hosting plan details

Looking for enterprise class tomcat hosting plan? Arvixe is the best choice for its powerful server setup and rich feature hosting plans. Priced at $9/mo you will be hosted on a dedicated tomcat hosting server where you can take full advantages of the service with private JVM support.

Unlike all other cheap solutions, the arvixe tomcat hosting focus on performance and security. There're not too many tomcat hosting providers who can setup the service as dedicated on hosting server. If you need high performance and secure web server, arvixe will be the best choice.

Go to www.Arvixe.com/linux_hosting for tomcat hosting details

What's good of Tomcat?

Open source – Tomcat is open sourced project and you can fully recompile the package in the way you prefered. Especially for intranet server setup, IT technicians can easily setup a secure and high performance web server.
Great Support – The Tomcat development introduced SUN technologies and it's been going to perfect from each release.There's big support community where developers are very active.
Low system requirements – Tomcat is a light weight web server and little system resource consumption generated when running.
Scalability – Tomcat is the best choice for JSP script debug, every programmer will be able to customize tomcat server to meet the actual development requirements.

The current tomcat release is 7.xx with multiple components for different development requirements.

Apache tomcat official: http://tomcat.apache.org/

Top Apache Web Hosting

Apache Introduction & Hosting

Apache – The world's NO.1 and most popular web server! The goal of apache project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

Apache is sharing about half of the web server market and leading in multiple areas for it's cross platform compatibility and great performance. Especially for the competitive hosting industry, apache is offered by almost all newly setup hosting brands for low cost hosting solutions.

Top Apache Hosting Providers

Most hosting services today are linux based and apache is the standard web server software. Although Apache can be deployed to almost all systems, for reliability and security consideration. LAMP system is the most popular environment for most webhosts. Because of this, We highly recommend from the top linux hosting providers. Especially the following providers that're verified by editorial experience:

Best Enterprise Class Apache Hosting – Inmotion

Inmotion is awarded the best apache hosting for enterprise class solutions. Inmotion Hosting provides leading performance and fast connection based their advanced hardware setup and huge network. Powered by both east and west coast data centers with max speed zone configuration, the Inmotion server is twice faster than most their competitors. Especially when you need cheap hosting solutions, you can not find a better hosting other than IMH. For only $5.99/mo you get unlimited SSD storage space and access to unlimited other services.

Visit www.InmotionHosting.com for apache hosting plans!

Best Developer Friendly Apache Hosting – Arvixe

Arvixe linux hosting service is 100% LAMP based and based standard cpanel software. Arvixe apache web hosting is extremely optimized to work with different hosting rquirements, thus different users/developers be able to find perfect solutions at arvixe service. By offering high quality service at low costs. Arvixe apache web hosting plans come with unlimited space and bandwidth for only $4/mo to begin with. The arvixe web server is SSD powered and apache tomcat is also available by extra costs.

Visit www.Arvixe.com for more details

Best Secure Apache Hosting – Hostgator

Hostgator is one of the world's largest LAMP hosting providers that's backend by the largest datacenter from north American. By utilizing the best datacenter service, Hostgator is secured deeply from both hardware and software ends to deal with common attacks such as virus and ddos attacking. Hostgator is rule maker for cpanel hosting service because of its huge business, a lot of hosting companies followed hostgator to setup their own plans.

Visit www.HostGator.com for more details

How should you choose the best apache hosting plan?

Even from your most desired apache hosting provider, there will be multiple hosting solutions. You have to evaluate the plan features carefully and learn about your website requirement for example the amount of disk space, database requirement, access level of hosting service etc. Only after reviewed personal requirement side by side, then you can compare out the best hosting plan.

What's good of apache?

Cross platform support – Since from the born of apache, it's been designed to compatible with the most modern system including Unix and Windows. You don't have to prepare a standard server system in order to use apache, you can install it directly from your personal computer!
Secure Server – Apache web server is quite simple and secure, all configurations are file based, you can manage the extension and configurations directly via notepad without third party softwares.
Open source – Apache is 100% open sourced. If you're system administrator or developer, you can customize apache source codes to fulfill your actual production environment.
Scalability – Apache is not just a web server for http, you can also use it for loading balance and proxy server. You can also develop a third party module to meet your project requirements.

For more features and newest information you can refer to apache official site http://httpd.apache.org/ to check more.

Popular Apache environment names

For apache, there're several environment available: XAMPP(Apache+MySQL+PHP+PERL). WAMP(Windows+Apache+Mysql+PHP). LAMP(Linux+Apache+Mysql+PHP), No matter what environment it is you will found Apache+PHP is always the golden partner. Especially when you like to offer hosting service to people, you will find it's pretty easy to deploy a LAMP server by taking advantages of various existing products like cpanel, WHMCS etc.

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