Thursday

Free Web Hosting

Where to find Free Web Hosting

Free web hosting companies are aplenty, ranging from the larger ones such as 007sites and 0catch, to the smaller and more obscure ones that lurk in the corners of cyberspace. At first look, free web hosting seems like a promising deal: a free web host that supports your website, letting you effectively earn money and conduct business without any costs involved. However, let us take a look at the implications, advantages and disadvantages of using free web hosting.

Free web host providers are generally supported by ads; banner ads, pop-up ads, text link ads, top/bottom ads, frame ads, are all standard fare of free web hosting websites. The pertinent question is: do you want these ads to be displayed prominently on your website. The answer really lies in what you intend to use your website for.

A business website, one designed to appeal to clients and attract customers would definitely not want these advertisements spoiling not only their business image, but effectively driving clients, disgusted by the pop-up spam, away. Even for a personal blog, these advertisements can occasionally get on your nerves. Is the few dollars a month that you save worth the frustration and irritation of incessant advertising appearing on your website?

Reliability and uptime are keywords in the web hosting industry, of which free web hosts tend to lack both. Free web hosts usually lack a dedicated customer service. This means that your website might just disappear in the middle of the night and it can take up to weeks for it to get back online. This means a loss of visitors, traffic, and possibly some regular visitors may think that your website has been shut down. The consequences for a website, especially a business website, are unthinkable.

Does this mean that there is no role for free web hosting for a proper, serious website and budding website owner? The role of free web hosting is not to replace their paid counterparts, but rather to serve as a testing ground for new website owners. Free web hosting allow the website owner to get an idea of the website, and to allow him to experiment with new ideas with no consequence. Hosting a site on a free web host, even for just a week or two, can allow the web owner to collect real time information and data without signing a 12 or 24 month contract with a paid service.

You can obtain free web hosting at almost any provider available on the internet. A quick search in Google will easily turn up hundreds of free web hosting providers. How do we pick the best free web host? A good way to decide is to compare the number of advertisements that will be run on your website, as well as the amount of space they give you. This can range from anywhere between 50MB to 700MB. With the numerous choices available you can take your time to pick which free web hosting program suits you the best. Ultimately, if you are moving on to a paid service, the free web host you choose is not of crucial importance. However, getting a good free web host is afterall beneficial for your website publicity.


Wordpress Web Hosting Companies

Wordpress is a publishing platform for Internet websites which is popularly employed by various web hosting companies on the Internet. It is the "interface", so to speak, through which website owners are allowed to modify and change their website. Wordpress makes things easier for website owners to carry out their own modification without needing to work at the code level. The advantages of Wordpress are plenty, as it is a program that focuses on "aesthetics, web standards, and usability", as quoted from Wordpress.org.

Wordpress is also highly customizable with various addons modules which provide a large variety of features. The huge community as well as the open-sourced addons available is an advantage enjoyed by few, if any other publishing platform. WordPress supports categories, modification of the core files as it is open source, and plugins for even more customization. Of course, there are various other publishing platforms available, but with the industry dominance enjoyed by Wordpress, being the most popular and well-designed platform, it is no wonder that a budding website owner would want to use Wordpress web hosting companies to support his new website.

Here is a list of popular Wordpress web hosting companies:

Blue Host, at bluehost.com is an industry leader in web hosting by any standard. With web over 1500 GB offered in website storage, free domain names, high bandwidth allocation, guaranteed 99% uptime, it is no wonder that Bluehost has become a tour de force in the web hosting market.

Dream Host allows you to install and run Wordpress with just a click of the mouse. Getting your website up and running is possibly the most daunting task facing any new website owner, and Dream Host allows Wordpress to be instantly synchronized with your web host. With 1 TB in disk space available and 10 TB of bandwidth, it is a good choice for any business or perosnal website owner.

Media Temple is a wordpress web hosting company using clustered hosting platform which offers benefits that standard web hosts do not. Being hosted by a clustered hosting platform, your website or blog will always be up no matter how much traffic is redirected to it. A sudden burst of traffic or a malicious denial of service attack can no longer take down your blog for hours on end while your web host sorts things out.

Laughing Squid at laughingsquid.net is an independant wordpress web hosting company operating out of San Francisco. Ran by open source programmers, they provide various addon modules and Wordpress mods unavailable anywhere else. Running a dependable, friendly and secure web hosting service, they may not be the biggest corporation in the industry, but they are by no means any inferior.

These web hosts are just a few of the many web hosting companies which provide Wordpress support. There are many other web hosts which provide similar support for the popular publishing platform Wordpress. The most important thing is to find the most suitable web hosting company and plan before you decide on which web host to use. With the variety available in the market, finding the perfect wordpress web hosting company is no longer just a pipe dream.


Hosting for Social Networks


Social networks have a unique hosting requirement. They need huge amounts of bandwidth to support the large amount of multimedia being shared in the network, as well as a vast amount of web space needed to host the various pictures, videos and text documents that belong on each user's profile page. This is mainly the unique requirement that social networks have. Another special need that social network websites have is that they have a high tendency to lag due to high latency. This is because of the large amount of bandwidth leaving the web server at any one time. Thus, when picking a web host for social networks, it is vital to keep these in mind before you select a web host.

Selecting a web host with a high bandwidth is vital. It is likely that you will not be able to find any web host that has such high bandwidth normally, you probably will have to get a special arrangement or special web hosting plan for you social network website. Having a high bandwidth cap is of utmost concern, you do not want your users to start leaving your network in droves when it goes down in the middle of the month due to a capped bandwidth. This is the same for the latency. Keeping the latency low by using a fast connection and low bandwidth is vital to keeping your website lag free. A common problem with most social networking websites is that it is very slow to load. This not only makes your visitors lose patience but it also hurts your advertising and other media that you need to show on the website.

A huge web space is not too difficult to find. There are various web hosts which even offer up to 1 TB of web space for you to use. With such a huge webs pace, backup is of paramount concern as any server crash can literally destroy your entire social networking site in an instant. Of course, having a large web space is needed to provide the space for your users to upload their files, photos, comments, and videos to your website. This can help increase the popularity of your website. Of course, a good content management system is vital to any website of this scale. Picking a good content management system such as Joomla can help you arrange and organize the huge amount of data in your website easily and quickly.

Ultimately, picking your web host for a website of this scale is of utmost importance. Any error in doing so can not only compromise your entire social network endeavor, but also cost you a large sum of money. There are many potential web hosts that you can use, all that matters is for you to pick one. However, pick wrongly and the consequences can be unthinkable. Use the above pointers to help you choose a suitable and functional web host. This can just bring your social networking website over to success.

Best Web Host For Images

A picture speaks a thousand words, but takes up at least 4 times as much web space. Yet images are often important parts of our blog, our website and even our Internet experience. Finding a good web host for images is an important yet often overlooked part of starting a website. Even if you are not starting a website, there are many reasons why you would like to host an image on the internet. For instance, you may want to share it with someone else, and thus the internet can be used to share a photo album; all you need to do is to get a good web host for images. Images add flavor to any dull chunk of text, and can enable the web master to communicate on a level that goes beyond mere text. A simple illustration can often explain something far better than text can ever hope to. Thus, it is clear that getting a good web host for images is an important consideration.

What then makes a good web host for images? Apart from having a large amount of web space as well as minimal downtime, there is little that separates the various image hosts. A good image web host will have a large maximum image file size or no maximum at all. This allows you to upload larger images with higher resolution to share with others. With a better quality image the pictures that you share will also look better. Good image web hosts also host the image for a decent period of time, perhaps over 40 days. This is because you wouldn't want to share a picture with someone only to find out that it is gone.

Here is a list of good web hosts for images.

FlickCabin is an image web host where you can submit your images anonymously and hotlink the images to eBay auctions, blogs, websites and wherever you need them. You do not even need to register in order to get the service. Being completely anonymous can often be a benefit when you are submitting and hosting sensitive images. With no maximum file size and bandwidth, FlickCabin is a good choice when choosing a web host for images.

FileAve is another popular image web host which provides a free image hosting service. FileAve gives free members a 50 MB image storage space and 150 MB Bandwidth per day. All file types are allowed on FileAve which allows you to host even streaming videos on FileAve. With a 5 MB maximum file size, you may be unable to upload certain files or images, especially the high resolution ones. However, the option to upload .avi, .wmp, in addition to the usual .gif, .png, and .jpeg image file types is definitely a huge advantage over other web hosts for images.

These are just two of the many available image hosts on the internet. Each host has a different selling point and different things they offer to subscribers. Search around for the one that suits your needs the most, after all, if the service does not satisfy you, you can always look for a new one.

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