Reliable web hosts aren’t as easy to find as you might imagine. There is considerable competition out there with an increasing amount of web hosts, and resellers who all claim to give the consumer upwards of 99% uptime.

For any website, reliable web hosting is incredibly important. It can mean the difference between a frequently returning visitor and one who doesn’t bother at all.

Pages often returned as not available can also impact your rating with today’s ultra-clever search engines who are also in a race of their own to beat their own competition (other search engines!) after all, a customer returns to good service.

Why is it important to have a reliable web hosting? Your peace of mind is one reason that springs to mind straightaway.

Imagine trying to build your website, to find that every time you go to upload new content or make any changes you can’t, because the service is down.

It becomes tedious and frustrating and we are no longer in the early 1990’s were that sort of thing was experienced daily.

Consumers are more demanding and won’t keep coming back to a website that offers less than perfect service. Whole businesses have been lost because of the same thing, and it’s this sort of problem which needs addressing the moment you realize you have it.

When is it critical to have one? It’s important anyway, very important unless you have a website you aren’t too concerned about people seeing; today’s new search engine methods mean that reports are made each time a URL is inaccessible and this can lead to a drop in search engine rankings after so long.

Running a business through your website though makes it critical to have a reliable webhost. You need at least 99.9% uptime, this may seem excessive to you, but in today’s modern technology it is perfectly possible to find web hosting businesses that can manage and in some cases even exceed this percentage.

Say your webhost was current providing you with 20% downtime (80% uptime) this could in effect mean you are losing up to 20% of potential customers, who cannot view your site due to this downtime.

This is affecting your earning ability, thus losing you potential revenue. Anyone you employ to help your business, in this case the webhost should not help you LOSE money!

How do I know if my webhost is reliable? You don’t, not at first. There are ways though that you can use to find out how likely they are to be reliable, or not.

There are free tools now on the internet which help you monitor up and downtime, and these are becoming more and more popular in the race to be top of the search engines.

More and more people are realizing the importance of server uptime, and these tools can become an invaluable resource if your webhost isn’t communicating too well with you.

If you are with a decent webhost then the likelihood is, you’ll either receive an email advising you of planned downtime, or there will be a portal on the webhosts website advising of any problems.

Webhosts who hide this sort of information do so for a reason, and that is because they’re frightened you’ll go elsewhere.

Perhaps your business is growing faster than your web hosting company can keep up with or maybe your chosen site just isn’t up to par with your sites’ needs.

In any case, the best solution to this conundrum is to switch web hosting companies. Before you dive blindly into what can be a sea of confusion, there are a few steps you should take to ensure the transition from one site provider to another is seamless and worry-free.

As with any type of renovation project, embarking on a web hosting company change will go much easier if you develop a plan and then stick to it.

In order to ensure a smooth and efficient transfer from one web hosting company to another, you should allow yourself enough time to complete each step and then run tests for accuracy and accessibility.

Generally this type of transition requires at least three to four weeks from the initial planning stage to the date your new site is up and running.

Once you have completed your research and determined which site you will do business with (bear in mind there are hundreds of thousands of sites you can form an alliance with, so this can sometimes be a daunting and often frustrating task.

However, doing your homework at this stage can eliminate a lot of aggravation later.), you can have your new site activated usually within 24-48 hours.

The first, and most important, step at this stage is to ensure you do a secure and complete backup of all the files on your current (old) web hosting provider’s site regardless of whether or not you have the files stored on a local computer.

Backups are like insurance, you never appreciate having them until a catastrophe strikes, so even though it may be tempting to eliminate this step, you may live to regret it should the proverbial "Murphy, what can go wrong will go wrong " be lurking in cyberspace to sabotage your efforts.

Besides backing up the customary HTML files, it is a good idea to have copies of script, database and server log files. Creating a directory structure that mirrors the one on your web server makes downloading files easier and the transition a lot more efficient.

Following confirmation from your new web hosting company that your account has been activated and your file transfer protocol procedures are operational, you are ready to upload your files to the new server.

Since you have already saved your files in a familiar directory structure, uploading your information to the new site should progress without a hitch.

Following completion of the above steps, you can now run some tests on the new web site in order to verify that all modules are working perfectly.

Once everything is working flawlessly, you are ready to change your old Domain Name Server (DNS) to the new one which would have been provided by the new web hosting company.

All that’s left now is for you to sit back and wait for the hits to begin.

Alojate.com is the premier web hosting company in Mexico, offering a range or services for all business needs.

Web pages used to be simple affairs, where everything you needed to do could be done in HTML, there was really one set of rules and one set of expectations. Today’s world is far more complex.

Web pages can be more complex and customers expect more from web pages. Terms like PHP and ASP now compete with HTML when starting a web page and it can be hard to figure out what option best suits your needs.

If you’ve ever driven an import car, you can appreciate the importance of being able to find support that meet your needs, if you’re going to kick the tires with your website and turn it into something exception, having a large community that can support you is critical.

PHP, Personal Home Pages has more support on the internet than ASP – Active Server Pages. The larger user base gives you more allies; more people who can help you develop your own talents and your website.

Another advantage of PHP is that it’s based on unix, giving it more cross platform capability than ASP as increasing demands of Microsoft’s operating systems level the cost playing field between Microsoft products and Apple, this is ever more important.

And did we mention that in the grand tradition of unix, PHP is free, while ASP needs support software that isn’t? For add-ons and additional tools, PHP’s open source has a strong base of free tools, whereas ASP demands that you purchase these tools.

You can find help for your PHP programming from free to paid. Most professional ASP support is very expensive by comparison.

Also, you have to consider the costs associated with a web hosting on Windows Server compared to Linux Servers. For most cases, you will notice a substantial difference in prices.

Not only that, but Windows severs do tend to be unstable and prone to failures, are more likely to be attacked by viruses, Trojans and exploits. Linux servers on the other hand are much more stable and the attacks windows servers suffer in a daily basis are non-existent in Linux.

If you are considering either a dedicated server or a shared hosting, your fist choice should be Linux. I’ve yet to find a problem that can’t be solved using PHP and Linux.

With all this, you might wonder why ASP still is out there at all. Part of it stems from ASP being based on the same methodology that’s used to make macros in other Microsoft products.

People that have invested the time learning how to use macros in Word or Excel will be more comfortable using ASP. PHP is based on C++, a robust computer programming language.

Before this intimidates you, the free tools that exist out there allow for a lot of this to be hidden, until you’re ready to take advantage of the power behind PHP.

Putting it all together, the power, the cost, flexibility, stability and support of PHP is far superior to that of ASP. If you’re going to commit to building the best web page you can, commit to using the best tools you can.

Investing in learning PHP will pay off when you’re able to pop the hood, invite your friends over and transform your web page from a normal, average, page to a sophisticated and highly toned performance page.

Orlando, Florida – Provider of managed hosting services, HostDime Israel, has commenced hosting the website for Cisco’s Mediterranean Youth Technology Club, an education initiative.
Roman Markuze, Director of HostDime Israel stated, ”HostDime Israel is interested in facilitating technology and IT growth in Israel and its surrounding countries. We’re interested in any opportunity to bridge the gap between cultures and spur economic growth in our region, and hosting the online presence of MYTecC is but one small role we can play.”
Aimed at giving ninth and tenth grade pupils from the Mediterranean region the skills needed for them to become future business and social leaders, the program features participants from Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Portugal, Turkey and Yemen, MYTecC and was developed in partnership with the ICTDAR (ICT for Development in the Arab Region), the Peres Centre for Peace, and Cisco. Employees from HostDime Israel have been connected to Mytecc.com for several years.

HostDime Israel recently released HDrupal, a custom designed Virtual Private Server solution for Drupal. Drupal is an open source content management system that has been downloaded nearly two million times and used by tens of thousands of websites internationally.

The innovative HDrupal solution solely utilizes open source applications, and optimizes the entire server environment, including the VHCS control panel and Ubuntu/Debian operating systems. HDrupal disables needless services/applications on the OS level and optimizes all modules/services to run under lowest CPU/Ram consuming. Bind has also been replaced with NSD to reduce RAM usage by the DNS activity.

Emmanuel Vivar, CEO of HostDime added, ”HostDime Israel is an important link in our global plan to serve more customers in different parts of the world. In addition to providing our international customers with an additional geographic location to colocate servers, HostDime Israel also develops innovative applications and unique solutions that the rest of our divisions rely on.”

HostDime is a privately owned, leading website hosting provider offering reliable, secure managed hosting services that cater to a range of clients, from entry-level to enterprise-level operations. HostDime owns and operates its own data center in Orlando, Fla. With a client base of more than 700,000 hosted domains on 3,000 servers, HostDime presently ranks among the top 50 biggest web hosting companies in the world.