Website Hosting Reviews Made Easy

In order to ensure the best choice for your specific needs, studying a few top website hosting reviews may be a wise decision. However, in order to better interpret the positives and negatives of a website hosting review, let us first look at what website hosting is all about.

What is Website Hosting?

A website hosting service provides individuals and companies with the necessary facilities to make their websites accessible via the Internet.

Professional and reputable website hosting companies typically run large data centres providing data storage space for their clients’ web pages as well as backup copies.

The scope of website hosting services varies considerably depending on individual requirements. It can vary from the most elementary requirement to store a few web pages and graphic images uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to large corporate websites with thousands of web pages.

Today most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer a service that caters for most of the needs of the smaller user and it often comes for free. Larger clients with more complex websites will require a more substantial package specifically configured to their needs and priced according to the components selected.

What Features Are Offered?

The top web hosting services that support a more complex environment will typically offer a Dashboard or Control Panel feature such as cPanel to facilitate the management of the following functions:

• Upload and download of data files, images and videos
• Editing, moving and deleting files
• Domain names
• E-mail accounts
• Web traffic statistics
• Backup and recovery
• Simple Scripts or Fantastico for implementing third party applications

Support is offered for databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server, and application development tools such as Java and PHP. These facilities allow the client to develop interfaces between backend business applications and the Website.

In order to ensure a secure environment for the execution of e-commerce transactions, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) will typically be offered.

Types of Website Hosting

• Shared hosting – More than one website share a single server.
• Dedicated hosting – The client leases a server, which is not shared with anyone.
• Colocation hosting – Similar to dedicated but the server is owned by the client.
• Re-seller hosting – The host allows clients to become web hosts themselves (affiliates).
• Cloud web hosting – Often offers a higher level of reliability. With traditional hosting, businesses can potentially be brought to a standstill when a hosting server crashes. Websites, company intranets, e-mail, and data can be completely inaccessible until the server is repaired. When a particular component fails in a cloud configuration, another resource steps in seamlessly to take over.

Critical Elements of the Service

The hosting services promoted on this site have all been evaluated and rated in terms of the following critical elements in the various website hosting reviews:

• Website Uptime
• Storage Space And Bandwidth
• Customer Service
• Service Monitoring
• Security And Backups

Conclusion

There are thousands of website hosting services available globally and there are thousands of website hosting reviews available on the Internet. Studying and comparing all these reviews (many of which are blatantly biased) can be a daunting task.

So, what we have done on this site, for your convenience, was to compare a large number of the top website hosting reviews and present you here with the overall best domain hosting services in the industry. As these companies are all worth considering, we list them in alphabetical order.

(You may also want to learn how to build and how to host your own website)