There are a lot of hosting service providers out there and they all sell you something different for the most part trying to compete with each other and stay competitive. As a webmaster, it is important to me what is offered that has to do with website performance and abilities. The bells, whistles and freebies don't mean a thing to me. What this tells you, is that you should carefully compare and even consult with whomever is maintaining your website as to what services are needed. For my clients, I always try and get them on the best hosting service provider for the money and with me being the webmistress, they have the hostess with the mostest.

I mostly use Startlogic, no specific reason other than I have been with them over ten years and have had a satisfactory experience with their services for the money I spend on them each month. You have to consider, you get what you pay for when dealing with service providers.

They also use VDeck as their Hosting and Domain Management interface which is user friendly. That can mean a lot when you need something done and you don't care to submit a support ticket or make a long phone call. Additionally they have 24/7 chat, which is slow at time during off peak hours, but it is nice to know you have alternatives to resolving your needs.

Domain and Website Hosting Services

You have to consider what your websites purpose is, what type of user interactions will take place and what you expect from your websites performance. There are different scripting environments and languages that do different tasks while sharing some common functions. There are those basics that you want to be sure your hosting service provider provides such as CGI, JAVA, HTML, CSS and so on. There there are platforms such as PHP and ASP that are required for different purposes. Are you reading about website hosting services? PHP is a common scripting platform that is open source governed, meaning it is free to use and is a product of contributions from a community of script writers. It is a very common platform to use for user interface with the hosting server. An easy way to explain this is a simple contact form where you put in your name and email address and it gets collected by the server and sent to the site owners email address. This can be achieved a number of ways, using HTML, PHP, CGI or ASP. But which one is right for you? If you have a simple site in mind, like mine, you do not need advanced scripting so you can pay less each month for hosting services that include the basics like HTML, CGI, JAVA, PHP and so on. However, if you are considering online activity such as large content forms that use databases or online commerce, while PHP can handle this, ASP (active server page) might be worth the money for development and maintenance reasons. ASP is a byproduct of Microsoft, much of what they produce today is ASP, .NET or SharePoint services. So, as you can see, there is a lot to consider about hosting services and that the products offered by different hosting services providers can be very different from each other yet worded in a way a typical user may not understand exactly what they are getting.

Website Designs and Maintenance by Website Designer Kessler Associates, Designing over ten years

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What can you do to save money on hosting services.

I love money, don't you? It's hard to get right? I help my clients save money every way I can. We should all get better at learning ways to save money. A good price to pay for reasonable and satisfactory hosting services is less than $10.00 per month, Microsoft environments slightly higher than basic packages. This is also on a shared server environment, meaning, you are not alone. The same way you make folders in your "My Documents", a shared server has folders on it for 100's of customers. Is this safe, for the most part yes and this is how you get hosting service for under $10 a month, everyone is sharing the same resources, including support. There are other options such as a virtual private or dedicated server. But for most small business just looking for some hot internet action, shared hosting service for under $10 a month is the way to go. Now, who has what or what is the best? If you Google "compare hosting service providers" you will find a lot of websites that try to give you a heads up on the who's and what's, but I want you to consider Starbucks as you do. Starbucks? Yes, think about what Starbucks is, a huge marketing campaign that lasted several years before people finally started to wake up and smell the coffee. No pun intended. The most common or big successful hosting service providers like GoDaddy are marketing campaigns that prey on the unknown, impulse and market demand. But when you really compare what you get for the money and the user friendliness of the environment, the quiet, less advertised companies like Startlogic actually give you a much better deal. Check out this consumer ranking site for hosting providers, you'll find them both there.

The best practices are to try and keep your domain name safe and secure with a separate provider when possible or navigate towards that objective as you grow on the internet. Make sure you have a means of setting renewals for both your domain name and hosting services to auto renewal and have an alternate email account, such as a free mail address as an external means for contacting you and for verifying account information. As for domain name privacy, never used it and never will, my contact information is everywhere, I am not going to pay money to not have it in one place.

With Startlogic I recommend the Prologic package which is normally $7.95 per month. If you want to get a little fancy and creative with how you interact with your visitors, consider the WindowsLogic for ASP, AJAX and .NET functionality. Potential clients are always encouraged to feel free to ask questions.

Thanks for visiting my website and be sure to visit my contact page to learn more about me.
I wish you well in life and business.

Kessler Associates has small business website hosting solutions in The Woodlands, Spring, Conroe and North Houston metro areas.