Everyone now wants to have a website and many also think about starting their own business online but only few are capable enough to turn this into reality. If you also feel like giving your online venture a try and want to get your own business website you must know certain essential things to get your way around in the online world.

The first step to getting your presence on the internet is by having a good website. Once your website design is ready you need to put it on the internet by getting website hosting from a service provider. Now, this is the tricky part. Firstly there are as many hosts as you can imagine however many are also resellers which you must avoid and look for a genuine hosting company only. Secondly, each host has quite a lot of plans to make you think why you decided to do this in the first place.

Even though there are various types of plans you need to know what is good for you and what’s not. As a rule of thumb you cannot get Free hosting for your business or eCommerce site. There are many issues with it and it affects your website performance which would be detrimental to your corporate image and would make your customers look for your competitors.

It is always good to do an assessment of your website and the amount of visitors you expect so that you can choose an appropriate hosting package for your website. For moderate amount of visitors you can go for a VPS or if you want high resources then you can have a dedicated server instead.

When you look for web hosting you must not forget domain registration. If you don’t have a domain name for your website you need to register one and if you are not able to find a registrar you should look for a web host who can do this for you.

Another important thing to take care of before choosing any web hosting provider is to ensure their level of expertise and quality of service and support offered to customers. In case your website faces any issues then the hosting provider must be capable enough to get it sorted for you as soon as possible and prevent losses to your business. And when there are upgrades to be made or changes are to be done to the server then a technically sound host can make this process simpler and avoid any complications.

For any website it is essential to have the best dedicated web servers hosting as the business is dependent upon its website and the entire website is dependent upon the hosting. So you must ensure you have the correct hosting service for your business.

The blog post speaks about the seven essential tips by ESET for parents to allow protect their children’s from the newest emerging threats that thrive the Internet.

Stay alert and monitor your child’s connection to the Internet

Always protect your computer system with a strong password to prevent free access to it and allow children to just surf the Web during the times when you have the opportunity to go periodically checking their activities online. Enjoy clear rules on the use of computers.

Talk to your children about privacy on the Internet

Tell them never to provide personal information and other data, such as school and the places where they usually present such as the social networks.

Be careful with the webcam

This peripheral can be easily connected remotely by malicious users. Unplug or turn off this device when not in use. The malware can access your webcam without your knowledge. If children want to use the webcam, make sure it is close by and that the conversation is being maintained only with friends or acquaintances of the family.

Analyze the browser history

All browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc…) store a history of navigation that should be examined periodically by parents. If, for some reason check that the history has been deleted; here is a good opportunity to have a conversation with your child, trying to ascertain the reasons which led him to do so.

Control the movement on Facebook

If the child’s sharing the wall with ‘Everyone’ or ‘Friends of Friends’ on Facebook, it can lose control over who has access to data of the minor. The same happens with the use of such dubious social network application: these can lead your child to share the data with the world.

Look at the pictures and information that your child puts on the Web

Actually, the information that was posted on the Internet does not disappear. Pictures and information may have already been saved on your computer of other people. Moreover, everything is stored on the server. Notice that this is a good exercise to verify the accuracy of this information: if you delete your account, for example, Facebook or Hi5 and later return to reactivate, you will find everything you thought was deleted.

Having a solution of virus installed and updated

Various solutions are available in the industry having several functionalities as various filters and parental controls based on the age of the user. Also block sites that may contain potentially offensive material. Some software also allows parents to block access to twenty different categories of websites.

You’ve probably seen various free hosting offers on Internet, however when it comes to a business website or a project that you want to give some credibility and has plans for a future prolonged thereof, shall have regard to the following counter-parties that usually are associated with this type of Free Web Hosting:

Downtime

If the service is free, then it is quite possible that many people are interested in it. Not only people who really want to create their own website, but also malicious users who want to take advantage of the fact that the service is free to use it for sending spam, distributing illegal software, scripts for flood and DDoS attacks, among others.

For this reason, easily one service user can make the server that supports the same unstable and cause all sites to be inaccessible and may cause long downtimes without you can claim it is actually a service whereby non-paid.

The downtime will cause your site, be it a business, project or portfolio and thus can “cost” more than what you thought.

Lack of Customer Support

Again, being a free service, this will be “invaded” by any person. The more users of the service will make it more difficult to maintain server stability.

When there is some downtime, probably your first thought will be to send an e-mail to customer support department to ask, what’s the reason for the downtime? Yours and the other users hosted on the same service.

You should understand, being a free service, unless it is supported by a large company with many employees and a dedicated team to the free service, it is very likely that this is a work of a single man, in his spare time, probably not since the hosting service will be free that ensures your salary at the end of the month, unless it is monetized with advertising on your sites.

Given this detail, your support requests may take days, weeks or even months to be answered.

In addition, the person who is providing support will not bother to help you solve minor issues that are easily resolved and which are platform related that your site uses. Usually, only a few companies who cherish professional hosting by better tracking their clients care to help in such kind of issues.

Forced Ads

Many of these services are supported by revenue generated via advertising on the customer’s sites. It means the hosting provider will put advertising on your website forcefully, and you have to accept it if you want to continue with the free hosting service. There isn’t any issue if the service provider puts advertising on your personal website, discussion forum or other community, however, it doesn’t apply to websites such as online stores, promoting products and services or institutional sites.

For example, if the Google Adsense system is used to for advertising, then it will show ads related to the content of your website. In the same way, if your site is an institutional or business, then obviously it is going to show ads of your competitors on your website which is not very pleasant for the credibility of your business.

No Self Control

Another major disadvantage of these free web hosting services is that most of the service providers won’t allow you to have your own domain, being forced to use a sub-domain name service, such as “yourdomain.000webhost.com”.

Besides being a name quite long and difficult to remember, your customers and users of your site will start to be aware that you are using a free service. For many people, the image that will convey is that your online business is not relevant, which may cause you to lose business, proving once again that “cheap is expensive”. With a professional and premium hosting service, you can have your site with a domain name itself, and may even change your web hosting company at any time without having to change the site address.

No E-mail Accounts

Many of these services do not provide e-mail accounts, making it impossible for you to create an e-mail account with the address of your website. Even those who provide services, your e-mail will be something like yourname@yourdomain.000webhost.com.

Probably it will not be interested in putting this address in their contact cards and will end up using a e-mail: @yahoo.com, @gmail.com @live.com. If you compare these, still it continues to be a free service and without any branding for your company, it’s not worth.

With a professional hosting service, you can create your own mailbox with the address of your site, for example: yourname@yourdomain.com.

No support for PHP / MySQL, etc…

Most of these free web hosting providers only provide support to HTML pages, making it impossible to create dynamic pages with links to database and forms. Support for PHP and MySQL is very simple to be implemented on a server; however these technologies greatly increase resource consumption by each hosting account on the server and thus drastically reduce the number of hosting accounts for a normal server.

Usually hosting companies define a maximum value of hosting accounts per server for on average 250 accounts / server. However these services tripled this value on servers with PHP and MySQL support and servers without support for these technologies may increase to 2,000 to 3,000 sites per server, since HTML does not use any server resources to compile its syntax, unlike what happens with PHP-based sites.

With only HTML support, your site will be very sluggish and will not have much interactivity with the customer, making it a site with only static content with almost no features.

Limited Disk Space and Bandwidth

Although some hosting providers also offer Free Web Hosting Plans with Unlimited Space and Unlimited Bandwidth , most of them excessively limit the disk space of their plans by not providing sufficient disk space and monthly bandwidth so you can maintain your site.

Typically a hosting plan of a joint account, which occupies more disk space, is sometimes not the files of the site, but the mailboxes of their e-mail and databases of their websites. If you reach your limit of space, probably the free hosting provider will get your site down and won’t be up until you upgrade your hosting plan to a paid service.

This will make you to quickly find a hosting service to migrate, which is a process that should normally be done with some care, a lot of research and time. The same happens in the case of achieving monthly bandwidth of your site, requiring an immediate migration service.

Sometimes some free web hosting providers do not activate the plan after exceeding monthly bandwidth, putting the “Terms of Service – ToS” indication of fees if it exceeds the monthly traffic, and these values usually are exorbitant and the service can be more expensive than a normal service if no attention is paid to consumption.

Lack of Essential Tools and Features

You cannot expect the latest and most useful tools in a free hosting service. Usually this type of services used control panels that are limited in terms of features, which make the simplest task, authentic puzzles. Most services won’t allow you to create even a backup file for download, and this process has to be done manually using FTP, if FTP details are provided by the service provider. It can also be limited to a file manager, web-based.

If you like tools that allow you to install hundreds of scripts on your hosting account with just a few clicks such as Softaculous, then it’s better to opt for a premium hosting service that offers such tools. Think about Idera CDP Backups (formerly known as R1Soft CDP Backups) is the solution for server backups more than a spectacular hosting service you may have.

These are just some of the examples of features and tools that are usually not available with a free web hosting service.

Data Loss

Unfortunately, nowadays almost everything has a price; however the data and information is something that can hardly be assigned a value. A simple database can contain very important information and is worth millions of Dollars ($). In any hosting service, whether free or paid, the customer is responsible for maintaining the security of their copies, unless you pay extremely high values for a service that guarantees the integrity of your data backups.

Companies that provide professional shared hosting usually have defined a plan for backups to save some restore points of data stored on their servers so that the customers can easily retrieve the information in the event of data loss. Often customers fail to make their own backups as verify that the company makes. However, the backups made by the hosting company should not be used by customers as replacement guarantee in case they remove or edit a file unintentionally and having a problem during a platform maintenance, etc…

Whenever the client wishes to make a change, maintain or update the platforms of their site, they should create a backup and download the same to their computer, double the same for server testing / developing local or remote and only after confirming that the changes were applied correctly in test environment / development, that should make uploading to the server where the platform is in production.

The customer should not be waiting for the backups made by the company for the recovery if an update goes wrong. However the truth is that most professional hosting companies provide backups if the client requests, if it has made any changes that have gone wrong. However, the client will not have the same fate in a free hosting service, because most likely there will not be a plan for backups, even for recovery in case of hardware failure.

Thus, if there is a hardware failure and you have not done your backups, you can say goodbye to your site and probably your online business.

Service without Guarantees

As everyone knows, cheap is expensive. A service for which no amount is paid doesn’t even have the invoice or receipt that you are being supplied, is a kind of service where you cannot expect guarantees or cannot complain or demand for any value added service.

It would not be the first time one of these services disappeared from the Internet from one day to the other, leaving thousands of inaccessible sites and causing damage to thousands of businesses. There are many reasons why this can happen, whether the service has become untenable for those who were to bear or even total loss of data that had been planned without any strategic plan for data recovery. Keeping a commercial site in one of these services is not worth, as you never know that if your site will be online tomorrow or simply disappeared.

These are just 10 examples of the disadvantages of free web hosting service; however the numbers of disadvantages are much more for free web hosting services.

If you want quality service, you must know that there will be several costs associated with it. Free Web Hosting is just like the free cheese that people put in their trap to catch the mouse. Be cautious when selecting a quality web hosting service and not be deceived by the fact that it is a free service.

At present, any person with minimum computer knowledge is able to build his / her own web page for several purposes such as promoting a business, sharing personal opinions and sharing photos, etc…

In order to create such web pages, there are various web applications are available on Internet, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Blogger. Now, imagine a user who decides to build his own website, blog or photo gallery and decides to hire a web hosting service provider.

Well, in order to install WordPress CMS, the first point you need to bear in mind is the selection of a web hosting provider that can suffice your requirements. No doubt, this is one of the essential points that need to be considered, as a bad choice can affect the quality of your service, security of website or blog, etc…

Since there are so many web hosting companies in the market that offer these services, making a proper selection is very confusing task for beginners. To make it easier, I have listed some of the web hosting aspects; a selection criteria which should be considered when selecting a suitable WordPress hosting provider.

Selection Criteria to Choose a Quality WordPress Hosting Provider

Provider’s Reputation – Certainly, this parameter is individual, however is very important to look for providers that offers guarantees and whose reputation is really good. In order to know the reputation of a hosting provider, you may consult with other people on forums, visit reviews sites or ask other companies that are hosting their websites with the particular hosting provider. It can be a good way to know their reputation for reliability.

Type of Hosting (Service Architecture) – Majority of providers offers two types of hosting platform: Windows & Linux. For compatibility reasons WordPress, Joomla and Drupal perform much better on Linux platform. Although Windows platform may also be a good option for hosting such sites, however issues related updates, functionalities, etc… may arise in future. Generally, in order to install Joomla, the service provider needs to have components like PHP, MySQL and Apache.

In short, for these types of content management systems it is recommended to opt for a Linux-based hosting solution. You may opt for a free web hosting provider as an alternative if your purpose is just “Testing”. However, free hosting solutions are not recommended as most of the times it doesn’t cover essentials like “Uptime Guarantee” and “Backups”.

Disk Space and Bandwidth – This is another important aspect of web hosting service. You must select a hosting provider that suffices your needs in terms of storage space and bandwidth. You should put a special attention to those who offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Remember that, terms like “unlimited” doesn’t exist. If you read web hosting provider’s fine print of “Terms of Service”, you will get to know that in actual it is far different than unlimited.

Technical Support – You must know what kind of support the hosting company provides if any technical issues due to server crash occur. Also, check out what is their response time to the issue as well as what kind of tone the support persons use when responding.

Technical Elements – Usually most of the web hosting providers offers same or similar tools to facilitate the user for website management. See, if they offer cPanel, phpMyAdmin, etc… as these can greatly help in WordPress installation as well as managing databases.

Security – Ask the web hosting provider, what policies are applied to protect your data from potential security issues as well as backups generation frequency.

Other aspects to consider would be the price, discounts and some sort of package which can benefit you.

Based on the above selection criteria you can choose a suitable WordPress hosting provider to build a website or blog.

Logically, the high level of breach and enormous use of WordPress have made it a potential target for cyber criminal. Due to this reason, I have decided to provide some effective tips on WordPress security. Don’t forget to check out my next blog post “How to Improve Your WordPress Security”. It will cover a set of security recommendations and steps to increase security of your WordPress based website / blog.

If anyone want to get a web page on the internet then they have to choose a suitable web hosting provider. There are many web hosting providers in the web hosting market with their different hosting plans, like- shared hosting, reseller hosting, vps hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud server hosting etc. Users have to choose the web hosting plan based on how they plan to utilize their website, how much budget they have for the server, and how much time they want to spend maintaining the servers which make up the website.

Select a perfect hosting service is very important for online business. So, business owners have to careful about hosting service selection. The most important point before selecting web hosting service is reliability of the data center. It would be better if the business owners get a clear idea about different levels of classification based on the ANSI/TIA-942 Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers.

Tier I : The tier I data centers are same as a normal computer rooms. Users have to shutdown the machines for which require a preventative maintenance. So, users get 99.671% uptime and 28.8 hours downtime Per Year with it. Users get don’t pay IP transit, means, the users don’t have a global presence and don’t pay another providers for any kind of connectivity. Finally we can say about Tier I is that, it would be suitable for small business.

Tier II : The tier II data centers are facilities have some redundancy even so have a single path for power. Users have to shutdown the machines for which require a preventative maintenance. So, users get 99.749% Uptime and 22 Hours downtime per year with it. In this case networks have a national or international footprint, however pay IP transit to reach some portions of the Internet. Finally we can say about Tier II is that, it would be suitable for medium size businesses.

Tier III : The tier III data centers have enough redundancy even though they have a single path for power and it permit the maintenance without downtime (N+1 redundancy.) Tier III data centers are required to have minimum 13.2 KV (kilo volts) of power. So, users get 99.982% uptime and 95 minutes downtime per year and 72 hour power outage protection with it. In this case networks are regional providers. Big data centers have tier III networks and build redundancy through redundant POPs (points of presence) outside of their facilities. Past the POPs, these providers pay for IP transit. Finally we can say about Tier III is that, it would be suitable for Large Businesses.

Tier IV: Maximum Tier IV data centers have their own internal network but they pay other networks for IP transit outside of the facility. Tier IV data centers are the top tier. They are built with multiple paths to power and AC and are designed to cope with a worst-case scenario with no critical impact. Tier III data centers are required to have minimum 26.2 KV (kilo volts) of power. So, users get 99.995% Uptime and 26 minutes downtime per year and 96 hour power outage protection with it. In this case networks are regional providers. Finally we can say about Tier III is that, it would be suitable for Enterprise Corporations .