Web Hosting Diary

Thirdsphere Hosting Review

I've been using the Thirdsphere Hosting service for just over a year now. While Thirdsphere have provided superb uptime and decent support, they also include a unique ecommerce service which has proved to be very valuable to me.

It's called the Automation Station and allows you to set up a complete business selling digital or intangible items such as software or pdf files which can be paid for and automatically downloaded by the customer. You can set up the system to use Paypal, 2Checkout or your own merchant account to accept payments easily.

Other features included in the Automation Station include a built in autoresponder system for followup sales plus even an affiliate sytem so other webmasters can sign up and sell your digital products for a standard or customized commission.

The cost of $24.95 per month might usually seem a bit steep for a 30 gb shared hosting account, but the inclusion of the AutomationStation at no extra cost makes this service a bargain that no other web host I know of provides.

If setting up an automated business selling digital goods is of interest to you I encourage you to take a look at the Thirdsphere Automation Station today.

Andrew

Finding the Best Hosting Provider Part 2

Web Hosting Don'ts (Read the Part 1 of this article here)

Avoid these hosting mistakes at all cost or face the consequences!

Choosing a Host On Price Alone

Do not chose a web host based only on their pricing. Their are many cheap hosting providers and with most you get what you pay for. Very little. If the price you are quoted seems to good to be true, it probably is. Expect to pay at least .50 cents for every gigabyte of bandwith for average reliability and three or four times that if you want high quality hosting.

Purchasing Hosting from an Auction Site

Not that you will not find good hosting from an auction site, but the chances aren't good. Especially if the company does not even operate a web site to market their services.

Trusting Customer Testimonials

Most testimonials simply can't be trusted. If the web host lists contact information and the web site of the testimonials listed they may be trustworthy, but the majority should not be taken at face value.

Free Domain Included with Hosting

It is always better to keep your domain seperate from your hosting company. Many hosts offer free domains with their hosting plans. This practice is fine as long as the domain is registered in your name and belongs to you. If they register it to themselves and only let you "borrow" it you face the risk of them holding your domain hostage if you ever decide to move to another hosting provider.

This valuable information has been provided by Michael Shelton
Owner of Host-Resource.com

Finding the Best Hosting Provider Part 1

Looking for a new hosting provider? Here's some great advice on what to look for and what to avoid.

Web Hosting Dos

Follow these guidelines and you will have a better chance of finding a reliable hosting solution.

Research

Spend time reading what others have to say about the hosting companies you are looking at. Read reviews and investigate into the history of the company. How long have they been in business? What data centers are they located in? How many customers do they have and do they have enough employees to support them? These are all questions you should know before choosing a web host.

Contact Support

Contact your potential hosts and ask them a few simple questions about their service. The main goal is to gauge their response time and the quality of their reply.

Know Your Requirements

You may WANT gigs of space and bandwidth, but do you really NEED them. If not, do not waste money paying for bandwidth and storage space that will not be used. On the other hand, if you use a lot of resources you should purchase hosting with a little head room just in case you have spikes in traffic. This way you can avoid any overage charges.

Have a Good Backup Plan

Do not rely on your host to keep backups of your sites. Most don't and if they do they could be weeks or even months old. If you keep good backups you will suffer little downtime and data loss if you ever do have problems with your host and need to move elsewhere.

Part 2 of this article will follow in the next post...

Fast Web Hosting - Is Your Host Built For Speed?

I came across an interesting site today while browsing some of the web hosting discussion forums. This website ranks the speed of hosting services both globally and by individual country. It's well worth a look if you're interested to see where your hosting provider ranks.

HostingSpeeds.com is home of the 'Hosting speeds comparison project'.  According to the site they provide "an independant and accurate 'Real World' & 'Real Time' comparison of the hosting market" based on 3 types of web host speed tests...

First, webmasters and web hosts let their site visitors perform speed checks to see how fast a 100kb page loads.  Page load rank is based on speed tests performed during the last 3 days.

Second, all users can perform server reponse time speed checks to see how much time it takes for the host servers to respond.  This test measures from 13 locations world wide simultaneously

Finally web hosts themselves can perform speed tests on their local networks to see how fast their local network can handle data.

"All results of these 3 speed tests are collected and stored in our database at hostingspeeds.com to calculate and display the speed ranks"

So I thought I'd look up one of my favorite web hosting providers, Thirdsphere Hosting  to see how fast they were performing and found them to be ranked 52 overall out of 353 hosting services listed.  I guess I'm satisfied with this result, as they perform extremely well for me and offer great customer service.  Although I'd be far more impressed with a top 20 listing!

So pay them a visit and see where your current web host ranks, but make sure to come back here to HostingDiary and leave a comment below with the results for us all to see.

Andrew