Website Hosting Reviews

Note: The web hosts listed in Website Hosting Reviews all have reputations for having excellent uptime track records.  This article is meant to help you avoid web hosts that don't have stellar records.  

As applied to web hosting:

Uptime refers to the amount of time your website WILL be available.

Downtime refers to the amount of time your website WILL NOT be available.

Almost all web hosting providers display their uptime in the form of a guarantee. This uptime guarantee is suppose to reassure you that their hosting service is dependable. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as most uptime guarantees are no more than just marketing hype and misleading promises.

With that said, when selecting a web hosting provider, the uptime guarantee is still something you don’t want to overlook. After all, time is money - and if your website is down, it’s costing you money! Start to think about downtime as lost sales, unsuccessful newsletter sign-ups, missed promotional opportunities or even your online reputation. In fact, website downtime could end up costing you much more than the monthly cost of the web hosting.

The Industry Average

An uptime guarantee of 99.9% is the industry average. In a 30-day month, a 99.9% uptime guarantee allows for a maximum of 43 minutes and 12 seconds of downtime per month.

Almost all web hosting providers state their uptime guarantee on a month-by-month basis. Although rare, a few will state their uptime guarantee on a yearly basis. Obviously, this benefits them much more than it benefits you. In order to receive any compensation for their poor service, you would have to stay with them for at least a year. This could expose your website to more downtime, which in turn, could cost you more money.

To sum it up, if a web hosting provider you’re considering states their uptime guarantee on a yearly basis - you should probably consider using another provider.

Types of Downtime

Even with an experienced web hosting provider, some downtime is unavoidable. Eventually, all servers and network infrastructure require some kind of software upgrade or hardware replacement that will require downtime.

The three types of downtime you may experience include:

1. Planned Downtime – This type of downtime usually involves server upgrades, network upgrades, software upgrades or possibly new software installations. Most web hosting providers will notify you in advance when performing this type of maintenance. In an effort to reduce website downtime, most will complete this type of maintenance late at night when the majority of websites receive the least amount of traffic.
2. Semi-Planned Downtime – This type of downtime usually involves the discovery of a serious software bug or security breach that involves patching the installed software. Because these problems require immediate attention, you’ll receive very little (if any) advance notice of possible downtime.
3. Unplanned Downtime – This is the worst type of downtime and is the result of an overloaded server, unstable or corrupted software, hardware failure, network problems and even the weather. With this type of downtime, you will receive no advance notice.

Generally, any downtime you experience because of planned or semi-planned downtime will not count toward the uptime guarantee. In addition, some web hosting providers state in their TOS (terms of service) that any downtime caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, DDOS attacks, and any event that’s out of their control will not count toward the uptime guarantee.

Network Uptime, Server Uptime or Both

Some web hosting providers state their uptime guarantee as applying to their network, some to the server, and some apply it to both the server and the network. To examine how these differences affect you, let’s look at the following two examples.

1. Server Uptime – Your web host states their uptime guarantee as applying to the server. In this example, the server that your website is located on is working fine. Unfortunately, their network is down and your website isn’t reachable from the Internet. Even though your website is unavailable, technically the uptime guarantee does not apply because the server that your website is on is still up and running.
2. Network Uptime – This time your host states their uptime guarantee as applying to their network. In this example, their network is working properly but the server your website is on has developed a bad hard drive. Again, even though your website is unavailable, the uptime guarantee does not apply because their network is up and running.

Obviously, the best solution for you would be to find a web host that applies their uptime guarantee to both the server and the network. Unfortunately, most providers state their uptime guarantee as applying to their network and not the server. Generally, this network uptime policy applies to all types of hosting such as shared hosting, VPS (virtual private servers) and dedicated servers (both self-managed and managed).

Uptime Guarantee Compensation

The amount of compensation you’ll receive for downtime varies widely between hosting providers. Some will only compensate you a messily 5% of your monthly hosting fee no matter how long your website is unavailable. Some will compensate you a maximum of 50% of your monthly hosting fee, and still others will compensate you the total monthly hosting fee.

For any downtime event, the compensation you’ll receive is limited to the monthly amount you pay for hosting. The compensation will usually be in the form of a credit on your account, and will used on your next month’s hosting bill.

Because of the vast range of compensation between hosting providers - it’s important to read the fine print in their TOS (terms of service) or SLA (service level agreement) policies. If you can’t find the amount of compensation you’ll receive for downtime in these policies, ask their customer service representatives.

Proving Downtime

When it comes to proving downtime, you are at the mercy of the hosting provider. Every provider handles this in a different way, but most will require you to contact them stating you’ve experienced downtime. Typically, you’ll have to use their ticket-based help desk to make the request.

In a worst-case situation, the web hosting provider will start measuring downtime from the time you submit the support ticket to the time they close the ticket.

For example, your website is unavailable for 2 hours before you discover it’s down. You submit a trouble ticket to the provider, and they fix the problem within 15 minutes. Even though your website was down for 2 hours and 15 minutes, they only consider it down for 15 minutes.

And just so you know, most hosting providers will not accept downtime proof from a third party uptime monitoring service. This is because of all the variables that come into play (such as the quality of the monitoring service, their network capacity/transit availability, etc.). Instead, they utilize their own in-house monitoring service and the reports produced by the server’s operating system and web server software.

What if you know you experienced downtime, and the host says you didn’t? Basically, too bad. The hosting provider has the final decision - and if they determine that your website wasn’t down, you won’t receive any compensation.

Conclusion

Even though most uptime guarantees are just marketing hype - and most web hosting providers TOS (terms of service) and SLA’s (service level agreement) make it just about  impossible for you to collect on the uptime guarantee - it still offers some usefulness when selecting a web host.

The best advice we can give - read the fine print in the hosting providers TOS (terms of service) and/or SLA (service level agreement). This way you’ll know in advance what their uptime guarantee policies are before a problem develops. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to decide if you feel comfortable working with a web hosting provider based on your individual requirements.

The web hosts listed in Website Hosting Reviews all have reputations for having excellent uptime track records.

Web Hosting Uptime Guarantees Exposed

Shared Web Hosting; Is It Right For You?

Shared Web hosting (oftentimes called virtual hosting or just shared hosting) is simply using one web server to host multiple websites. Each website has its own hard drive space on the server to keep it separate from the other websites.

If your website is a personal or small business website, consisting mostly of static web pages, shared hosting may be an economical option you’ll want to consider.

Let’s look at some of the advantages of shared hosting, and then we’ll explore some issues you’ll need to consider before deciding if shared hosting is right for you.

Shared Web Hosting Advantages

The main advantage of shared hosting is the low cost. Web hosting providers are able to keep the cost low because everyone on the server is sharing the overall expense of maintaining the server. As a result, you can get feature packed shared hosting plans for less than $10.00 a month!

Another advantage with shared hosting is that you don’t need to be a technical guru to get your website up and running. Most shared hosting plans include some kind of web-based control panel (such as Plesk, cPanel, Helm, etc.). Some of the larger hosting providers will have their own custom-made control panel. Through the control panel, you can easily manage your website. Script installers (such as Fantastico) are typically included, and allow you to quickly install a blog, add a shopping cart, a forum, and many other programs that help promote customer interaction with your website.

Last, but not least, with shared hosting you don’t have to worry about the technical aspects of keeping a web server operating smoothly. Since the hosting provider takes care of the server maintenance and also security, you can focus on building and promoting your website.

Now that you know about some of the advantages of shared hosting, let’s explore some other issues you need to consider.

Sharing Crowded Servers is a disadvantage of shared web hosting.  How many shared hosting websites are on a server vary widely between hosting providers. Typically, it’s common to have a hundred or more on one web server. In addition, if the hosting provider allows reselling or unlimited websites, there could be literally thousands of shared hosting websites on one server.

The more reliable providers will limit the number of shared hosting websites they place on their servers. Other providers, in an effort to maximize their profit per server, will pack as many shared hosting websites on a server as possible.

Website Hosting Reviews features web hosts that don't put too many websites on one server. 

With shared hosting (as with any type of hosting), your website uptime is an issue you need to pay close attention to. An uptime guarantee of 99.9% is the most common. In a 30-day month, this amounts to 43 minutes and 12 seconds of downtime per month.

With shared hosting, you are at the mercy of the other websites hosted on the same server. Some of these websites may have scripts that hog server resources, others may try to run malicious programs that consume server resources, and others operate questionable websites that attract troublemakers. Even a denial of service (DOS) attack against another website hosted on the same server as yours will cause your website to be unavailable.

Because of these other websites, the server becomes unstable. At this point, rebooting the server is the only option. Typically, servers used for shared hosting require rebooting more often than VPS (virtual private servers) and dedicated servers.

A reliable and committed hosting provider can manage these problems and take action against the offending website(s) and attackers before the situation gets out of control. However, even with the most knowledgeable staff working on and tweaking the server, downtime can still happen.

IP Banning/Mail Delivery Problems/SSL

Many times with shared hosting, all the websites hosted on the server have the same IP address. Known as name-based hosting, this can create some IP banning, email delivery issues, and secure certificate issues.

First, let’s look at the IP banning issue. At one time, search engines would ban offending websites by blocking the IP address. Today, the bigger search engines and directories typically block a website by the domain name. Although, through the control panel, a website can still block email delivery and web page access by the IP address.

The mail delivery problems start when one of the other websites hosted on the same server as you repeatedly sends out SPAM messages. To stop the SPAM messages, some ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) will blacklist that IP address and mark all email as being SPAM. As a result, your email is marked as SPAM because of the actions of somebody else.

In addition, with name-based shared hosting, you can’t have your own SSL certificate. If you only have a few products to sell, and intend to use the PayPal button option, you can get around this issue. On the other hand, if you’re planning on a more robust ecommerce enabled website, you’ll need to have your own IP address.

Register.com shared web hosting comes with a dedicated IP address, and is our #1 shared web host partially for this reason. Read the Register.com web hosting review here.

Server Resources

Another issue with shared hosting has to do with server resources (CPU, memory, bandwidth, etc.). For the most part, the majority of websites using shared hosting are static web pages. A visitor goes to a web page and then spends some time reading it before loading another page. While the visitor is scanning or reading the page, the server is free to process other requests. As a result, the server is able to multi-task very efficiently.

However, everything has its limits and the same goes for a server. The server can only process so much information at one time. If there is one website that receives a lot of traffic, this website will be using more of the server’s resources. The more requests made at one time will eventually result in a slight delay in displaying your web page.

Typically, with shared hosting you can only consume a certain amount of server resources at one time. For example, most terms of service agreements will state something like “you can use no more than 20% of the server resources for no more than 90 seconds at one time”. If you have a popular website or a script that uses too many server resources, you will have to upgrade to a more advanced hosting solution.

Standard Server Setup

With shared hosting, you will have less control over which modules and OS (operating system) versions are available. This holds true for both Linux and Windows shared hosting. Therefore, it’s important to know in advanced what scripts you’ll be using and what their minimum requirements are. Depending on what you want your website to accomplish, this may or may not be an issue for you.

This is why we recommend you get a web hosts that specializes in what you're trying to do with your website.  For example, if you want to run Windows hosting, get LunarPages. The best ecommerce host is inmotion web hosting. Or, if you're using WordPress then BlueHost is a great web host for you.

Security Issues

There can be security issues with shared hosting because other customers are on the same server. While the risk is slight, there is the chance that they might be able to view your directories and sometimes even overwrite your files. This of course, could be serious problem for any website, and especially one just starting out.

Moreover, let us be honest for a moment. The Internet is not all about peace. There are hackers that spend their day trying to raise havoc on the Internet. Even regular people tend to be far less honest on the Internet. Perhaps it is that degree of presumed anonymity that brings out the worst in people.

At any rate, if you’re dealing with highly sensitive data, the security risks associated with shared hosting may pose a serious security problem.

Exit/Upgrade Plan

As you build and nurture your website, eventually you will outgrow shared hosting. When this happens, you need to have a plan that will allow you to move from shared hosting to a more powerful hosting solution.

Preferably, the host providing your shared hosting can accommodate your growing needs and requirements. If they can’t, you’ll have no choice but to find a new host that can handle your growth requirements.

The Planet is an excellent web hosting choice if you need a dedicated server instead of shared hosting.

So, is shared web hosting right for you?

For most personal websites, blog type websites and small businesses with mostly static web pages, shared hosting is a very practical an excellent solution. Since you can find many reliable providers that offer shared hosting for less than $10.00 a month, shared hosting can fit into the smallest budgets.  Take a look at Website Hosting Review's Top10 web hosting list - you'll find a great shared web host to fit your needs.

One last critical point to remember is the fact that the hosting provider you select will determine if shared hosting works for you. Select a host that’s not committed to providing excellent service and support - and your shared hosting experience could very well turn into a nightmare. Nothing is more stressful than learning from one of your customer’s that your website is unavailable.

Register.com has won the J.D. Powers award for excellent web hosting customer service numerous years in a row.  

Shared Web Hosting; Is It Right For You?

It's a fact; all successful websites have a reliable web host

Your website is one of the most important tools you can use to promote your business. After all, your website will work to promote your business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

When building or maintaining your online presence, one decision you must make is which web hosting provider to work with. As the Internet quickly becomes the contact method of choice for many people, the web host you select becomes even more important.

Do not take this decision lightly! After all, a web host provides the foundation for your website. It doesn't matter whether your website is a personal home page or a full-service e-commerce website; you need a reliable web host.

When you use Website Hosting Reviews as a research tool, you'll save a lot of time, hassle, and expense when selecting a web host. Plus, you'll know which web host is right for you, based on your current needs and future website plans. Use Website Hosting Reviews to find your web host now.

Looking for Java Web Hosting or JSP Web Hosting?

It helps to know the difference between the options.  It also helps to know a web host that has had success for their clients running Java Web Hosting or JSP Web Hosting.

JSP and servlets are server-side scripting that requires the user's webhost to provide a servlet runner and support for the languages. Lunarpages, our suggestion if you need Java Web Hosting or JSP Web Hosting, uses the servlet runner Resin.

Using JSP and servlets is a good way to go because a user's browser does not need anything turned on or enabled to run pages coded using JSP and servlets.  This is because the server is what parses them, so pages built using JSP and servlets would run on any browser so long as you have JSP and servlet support on the web hosting account. JSP and servlets are written using Java language, so knowledge of Java is required to successfully use these.

JavaScript is primarily client-side (meaning that the user's own system would be running it) and supported so long as the user's browser is configured to allow JavaScript.  Roughly 10% of people have JavaScript turned off in their browsers due to a desire to reduce security issues that Javascript can cause.  People's employers may restrict Javascript due to security concerns.

All webhosts can support this type of JavaScript as it is run client-side and not server-side. JavaScript is not related to Java or JSP and servlets at all despite the name similarity.

Java applets are client-side scripts that are created locally on a system using Java language and then compiled and uploaded. A user's browser determines support for these or not. The program to allow applets to run on a browser is included on most computer systems, although people can disable the capability or not update their program and so not be able to run newer applets. Again, because this is client side, all web hosts can support this.

Make sense?  We hope so.  And now you know what web host to get your JSP web hosting from ... try Lunarpages today!.