10 Things about Drupal Hosting

Drupal is a very popular open source system. It’s so powerful that a lot of webmasters start migrating their web site to it. But the first issue they have to meet is how to find a reliable Drupal hosting solution.

Web hosting industry is very mature and is very competitive. But considering Drupal is still young, there are still a lot of space for Drupal hosting to grow.

When looking for a Drupal hosting, below are 10 things you should know about it:

1. Drupal is developed by php, although you can choose an Windows hosting and PostgreSQL, the best platform to run Drupal are still Linux and MySQL.
2. Just as I have mentioned in above, Drupal hosting is still a new market. Not all big hosting companies can provide you with a solution to give your Drupal site enough support
3. Even a company provide you with free Drupal installation service, free theme, etc, it doesn’t mean they can provide you with a great Drupal hosting solution. Those type of free service comes from Fantastico, every hosting company get this tools installed with be able to give you this service, and Fantastico has been very popular in web hosting companies already.
4. Clean URLs support is an important need from Drupa hosting since it will be able to make your URL more friendly to search engine
5. In order to get multi-sites features of Drupal work, in most case, you will need to have access to Unix Shell to create Symlink. But for security reason, this might not be allowed from the web hosting companies. In this case, you can create a php script to do it. Don’t worry.
6. A optimized-drupal hosting solution will need to get the database run very fast. A lot of hosting compaines fails in it, and make their solution a suck to Drupal.
7. Some companies might set the limitation for you to use the CPU resource or Memory resource. Please check with your hosting providers to know the data. You will need to check your log regularly to see is your web site down frenquently for that reason. If yes, you should start to think about upgrade your hosting plan.
8. Choose a hosting company which allows you maintain cron job easily, such as a tool in control panel, etc
9. Overselling is very common in shared web hosting market, you will get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth from your vendors. Don’t trust this number, your site will be down if you use too much resource. Remember, you pay for what you get.
10. Last and the most important one, backup your web site regularly.

Do you have more to add to the list?

WebHostingClue Announce the Best Web Hosting in 2008

Today, www.webhostingclue.com , the leading web hosting review web site, announces the best web hosting in 2008.

HostMonster is the biggest winners in Shared web hosting category. It’s #1 overall best web hosting. Besides this, it’s also selected as one of the best web hosting solution for Drupal Hosting.

Below are the detail listed of top web hosting awards, you can get to know more about it by visiting them.
Best Linux Web Hosting
Best Windows Web Hosting
Best VPS Web Hosting
Best Linux Web Hosting
Best Small Business Web Hosting
Best Family Web Hosting
Best Drupal Hosting
Best Blog Hosting

What Blog Hosting You Have Chosen

It’s so often that people ask me question about what’s the best blog hosting. I used to host my blog in HostMonster, which works pretty well. Since I hosted more than 10 web sites there, as my traffic grows, I purchase iPower as a backup, and host this blog with it. And I am quite satifisied with it right now.

But today, I’m interested to hear who you use and recommend to host your blog? And what are the cons. and pros. of them?

What You Should Avoid in Drupal Hosting

Drupal is an opensource Content Management platform. Created in 2001, Drupal has become the most powerful CMS system currently. And it’s mostly used for creation and management of diversity content such as community web portals, FAQs, and knowledge bases, etc.

Owning a Drupal web site is not hard, you can purchase a web host, download their latest scrips, and get is setup. But as my many years working experience to support the Drupal webmasters, I think below are the top 3 mistakes they have made.

1) Drupal Hosting is Very Special

This is probably the most common thing we can feel from Drupal webmasters, especially for those beginners. The fact is that every hosting which can support php and MySQL, and grant you with the write permission to the root directory, then you will be all set. The only thing you need to care about is the connection speed between web server and MySQL database server. Some web hosting companies havn’t optimized the connection between those two and cause some performance issues for Drupal. But this issue doesn’t exist for the most of the current leading shared web hosting service providers.

2) Web Hosting Companies with “Drupal” included in their Name are Drupal-Specialized Host

It’s fun that there are many companies who declare they are dedicated to the web hosting for Drupal, and place “drupal” into their companies’ name, such as drupalhosting, drupalvaluehosting, etc. This is really strange if you have read the first mistake I list in above. If a company can provide good solution for Drupal, it definitely can provide the same level support to other open source application like WordPress, Joomla. So why he wants to place it in his company name, and keep the other webmasters out of door. This is not good for the growth of their business. A company even doesn’t know how to take care their business, how can they protect your business.

This type of company is usually very small, they actually cannot provide with you reliable support. There is no surprised to me when I see many complaints of them in Drupal forum.

3) The Experience Shared in Durpal.Org forum is Trusted

Hosting threads created in Drupal.org forum are probably the most scammed forum I have seen in all those very reputed web sites. It’s allowed you to simply paste an advertisement to there. Currently drupal.org is considering to close their hosting section. I think this is a good decision.

So, for a Drupal webmaster, in order to get a good hosting solution, what you really need to do is to find a reliable Linux web hosting service provider. That’s all.

Althought, Drupal.org provides with a list of recommened Drupal hosting companies, but as said by them, those are the sponsors only, it’s not necessary to provide a good service and be listed. But in webhostingclue.com, you can find the true best Drupal hosting which have been carefully filtered. If you want to setup a Drupal site, that is the place you can get help from for a host.

iPower Discount - Free Web Hosting for 6 Months

I just finish my iPower Review, and find iPower is in a new promotion today, which is only 5 days left. In this promotion, you will get free web hosting for 6 months, which lead to only $3.98/month, and what’s more, you can choose to pay month by month at a price at $6.95, this is totally new payment terms from them. And you still get free setup even you pay with monthly terms.

Need a reliable web hosting for your blog or small business, check them out now:

iPower Review - Budget Web Hosting Solution

This blog is hosted in iPower. Since many people ask me to recommend some reliable hostings for their Blog, I would like to share my experience with iPower and explain why it’s a good choice for Blog or Small Business site.

It’s Affordable

This blog use the iPower Pro Plan solution, the regular price for this one is at $7.95/month. This is an average price for a shared small business web hosting solution in the industry. This price is affordable, and it’s less than the cost of a lunch for most of the people. And what’s lucky is that I purchased the service when they were promoting their products, so that I only spent $4.95/month to get it actually. 

By signing up with them, I have received around $80 free marketing credit for Google Adword and Yahoo Search Marketing, which is more than my spending on their service.

It’s Powerful

In its Pro plan, you will be provided with 1500GB disk space, 15000GB monthly transfer. You can host unlimited domains (blog) in it if you want. And your site will be powered with tools like MySQL, php, Perl, Agora Shopping  Cart, and SiteBuilder, etc. You also can get many other web site promotion tools from them, such as Google WebMaster tools, which has been integrated into their control Panel recently.

What’s the beautiful thing of iPower is that their teams are continuously thinking about how to give their customer better service to keep the business relationship. I see many enhancements from them since I used their service. 

It’s Reliable

I haven’t seen any down time for my sites (one blog, and one web site about affiliate network) so far. Looks like their solution is pretty stable. I only have encountered one issue when trying to create a Joomla site, I override the .htaccess file, and cause some priviledge issues, but they help me re-instate my environment and then there is no problem any more. 

Great Customer Support

I am pretty satisfied with their service so far. What iPower attracting me most is their Live Chat support, which allows me to ”chat” with them easily via instant messager and show them the problem I met. Live Chat support is a much have feature for me to sign up a service with a web hosting vendor. Otherwise, you will have to send out an email and sit there waiting for the reply. This doesn’t feel good, as least for me.

Cons of iPower

I have purchased the service from many web hosting companies to try their service so that I know what I should recommend to my customers. And compared with some other hosting companies, there are still some space iPower can improve:

• More free open source scripts.
  Currently, most of web hosting companies will provide their customers with a lot of free open source scripts so that you can get them installed with some simple clicks. But iPower only includes some basic scripts such as WordPress, phpBB, etc. And for the scripts like Joomla, Drupal, you need to pay for the installation if you want them to do it for you. Even the charge is limited, this defintely not the necessary cost for the web site owners. The good thing is that setting up an Drupal or Joomla sites is pretty easy even you do it by yourselves.
• Web Statistics Tool
  iPower does provide a very good web site statitics tool AWStats as free. But there is one issue in iPower AWStats configuration that all the traffic data from different domain are mixed together, if you have more than 1 domain hosted with them, it would be hard for you find out the web statistics for each domain.  
• Non working time support
  iPower live chat support is only available in their working time. For non working time, you have to use the email support system. This is somehow slow, but considering everyone want a work life balanced, this sounds acceptable for me. And this isssu should be able to be resolved by outsourcing this support service to China or India.

Summary

As a responsible company, iPower has served for more than 700, 000 customers so far. It’s experience and technology will guarantee you a reliable environment for your web site. You can visitor iPower to get to know about this company.

HostMonster Wins the Best Affordable Web Hosting Awards

HostMonster wins the #1 web hosting in overall from webhostingclue.com. This is a great reward for their years of hard work to provide reliable service to their customers  with affordable price.

WebHostingClue.com is one of the leading web hosting service review web site, and famous for providing the comprehensive tutorials to find reliable affordable web hosting service providers, such as the professional editor review, web hosting guide, Open Source application hosting guide, etc.

HostMonster is one of my favorite web hosting service providers. Unlike most companies fall into the over-selling trouble as the growth of the customers, HostMonster has very clear strategy to make a balance between the cost and growth. You can read my review on it before or HostMonster Review from webhostingclue.com

Discount Web Hosting - Theme of Web Hosting in July, 2008

It has been long not seeing so many leading web hosting companies give out such huge discount to their customers, majority of which will be 30% off, some even go up to 50% off.

All these tell us that the competition between different shared web hosting companies has became very host in this month. More and more companies choose to reduce their sale price to win more customers.

This is quite different with what you have seen in the beginning of this year. Most of the leading shared web hosting service provider increase their hosting price to $6.95/month, such as HostMonster, it increased its web hosting price from $4.95/month to $6.95/month, which made it charge the same price as its competitors. This is not surprised to us since even at this price, HostMonster was still the best cost-value vendors in the industry.

But in May, Lunarpages launched a new campaign and promoted its most popular web hosting solution at a price of $4.95/month. This give all the other companies very high pressure. Lunarpages is the leading web hosting service providers, and win a big market share already. The consequence of this promotion is that some other leading competitors come out with their promotion plan as well. Such as HostMonster, the current price is back to $4.95/month again. And in this month, some other companies join this group, such as iPower, PowWeb, and StartLogic.

We don’t know will these promotion be continued in August, but the price is really very low now. And I believe that this month will be a hot season. As a customer, if you need a package, now is the best time for you. Purchasing a discount web hosting, and saving on it will be the theme of this month.

WebHostingclue.com is an great place to find the affordable web hosting solution, in its Discount Web Hosting, you can find the latest promotion news in the industry. Unlike some other web sites, all the web hosting companies listed there are the trusted reliable web hosting service providers, they carefully filter the message for you.

Cost of Web Hosting

An $4.95/month web hosting solution is really “Cheap”? In this article, we will discuss about the structure of the web hosting cost so that you will get a better understanding about the answer.

Basically, the overall cost of a web hosting is comprised of 3 parts:

1) Time spent on searching for a web hosting

People tend to forget this part of cost, and spend a lot of time to look for a perfect solution. But in this inperfect world, it would take a lot of time to find so call “perfect” one. So, if you really take care of your time, then you need to make decision when you find an appropriate one which is within your budget.

2) Another cost is what you will be charged by the web hosting service provider.

For most personal web site , small home business web site, the price of a web hosting is lower than $10/month. This is not big deal, it’s less than what you will have to spend for a lunch.

3) The last one is the maintenance cost.

Maintenance cost happens when your web site falls into trouble and need the support from the web hosting service provider. Poor support and even no support will put your business in risk and give you a feeling of hopeless. And then you might start looking for another web hosting service provider and transfer all your web site to the new place. Usually, this is the largest portion of the cost you need to consider.

In the real world, a beginner tends to too care about the fee charged by the web hosting vendor, and forget the other two. This is danger as analyzed in above, a cheap but not reliable web hosting will bring your business in risk.

Find a reliable affordable web hosting is not too hard, www.webhostingclue.com is a very special site which lists out the top web hosting based on the review from the web hosting expert and the customers. You can look for an appropriate web hosting solution there if you need.

How to Get Support from Your Web Hosting Service Providers

It would be very frustrated when your web site is broken and cannot be access. At this time, if you know about what kinds of support you can get from your web hosting service provider, you will be in a better position to get your site up.

If your web hosting service providers are really care about their service, you will be able to find 4 types support channel from them. You can leverage those services according to the serious level of your web site.

1) Online Knowledge Base

This is the documents center from your vendor, you can see a lot of online help document which will tell you how to handle some very common issues. If the issue from your web site is not too serious for you, and you also happen to have a lot of time, if should be fine for you to go through the online knowledge base to see if your issue can be resolved by yourself. And this is also very helpful if you want to learn some technical knowledge about web hosting.

2) Email support

In the most web hosting vendors site, you can find a place which will allow you to open a ticket to describe the issue you have met, and very soon you can receive an email from the engineer in their company to tell you how to handle your case. Email support system is treated as a very important part of the web hosting service. If they cannot manage this well, they will lose their customers very soon.

Try the email support if the situation is not too bad and you don’t know the answer as well.

3) Live Chat Support

Live chat support is the one I like most,. By this method, I can chat with the engineer immediately, and get the problem resolved steps by steps with the guide from them. But not all the companies will provide this type of service, you need to pay attention to their support system to see it is there. Usually, I only sign the offer with those who provider Live Chat support.

4) Toll free phone support.

This is for very urgent case, you want to get the problem resolved as soon as possible. At this time, you can pick up the phone and ask for help. The same as live chat support, not all companies provide you with this type of service, if your business is really very important to you and cannot be offline for even 1 hour, you should only work with those who provide toll free phone support, and it will be better that the support is 24*7 available.

As for above 4 types of support channel, email support is very basic, if a web hosting service cannot reply your email prompted, you should not work with them, since this is also happened in the company with very poor service.

And you should try to signup with those providing live chat support, which will ease you a lot when you are in trouble with your site. For toll free phone support, this is just a nice to have feature unless your web site is not very critical.

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