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Blog - Web Hosting Reviews and Guidance - Page 7

There're multiple choice to start your web hosting business. The direct and most simple solution is to become reseller of a reputable hosting service. You also have choice to use VPS or dedicated server then offer hosting space to clients. But what would be the best choice? What's the pros and cons in using reseller hosting and VPS server? We have compiled a list of comparison between the two options and check who provides the best service.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is a type of hosting service where you get authority to sell server space from existing hosting service. Normally, you get a client management system and billing management system. What you need to prepare is a website for service promotion.

VPS Hosting

VPS is simply a small server where you get root access for side by side customization. There're both managed and unmanaged vps server provided depends your needs. From tech sight, you can use vps server for any kind purpose.

If you plan to launch your own web hosting service and looking for the best solution, reseller and VPS are always top considerations. But before you go, let's learn about the two products from indepth reviews

VPS vs Reseller Hosting – Ease of Use

Absolutely reseller hosting wins for ease of use comparison. With reseller hosting service, what you just need to do is website promotion for more orders. The technical stuff such as server setup, optimization and security etc are all handled by uplevel hosting support. They will also handle account backup and tech support. You can easily decide what to offer to people based the existing features from uplevel hosting.

For vps server, you have to configure everything from scratch like website creation, server optimization and software installation and all other required tools for web hosting business. Basically, you have to be some kind of technical and be skillful in system management to configure a vps server for hosting business purpose. Unless you have great experience or got a nice team to deal with the technical part, vps is not suggested for web hosting offer.

VPS vs Reseller Hosting – Costs

Reseller hosting wins again with regarding to costs. Reseller hosting plans normally starts with about $20/mo and everything is ready for live hosting service. You need following softwares at least to start hosting service: Control panel, billing system, firewall and monitoring software. All these softwares are ready from a reseller service and no extra fees required. However, you have to prepare everything for VPS server and each software will result in monthly fees. The more service you add the more costs it will be. You must have a clear plan and evaluate carefully between investment and revenue.

VPS vs Reseller Hosting – Level of Access

VPS wins for level of server access. From traditional reseller hosting, what you get is a simple client management panel and billing management panel. What you can edit is all from control panel software, you don't get server root access because that's the property of uplevel hosting company. You're playing more like an advanced client where you can manage multiple sub clients.

Things are completely different for vps server. Because you have root access to setup everything, you fully understand how's going and be able to make instant changes. You don't have to wait long for hosting company assistance. It's extremely helpful when urgent support needed from customer end but hosting company support is busy!

VPS vs Reseller Hosting – Scalability

VPS provides more scalability in case your business grows further. Normally, there's account numbers limitation for reseller hosting service. After you used up the allocation, you have to upgrade to higher plan or create another reseller account which is pretty unprofessional for management.

But VPS is scalable for itself. Some main features like disk storage, RAM, CPU and other resources can be added on the fly. In case there's really a need for dedicated server, the migration is pretty streight and fast. You won't loose a single service.

VPS vs Reseller Hosting – Brand promotion

If you are going to promote your business for brand purpose, reseller hosting is not the right choice. With reseller hosting, all your customer accounts are located on uplevel hosting servers where you don't have direct access for server end modifications and in case there's server end problems such as overloading or hacking, you have nothing to do but to wait for solutions from hosting support.

Via VPS, you manage all properties by your own. You can tighten your server security via all available resources by following professional practice. In this way you can ensure the best server performance and security as much as possible. What most important is you will learn how to manage a healthy server and gain experience for further growth. You can't get such experience from traditional reseller hosting.

Best VPS & Reseller Hosting Plan

After reviewed the top 10 reseller and VPS hosting providers, arvixe(www.arvixe.com) is awarded the best choice based server features, price and addon services. The arvixe vps and reseller hosting plans are almost provided the same except for monthly fees. Arvixe VPS and reseller plans both provide the following out standing features

• Windows & Linux Server platforms
• One free domain name for life
• Unlimited Hosting accounts opportunity
• Unlimited Mysql/Sql server databases
• Free SSL certificate for life
• Free cpanel/websitepanel pre setup
• Free whmcs billing software license
• Free sitebuilder and softaculous installer

It's hard to get both windows and linux reseller hosting opportunities and more hard to get same offer for vps server. You can make full use of arvixe vps server for reseller purpose because all needed tools have provided like control panel and billing software etc. A good start means half sucess, arvixe would be your lucky star for web hosting success!

Visit arvixe official site for full details http://www.arvixe.com

Hosting server end backup is quite essential for urgent data recovery. In case you do not make your local backup or you can't upload it in quick time, server end service will give big help. However, you might have learnt the importance of backup service and looking for such hosting provider to keep your data in safe place. However, have you learnt the backup policy will vary a lot from different hosting companies? We have compiled a list of common difference among popular hosting providers regarding to their backup policies

Full Daily Backup

This would be the greatest solution for user needs. A full daily backup service will backup all data in customer account including website files, email/ftp accounts, databases and even access logs. In this way, all your account data will be copied to backup drive with time lables for future retrival purpose. It's perfect for clients but not so good for hosting providers because they will have to prepare a big backup system and do lots of daily works to ensure it's performing properly and no existing services will be affected. Daily backup is normally handled at midnight when the least traffic being generated by users.

Weekly Backup

Daily backup will simply keep lots of duplicated data if there's no change at all with your account. In order to save space, some providers will backup on weekly basis. Depends your data change frequency they might backup once or twice a week over your account for different services like emails, database. Some popular hosting brands like ixwebhosting is doing weekly backup and even on monthly basis for some services.

Partial Backup

Logically, this would be the best solution for either clients or hosting providers. The partial backup will only work once you made any change to your account. For example if you have deleted a file or made any update to your existing database, the backup system will instantly take a backup of the old ones. This solution will consume the least disk storage and system resources. If you never made a change to your site then there's no backup at all. However, the backup system will be complicated to setup and you must ensure the accuracy or else you don't know when it will go wrong. Most of the time, hosting providers will have to program their own softwares to handle the task automatically.

About Retrivable Periods

As explained for above different backup policies, you can retrieve backups on daily, weekly or monthly basis. However, for most of the cases you can only get up to 30 days back. Because backup system will take lots of space and system resource but hosting companies are almost non profitable for this service. They can not always keep your backup data on server end. Once your old backup reached the preset life cycle, it will be relaced by new backups. With editorial experience, the actual backup people can retrieve from hosting service is up to 15 days. Many companies only keep it up to 10 days in order to allocate more resources for live web services.

Maybe you have worried about your data security since they kept your backup in their system. Actually they won't keep your backup data for long time so there's no security issue to your account. If you no longer need their hosting service, they will clear out everything once your passed the due date.

About restoration fee

What happens when you request backup from hosting server? You might have the option to restore directly in hosting account or you might be asked to pay some fees. You absolutely don't feel good to pay for this service because that's your data and you have full rights to it. However, please remember sometimes the charge is reasonable. First, hosting company did great efforts to keep your data in safe place. Unless it's a server end failure, there's really no reason for them to provide backup service especially when it's a non profitable service. If your account data is quite important, your local backup is a MUST. Not just about retrival fees, if hosting server crashed with no backup left, you can still get your site alive again from another space.

Who can provide quality backup service with fantastic customer service? Arvixe is the best by our editorial experience if you have read our data loss story. They will backup your account on daily basis with fast response if you want to recover a specific backup from their system. If you highly rely on server end backup services, arvixe is your best choice.

Visit arvixe for hosting plans http://www.arvixe.com

Every service is provided in different ways from different providers. Especially for web hosting service, each hosting plans come with different features and price. Based our editorial experience & reviews, one of the mostly complained points is hidden fees. You might get the hosting for $1/mo but it might cost you another $10 or $20 bucks for some features that you thought should be included for free. So are we playing tricks with hosting company? What kind of fees might be hidden behind? We have compiled a list of some typical hidden fees in web hosting industry.

Free Domain Name

More and more hosting service provides free domain name registration or transfer from old registrar. Free domain is absolutely a spotlight to attract users eyeballs because everyboddy like to save investment. However you need to keep in mind not all of them are top level domain registrar, most hosting providers are just reseller of the real registrars like godaddy, namecheap etc. Hosting companies must find a point to be profitable. You might find it pretty easy to get registered, but in case the service doesn't work properly and you have to transfer to other service, you always need to beg a lot to transfer over the domain. Generally, you will be charged more than regular domain registration and probably you have to pay for the used periods fee.

Multiple Domain Hosting Support

Many hosting providers announce to support multiple domains or simply unlimited for everything. But the term "unlimited domains" is really vague. We got experience with several "unlimited domain support" hosting providers, but when we want to start a new site after added the first domain, it's asking for credit card details. After contacted cutomer support, they provided us this explanation "You can add unlimited domain names to point to your existing site, if you're going to add a new domain name for new website purpose, it'll be charged". Wola! What a smart explanation! What can I say for such service? So if you really need to host multiple websites under the same account, please make sure it's doable by contacting pre-sales representative.

Money back guarantee

Every hosting group provides a period of refund policy. Many people might think they should get full refund for every service in hosting account. However, some services are non refundable based how your providers policy. For example some hosting providers will deduct setup fees. And if you have taken the free domain opportunity, you will be charged for registration fee. Most terms are included in their TOS or AUP but most of us simply ignored it. It's always good to check out such terms before we submit payment details because it will reduce lots of potential problems.

Daily Backup

Backup is quite essential to ensure fast recovery from data disaster. Earlier of this year we experienced the worst data loss and we have to contact support for assistance because we have not any local backup. It's grateful arvixe people responded fastly with needful help. However, not every hosting company is so kind. Based our editorial experience, many hosting providers charge for server end backups. They announce to backup your account daily but you have to pay to get the data and it's not adverised anywhere! What worse is it's always charged per request. If you got a backup from hosting but found it not right then request for it again, you'll be charged again as well.

Cancellation Fee

One day, you find your hosting is no longer suitable with your website requirements and have to find a new provider. Then you contact support for account closure, however you're told to pay extra to get account closed or else they will not take actions. No matter how much the fee is but you're charged and you're not happy for it.

First year only promotional price

Many hosting plans are provided via very competitive price, but you're charged much more when its due for renewal and probably there will be "renewal fee" included. It's common trick for most budget hosting providers. They do provide very low price to start with but you have to bear with high rate fees if you want to continue with it. What bad is if you have not used up the service and want to get money back, they will charge based the regular price not the promotional one!

As we see, it's not so easy to get a perfect web hosting service because of above mentioned hidden fees/rules. It's always wise to clear out your doubts with presales support. Most hosting TOS/AUP are much the same but it's still suggested read it carefully in case something goes wrong. Just remember you're paying to the service so you should know how it's working in as detail as possible.

Sometimes you just need a simple page for personal profile purpose. Because of the low requirement you don't have to research a lot for a high performance web hosting service. Instead, you can make full use of the available free website platforms. You will get a bunch list of such service from a simple google search. But which will be the best choice? We compiled a list of the top 5 free website platforms based editorial experience and user ratings from below. Take a look and select the best one that suit your needs.

NO.1 Blogger.com

Blogger(www.blogger.com) is officially operated by google group. It's firstly crated by Pyra Labs group in 1999 and merged into google in 2003. Blogger is one of the very first free blog platforms with the most popularity. From it's official report, the highest registration rate is over 1 million within one month. Till present, blogger is still the largest blog platform. You can use blogger for simple website creation, blog posting. It comes with a very powerful visual editor where you can make instant changes to your site without dealing with code behind. Blogger also has a great template source to help with your website customization. Just join with your google account!

NO.2 WordPress.com

Wordpress(www.wordpress.com) is the most popular blog platform that's managed by wordpress official team. Unlike all other website system, most core functions are provided from admin panel to help you create a powerful website. Some critical functinos like url structure, widgets, traffic analysis are all included as default. You can also define the website address whenever you like to change. In case you need to create multiple sites for different purpose, you can manage them all from the same admin side but don't have to sign up each site using different personal details. In case you would like to apply your own domain name, just register it directly in the backend then you can start your own site!

NO.3 Weebly.com

Weebly(www.weebly.com) is website builder service provider where you can drag/drop modules to the design panel for website creation. It provides both free and paid plans with different features. The free plan provides people basic functions for simple website creation. Unlike any other sitebuilder service that comes with lots of templates, you need to define most design by yourself from weebly panel such as page navigation, type of content etc. The big advantage of weebly sitebuilder is its 100% mobile device compatibility and simple usage. Once the template is selected, you just use the drag/drop modules for customization.

NO.4 Wix.com

Wix(www.wix.com) is also a type of sitebuilder service with both free and paid plans. The main difference is if you want to show their ads on your website. Paid plans also offer free domain registration and additional offers based the plan you choose. The wix sitebuilder service provides a bunch of templates in different categories. Just pick up the best one with you needs and start the building! However, you should note many templates are commercial version. You need to pay for such templates in case you need it. The wix sitebuilder is html5 based and all your data will be stored in its cloud storage for maximum accessability.

NO.5 Tumblr.com

Tumblr(www.tumblr.com) was opened in 2007 and currently owned by Yahoo! group. It's different from any existing blog platform, it's a featured light blogging site with well organization for content, social media and personality. Tumblr merged the advantages of traditional blog and social media site like facebook and twitter. You can follow and like other bloggers and articles by mouse clicking. Tumblr is 100% free to join and pretty easy to create your own website by following its guidance.

As we see, it's quite easy to launch your own website without paying. Especially when you have pretty low requirement for simple website creation, you can make full use of above free platforms and they will keep it free forever!

However, please note all your submited data on these free platforms can not be downloaded to your local computer. Means you can not transfer the website to anywhere else. If you got a paid hosting some day for better experience, you will have to start over again. So you need to evaluate if you really need the free service.

One day, you found you have added too many stuff to your site and need more reliable service to deal with, you might have to work days to move it over. If you need to go to paid hosting service in short periods, we highly suggest check out the best budget hosting service from ipage(www.ipage.com). Only $1.99/mo you can take full advantage of web hosting for any website purpose.

Coolhandle is one of the oldest web hosting companies one of the very few who doesn't over advertise their services. For the past 1.5 years, coolhandle has been our powering one of our partner site with pretty stable performance. Because of this, we rarely contact their support team for assistance. Thus we're not so sure how it goes on and hard to comment a word for it. However, we just got such experience with website problem so we're going to tell you how their people fix problems for clients.

About one year ago we did a very positive coolhandle review for their great features and performance. However, from last wednesday, our website failed to response and web server can't be pinged. I guess it's my network problem because my ISP always block some connections. I then connected my VPN account and try to trace the server. Unfortunately, it failed again after 10 local nodes. I also tried to ping/trace from third party site like dnsstuff and whois site, all failed. So finally I think it's server end problems and logon their support site for urgent assistance.

Unfortunately, their live support is offline(Live chat is always offline based our continuous monitoring) and I can't call phone support based my location. The only choice is to submit support form and wait their response. Since its a big urgent, I filled out the form in quick time and almost instantly I received helpdesk login credentials. I clicked the ticket link and suppose it will get me to the support area. Unfortunately, it just returned invalid login error and didn't provide a login box at all to enter the credentials! Since the support request is already sent, I guess they will handle it fastly for such issue. However, after 5 hours waiting, there's still no updates and I have to send notification again via support form. This time I get their response quickly in about 30 minutes. They said the server already migrated to new data center and provided me a new IP to update from domain registrar.

Surprisely, the new server connection is much much faster than the old one so I think they're doing good job. The DNS propagation is pretty quick too so I start to view how my site performs. Yes it's fast as expected. I then logged into the site admin for news update. But when I tried to publish, I get 404 not found error and such error will be displayed for whatever changes I want to apply. Since it's a wordpress site, I tried all solutions I can think of such as deactivate all plugins and switch to default theme etc but problems still not fixed. New articles can't be published, existing articles can't be updated and permalinks can't be updated. I then send another support request to coolhandle. I sent the support from 22:00 pm and got reply from the next morning. They said it's a security rule on server end and they just made a change for it, they suggest me try again. Yes, I can't publish new articles this time but they switched the permalinks to default value which is not I needed. I then tried to update with new structures but returned file not found error again! I also tried to manually apply rules via .htaccess but nothing worked. I then send support request again for the issue, no replying.. another request sent, still no reply. 3 days passed and no one replied. I can't bear with such slowness and moved the site to my another server account with about 30 minutes efforts.

What I learnt from Coolhandle Support?

As you see, I got very bad experience in dealing with the coolhandle support and finally forced me to change server space. Below is my basic conclusion to their service:

• Coolhandle support is not operating 24×7. As you see from my experience their live chat is always offline and ticket support is a bit slow. I'm not sure if they're just too busy for lack of support staff or just work during business hours but it's absolutely not good to clients in case there's problem occured like us.
• Their support structure is not well designed. Coolhandle is cpanel/whmcs based service. Users can submit ticket under client area based the design. But they use Kayako software for knowledge base and website form support is sent to this system. However, they don't provide people a login area to view tickets so you can't track how your support is going on.
• They don't follow up problems carefully. I sent the support requests and described several problems. However, their support just fixed one and ignored all others. After I send out further updates, they don't even reply at all.

More about Coolhandle Web Hosting

Coolhandle has been recognized reliable and advanced web hosting provider for their rich feature hosting plans and affordable costs. They take advantage of all leading equipments and technologies such as DELL server, Cloudflare and Cloudlinux platforms etc. They're always the very first to provide such support to clients. However, based our experience with their helpdesk, they're absolutely doing bad. They provide very limited support resources and most of the time you probably have no more choice but to wait. If you highly rely on hosting support in setting up your website, coolhandle is definitely not perfect choice. Instead, arvixe is our best recommendation for best web hosting support.

Go to arvixe site for best supported hosting plans! http://www.arvixe.com

Behind every successful web hosting service, there's one or more leading data centers. Are you pretty satsfied with your current host? Have you ever thought to take a tour to their office or data center space to check how is your server working? Thanks to our partners and hosting sponsors to provide us these gorgeous pictures of their DC and server. We have taken some typical photos of their structures for quick view.

Arvixe Data Center

Arvixe(www.arvixe.com) provides leading web hosting service and server plans. From official analysis, there're more than half million clients being supported by arvixe hosting. However, arvixe doesn't setup their own data center space. Instead, they ultilize server racks and networking from softlayer(www.softlayer.com). To be more exact, they put their hosting servers in softlayer Dallas and Huston DCs. Both data centers are multiple SAS 70 Type II Certified and all servers are fed power through an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS). Screenshot of their data center space like below:

Inmotion Hosting Data Centers

Inmotion Hosting(www.inmotionhosting.com) Operate two datacenters in Marina Del Rey, CA and Virginia Beach, VA. Inmotion is the only hosting provider with coast to coast connection ability. The provide max speed zone to ensure the best speed connection from anywhere of the country. Their leading technologies including N+2 or N+1 power systems with multiple battery and diesel power sources, RAID5 servers and BGP4 network. Their west coast datacenter is also the first class green data center that will reduce around 2000 tons carbon output.

Bluehost Data Centers

Unlike most other popular hosting providers, bluehost(www.bluehost.com) completely manage their own data center space in Utah. They operate total of 3 modern data centers with 12000+ ft space size for each. Their data centers were setup in 2011 to meet up with the next 30 years IT requirements. Bluehost only take up about 25% of the total space as revealed by Matt heaton. As bluehost is merged into endurance group. Their data center space will power more servers from hostgator, justhost and maybe more others. The hostgator almost completed migration to the space from its official announcement.

Greengeeks Data Center

Greengeeks(www.greengeeks.com) Operates two data centers that're located in Chicago, IL and Phoenix, AZ. They are equipped with raised floors, climate control, 24/7 security, fire suppression systems, water detection systems, UPS & generators. The greengeeks datacenters highlight themselves for 300% green, means zero negative effect to environment. It's pretty hard to find another data center facility that cares environment so much. Since from the beginning of greengeeks business, it's fully optimized to provide green services. Greengeeks is one of the very first hosting provider with green certification. More details about their data center can be found at http://greengeeks.com/about/data-center.php

Host your website from the right data center is crucial for your business success. Except for the most considered performance, the leading data centers come with extra security protection to avoid various virus and ddos attacks. We highly recommend above web hosts with leading data center specifications based our personal experience and editorial reviews.