There are differences in the hosting platforms of Windows and Linux. Both OS Platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. Windows has the advantage of running Access and MS SQL that is Microsoft software Another advantage of Microsoft is that the servers offer great support for web developers. The programming environments on these servers include ASP, Visual Basic Scripts and the MS Index Server. This support is very important to many web developers.

Because Linux is an open source system, it is much more cost-effective in maintenance and operation. The cost of hosting Linux is less than that of Windows hosting. The open-source feature of the Linux platform minimizes the cost because you only need one license. Windows requires associated licensing for the hosting company and this cost is transferred to the end user.

Linux has other advantages besides the cost. In respect to performance, Linux offers scalability because of the wide range of software, applications, languages and databases it supports. This includes PH, Perl, PostGre, MySQL, PostSQL and others. One disadvantage of the Linux hosting platform is that it does not support some Microsoft technologies.

Although Linux is an open source platform, that does not mean it is not secure. Security is very important and proactive steps are taken regularly to ensure security. Modifications and software updates are done on a regular basis to make sure the latest security and performance patches are installed. Security is handled well in both platforms. It is important to note that security is more dependent on the server administrator than the actual platform.

Scripting is the factor that may influence what actual platform you choose. If your site holds a blog, shopping cart or a forum, this active content will require scripting. And, in this case, should you require applications such as ASP, ASP.Net, Access or MS SQL, Windows is the better option. If this is not the case, Linux will do just fine. Both platforms are comparable in performance and security. However, the cost advantage goes to the Linux platform. The support advantage is tipped in favor of Windows platform based on the scripting factor.

General Business · Hosting · Small business · Small businesses · UK web hosting

Small businesses require reliable web hosting services to ensure existing and potential clients are able to locate them easily via popular search engines. New companies cannot operate profitably and successfully without dedicated hosting services for their domains. They require the following services from the hosting company:

Dedicated Servers
Web hosting providers should run your website on dedicated servers that operate on either Linux or Windows operating systems. Such servers will guarantee users full access to your site with optimum up time.

You might have spent heavily on design and customization of your domain, but an unreliable host can cause its demise. Online users do not waste time on sites that take ages to load and respond. You might end up losing a substantial number of potential customers and clients besides denting the credibility of your business.

Round the Clock Monitoring and Security
Online businesses do not shut their doors but serve worldwide customers and clients day and night. It is therefore essential to have a web hosting company that monitors domains functionality and security concerns round the clock.

Full time Technical Support
Even the most advanced technology goes haywire at times and requires repair and configuration by experts. Small online businesses have to shoulder this risk during their operations.

Nonetheless, web hosting companies should keep disruptions at a bare minimum, and deal with incidences forthwith. The hosting company should offer twenty-four hour support services for the website. Ideal providers are available at all times even during holidays, which ironically are the busiest days for online businesses.

Back up Services
A reliable web hosting company offers complete back up facilities for your server, website and database files. Back up is part of baseline security measures that enable swift restoration of your site in case of a mishap. It can take more time to restore your website from a remote server than from the hosts computers.

Numerous small businesses rely on the internet to sustain their upkeep. Web hosting services are critical to the success of such businesses. They are responsible for operating and maintaining the website on a round the clock basis. Hence, they must offer services such as dedicated servers, monitoring and security, and twenty-four hour support services for clients websites.

Dedicated hosting · dedicated server · UK web hosting · Web Hosting · web hosting company

The web hosting business is currently swamped with thousands of companies that are offering the service. Each of this companies claims to have the best services at the best rates. This makes it very difficult for those who want to procure hosting services. Those who are new to the business will find it especially challenging to differentiate between the good and bad providers. Below are a few pointers that will help you make an informed decision when choosing a web hosting provider.

Reliability is the single most important attribute of a good web hosting provider. Reliability covers up-time, fees as well as delivery of the agreed capacity at all times. While some providers have frequent outages, others deliver fluctuating capacity which affects the quality of experience for those visiting your website. A reliable web host is one who can deliver the agreed capacity with no interruptions. Fees are another important aspect of reliability as provider should calculate and charge all fees as per the indicated rates. Some hosting companies have hidden fees and charges that could negatively impact your finances.

You can establish a web hosting company’s reliability through the online reviews and opinions posted by current and former clients of the company. Though they are not always one hundred percent correct, they are a good indicator of what other clients think of the company. If a company has too many negative remarks on its reviews, it is best to keep away.

Another way through which you can evaluate a company for reliability is from the way they respond to inquiries and how well they handle you as a potential client. This will help you know how long it is likely to take them to respond to issues which may affect your hosting once you are a client. If a company cannot quickly and satisfactorily deal with questions from potential clients, they are likely going to offer you very poor technical support.

Although there many other factors that should be looked into when choosing a reliable web hosting provider, reliability should always be at the top of your list of considerations. Once that is assured, you can then proceed to looking at other considerations.

choosing a web host · Technical support · UK web hosting · Web Hosting · web hosting company

Well, the answer is a resounding ‘no’ as far as Freezone’s marketing team is concerned. No sooner have they helped many small businesses enjoy the benefits of our Ultimate web hosting package at half the normal price, they’re now offering 6 months free web hosting on the same package.

It’s actually not a surprise that the Ultimate web hosting package has proved to be a big hit with people looking for UK web hosting. The package is packed full of features – not only do you get 10GB of disk and unlimited bandwidth, you’ll also be able to benefit from 5 databases, unlimited mailboxes, SSL certificate, a Sitebuilder and data back and restore.

And that’s not all. The Ultimate web hosting package also comes with WordPress allowing you to start blogging immediately. (In fact, we use WordPress to write this very blog.)

But it doesn’t end there. Instead of you having to buy domain names, Freezone throw in 5 free domain names. And importantly, provide you the facility to host 5 separate websites under the one single package.

All this and 6 months free! Perhaps not all good things come to an end. At least not as far as UK web hosting is concerned.

domain name · Free domain name · Free web hosting · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

You spent weeks planning your website, preparing the content, hiring the services of a highly creative web design and development team. And now, you have a live website.

But do you know how many people are visiting your website? How do they search and find your website? And where do they go when they leave you?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you will find it difficult to exploit the full potential of your website. Our advice is to check with your web hosting company to make sure that they offer you tools to monitor traffic to your website. In fact, most good web hosting companies now include traffic monitoring tools with every web hosting package. (If your web hosting company doesn’t provide you with these tools, look for a new host!)

Should you want a more detailed analysis of traffic to your website, install Google Analytics. This free and easy-to-use software allows you to build a detailed picture of the source of traffic to your website and also gives you a clear understanding of which specific pages on your website people have visited.

Once you have a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what they are looking at once they are on your website, you will be able to provide a better experience to your visitors and then convert them into customers.

Tip: get on to your web hosting company immediately and analyse visitors to your website today. Good luck!

UK web hosting · Web Hosting · website traffic monitoring

Suddenly the roads are empty, the Chelsea tractors have almost disappeared and the peace in households with children has evaporated into the hot English Summer air.

Yes, the schools are closed and kids have invaded every shopping mall in the country – you leave the office to grab a sandwich at your peril!

Well, it’s not that bad – not at least from a business point of view. Parents’ struggle to keep their children occupied over the holiday period is an opportunity for businesses to play their role.

If you have any products / services aimed at school-age children, now is best time to increase your marketing efforts.

Start with your website – fill it with useful offers. Think about partnerships with other similar businesses. Run regular email promotional offers. Either buy in or build your own email database – talk to your web hosting company to help you capture customer emails.

Your web hosting company may also be able to help you run Google adwords and search engine optimisation campaigns.

While some companies lament the onset of Summer holidays, there are others that relish the opportunity to up their game. Which one are you?

Email Marketing · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

According to a survey by eMarketer.com, 37% of online shoppers prefer receiving promotional offers by email. This is significantly greater than the more established direct mail channel (23%). And despite the near-universal use of texting, only 18% of online shoppers prefer this option.

Clearly, email should be the channel of choice for you to send promotional offers to your customers. If you are not exploiting it, you are losing out.

So, here are some tips for getting your email marketing started today.

Set up a regular promotional offer email

You can either set up a regular promotional email or send it out on an ad hoc basic – it all depends on the nature of your business. However, you don’t have to spend too much time on ‘designing’ the email – it’s more important to get the offer right. You could test different offers to a subset of your customers and then rollout the most effective one to the rest of your customer base.

Talk to your web hosting company

Before sending out any bulk emails, it is worth talking to your web hosting company first. Not only will it avoid any potential spamming issues, your web hosting company may also have the tools that allow you to manage the whole process.

Send out your promotional email today

Perhaps the most important advice we can offer is to test a promotional email – in fact, try it today. What do you have to lose?

Email Marketing · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

In Part I, we looked at some of the broad issues that you need to consider when choosing between shared and dedicated web hosting. In Part II, we analysed shared web hosting in a little more detail. Today, we will look at the pros and cons of dedicated web hosting.

Dedicated web hosting

Whereas with shared web hosting you are effectively sharing a server with other businesses, with dedicated web hosting you have sole use of a server.

(Higher) cost

Compared with shared web hosting, the cost of dedicated web hosting can be significantly more. Typically, for a reasonably powerful server, you can expect to pay around £150 per month.

While this is significantly more than the cost of a typical shared hosting package, you do get some notable benefits as outlined below.

Unique IP

With shared hosting, bad behaviour (such as spamming) from one domain name can affect other domains on the same server as they all share the same IP. Clearly, with your own dedicated server, you need not worry about the actions of others.

Speed / responsiveness

A dedicated server will certainly be more responsive as it deals with requests for your website only. If you expect a lot of traffic, then dedicated web hosting should be a serious consideration.

Bandwidth and storage

While bandwidth should be unlimited, storage space would be determined by the specification of your server – the higher the spec, greater the amount of storage space.

SSL

Whether you are selling online or capturing customer data, SSL is a must and for a dedicated server, this should part of the package.

I hope our three-part guide to shared / dedicated hosting has given you adequate understanding to at least pose the right questions to your web host.

Finally, whether you opt for shared or dedicated hosting, always look for full support. You never know when you might need it.

Bandwidth · Dedicated web hosting · IP address · Shared web hosting · SSL · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

A short while ago, I visited a large exhibition here in London aimed at business start ups. There were plenty of ‘entrepreneurs’ full of confidence of a person about to launch the next big thing. (It’s strange how the success of reality TV shows such as Dragons’ Den and The Apprentice has turned us all into a nation of entrepreneurs.)

There were plenty of gurus / mentors / all-round successful business folks eager to dispense free advice and inspiration. There were also plenty of experts with failed businesses equally happy to point out their own mistakes! Well, we all learn from mistakes.

Of course, there were also a lot of exhibitors offering practical help and tools to get your business off the ground. As a web hosting company, I found the services offered by ‘company registration’ agents most interesting.

Essentially, these chaps allow you to register your company with Companies House, buy a domain name, web hosting package and website design, all at a click of a mouse. All very convenient and fast.

However, there was a catch. The cost of a domain name and web hosting from a large number of these agents was dramatically more than what you would pay a dedicated web hosting company.

Our advice is simple. By all means use these agents if you are registering a new business. For your web hosting needs, however, shop around – Google ‘web hosting’ (better still ‘UK web hosting’) to find a dedicated web hosting company where you will pay a fraction of the price of some of these agents and, equally important, receive full technical support to get your website up and running quickly and efficiently.

Company registration · domain name · UK web hosting · Web Hosting

When looking for web hosting, there are a number of key elements to consider. In fact, in previous blogs, we have looked at this subject in some detail.

However, as a UK web hosting company, we have become aware of one increasingly important requirement from customers – location i.e. location of your web hosting company.

Over the last five years or so, cost of web hosting has dropped dramatically. Particularly so as cross-border purchase of web hosting has become common place. However, this has also led to the commoditisation of web hosting – web hosting companies have been focusing on price alone and are drawing attention away from support. (After all, for web hosting companies, cost of providing full support can be significant.)

As UK web hosting company, we believe that price is indeed an essential part of the equation. However, we attach equal priority to support.

Now, you can certainly buy web hosting for a dollar or so per month from many non-UK web hosting companies – there are many US and Far Eastern web hosting companies offering cheap web hosting. But what are the chances that you will be able to get hold of someone on the phone during UK working hours?

Not surprisingly then, more and more small businesses are opting for UK web hosting companies. Not only can you get quality web hosting from as little as £2 per month, you have more chance of getting support when you need it.

Our advice is simple – next time you are searching for web hosting, type ‘UK web hosting’ into Google.

Cheap web hosting · Hosting · UK web hosting · web host · Web Hosting