Myth #1 – The software choices in managed hosting packages are incomplete.

This myth originated from a select group of people who love to complain. In reality, the number of software choices the great majority of companies offer is far from lacking. In fact, in order for a hosting business to remain competitive, they have to offer everything the great majority of customers want and need. This means you are almost guaranteed to find the software you need at a price you can agree upon.

Myth #2 – Managed hosting = protection against viruses and other malicious acts.

While most managed hosting providers have some form of protection against malicious activity enabled, there are always new threats being released on the Internet. The ability to ensure that you are 100% protected 100% of the time is impossible. Just as new technologies are always being developed to counteract malicious threats, there will always be a new one released. All in all, you are fairly protected from the most common and mainstream attempts to thwart your hosting providers resources. Otherwise, Internet hosting companies wouldn’t be able to stay in business like they do.

Myth #3 – Managed hosting with an uptime guarantee will keep my site online 24/7, always.

While this is a pleasant thought, the reality is that this could never be 100% true. Managed hosting contracts, 99% of them anyway, have a loophole declaration in their terms and conditions that release them from any liability should your site go down. While the nature of business requires that businesses offer excellent service in order to stay alive, 100% uptime 100% of the time is an across the board impossibility. Generally speaking, you can expect managed hosting services to live up to their guarantee, except in the event of a complete and total failure. That is the reason for the contractual loophole. No business on earth can offer a refund to all of their customers at the same time, the cost would be astronomical.

Myth #4 – A managed hosting provider is 100% sure to always keep my data safe and secure.

Most often, this is a true statement. However, because of unforeseen circumstances, like acts of God and catastrophes, you aren’t 100% guaranteed that your data is safe. Matter of fact, managed hosting companies also have a loophole in their terms and conditions regarding the data storage. Because they can’t offer a refund to all their customers at the same time, ever, this would keep them safe from a financial catastrophe should such a thing happen.

Myth #5 – Only inexperienced Web hosting customers need a managed hosting option.

This is entirely untrue. If only inexperienced people need managed hosting, then why do some of the most recognized websites in the world utilize managed hosting as their tried and true means of Web hosting? Because it works incredibly well and offers features they need. The ability to have your site managed by a team of professionals means that you don’t have to perform the great majority of cumbersome maintenance that needs to be done. Adding disk space and increasing bandwidth quotas, among other things, would cost businesses valuable time they could be using to improve the other aspects of their business.

Myth #6 – Managed hosting is completely managed by the hosting professionals at the site.

While a managed hosting team can handle the lion’s share of the managed hosting features, there may be some actions you will WANT to perform yourself. While the automation offered by standard website hosting is miniscule in comparison to managed hosting, there are some things you have to do yourself. Usually, the level of care a company takes to manage the hosting of your site is completely dependent on the amount of money you pay.

Myth #7 – Managed hosting costs way more than dedicated hosting.

This statement is entirely false. Managed hosting actually ends up being a money saver in the long run! If you look at what goes into managed hosting, you’ll realize that big companies use the time they save to improve their own business operations. Time is always money in business. If you aren’t making efficient use of your time, then you’re losing money. This is one of the main reasons managed hosting was created. To give Web hosting customers more time to more efficiently run their business. All in all, statistics show that managed hosting actually saves you money, although the initial price may reflect a higher cost.

Myth Buster – Top Myths about Managed Hosting and the Truth behind Them

The Budget Web Hosting Landscape
When considering budget web hosting products, a buyer will generally break these products into one of several basic categories according to account type. Below are listed the traditional account breakdowns with a brief description of each.

Ad Supported or Free Hosting
This category of hosting is generally for non-business use and consists of those accounts that offer an extremely limited amount of disk space and bandwidth in exchange for displaying 3rd party advertising such as banner ads or Google AdWords. In addition to being limited in size and scope, these types of accounts can also be subject to frequent slowdowns or outages as the transitory nature of the customer base attracts potentially unsavory co-tenants on your shared server.

Discounted Shared Hosting
A cut above free hosting accounts are deeply discounted shared accounts which typically charge just a few dollars or less per month. The fact that discounted shared hosting accounts require payment strongly discourages the same types of abuses that can occur with free web hosting accounts – a definite plus. One potential pitfall is the fact that to keep the operating costs as low as possible, deeply discounted shared hosting operators may attempt to stuff as many accounts as possible onto a single server as possible. This is where getting a current customer referral or conducting proper market research becomes critical to your success.

ASP.NET Hosting
For those customers needing use Microsoft’s .NET platform, an ASP.NET hosting provider is a must. This account is pre-configured on an ASP.NET server which the hosting provider maintains. This maintenance activity includes not only the usual monitoring of server performance and uptime, but also installing the sometimes frequently needed patches from Microsoft to address software updates. An additional bit of credibility is the Microsoft Gold Certified credentials coupled with Microsoft certified engineers.

Virtual Servers or VPS Hosting
A bridge between shared server hosting accounts and dedicated servers is a virtual server – also known as VPS hosting (that’s an acronym for Virtual Private Server hosting). Virtual servers have dramatically increased in popularity along with the growth of better virtualization software. This is software that emulates a dedicated server by using a fraction of the server’s total resources to execute programs like a complete and stand-alone dedicated server. There are various virtualization platforms, but generally speaking you can get a virtual server in either a Linux OS or a .NET OS powered by Microsoft’s hypervisor. The advent of less expensive hardware and software for virtualization has created a discount virtualization hosting product that is quite viable.

Cloud Computing or Cloud Hosting
As there are often contradictory descriptions of exactly what constitutes ”cloud computing” we present the Wikipedia definition here. ”Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid. Cloud computing is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client–server in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves over-the-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources. It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet. This frequently takes the form of web-based tools or applications that users can access and use through a web browser as if it were a program installed locally on their own computer.”

Dedicated Servers
While one may not think of dedicated servers falling under the auspices of ”budget hosting” – there are a number of discounted dedicated server hosting products which bear mentioning here. A dedicated server is a server whose use is restricted to just one customer or website. This means that the resources are allocated directly by the owner to their own sites. A key feature of dedicated servers (and also virtual servers) is root level access. Root level access is a special user account used for system administration. A key consideration in discounted dedicated servers is whether the server is considered ”managed” or ”unmanaged”. A managed server generally means that the hosting provider will look after any problems with the server, the connectivity to the network, any software patches that are required, or correcting any malicious activity that may occur on the server. An unmanaged server places the responsibility for the aforementioned items on the server administrator designated by the buyer (dedicated server hosting customer).

Things to Consider When Purchasing Budget Hosting

Value versus Price – With any of the budget hosting products listed above the cheapest price doesn’t necessarily mean the best deal. That is because one needs to look carefully at the brand, the account specifications, the guarantees, and the service component of the offering. Therefore, the lowest cost product may simply be the most stripped down product or the product that offers the lowest level of service. What you really want is the best value for the money. That means selecting a budget hosting plan that combines the lowest price with the highest service component and specifications.

Security – As mentioned previously, in an effort to wring the most cost out of the hosting and to generate sufficient profits it is possible that a deeply discounted shared hosting offering will attract unsavory neighbors on your shared server. At the very least you should ask questions about how secure the server is, and what provisions are made for backing up your valuable website data.

Reputation – One of the best ways to get a great budget hosting deal is to stick with a known quantity in the hosting business: a company with a good brand. You don’t have to look hard to find a reputable hosting provider. There are many out there and they can be identified by the way that current customers refer to them online. They use accolades like ”great” and ”fantastic”. You can also always check out great hosting resource sites like The Hosting News and Web Hosting Talk. If you see a company mentioned prominently and advertising, then they most likely have a strong hosting brand.

Uptime – If you truly need 100 percent uptime you’ll have to pay for it. Budget web hosts offer the best compromise between reasonable uptime and a great price. That being said, most websites can survive very modest amounts of downtime for emergency patches, or other preventative maintenance. If you need to have guarantees regarding uptime, check to see if the hosting provider offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

SLA’s – Service level agreements or SLA’s are the promise that a hosting provider gives you regarding the uptime of your website or server. Most of the higher end hosting products (typically VPS hosting, Cloud computing and dedicated servers) will come with an SLA. If you need assurance on your website’s uptime, ask about the SLA. While an SLA won’t prevent outages, it will compensate you for any outages by paying you back some of your hosting fees – proportional to the outage. Also, the SLA is an indication that the hosting provider is serious about ensuring that your budget hosting plan is as stable and reliable as it can be.

Budget Web Hosting – What to Look For

BaseKit is a next generation website builder which automatically converts user-uploaded Photoshop designs into standards-compliant HTML and CSS – in seconds. For those who do not want to use their own designs there is a selection of pre-built site packs – each customisable from not just the colours and text but also the functionality.

BaseKit is currently in public beta, and plans to launch in March. Aimed at website designers and developers, BaseKit is purely web-based – ‘software as a service’. Having developed a working prototype, the team entered Seedcamp 2008, the premier tech start-up competition in Europe, and were chosen as one of 7 winners out of 400 European web technology companies.

BaseKit has a fully-featured content management system (CMS) with hosting included. This gives users access to powerful features from contact forms, maps and video to widgets and social networking. Adding functionality is as easy as point, click, drag and drop.

“Websites are online, so building them should be as well,” said Gordon Plant, User Experience Officer at BaseKit. “I’ve always been confused about why web design software is stuck, entrenched in our desktops and laptops – building a website offline only to upload it bit by bit. Often trying to make even the smallest of changes is an unnecessary stress.”

The team behind BaseKit are web professionals themselves so every aspect of the service has considered the issues that often dog development. BaseKit is cross browser compatible, including IE 7+ for the BaseKit editor and IE6 for published websites. The HTML and CSS BaseKit produces is standards-compliant and validates to W3C guidelines.

“BaseKit is a big step ahead in web design,” said Gordon. “The way BaseKit works will mean that designers can focus on creating engaging designs, while our team of developers take care of the hosting and functionality.”

It has never been easier to create websites without having to code. BaseKit is also underpinned by an intuitive content management system, letting users keep their websites up to date without special training. “Of course, for traditional web designers, we also have a detailed code editing dashboard built in too.”

New Software To Offer ‘Live’ Website Design

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