If your existing web hosting provider is not providing you with a reliable business email hosting service, it’s time to switch over to a reliable email service provider and not lose an email and business opportunity again. Don’t think about the money you will spend in getting your business emails hosted by a premier email hosting provider because the cost of a lost opportunity could be actually much higher that what you will pay to host your mailbox.

Mentioned below are some of the best email hosting service providers who are not only most reliable but affordable also.

Business email hosting by Rackspace – Rackspace is one of the most reputed web hosting companies in the world. They offer business email hosting at $2 per month per mailbox. In just $2 you get 10GB of mailbox storage space, access to 250MB of SharePoint storage for free, send 50MB attachments and spam and anti-virus protection. Your mailbox could be accessed using Microsoft Outlook, Web client or mobile devices such as BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, or other mobile device. For more information, visit Rackspace business email hosting.

Google Apps for business – Gmail for business offers 25 GB of storage per user, powerful spam filtering, BlackBerry and Outlook interoperability, and a 99.9% uptime SLA. All this for just $50 per user per year, which is ~$4 per user per month. For more information, visit Google apps for business.

Customized hosted email solutions from GoDaddy – Hosted email solutions by GoDaddy starts at just $1.19 per month. Plan features a mailbox with 1GB of storage, POP3 connectivity, free personal calendar and 1GB online file folder storage. For small and medium size businesses GoDaddy offers Deluxe and Unlimited plans with 5 and 10 mailboxes respectively. All the plans include webmail, mobile email access, spam and anti-virus protection and 256-bit encryption. For more information, see Group Email from GoDaddy.

Why people check the ping response time of web hosting servers?

A lot of people believe that the lesser the response time is, the faster will their website be if hosted on the server that responds faster. This is actually true. If a server responds faster to your ping requests, your websites are also going to open faster (given the assumption that your server’s hardware is processing your website at optimum level). If you place two identical servers on two different networks, your website will load faster from the server which has faster response time.

What factors affect the ping response time of servers?

There are several factors that affect the ping response of servers. Some of the important ones are listed below.

• Their physical location makes a lot of difference. If they are located in another country, the response time will be high. Likewise if they are located in the same state as that of yours, you will experience much better response time.
• Your network also is important. If your computer is connected to faster Internet connection, you might see good response time. Try pinging a server you are interested in from a dial-up connection and you will see what difference it makes.

How important really is ping response time?

I would say that ping response time is an important factor but only when you are going to host games or applications that will require a lot of back and forth communication between your servers and client browser. For general purpose websites, blogs and business websites more important factor is the bandwidth throughput of the servers the websites will be hosted on. Also remember that the response time you see could be high but for a vast majority of your website visitors, the server could actually respond much faster. So, don’t base your decision on the response time you see on your computer.

Based on our understanding, an average response time of upto 100ms should be considered good. Only when response time goes higher than 150ms to 180ms, you might experience a slight slowness in loading a website but that will also not make a lot of difference.

An example in case – the server that hosts this site responds to my pings at avg of 350ms while google.com responds in 400ms. But when it comes to opening the website, Google opens much quicker than my blog. Got the point?

Use the comments section below and let us know what you think.

What makes a VPS better than reseller account?

VPS is a virtual server which means it’s entirely yours, basically private and the resources of the VPS are not shared with other users. VPS virtual servers are available as managed, unmanaged and also unmetered depending on the offer. You get the root access of the virtual server and mostly free to install softwares of your choice. In short, you are the administrator of the server and have the ability to manage every aspect of it. If you have the time and skills to manage the VPS server, VPS is what you should opt for. But if you have no intention of installing softwares such as IRC on the VPS and not even need root access, reseller hosting should be considered.

What makes reseller account better than virtual private servers?

Reseller accounts share the common server resources and most often are a result of oversold resources of the dedicated server. A reseller hosting will not require a lot of technical experience or hosting expertise. If you need to host multiple websites or if you are new to hosting and want to start your own hosting business, reseller account is what you should consider. But if you want to install softwares, use command line, need access as root user, then go for VPS.

We hope you find this information useful and it will help you choose between a reseller account and VPS.

Let’s start with determining the space that will be needed to host your website. Almost all websites consists of various files such as html, jpg, txt, zip etc. If your website is already designed, calculating how much of space it will take to host it on a server is quite easy. Just place all the files in their respective folders on your hard disk and then right click to find the size of the main folder that contains all the files of your website. That’s it! That’s exactly the space you will need on the server where you wish to your host your website.

Let’s now see how to find the bandwidth you will need on a monthly basis. Although most of the hosting packages offer plenty of bandwidth now a days, in fact much more than what most of us actually need, we will still look at the formula to calculate the estimated total bandwidth consumption every month.

The formula is actually quite simple, here it is.

[total size of all the files of your website including graphics] x [number of visitors everyday x number of pages each visitor will view] x [number of days in a month, i.e. 30 in our case] = Total monthly bandwidth required

Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose, you have a website that consists of 10 html pages and 2 images. All the html pages put together is 100KB and 2 images are 100KB in total. Your site might get 100 visitors every day and each visitor might see 2 pages of your site, then using the formula we arrive at the monthly bandwidth required.

[ 200KB ] x [ 100 x 2 ] x [ 30 ] = 1200000 KB which is ~ 1.2GB of bandwidth

In the formula mentioned above, the total size of the files can be replaced with average size of the files and you will still be able to calculate estimate bandwidth. However, one thing to remember is that browsers cache static content such as html pages and graphics files, so your actual bandwidth required may be less if there are a lot of repeat visitors.

Well it does! It makes a lot of difference in terms of access speed depending on the location where the server is hosted. For instance, if your clients are located in UK and their website is hosted in a server which is co-located in Singapore, then your clients will experience slow performance while accessing their website. How slow it could be will depend on what is being accessed. If the website contain simple picture and plain HTML pages, your clients may not notice the slow response but if it’s an hosted application on the server, then they might see very slow response from the server.

It’s always advisable to host a server in close proximity of your clients. If majority of your clients are from USA, then host the server in USA based data center. If they are from UK, host a server in UK based data center. But if they are located worldwide, then locate the server in a US based data center.

Also, when you colocate, make sure that the data center is near to your location so that it’s easy to go over and take a look at the server in emergency situations.

Weird domain name: Al right, I know it’s very very difficult to find a nice domain name and when you find one, you see that the domain name is already registered. You spent a lot of time again to find another name but that’s also taken away. What do you do then? You end up picking some name that may not look professional. One thing that you should keep in mind about the name of your company and its domain name is about how it looks to the customers who are going to visit your website. You don’t have to use keywords such as hosting or web or anything on those lines but whatever you choose should tell the customers that yours is a professional company.

Everything unlimited for $1/month: This will drive away serious customers like me for sure. We don’t want $1/month cheap web hosting that offers everything because we don’t trust your business model at all and it may fail any day. If I were to host my critical website or my blog, I will never host it on a $1/month account. Never! I will always host it with someone who sounds reasonable and has sound business model and nice hosting packages. Still want to sell everything for $1/month? Think again and think long term!

Bad web design: One thing, that I personally like about websites is its web design. If a company is new and they have a nice web design on their site, I spent some time looking around the packages and what they have to offer. This is how I actually ended up signing up with my current hosting company.

If you are a new hosting company and advertising doesn’t work, customers don’t sign-up then look at the points I mentioned above. Even if one of those is true in your case, I recommend you change and see the difference.

Why customer testimonials should be avoided?

• Customer testimonials are always false! That’s the belief of a vast majority of customers about customer reviews or testimonials. Whenever I come across a testimonial that talks positively about a service of the website or a company and without providing a way to verify the testimonial, I assume it to be false. If your website has such testimonials from your clients, it might be hurting your image than adding to your sales.
• Testimonial do not hold any value if the customer is interested in shared hosting service that charges him just $2 or $3. People don’t pay attention to the testimonials unless they are going to spend a lot of money for your services.

How customer testimonials can actually help you make more sales?

• Customer testimonials from reputed people and companies make a lot of difference. As long as they can be verified to be genuine, they add a lot of value to your website and sales. If you are fortunately hosting websites of some well known companies, do send them emails to get their feedback and post it on your website and don’t forget to mention their URL.
• It’s a good practice to quote positive reviews from hosting forums, blogs and other third party sources in the testimonial section of your website. They are trustable and create a positive image of your company in your prospective customer’s mind.

The choice of putting up a testimonial section in your website is yours! Make sure you are able to think from a customer’s perspective about your testimonials and then make a decision.

Rentals for rack space

If it’s your own server, you’re going to be charged according to the amount of space it takes up at the facility. Storage units at colocation centers measured in terms of U’s, and with servers normally available in sizes of 1U or 2U, space is allocated accordingly. If you have a larger storage capacity and include more hard drives in your server, you’re probably going to need at least 3 or 4 U’s of space and will be charged per U of storage. If you’re renting a server at a colocation center, you’re going to be charged the monthly rental fees as set by the facility.

Bandwidth charges

Some facilities use the Straight Data Transfer method to calculate the bandwidth your server uses to download and upload data – the number of bytes are added up at the end of the billing cycle and you’re charged according to the going rates. Others use the 95th percentile method where your data transfer is measured every three to five minutes. At the end of each billing cycle, the highest 5 percent usage is discarded and you’re charged for the rest. The second method is preferred by sites that have sudden traffic surges a few days a month as it’s more cost effective.

Costs associated with managed services

If you’re not in a position to manage your own server (take care of regular maintenance tasks, troubleshoot issues as they arise, and install updates and patches on a regular basis), you’ll have to shell out extra for the managed services that the colocation center provides. If you have a strong IT team, are physically near the colocation facility, and are thus able to manage your server yourself, you may be charged for remote reboots for minor problems that crop up and technical assistance provided for both hardware and software issues. Check your service level agreement (SLA) to see what’s included and what’s not in the package you sign up for.

Miscellaneous expenses

Some services are included in your SLA up to a certain usage limit after which they’re charged, like the number of IP addresses you need and the DNS servers that host your DNS files. You may be charged extra for each additional IP address and domain, for backup mail servers that prevent email from bouncing when your main mail server is down, and for firewalls that protect your server from malware on the Internet.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of top web design schools. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

If your webhosting company offers shared hosting then chances are high that a vast majority of your customers are end users who make payments using their credit cards. But if your hosting company is majorly into reseller hosting, you should know that most of your existing and future customers are not end users. They are buying space from your company and selling to the end users or other resellers. Some of them are also website developers who receive a majority of their income from their clients via Paypal and who always prefer to use the money they have in Paypal rather than paying using their credit cards.

In simple terms, if your website doesn’t accept Paypal then you are losing a lot of potential customers who don’t tell you that they are not signing up with you because you don’t accept Paypal payments. So, it’s in best of your interest that you accept Paypal payments also on your website. Credit card and Paypal payments are the most preferred online payments now a days, so don’t be left behind.

How to make money using Paypal?

I had not realized it before that I could actually make money using Paypal by letting money sit in the account for a while. Here’s how – you let your money sit idle in the Paypal account while your local currency weakens against the dollar. Once that happens, you should transfer the money to your bank and it then gets converted into your local currency at a higher rate. You make more money using Paypal this way.

If you still don’t accept Paypal on your site, it’s time that you get started. Setting up Paypal is very simple. Give it a try today.

Launched on July 1st, the offer remains valid until 31st August 2008. All customer who signup for either their Home or Business Pro shared hosting packages with a minimum term contract will be eligible to receive free hosting for first 12 months. This represents an overall savings of 180 pounds.

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