The Internet is a large collection of computers all connected together in one very bignetwork. A diagram of the Internet looks similar to a spiders web. A website is a place on that web, and website hosting means providing the physical location, the connection and, usually, the computer that “serves” the web site’s content to the PC that requests it. Web servers or computers are installed with special software designed to handle many users and services simultaneously.

The Internet is a global network, which means that communication can occur at any time. This means that a website should be ready to receive visitors at any moment. For this to be achieved there should be a constant connection to the web and a server that is always powered on running a stable environment.

The physical environment where the server is located, often called a Network Operations Center, or NOC is also very important. Data Centres have temperature controls, backup generators, earthquake-resistant architecture, and more, all designed to ensure your site is available at every moment.

When you are creating your website at your home computer, to upload it you need to send the files to your web server. FTP (File Transfer Protocal) is a service that allows you to do this. Once the file is on the server, whenever someone requests that file from the Internet either by typing in the web address or clicking a link, the server gives them the file they requested. Changing the content is as easy as changing the file and re-transferring it to the server.

In addition to web and FTP services, web site hosting almost always includes an email server that will receive email sent to your domain. This enables you to control mail delivery, create your own addresses, and present a professional image to your customers, clients, or constituents.

Do iUKHost support WordPress web hosting?

Yes, WordPress is available with any of our web hosting packages. You can quickly install WordPress from the Fantastico section in cPanel. This enables you to install WordPress in a matter of minutes without having to have any technical knowledge. WordPress is one of the most widely used free blog platforms available, it makes management easy with third party plug-ins & ability to upload your own themes. iUKHost provide reliable blog hosting services at an affordable price.

The powerful administration panel allows you to write posts and publish them at the push of a button. You can also manage previous posts, make updates & view comments made by your readers. Here are some further features of WordPress:

• Full standards compliance
• WordPress Pages
• WordPress Links
• WordPress Themes
• Cross-blog communication tools
• Comments
• Spam protection
• Full user registration
• Easy installation and upgrades
• Password Protected Posts

Learn about more of the features here.

Everyone has different needs when looking for shared web hosting. You will need a certain amount of space and bandwidth for your website. You may also need databases, add-on domains, sub-domains and e-mail accounts. You should check with the host that the package will meet your needs.

Over Selling Resources

A small website will not need many resources; however people are caught in the headlights by large numbers. A large majority of web hosts on the Internet oversell their services. You may have come across plans that include 500GB Space and 2TB of bandwidth, this is overselling. If you were to actually use all these resources I’m sure the host would soon close your account on the grounds of “high CPU usage”. There is no need to get lots of space and bandwidth, simply get what you need at a moderate price.

Resource Limits

Most shared hosting will have resource limitations such as CPU etc. This means that you can only use X% resources for your site for X amount of time. If you are running scripts, check that they can run in the time limits set by the host. You should also check database size limits, and outgoing e-mail limits that may be in place.

You may only be able to have a database up to so many MB. If you have a forum then this is likely to grow and you may need to upgrade so you might want to plan ahead and see how easy upgrades are going to be. E-mail limits may be set hourly which means you can only send for example 200 e-mails an hour.

Reseller Hosts

Reseller hosting makes it easy for anyone to setup a web host. This means you need to check to see how reliable the host is. The last thing you want is a weeks hosting before the person running it ditches their hosting site leaving you with no money and no hosting. To avoid this look for a host that has good reviews from others and is well established. If you are insistent on going for a certain host check how long they have been operating for, if they are a registered business and you may also check there PayPal transaction rating if this is available.

More on Reviews

There are many review sites that you can take a look at, however it is likely that the host themselves have added their website to allow reviews. This also implies that they have the ability to edit and remove reviews that have been left. The best place to get reviews is from existing customers – how obvious was that? You can do this by running reverse IP on the hosts IP address. This will allow you to get some of the web addresses on that hosts server.

Hopefully you will not get other sites run by the host so check the WHOIS info to different details and send an e-mail to the site owner asking about the service. You may also want to Google terms such as “hosts name reviews” or “hosts name scam” to see what comes up. Forums are another good place to ask, however if someone simply keeps saying the host is great, check the website URL that they have hosted with the host to ensure they are not just self promoting.

Up time

Up time is very important in hosting and now many hosts have a service level agreement that ensure you receive X% of up time. You may want to use external monitors to see what the up time for a web host is like. The only real way to find the truth is to ask previous customers due to some monitoring sites allowing hosts to remove outages from statistics.

Support

This is one of the most important things in hosting. Check what types of support are available. Do they have Phone, E-mail, Instant Messenger, REAL Live Chat or Ticket Support? If there is a problem with your website you want it sorted asap so ensure that the facilities are there for you to receive help when you need it. Ensure their after sales support is as good as their before sales.

Summary

Always go with a host that has a good reputation for up time, pricing and customer service. New hosts with great deals might to be around for too long due to lack of experience. It only takes one thing to go wrong with a small host that removes their budget for servers so ensure that your host is there to stay.

Those are a few basic things to look out for; more advanced users may wish to check that the server IP is not black listed and that they have a good server infrastructure etc.

A web hosting package is sometimes also known as a web hosting solution due to the fact that it provides the user with the solution that they require to host a website. There are many different web hosting solutions available and each user will require different features from a web hosting package. A web hosting solution could be in the form of shared, reseller, VPS or dedicated web hosting to name a few. With such a wide variety of web hosting solutions available there is a package to suit all users from those who want to host a personal website or a business website. There are many web hosting providers on the Internet who can meet the needs of users looking for a web hosting solution. As a web hosting customer choosing a web hosting company can be a hard task simply due to the large number to choose from.

Web Hosting Control Panel

Most web hosting solutions will come with a web hosting control panel to allow you to manage your website with ease. The majority of web hosting service providers will give you access to cPanel. This is a web based control panel system that can be used to manage and maintain your website. There are other choices for control panel available such as Plesk and Direct Admin. You may wish to consider the control panel available from the provider before you purchase a web hosting package.

Web Server

There are two main operating systems that are used to power web servers which are Windows and Linux. Linux servers are usually cheaper than Windows since they are have no license costs. It is an advantage as a user that you can see the different web hosting solutions available before you purchase. Some web hosting providers will specialise in one type of hosting package based on a specific operating system. By specialising on a hosting niche that company can build a reputation for being the best provider for that specific hosting solution.

Reliable Web Hosting Solutions

In most cases users find that Linux shared web hosting is the best package available because it is cheap and meets their requirements. This is usually the case due to the low amount of traffic their websites receive which means that fewer resources and bandwidth are required to power the website. From a business point of view they are more likely to adopt a dedicated server to provide a more powerful web hosting solution.

Most web hosting solutions are in place to server users who wish to have a public website. Web hosting solutions do not only cater for websites, but in some cases for e-mail hosting too. It is now very common to be able to obtain a web hosting package relatively cheaply that will meet the needs of the user.

There are a wide variety of web hosting companies that can offer or tailor the perfect web hosting solution for you. It is important that you know the requirements of your web hosting package so that you know which web hosting solution is best for you.

When you are on the Internet you are using DNS all the time even though you may not realise this. Without the use of DNS and with current technology, it would be much harder to use the Internet with regards to finding websites. When you are browsing a website or sending an e-mail you are using a domain name.

At the present time you should be located on the domain of iUKHost.com http://www.iukhost.com . This is also the case for the e-mail addresses that we use: sales@iukhost.com. The reason we use domain names is simply because they are very easy to remember. Using domain names is fine for humans, however computers use the IP address behind the domain name. Domain Name Server (DNS) covert the IP address of the website into the domain name that you enter into your web browser which saves you having to remember the numerical IP.

If you are the owner of several websites or domains then multiple website hosting is the ideal solution. Multiple website hosting allows you to host many different websites under one web hosting account. This can save you a lot of money because you do not need lots of different hosting packages for all the websites that you own.

Multiple website hosting is a great way to manage a large number of websites because you can do so from one control panel. This means that you do not have to login to multiple control panels and have to remember lots of users names and passwords to change settings for all your websites. You should ensure that the web hosting account that you choose has enough resources to handle all of the websites that you want to host. You need to check that there will be enough bandwidth available for all the sites that you are hosting. This may result in you having to purchase a larger shared hosting package to accommodate all the websites you have however in the long term, you do not have to manage lots of smaller hosting accounts.

In cPanel control panel you have add-on additional domains onto your web hosting account. When you want to add-on a domain you need to create a directory for where the site files are going to be located. Once this has been completed you can upload the site files to the directory that you specify and then host multiple websites.

For a video guide on how to achieve this view here: How to create an Addon Domain is cPanel

Fantastico is a great application that can be used with cPanel web hosting to allow you to auto-install scripts. The installation of these scripts can take a matter of seconds and can be performed by anyone with or without indept knowledge. This feature allows you to install web aplications such as forums and blogs without the need to create databases, upload files or change any permissions. All our shared web hosting packages come with fantastico to make setting up your website much easier.

Blogs
     b2evolution 
     Nucleus 
     WordPress  
     
Classifieds
     Noahs Classifieds  

Content Management
     Drupal 
     Geeklog 
     Joomla 1.5 
     Joomla 
     Mambo 
     PHP-Nuke 
     phpWCMS 
     phpWebSite 
     Post-Nuke 
     Siteframe 
     TYPO3 
     Xoops  
     
Customer Relationship
     Crafty Syntax Live Help 
     Help Center Live 
     osTicket 
     PerlDesk 
     PHP Support Tickets 
     Support Logic Helpdesk 
     Support Services Manager  
     
Discussion Boards
     phpBB 
     SMF  
     
E-Commerce
     CubeCart 
     OS Commerce 
     Zen Cart  
      
F.A.Q.
     FAQMasterFlex  
     
Hosting Billing
     AccountLab Plus 
     phpCOIN  
     
Image Galleries
     4Images Gallery 
     Coppermine Photo Gallery 
     Gallery  
     
Mailing Lists
     PHPlist  
     
Polls and Surveys
     Advanced Poll 
     LimeSurvey 
     phpESP  
     
Project Management
     dotProject 
     PHProjekt  
     
Site Builders
     Soholaunch Pro Edition 
     Templates Express  
     
Wiki
     TikiWiki CMS/Groupware 
     PhpWiki  
     
Other Scripts
     Dew-NewPHPLinks 
     Moodle 
     Open-Realty 
     phpAdsNew 
     PHPauction 
     phpFormGenerator 
     WebCalendar

Cheap web hosting has become very common but it can still be hard to find the right cheap web hosting package that meets your requirements. With so many different web hosting providers to choose from it would not take very long to find a large number of different cheap web hosting plans. If you have a small budget but want to get your website online as fast as possible for testing then finding the cheapest web hosting package may suit you. If your website is promoting your business you may be prepared to invest more money in hosting to provide a more stable environment.

This is not to suggest that the cheapest web hosting available is unreliable and slow, however it is a popular concept that in web hosting you get what you pay for. You are more likely to find web hosting packages cheaper in the US than in the UK. This is mainly due to cheaper bandwidth and server hardware in the US. This means UK hosting companies have higher costs and therefore cannot pass on the savings the US companies make to consumers. If you are based in the UK and choose to have your website hosted in the US there are a few things you should be aware of. The first thing to check is if the support is available from the hosting company in your timezone. The second thing you need to be aware of is your websites audience. If you have 80% of your visitors from the UK then it is best to choose web hosting in the UK to ensure the majority of visitors receive good connection speed.

The cheapest web hosting is usually from a web host that is running a Linux web server. Unlike the Windows operating system, Linux is free which means the host can provide cheaper web hosting to the consumer and they do not have to pass on the licensing cost. With Linux as the operating system many hosts will also include a control panel that will allow you to manage your website. This is normally in the form of cPanel control panel.

If a web hosting company specialises in the cheapest web hosting this will result in reduced profits which may affect other services such as support. If you require support 24/7 is it unlikely this will be provided with the cheapest web hosting package that you find. This will mean you should have the correct knowledge to manage your website without the need for round the clock support.