Should You Purchase Cheap Hosting?

A website can be a very powerful tool for any business.  It is your ticket to cyberspace, allowing you to sell goods and services while connecting with an unlimited amount of potential clients.  Even if you do not intend on starting a business or have nothing to sell, a website can still give you the opportunity to effectively communicate with family and friends around the world.

Websites offer many benefits and everybody is looking to get online with one or more of their own.  This demand has resulted in a plethora of companies who are ready and waiting to provide you with a cheap web hosting plan.  While such a solution is attractive for obvious reasons, is it the right move for you?  Lets further examine the subject to help determine if a cheap hosting plan is worth your time and money.

Distinguishing Cheap from Inferior

With numerous companies offering service, defining “cheap” can be difficult.  While there are no standards, we will comfortably state that anything in between $5 to $8 per month qualifies as cheap hosting.  One can actually find plans from the $3 to $4 mark, although anything under that could leave you with limited options.  For instance, competitive hosting packages priced at $1 to $3 per month typically come with limited bandwidth and storage, less features and little to no database access.  This might be suitable for your personal site but isn’t nearly enough for someone looking to establish a small business.

The Disadvantages of Cheap Hosting

Your search for cheap hosting should be one that involves caution.  Some of the company’s providing an inexpensive service are able to do so by sacrificing on quality.  Even dedicated servers can be found for cheap at prices for low as $200 to $300 per month, enabling individuals to become overnight web hosts. Many of these companies will host more than 400 domains on a single server, enabling them to reap major profits.  However, even a robust dedicated server can become unstable when loaded with too many sites.  This makes the server less secure and essentially lowers the overall quality of service.

An unstable server could result in more downtime, a factor that could place a terrible blemish on your web presence.  The customer support could be poor or simply non-existent.  Sharing your site with hundreds of users could also limit the potential growth of your business.  If you are looking to build small or get off the ground with a huge online venture, the cheap web host is something you want to investigate thoroughly.

Helpful Suggestions

To spare you the experience of bad service, we recommend that you seek “affordable” web hosting, not necessarily a service that promotes the term “cheap”.  As they are used rather loosely, these terms could be nearly identical and completely different depending on the provider.  A cheap host could be one that provides you with adequate bandwidth, storage and database access, but also short you with limited features and horrible customer support.

Whether you call it cheap or affordable hosting, there is plenty of available.  The right plan for you is one that meets a predefined budget and the requirements of your website.

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Sep 17, 2008 : Cheap Web Hosting No responses yet

cPanel Tutorial: Database Creation

The information in this cPanel tutorial might seem apparent to the advanced webmaster, but the novice will certainly find it useful.  Whether it’s using Fantastico to install a blog, guestbook or CMS such as Joomla, many beginners have a hard time setting up the database.  This tutorial will show you how to properly configure databases in cPanel to assure that the rest of your operations run seamlessly.

Creating the Database and Users

In order to install any scripts with Fantastico, you must first have an empty database for the installation procedure.  To begin, log into the cPanel software with the username and password for account.  Once you reach the main interface, locate the “MySQL Databases” link and click it.  If you have already created databases for other purposes, the forms to insert them will be located in a footer at the bottom of the page.  In the “New Database” input box, type in the name for your new database.  We’ll use “CMS” for example.  Remember that the database name will be slightly modified in the end.  You will notice that cPanel automatically appends the database name to the username of your account.  So if your username is Pasco, the newly created database would read “pasco_cms “.  You definitely want to keep this in mind as entering the wrong name will prevent the script from seeing the database.

Next, we will create a user to enable access, using Pasco as our example.  From the interface, locate input fields for “Username” and “Password”.  Enter the credentials to your account and then click the “Create User” button.  You are now assigned the final database username of  pasco_cms along with the password you entered.

So that’s it, right?  Not quite.  In fact, this is where several beginners make their mistake.  They believe the process is over until later down the line when their script installation displays the message of “cannot connect to the database”.  Why does this happen?  You already created the username and assigned a specific user.  However, you didn’t make sure the user was assigned “privileges” for that particular database.  This is just a small setback.  Look towards the bottom of the window and locate “Add users To Your Database”.  Use one drop-box to find the database name you created and the other to find the username you created.  Select them both and then click “Add user to the database”.  You certainly want to be careful here, especially if you have created other databases with different usernames.  Making the wrong selections will cause the scripts you have installed on cPanel not to function any more.  After making the appropriate selection you’re done.

Conclusion

If you play it cautious and follow these simple directions, you can set up a new database for a new user with all the exclusive privileges within a matter of minutes.  All you have to do is perform an installation on the script of your choice and enter the accurate information pertaining to the database name, the database username and the database password.

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Sep 12, 2008 : cPanel Tutorials No responses yet

Warnings to Consider About Shared Hosts

“Unlimited” has become a prevalent term in the web hosting industry. It seems as if every other provider is offering some type of unlimited service, whether it’s storage space and bandwidth or domain names. So does this mean that there is no limit to the scalability of your business? Not exactly, especially in a shared hosting environment. Even if a web host is genuine about their claims of providing unlimited space, bandwidth and domains, there are other factors that need to be considered, factors that are unworthy of the unlimited title.

Before you are able to enjoy the benefits of unlimited bandwidth, you are likely to experience issues such as exceeding associated resources. Resource usage is a major factor that limits the capability of a shared host. It generally covers three areas: CPU usage, RAM usage and database usage.

CPU

CPU (central processing unit) is responsible for the functionality of a website and delivering content to visitors. If your website is built with dynamic content, with applications such as blogs and message boards, it would naturally require more CPU usage. This is because the CPU has to process web content and recreate it every time a user requests it.

If you are building on a shared server that is hosting a number of other sites, the performance of your site may eventually endure issues and thus function much slower. This is because the server uses CPU to compensate for each individual site on the server. Shared hosts with limited resources typically monitor CPU usage and restrict those use too much.

RAM

RAM (random access memory) is temporary memory used to store the programs, scripts and related data of your website as they are running. While many web hosting providers openly advertise their amount of bandwidth and storage, rarely will they disclose the capacity of RAM and how much you are allowed to use.

RAM usage also determines how fast your website runs a script or process. Keep in mind that every script and application requires RAM usage. The more you install on to the server, the higher amount of RAM you’ll need.

Database Connection

The database is a very critical feature in web hosting. With more than 10 million installations throughout the globe, MySQL is the most widely used database management system available. Your database is what stores the content of your website such as user names and passwords, customer addresses and credit card numbers, etc. However, when there are too many requests or connection to a database, the server may easily become overloaded, especially when a number of users are constantly making simultaneous adjustments.

In Closing

Before purchasing service with any web host, you should ask the provider about resource usage and how they handle accounts that have exceeded server limits. Shared servers are popular but at the same time they are limited. Hopefully this article helped you to become familiar with this type of hosting. This environment tends to be more suited for personal sites and small businesses opposed to large e-commerce sites.

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Jun 30, 2008 : Shared Hosting No responses yet

MySQL Database - cPanel Tutorial Ch.8

MySQL is a multi-function, multi-user database management system.  With well over 10 million installations it is without doubt the most widely used system of its kind.  Its basis is to operate as a server and provide access to databases for a number of simultaneous users, the reason it has been so popular for web hosting companies.  

MySQL has been used as a very reliable component for Linux, Mac, Windows and Apache servers.  It’s benefits towards web applications relates closely with the language of PHP.  We previously learned how PHPMyAdmin can enhance the MySQL database.  MySQL works with powerful content management systems such as Joomla and Mambo and blogging platforms such Drupal and WordPress.  It also manages the databases of several other web applications written in PHP scripts. 

ANOTHER BENEFIT OF MYSQL 

Since we already learned how to create a database and configure it for PHPMyAdmin we will now further discuss other benefits of a MySQL database.  

Automatic MySQL Backups

Blogs, message forums and other online communities have never been easier to create.  As more web hosting servers implement Fantastico in their cPanel, other applications are able to be attached with enhanced overall features.  Everything seems clear on the surface until the term “backup” is mentioned.

The uniformed user will not think much of this, firmly believing that their web host will handle the procedures of backing up information.  Though this is mostly fact, some hosting servers will clearly explain that they cannot give a one hundred percent guarantee when it comes to the limit of corruption or the quality of their back system.

Users who are lucky enough to have a cPanel with their web hosting have it a bit easier.  MySQL allows you to manage your database from A to Z, giving you the power to backup your information in case of technical difficulty.  

Here is a simple way to back up your database with MySQL:

- Navigate to “Cron Jobs” from the main page of your cPanel and click the icon.  You will be then be prompted with these options: 

Minutes: This explains how many minutes a script will run
Hour: This represents what time of day the script will run
Day: This details how many days per week the script will run
Month: This determines if a script is to run on a particular month

Next should be a command option.  After filling in the fields, the text inside the box should read something like this.  

mysqldump –opt -Q -u dbusername –password=dbpassword dbname > /pathto/backups/sunday.sql

Changes will need to be made with the command prompt to correspond to your information.  In this instance we would replace the variables in red.  

From here you will repeat the first script six times over but modify the weekdays.  This will go from 0 all the way up to 6.  You will also change the file name from Sunday to Monday and so forth until reaching Saturday.

Even standing on its own MySQL is a very powerful application that brings out the best in your cPanel.

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Apr 10, 2008 : cPanel Tutorials No responses yet