If you are worried about your websites and where they are hosted in case of a major storm such as those we had during the 2005 Atlantic Tropical Hurricane Season, then you are not alone. If your websites are hosted on servers in those areas you may be down for the count if all hell breaks lose and it is definitely something you should consider if you want to prevent these outages. It sounds like a nightmare scenario indeed.
Many hosting companies guarantee this will never happen and have all sorts of back-ups to save the data. This is great but if your business is offline then it is often down for the count. Indeed the only way to totally be set up and ready is to have a mirrored set of sites all set up and ready to go, which are hosted somewhere else as well.
If there is a total catastrophe then you have an option of turning on the back up servers hosting in a more stable part of the country and turning them on. Many companies do not consider such strategies up front and then it is too late. You must be prepared in advance to insure you will always be up. If not you are history when catastrophe strikes.
If your sites are down too long you can lose your rankings in the search engines, all your customers will think you are out of business and then you will have to re-establish your in the market place. Even worse some folks may not trust you and therefore be leery of using your online services in the future. Consider all this in 2006.
Source: http://www.ezinearticles.com/
The web hosting industry has become fiercely competitive and hosting companies are constantly looking for strategies to keep apace and remain on the top rungs in the hosting market. With such a rush of hosting companies, customers find it difficult to choose a reliable provider. By adopting a few strategies and methodologies, hosting companies can manage to rake in large profits and carve a decent niche for themselves in the industry.
1.Referral Programs
Referral programs can boost sign ups considerably and is a proven strategy, not just for web hosting companies but many online businesses as well. This pogram gives you a chance to directly interact with your customers. The customer is assigned with a special tracking number id and when another customer signs up for your hosting services through that id; the customer is given rewards or discounts as per the rules, terms and conditions stipulated by the hosting company. These referral programs therefore bring more users or customers to sign up for your services. Specially designed softwares are available in order to manage and track the above explained referral activity.
2.Mouth Publicity or Recommendations
If your company has been able to achieve customer satisfaction, chances are that you would naturally get recommendations perhaps evenly effortlessly. Participate in forums and blogs and take this route to generate popularity of your reseller website. Such relevant discussions would also influence your search engine rankings, an achievement that every website owner is striving for. Remember, happy customers would in turn generate more happy customers. Leave behind your website URL for easy access in case the discussion peaked some reader’s curiosity. Consider this step as enhancing your website visibility and spreading the word out about the reliability of your hosting services.
3.Hosting Directories
Submit your website to reliable and unbiased hosting directories. By doing this, you receive targeted traffic as well as higher search engine rankings. Once you have garnered ample credibility in the market, some web hosting companies may even want to do one-way link exchange. This will enhance your search engine rankings as well as website visibility even more. Most hosting directories out there could be perceived with a skeptical mind as not all directories give unbiased information and ratings. So select a hosting directory that has a loyal customer base and features impartial reviews and ratings about different hosting providers.
4.Link Exchanges and banner ads/pop-up, email campaigns
A little initial investment would yield optimum profits in the future. Set yourself an initial advertising budget. Alternatively, you could utilize the services of website marketing industries that could help you earn decent search engine rankings and place your banner ads or pop-up ads on relevant websites. You could also design email campaigns in order to offer relevant information to people who would be interested in your services. These mails could also include discount schemes or hosting coupons in order to attract the targeted customers to sign up for your website hosting services.
Source: http://www.a1articles.com/
To put it simply, Web hosting is a business that provides the service of storing, maintaining and serving Web pages to the Internet. Web hosting companies take on the role of providing the needed infrastructure so that everyone can publish to the Internet. This infrastructure can be quite complicated and costly.
These hosting companies are not the same as Internet service providers (ISPs). In order to access the Internet everyone needs an ISP. But in order to publish content on the Internet a Web hosting company will be a necessity. Many Internet service providers will give their customers a small amount of free hosting for a personal Web site. For a business Web site though, you’ll want to find a company that specializes only in web hosting.
Web hosting is really not as easy as it sounds though. Web site hosting is a 24 hour a day, seven day a week operation that runs all year. Web sites always need to be up and running. This puts a tremendous strain on the equipment and people that work in the Web hosting industry.
To properly host a large number of websites expensive equipment is needed. High-end computers are required to meet the ongoing demands. These computers, or Web page ’servers’, use large amounts of power and get very hot. This means even more power is required to keep the servers cool. In addition, the computers should be kept in a special data center environment that is kept clean and cold. Often times, data centers will have several large air conditioning units specifically to pump cold air onto the servers. It’s also a wise choice to have industrial size backup generators in case anything was to happen to the power.
Web hosting companies must also connect their Web servers to a backbone provider. Backbone providers are called network service providers. These companies provide direct network access to the Internet. This access is sold by what is called bandwidth. Web hosting companies buy this bandwidth and then resell it to their customers. Bandwidth is simply the amount of information transmitted along a communications channel in a given period of time.
As you can see, Web hosting is a very complicated business. To counter-balance the operational costs involved hosting companies deal in volume. A Web server can host 1000’s of Web sites. Adding everything up, there is a specific amount of money required to maintain a constantly running Web server. So each new site added to a server will decrease the overall cost per customer.
But, hosting too many Web sites on one server will start to decrease the speed and performance of the sites hosted on it. Then customers will experience the speed of their Web sites begin to slow down and might start to see general page errors when trying to load their site. A balance must be maintained by the Web hosting company between operational costs and server performance.
Web sites must be running all the time. This increases the human costs beyond that of a normal business. The hosting company must maintain a staff on location at all times. This means that instead of one 8 hour shift there are three 8 shifts. A Web hosting company will also need to cover weekends. Generally though, non-business hour staff is for technical support only.
In conclusion, the Web hosting business has many components including hardware, software, network technologies and human hard work. This synergy of man and machine makes the Internet what it is today.
Source: http://www.a1articles.com/