With virtual web hosting, you get a professionally managed server at an affordable price. This type of hosting is particularly good for smaller ecommerce websites or sites that are made up of mostly static pages.

Hosting companies that offer virtual hosting have their own technical support teams that take care of any problems for you. Even novices with little or no technical skills can use these services to host their website.

Companies that provide virtual hosting usually offer different packages, with different options and services. You can choose the package that best suits your needs, at a price you can afford.

Each package will offer a certain amount of disk space, bandwidth, databases, email accounts, etc. In some cases, they’ll also include site building software that will let you set up your website in minutes.

You should look for a host that provides 24 hour technical support and unlimited file transfers for updating and maintaining your website.

Many hosting companies also include web statistics software with their virtual hosting plans. This software is very helpful as it lets you track the most popular pages on your website, where people are coming from (Google, Yahoo, other websites, etc.), where most of your visitors are located in the world, etc.

Most virtual hosting accounts include some kind of “control panel” for managing your website. These control panels give you a simple graphical interface to many of the features of your server. These are especially valuable to anyone who is not very technical and doesn’t have access to a server administrator on a permanent basis.

What You Need to Watch Out For

When choosing a virtual hosting company, there are a few things you need to watch out for.

First, make sure they are not resellers but actually host the sites on their own servers. Some hosting companies are reselling other companies’ services and if you ever have a problem, they’re just a middleman between you and the true host. This can add to the length of time to get problems resolved.

Make sure that their technical support staff are properly trained and readily available. If possible, try to contact them prior to signing up and see how helpful they are.

If you can get some references for other webmasters using the hosting company, contact them to see whether or not they’re happy with the service they’ve received.

John Lenaghan writes about free web site hosting and other website hosting topics on the Hosting Report website. Find out more at http://www.hostingreport.org

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When you’re looking for a hosting company for your website, a web hosting guide can help you compare the services from the various hosts. Being able to do this research in one place will save you a lot of time compared to visiting each host’s site separately.

Before you start your research, you should decide on what your hosting needs really are. Do you need 10GB of storage or would 1GB be plenty? How much data are you really likely to transfer in a given month? Do you need to choose Unix or Windows for some reason, or does it not really matter?

Having an idea of your needs ahead of time will make it a lot easier to narrow down the right hosting plan.

Some of the other factors you should consider include:

- Email accounts, forwarding and aliases
- URL redirects
- FTP access
- FTP accounts - both public and private
- Web-based control panel
- Subdomains
- Autoresponders
- Shopping cart software
- Pre-installed software (blogs, forums, etc.)

Once you know what your needs are, you can start comparing hosting plans. You can use Google, Yahoo or another search engine to find a good comparison site - just search for “web hosting comparison” or something similar. (And if you’re not sure what your needs are in the first place, take a look at a site like www.hostingreport.org to help you work out your requirements.)

Once you find a decent hosting comparison site, you can compare packages from multiple hosts to see which ones meets your need at the best price.

Most of these comparison sites also include reviews, both by the people who maintain the site and often by users as well. These reviews can be invaluable when choosing your hosting company because they come from real people who have had experience with the host.

If the host has a history of problems, the user reviews will reveal that to you. This is something you would never find out just by reading the hosting company’s website.

Hosting comparison sites also sometimes have speed test results from the various hosts. This will help you to see how good the host’s performance is, and will give you an idea of how scalable your site will be if hosted there.

You want to be sure that your site can grow effectively as you get more visitors and more traffic. Choosing a host based on price and features alone can cause a lot of headaches down the road if you have to change hosts when you outgrow them.

John Lenaghan writes about low cost web hosting services and other website hosting topics on the Hosting Report website. Find out more at http://www.hostingreport.org

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Most web site hosting plans includes at least one, if not more databases. Depending on the operating system of the server they could be MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft Access. If you’re wondering what you can use them for or whether they’ll help your website, read on for more information.

To state the obvious, a database stores your data in a way that allows it to be easily accessed. The data could be product specifications, customer names and email addresses, sales history or even the content of your web pages.

Using a database to store and retrieve that information can make your website more effective for your customers by giving them a more interactive experience.

The Most Common Use for Databases on the Internet

The most commond way databases are used on the internet is to create “dynamic” web pages. These pages are built from information in the database, each time a visitor requests them.

On an ecommerce site for example, product information can be stored in a database. When a visitor clicks on the link to read more about a particular product, the page is built from information in the database.

This makes updating and maintaining the information much easier. Instead of having to edit each page that product appears on (which you would have to do with static pages) you can just edit the information in the database and whenever someone requests a page with that item, the updated information will automatically show up for them.

Dynamic web sites usually use a template for the layout of the pages. This template can include things such as headers, footers, navigation menus, etc. Basically, anything that remains constant from one page to another.

The information from the database gets inserted into this template by the web server, before it gets sent to the visitor requesting a page. They still get a standard HTML page that would appear to be static if you viewed the source code, but the web server put that page together dynamically before it was sent.

Templates can be laid out any way you like. You still have complete freedom in page layout and formatting, but when combined with a database server you can do much more, such as recommending similar products, upselling related add-ons, etc. - all based on the information in your database.

John Lenaghan writes about company web site hosting and other website hosting topics on the Hosting Report website. Find out more at http://www.hostingreport.org

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