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Dedicated Server Host Reviews: Liquid Web

I wrote about virtual hosting last time. Now I’m going to look at dedicated server providers, in particular Liquid Web.

In this review we will consider one of the most popular dedicated server host companies, Liquid Web. Established in 1997, they have an excellent reputation among users of dedicated servers. They are not your only option if you are looking for a dedicated server host but they are the top choice of many online customers. So let’s look at what they offer and whether it would be right for you.

Services Offered

Liquid Web offer a wide range of dedicated servers including a single, dual and quad processors. In each category you have a choice of different multi-core servers. You can choose either Linux or Windows operating systems.

At the time of writing, Liquid Web offer both managed and unmanaged dedicated servers. If you know what you are doing technically you might choose unmanaged. If you don’t, then managed hosting is definitely worthwhile for the software installation and support that you will get.

Automatic backups can be set up for you and it is highly recommended that you take advantage of this. Liquid Web own three separate data centers, giving more options for secure backup storage.

Pricing

Pricing for dedicated server host services is constantly changing so we will not quote actual prices in this review. It is also sometimes hard to compare like for like because different companies offer different server specifications. But generally speaking, Liquid Web’s prices are comparable with those of other hosting companies offering a high quality service for dedicated servers.

Support

If you are looking for either a VPS or a dedicated server host, technical support should be your most important question. Almost anybody who uses a dedicated server will tell you that.

Liquid Web are a professional hosting company offering dedicated servers, VPS and smart servers (cloud based) only. They don’t offer shared hosting. This means that their support team is entirely focused on providing technical support for dedicated and virtual private servers, so they should be more ready and able to answer your questions than a team that is expecting to deal with a lot of questions about shared hosting services.

As you might expect of a dedicated server host, Liquid Web have an excellent reputation for technical support. They describe it as ‘heroic support’. Staff specialize in one of eight service areas (setup, migrations, security, monitoring, network, development, system restore or data center ops) and the staff are extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

You have the choice of phone support or a ticket system. The ticket system is answered very fast but if you are based in the USA you may prefer to call them on their 800 number.

If your ticket remains open across a shift change you will find a new staff member dealing with it and sometimes this is annoying because they might not always read the whole ticket history so you can find yourself repeating the same questions. However, there can be advantages in having someone else look at a ticket that has not yet been resolved. In any case, this is a potential issue with any dedicated server host’s support team because no individual staff member works 24/7.

Types of Hosting – What Is Virtual Private Server Hosting?

My previous posts have looked at paid and free hosting as well as reliability. Now I’m going to look in more detail different types of hosting, starting with virtual private server hosting.

Virtual private server hosting is one of the many options for hosting websites on the internet. It is a step up from shared hosting and gives you a service equivalent to having a server of your own.

However, VPS or virtual private server hosting does not suit every customer. Before you sign up, it is important to understand something about VPS hosting and decide whether this is really the right option for you. In this article, we will look at the differences between VPS and its ‘big sister’ the dedicated server, as well as its ‘little sister’, shared hosting packages.

So what is the difference between VPS and a dedicated server? The answer lies in the word ‘virtual’.

A dedicated server is a physical machine that is rented to one customer. If you went to the offices of your hosting company, you could (if you were allowed) see an actual piece of hardware that is your dedicated server.

However, many servers can be partitioned in such a way that each partition can offer a customer almost all the functionality of a dedicated server. Each partition runs server software and can be configured to the customer’s specification, so each partition is called a virtual server.

VPS hosting may be either managed or unmanaged. If you choose unmanaged hosting, you will be able to configure and administer your own server as you wish. This is an attractive option for customers who have the necessary technical skills or those who employ technicians who can handle the work. If you choose unmanaged hosting you may be using your virtual server to provide shared hosting services to your own customers, or running special software that requires the server to be set up in a particular way.

Most customers who are upgrading from shared hosting don’t have the time or skills to manage their own server. If you are in that situation, you will probably want to choose a managed VPS service. That way you can choose a service that offers packages that you already know from shared reseller hosting, like cPanel and WHM, so you do not have to learn a whole new set of technical skills.

Virtual private server hosting can be an attractive option for both customers and hosting companies because it significantly reduces the cost of providing servers. Hosting companies can offer private server services to several different customers while only incurring running costs for one physical machine.

Apart from cost, managed VPS hosting has a number of advantages for the customer when compared with shared hosting.

First, each partition will have its own IP address (or even several IP addresses) that are not shared by any other customer. This means that with a VPS, you will not be affected by any dubious activity by other customers sharing the same IP, which can happen with shared hosting.

Second, you can set up your own DNS. This gives a more professional look to your server address, especially if you are reselling hosting.

Third, you have full control of the space and bandwidth that is allocated to your virtual private server. On shared hosting you may find that access to your websites is limited at busy times because other customers’ websites are using a lot of bandwidth. This would not happen with a virtual server because no other customers would be sharing your bandwidth allocation.

Alternatively, on shared hosting you may be told by your hosting company that you must upgrade because your sites are using more than their share of bandwidth. With virtual private server hosting you have the right to use all of the allocated bandwidth.

Reliable Hosting: Features To Look For

In my previous posts, I’ve looked at paid and free hosting. This time, I’m looking at reliability – I cannot overestimate the importance of having reliable hosting for your website. Reliability is what keeps your site online, whether you are operating a company website that attracts customers, a site marketing products that sell through an online shopping cart, or a small information site for your family or a local non-profit organization.

So what are some of the points that you should be looking at when you are seeking out a reliable hosting company for your site or sites?

Is It A Well-Established Company?

If you look around at a few online forums that focus on web hosting, you will find the names of many hosting companies. Some of these will be well-established, having operated online for many years. Others could be brand new startups that may succeed or fail.

Of course, as long as you own your domain and keep backups of your site’s pages, you can switch to another hosting company if things go wrong. So you may feel that it is worth taking a chance on a startup, if it is cheap. However, transferring your site can be time consuming.

In the worst case, a bad hosting company will not keep their security systems up to date and your site may be more likely to be hacked, attacked by viruses or malicious scripts, or used to send spam email. Any of these happenings can be a disaster for your site or for its visitors, so that is another reason for using a well-established, reliable hosting company.

User Feedback

User feedback is a great way to discover which are the most reliable hosting companies. Again, feedback can often be found on web hosting forums. Keep in mind, however, that individuals may have personal reasons for supporting or criticizing a particular company. Look for a large number of reviews before making a judgment, do not rely on one person’s experience.

Downtime

Reliability is not just a question of finding a company that will stay in business. It is also important that they keep your website online 24/7, or as near as possible to that.

When hosting goes offline, your website will be unavailable to visitors. This is known as ‘downtime’. The most common causes of this are maintenance of the servers and faults on the servers.

The most reliable hosting companies have systems in place to prevent most downtime. Through most faults and scheduled maintenance your site will stay online. However, inevitably there are some situations where a little downtime is inevitable, such as server upgrades. It is useful to be warned of this so that you can reschedule product launches or your own work on the site.

Again, you can check out some user reviews or you can email the company and ask what downtime they have had in the past 30 days, and whether they routinely warn customers when they are carrying out the type of maintenance that they know will involve downtime.

A Variety Of Packages

A reliable hosting company will usually have a choice of packages to suit different customers. These can range from a basic, single-domain shared hosting package to a dedicated server. It’s easy to upgrade so you can start with the cheapest package if you want.

However, it is best to avoid companies that offer a one-time fee for hosting and tell you that this is all you will have to pay – ever. They have running costs and how will they stay in business if they are not passing these on to their customers every month? You may find that you pay a large amount for ‘lifetime hosting’ and then the company goes out of business. That is the end of the ‘lifetime’ for your hosting, and you will have to find a more reliable hosting company and start paying again.

5 Top Paid Hosting Companies Reviewed

In my last post I wrote about free hosting. This time I’m looking at paid hosting options with a review of five different hosting companies, with options for people with differing needs.

The top hosting companies all offer slightly different specifications and account types, for different prices. This means that it can take a lot of time to work through them all deciding which one would be best for you.

In this article we will look at the main characteristics of hosting plans with five of the top hosting companies. All of them have a slightly different focus. Of course, you still need to check the fine print for any company that you are thinking of signing up with. Their terms, plans and prices can change at any time, and a mention here is not a recommendation or a guarantee of any particular service. The comparisons in this article are just a starting point and we hope they will save you some time.

Basic Shared Hosting: HostMonster

HostMonster offer one low-cost plan: unlimited domains on shared hosting. You start by allocating one domain to your account and any more must be add-on domains.

This is fine for low usage but keep in mind that even though it is standard in the industry to advertise ‘unlimited’ space and bandwidth, they can still ask you to open more accounts or move on if you are consuming more than your ‘fair use’ share. Check the fine print for each of these top hosting companies for details.

HostMonster’s support team is located in the US and has a good reputation. However, there is not much flexibility in the plans. There are no reseller packages, VPS or dedicated servers so if you want to upgrade you have to accept the hassle of changing to one of the other top hosting companies.

In summary, HostMonster is a good choice if you are pretty sure that you will not need to go beyond the limitations of shared hosting.

Basic and Reseller Plans: BlueHost

BlueHost go a little further than HostMonster by offering three levels of reseller plan on shared hosting as well as the basic plan that allows add-on domains. Reseller plans allow you to resell hosting space to customers or to set up your own domains on separate accounts so that you can more easily sell websites to buyers. This is valuable for some users, especially in the internet marketing field.

Flexible Plans: HostGator

HostGator offer a very wide variety of plans from one-domain shared hosting and reseller plans right up to dedicated servers. They have been providing web hosting services for a number of years and are well-established in the online business world.

Support response is acceptable in terms of speed and technical knowledge, but not the best we have seen. However, they have minimal downtime, a lot of experience and a good record with customers, many of whom have been with them for many years.

HostGator’s flexibility means that your hosting can grow along with your business. You can start with a cheap plan and upgrade very easily whenever you need to. They will transfer all of your sites to the new server when you upgrade, so there is no work for you.

Business Hosting: InMotion

Like HostGator, InMotion offer a number of plans for business users with different needs. They are a little more expensive but have an excellent reputation for support and service. Downtime is minimal and they claim to have much faster website loading speeds than many of their competitors (we have not tested this). In summary, they are marketing their services to business users who are prepared to pay an extra couple of dollars for reliability.

Dedicated Servers: Liquid Web

Liquid Web is one of the best known providers of dedicated servers. Shared hosting is fine for many users but it has its disadvantages. Your site is competing with others for the server’s bandwidth and in some cases you may find your site blacklisted because of the activities of another user on the same IP address. A dedicated server is the ideal solution for customers who want more control and greater capacity, and Liquid Web is one of the top hosting companies operating in the dedicated server market.

As you can see there are numerous options open to you depending on what you are looking for. Make sure you do your research before diving in and making a purchase.

Free Website Hosting: The Pros and Cons

I recently wrote about hosting – here’s a follow up looking at free hosting options.

Before you sign up for any type of free website hosting, it is important to understand both the advantages and the disadvantages of having your site hosted for free.

Of course, the main advantage of free website hosting is cost. There isn’t any! But always keep in mind that the providers have to cover their costs in some way. If they are not charging you anything, then they will probably be using your site to show ads. This can be intrusive and annoying for your visitors.

This may not be the case if you go with a blog. Sites such as Blogger and WordPress.com will let you set up a free blog. A blog is not so different from other websites except that it is more dynamic. Most blogs have their latest articles automatically appearing on the front page instead of having a static home page that always looks the same.

However, even with a free blog there are some disadvantages. First, you do not own the site. Your web address will be something like mysite.blogspot.com instead of mysite.com. This means that if you need to move your site for any reason, or if Blogger decides to move or freeze your blog, your address will change. Anybody who had bookmarked your site will not be able to find it any more.

Free website hosting usually has more restrictions than if you were paying for it. In fact, one of the biggest problems with free website hosting is that there are usually a lot of terms and conditions that dictate what you can have on the site. For most small websites, this may not be an issue. However, it is easy to do something that breaks these terms without knowing, and then the site has the right to delete your account.

In some cases they will suddenly change their terms and freeze your account without warning you. Then you have to go in and edit it to satisfy them quickly, before they delete it. Meanwhile your site is offline so nobody can see it. In more extreme cases, your site may simply be deleted. This can be a disaster, especially if you did not keep a backup. All of your work may be lost.

If you choose paid hosting, on the other hand, you can host a website very inexpensively with what is known as a shared hosting package. This means that you and other users share some hosting space. As long as your site does not have a huge amount of traffic, there should be no conflicts. And even if you hope to have a lot of traffic to your site someday, you can easily upgrade when that happens.

With paid hosting you have a lot more control. You own the domain so even if you need to move it, for example if your hosting company raises their prices or goes out of business, you can set up again with another host and you will still have the same website address (the domain) because you own it. That means that people can still find you in through their bookmarks. For all of these reasons, paid is better than free website hosting for most people.

In my next article I’ll be looking more at paid hosting options…

A few words about hosting

Whether you are a first time hosting customer or a current customer looking to switch or upgrade, web host ratings and customer reviews are an excellent tool in the search for the best service to fit your needs.

There are a huge number of web hosting companies these days and the choice is not easy. Different customers have different needs so the web host ratings and reviews that you find online may not all be equally useful for you.

If price is your only consideration, then the question is simple. You only need to find the cheapest service. But for most people, other factors are important too.

For example, the cheapest services may be reselling hosting from servers that belong to bigger hosting companies. You may not have access to good technical support. That can mean that your website may go offline and remain offline for long periods while you try to find somebody to figure out what went wrong.

Sometimes you need to be cautious when looking at web host ratings. There are several reasons for this. First, online reviewers may be paid for promoting a particular service. If this is the case they should say so somewhere on their site.

Second, even in the case of independent reviewers, you cannot assume that your experience will be the same as another person’s. Your needs are different and you probably have different priorities and expectations.

Also, the average customer does not write reviews of all of the products and services that they purchase. Life is too short. If you think about the times that you yourself have reviewed something that you bought, you will probably see that you are most likely to write a review if you have an unusually good or bad experience with something – so reviews often offer an extreme view.

Technical support is one of the most important issues for many customers of hosting services and so you will find some reference to it in almost all web host ratings and reviews. Some companies have an excellent and well-deserved reputation for their technical support, and you will find reference to that in many online reviews. However, support staff are leaving and being hired all of the time; companies can change their recruitment and training policies; and so even the best reputation is no guarantee for the future.

Even after consulting all of the web host ratings and reviews that you can find online, it is still possible to end up with a service that does not turn out as well as you hoped. It may be that the company has started to have problems recently, problems that did not affect customers in the past. Or you may find that the service is not the best fit for your needs even though it might suit other customers perfectly.

In that situation you might need to consider moving after just a short time with a new web host. For that reason, we do not recommend taking the type of plan where you sign up for several years, unless they have a good guarantee period (e.g. 90 days). It is more expensive to pay monthly but you have a lot more power in the situation because you are flexible and can leave the service at any time. So keep this in mind when you are signing up with a new hosting service and retain your flexibility even if the company came top of all of the web host ratings that you found on the internet.

I’ll be posting some further thoughts on hosting over the next few days, so please look out for them.

Work at home tutorials now available

I just uploaded some new work at home tutorials which I think you will find really useful, pasrticularly if you are just getting into internet marketing.

The tutorials cover a range of subjects:

• Building Profitable Membership Sites
• Making Money In Freelancing
• Avoiding Online Scams
• Affiliate Money Magnets
• Self Publishing Success
• Making Money with Website Flipping
• Membership Cash Secrets
• Profitable Blogging Strategies
• Fast Cash Strategies
• Gig Site Profits

You can find out much more on the special page I have created for you.

I recommend that you check it out now.

Article Marketing 10 – Bum Article Marketing

Bum article marketing is a way of making money on the internet. It is one of the most popular ways for new internet marketers to make money.

The term bum marketing was popularized by Travis Sago, a marketer from Arkansas in the USA. It happened when he was writing a free ebook about how to write and submit articles to make money as an affiliate. When he told his wife about it, she said the method sounded so cheap and easy that even a bum could do it.

So that’s why Travis (or rather, his wife) named his ebook the Bum Marketing Method(TM). It was so successful that bum marketing quickly became a synonym for article marketing among internet marketers.

So what is the bum article marketing method and why is it considered so easy? Well, the basic idea is that you pick out an affiliate offer where you can earn money from commissions if people buy through your affiliate link.

For example it might be an ebook about how to lose weight, where you get paid 50% of the purchase price for each buyer that you send. You would write articles, and put your affiliate link at the end. The idea is that when people click through, you can earn a commission.

Done in this way, bum article marketing is completely free. There is no cost at all except your time. It is also extremely easy to do, even for somebody with no technical knowledge of the internet. You do not even need a website.

However, the top article directories soon began to ban affiliate links in articles. This meant that you would have to have a website. It could still be quite simple to redirect to your affiliate link but it was no longer a completely free method. You would need at least one domain, web hosting, and the basic knowledge of how to do a redirection.

Article marketing is still a simple and effective affiliate marketing method, but this means that it needs to be done a different way by the homeless person with no credit card working out of a public library … the type of person that Travis Sago considered could follow his bum article marketing method. They can still do it for free, they just have to set up a free Blogger or WordPress.com blog and direct their resource box links there.

The downside of bum article marketing is that you have to do a lot of writing. It is not easy for people who hate writing or people for whom English is not their first language. While it may be possible to find article directories that will accept articles in other languages, the market is smaller.

Of course it is possible to hire somebody to write for you, but this makes it more expensive. Before you do this you need to have done some testing so that you know that the affiliate offer will convert for you. Then you can hire writers and be pretty sure that you will make a profit on your bum article marketing without having to do any writing yourself.

That’s the final post for now on article marketing. I’ll write more in future as and when new ideas and services are developed. I hope you enjoyed the series. Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions about article marketing.

Article Marketing 9 – Using Article Marketing Services

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to bring traffic to your site, whether you are promoting your own product or service or making money from affiliate commissions.

The great thing about article marketing services is that you do not need to do the time consuming work of writing and submitting your own promotional articles. Instead, you can outsource it all.

In most cases you will be looking for two kinds of article marketing services. First, you can hire somebody to write articles for you. There will be a cost for this of course, but for most marketers, it is worth the time that you save. The only exception would be if you enjoy writing and can do it well. In that case, you might want to spend your time writing and outsource some other aspects of your business. I’ve found writers on Scriptlance amongst other places.

There is another reason that you might want to hire or join one of the many article marketing services that you can find online. This would be for the submission of your articles to the directories.

Submitting articles is a real dull, time consuming job that hardly anybody likes to do. It is also very easy. So it is ideal for outsourcing to article marketing services or individuals who may be willing to do this for you for very good rates.

Of course, it is possible to use software to submit your articles. The problem is that most of the software has at least one of these two main faults. First, it may not include the best known directories such as EzineArticles and ArticlesBase.

Second, it can be difficult to have the software submit your articles to the correct category, because the different directories organize their categories and give them different names. For example, if your article is about forex trading, the appropriate category may be called ‘forex trading’ in one directory, ‘currency trading’ in another, and ‘foreign exchange’ in another; while other directories may not have this category at all, so you have to select ‘finance’ or ‘investing’.

This kind of selecting is something that can only be done by a human looking at the list of categories on every individual article directory site. Therefore, many marketers prefer to hire article marketing services that offer a manual submission service. This means that a human being will go through a list of article directories submitting your article to all of them, one by one.

If you outsource your article writing to a company rather than individual writers, you may find that they will also offer a submission service. This can save you a lot of time and energy. Instead of having to check the articles when they arrive from the writer, then send them on to somebody else to submit for you, you simply place your order and the whole thing is done for you.

I’ve used a number of article distribution and submission services and like Unique Article Wizard and Free Traffic System best.

Of course, that may work out a little more expensive, but what you save is time that you can profitably spend on other areas of your business. This is always the main advantage with article marketing services.