Web Hosting Box

FatCow was established in 1998 and has been offering shared web hosting solutions to small and medium enterprises as well as individuals at affordable rates. FatCow believes in old and simple values evident from its friendly customer services and easy to use hosting plans. Additionally, the web hosting provider takes pride in offering green hosting and has 100% wind-powered data centers.

Hosting Plans

FatCow offers two basic hosting plans. The Original FatCow Plan comprises of all the services of a hosting plan and is priced at $56/year or $4.67/month. It comes with unlimited disk space, unlimited monthly bandwidth, unlimited email accounts and a free site builder. Some of the hosting features included in this plan are integrated Google webmaster tools, online selling and store tools, free advertising and application installation wizards.

The MiniMoo plan, on the other hand comes with limited hosting features suitable for those who have just started their business and are not looking for a complete hosting plan. Using this plan, the clients may add a ‘coming soon’ or ‘under construction ‘page until the business is ready for the hosting plan. Although limited, this plan also offers some very useful hosting features such as spam filtering and newsletter management and is priced at $5 for the first year.

Reliability

With 99.9% uptime and guaranteed reliability, FatCow operates two data centers equipped with 800 servers and both A/C and D/C power supply. The servers are also equipped with identical severs making it easy to deal with the failure with the primary server. The data center also comes with a storage unit which backs up data so as to restore the websites in the event of a disk failure. Its data centers also ensure round the clock monitoring so as to assure maximum performance of servers at all times of the day. Such reliability is generally not seen with budget hosting providers.

Customer Support

FatCow also offers round the clock customer support through a toll free number as well as live chat and email support. The organization also has a ‘HeiferCratic’ Oath which pledges outstanding customer support and after sales services. The customer support department promises to answer phone calls within 2 minutes and resolve problems as soon as possible.

Pricing

With its reliable services and outstanding customer support, FatCow also comes with extremely affordable and competitive hosting prices making it the right choice for all types of customers.

Generally, FatCow is believed to satisfy customer demands and needs to the fullest and receives excellent reviews, however, customers complain about its inflexible plans lacking upgrading possibility and support for Linux only.

Web hosting is simply a service that allows you to lease a web server, which can be used to provide server resources to all of your websites. Since each webmaster has a different set of needs and requirements, there are a plethora of hosting types and plans available on the market today. For the inexperienced or aspiring webmaster it can be extremely difficult to choose a hosting type without knowing the main attributes of each hosting environment. Although there are many sites online that review plans individually, very few actually explain the different types of hosting and how they relate to webmaster capabilities/requirements. It doesn’t make much sense to begin comparing plans and prices without first knowing the type of hosting that will be most suitable for your online endeavors. The following is an overview of the three main hosting types, which can be categorized into three levels of experience.

Novice (Shared) Hosting

Shared hosting is by far the most popular hosting type, and most people that have a shared hosting plan don’t even realize it. The shared hosting environment bears its name because you’ll be given access to a web server that is shared by dozens or even hundreds of webmasters simultaneously. Shared web servers utilize unique load-balancing technology to ensure that a single webmaster cannot overload the server with the tasks of their websites. While this prevents significant performance problems, it also limits your capabilities as a webmaster and makes it impossible to accommodate thousands of site visitors across a large network of sites. Thus, shared hosting is usually recommended for novice webmasters that only have a couple of websites.

Intermediate (VPS) Hosting

Although most webmasters start out with a shared hosting plan, it is extremely common for successful site owners to upgrade to a VPS (virtual private server) hosting plan after reaching the limits of their shared plan. VPS hosting is by far the most diverse hosting type, with plans ranging in cost from $20 per month to $200 per month depending on the capabilities and allocated server resources. Virtual private server hosting is similar to shared hosting in that you will be sharing a web server with other webmasters, however the way the server is shared is very different. Rather than sharing the entirety of the server you are given a specific partition that is solely devoted to the tasks of your websites. This enhances performance and eliminates the possibility of another website affecting the performance of your sites. VPS hosting is an economical option for webmasters that need a powerful solution but cannot yet afford a comprehensive dedicated hosting plan.

Advanced (Dedicated) Hosting

Dedicated hosting bears its name because it gives you dedicated access to a web server that is solely used to power your websites. By having access to an entire web server the amount of tasks that your websites can perform are seemingly limitless, as a vast amount of bandwidth and disk space can be accessed at any time. In fact, many large corporations and Internet entrepreneurs utilize dedicated hosting plans to host hundreds of websites simultaneously without error. Since the cost of dedicated hosting can range anywhere from $100 to more than $400 it is usually a service marketed towards advanced webmasters that have an established online business presence.

Blogs are becoming as increasingly popular as reading the happenings each morning in the daily news.  While it’s a fact that almost everyone has the ability to blog, there are several things you should know beforehand to be considered productive.  Prepared with the knowledge of your initial blogging needs, and equipped with a reliable and affordable blogging host is essential for success in the blogosphere.

Assessing Your Blogging Needs

When looking for a dependable, yet, affordable, blogging host the first thing you want to consider is whether or not the available package meets your individual blogging needs.  Assessing your initial needs requires you to have a basic understanding of how much space your blog will claim on the blog host server, and if the hosting package fits your blogging budget.

Depending upon the blogging platform of your preference, any required plug-ins installed to run your blog, plus the additional space needed for the initial blog scripts, estimated disk space usage is around 10MB.   While most free blogging hosts support such basic blogs, however, if you intend to install video features, then the resources required are typically more than a free host sustains. Additionally, installing popular platforms such as WordPress is as easy as allowing users to automatically install platforms effortlessly using cPanel.

Reputable Blogging Platforms

If you’re searching for a trustworthy and free blogging platform to get started, consider the following favorite among established bloggers:

• Google’s Blogger – A free, web-based easy-to-use platform allowing users to edit using Microsoft Word and Google Docs.  Virtually instant blog set-up.  Ideal platform for beginners.
• WordPress – A known favorite for being a free web-based blogging platform that’s loaded with features such as trendy themes and plug-ins.  WordPress is not recommended for users wishing to profit from affiliate marketing.
• Live Journal – A popular and versatile blog host offering free and paid packages, with over 18 million customers.
• Tumblr – Another free web-based platform, although ostly popular for micro-blogging allowing users to post frequent short posts similar to Twitter.  Ideal for individuals desiring to blog without the required time and effort as a full-fledged blog.
• Posterous – Yet another free web-based blogging platform, but with a different spin.  A single e-mail to Posterous allows you to set-up an account and blog your thoughts via e-mail; however, not to be confused with micro-blogging.

As in web hosting, you should demand and receive excellent customer service when troubleshooting an issue with your blog.  Although for the most part blogs are usually not as complicated to maintain as fully-featured websites, however, you should still expect to encounter technical difficulties at some point in your blogging experience.  Inquire if the blog host supports third party scripts, offers 24 hour customer service support and provide the appropriate contact information visible on the company’s home page.

Armed with the knowledge of your blogging needs and a reputable blog host, the sky is the limit in the blogosphere.

Yahoo is primarily known for being one of the largest search engines, however it is also a web-based services provider that offers a plethora of products and services related to web hosting and advertising. Some of the best hosting solutions offered by Yahoo are included within their merchant services plans, which can accommodate the requirements of almost any online entrepreneur. If you’ve been shopping for a robust e-commerce solution for your online endeavors, then you may want to consider the following review of Yahoo Merchant Services.

Yahoo Merchant Services Plans

Yahoo Merchant Services currently is offered in three different plans – Standard, Professional, and Starter. The majority of novice webmasters will be able to access all of the server resources needed for basic websites within the Starter plan. However, more experienced website owners may want to opt for the standard plan initially in order to guarantee adequate hosting resources. Fortunately, even if you select the wrong plan initially, Yahoo Merchant Services makes it easy to upgrade to a more powerful plan within the control panel of your hosting account. Even the starter plan includes unlimited bandwidth and disk space, $100 worth of advertising credits, and simple installation utilities that facilitate the process of installing content management systems that will help you manage your business website. Yahoo Merchant Services hosting plans also do not have set up fees, and they are currently providing a 25% discount on the first two months of service for first-time customers.

Ongoing Merchant Support

Yahoo Merchant Services also provides renowned customer service and technical support, which is provided 24 hours per day, seven days a week, through various contact methods including phone, e-mail, and live chat. Since Yahoo is primarily a search engine, the company knows how to offer products and services that are relevant to the needs and requirements of specific webmasters. Whether you are having trouble setting up your checkout pages and shopping cart, or you need assistance with logging into your hosting account, you can be sure that Yahoo Merchant Services support will be available every day of the year, even holidays.

Additional Features

Every Yahoo merchant services hosting plan also includes free domain registration, a free e-mail account, access to integrated shopping cart applications, payment processor integration, inventory management and automated billing utilities, and even free Yahoo advertising credits. Thus, Yahoo merchant services is capable of providing an all-inclusive solution that can meet the needs of the most novice or the most experienced webmaster, regardless of their industry or business goals. Yahoo merchant services also provides custom web design, website promotion, Landing page optimization, and reseller hosting plans for online entrepreneurs that would like to create new residual income streams. For webmasters that do not have a large budget, or would like to begin designing and promoting their websites themselves, Yahoo merchant services also provides free site building utilities that include thousands of predesigned professional templates, which can be applied to the entire site quickly and easily.

VPS (virtual private server) hosting is definitely one of the most popular types of web hosting plans available on the market, as most novice webmasters utilize VPS hosting plans after graduating from smaller shared hosting plans. With a VPS hosting plan you will receive access to a partition of the web server, which can be used to power all of your websites simultaneously. Although you will not have access to an entire web server for your own purposes, VPS hosting is slightly more secure and stable than shared hosting because rather than sharing the entire server is shared with the dozens or even hundreds of others webmasters you’ll receive exclusive access to a separated partition of the server. Although VPS hosting presents many advantages over shared hosting it does have some commonly overlooked limitations, which are discussed below.

Limitations of Conventional VPS Hosting

It is important to note that there is a new type of VPS hosting available on the market – cloud hosting. The cloud hosting environment is very different from the conventional VPS hosting environment because it utilizes a network of web servers rather than a single server. Thus, instead of gaining access to a single server partition you’ll have instant access to a vast network of servers they can distribute and allocate workload evenly as traffic arrives. The cloud hosting environment barely has any limitations because it is not comprised of a single web server, and is therefore capable of accommodating many more requests and tasks simultaneously. The following limitations pertain to conventional VPS hosting, and most of them do not apply to the cloud hosting environment.

Software Configuration and IP Addresses

Fortunately, unlike a shared hosting plan, with a VPS hosting plan you be able to adjust the software configuration of the web server by installing new applications and changing/adjusting your operating system. Unfortunately, VPS hosting usually only comes with one IP address (although there may be the option to purchase multiple IP addresses for an additional monthly cost), which makes it not quite as powerful as dedicated hosting. Before selecting a VPS hosting plan it is important to ensure that you have the capability to install new software if you have the need to do so. This is especially true for webmasters that utilize Microsoft Web application such as SharePoint for business purposes. If you have the need to use Microsoft Web applications you will need to ensure that you purchase a Windows VPS hosting plan.

Monthly Costs and Upgrading

VPS hosting is perhaps the most diverse hosting type, with plans ranging in cost from $20 to over $200, depending on the hosting provider and plan capabilities. Some hosting providers offer more than seven VPS plans, all of which have varying feature sets and capabilities and are specifically targeted towards a particular audience or webmaster skill level. With a cloud VPS hosting plan you do not have to choose a specific plan type, as you are only billed on a monthly basis for the server resources used during the billing period.