I have a site hosted by web.com, but their online builder is so simple it makes it difficult to edit and create registration forms advanced php or html code.
Posts Tagged ‘features’
How do I edit my page with advanced features (such as php and core html) on the web.com hosting service?
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
How-To Understand Web Hosting Package Features
Monday, April 5th, 2010
The options available with a web hosting package are very wide ranging, and can be a bit confusing to understand – especially since the options are presenting in a large number of ways, and condensed in various ways, while shopping for a package online. Hopefully I can give you a breakdown of the categories these features fall into and help you to focus on the features that are important to you.
I break the features down into 10 categories, and will discuss the categories one by one to give you a firm grasp of the options and make an informed purchasing decision.
10 Categories of Web Hosting Package Features
Operating System Web Server Bandwidth Disk Space Domains Email FTP Database Control Panel Applications / Programming
1. Operating System
The operating system is the underlying software that runs on the host. It manages the physical hardware of the server and attempts to optimize the use of RAM, disk space, network, and CPU for the requests coming into the machine. The underlying OS does not have to be the same as your desktop or even the OS you use to develop your website. In fact, due to most of the management functions being driven thru a web GUI, you might never know or care what the server operating system is.
The predominant operating systems you will find while shopping for a web hosting service are Windows and UNIX. With Windows you will see versions available such as Server 2003 or Server 2008, and with UNIX you will see many brands of Linux, usually CentOS, Debian, or Redhat. Choosing between UNIX and Windows is an important decision, and involves a lot of variables, but in the end it simply means deciding if you want to build your website with open source technology or with Microsoft technology. A more complete write-up of the choice is available on www.HostGraphs.com in the How-To section on this subject.
Research the application you want to use or run as your website and check to see if it has any Microsoft technology requirements (MSSQL database, MSAccess database, ASP, ASP.Net). If you find no pressing reason to use Windows, then UNIX will most likely be a better choice for you. UNIX runs the open source scripting languages slightly faster and is also slightly cheaper than Windows.
There are a few specific sub-features of the operating system that may be of importance to you.
Do you need a virtual private server? This gives you a dedicated virtual operating system all to yourself instead of you sharing the OS with others. You still share a machine with others, but there are stricter walls in place to guarantee you bandwidth, CPU, and memory even if a website on the same machine is getting heavily hit. It also gives you great configuration choices with everything since it is your own OS. These packages are more expensive than the shared options, but are worth if as your site grows. The VPS packages mainly vary is the amount of RAM dedicated to you, so I would recommend going with the smallest package and monitoring the RAM usage over time and upgrading into a bigger package as needed.
Do you need a dedicated SSL certificate? Most sites offer a shared SSL certificate, which is fine for some smaller sites, but if you are running a medium or large ecommerce site you will need a dedicated certificate. Some buyers justifiably will not send in their personal and credit card information without a guaranteed valid SSL private certificate. Also some shopping cart applications require the dedicated certificate as well. Be careful when shopping for this – some hosting services say they give a SSL certificate with all their hosting plans but do not explicitly tell you that it is a shared certificate. If the plan does not include a dedicated IP, then it is a shared certificate.
To directly remotely administer your site, you may need to either shell into with UNIX or Remote Desktop in with Windows. The UNIX shell option is sometimes referred to as SSH Shell, Secure Shell, or telnet. These options are only useful to you if you intend to do low level maintenance and tweaking, mainly in the VPS packages. With a good hosting package with a high powered control panel, you will not need either of these.
You may see mention for the ability to schedule cron jobs – this is the UNIX version of scheduled tasks. This ability is only needed if you wish to run scheduled tasks at set times, such as a nightly backup. Most of the good control panels provide an interface for the cron job entry, but they also provide interfaces for performing maintenance tasks such as backups. You will probably never need this feature.
2. Web Server
The web hosting companies usually offer Microsoft IIS or UNIX Apache web servers. Both have their plusses and minuses, and it will only make a difference to you if the website you are developing or the application you are running requires one or the other. Apache, being open source itself, has slightly better hooks in it to run many of the open source content management systems and blog engines based on PHP, PERL, and Python, so go with Apache if that is all you need. The Windows IIS also has quite good open source content management systems and blog engines based on ASP and ASP.Net, but I would suggest not going with a PHP/PERL/Python web application on Windows IIS – see the above discussion of the operating system as to why.
The SSL certificate is hosted by the web server, and the web server has to do extra processing of SSL HTTPS requests – it has to encrypt/decrypt and verify data passing between the client and the server. For this reason, some would argue that you should shy away from web hosting packages that offer free SSL shared certificates to everyone. You might end up sharing a server with 100s of other websites that overtax the server. A well run website will only go into HTTPS SSL mode for the actual entering of credit card data, not for the entire website – but you do not know if the other websites on your server are well run.
3. Bandwidth
This is a measure of the amount of data transmitted in/out of you website, usually on a monthly basis. Keep in mind that a typical website only transmits a very small amount of the content to each user, and even though a package only offers a few gigs of transfer a month, you will most likely not overshoot your allotment. If you do, then your website is really popular with thousands of visitors, and you should be generating a nice revenue stream. Most of the web hosting companies will spell out what the penalty is for overshooting your allotment – it is usually a dollar to two per gig, which makes it cheaper to upgrade to the next highest package of course. If your website is heavy on images or multimedia, you may need a bigger allotment of monthly bandwidth immediately. Fortunately they all offer a monthly meter to watch your bandwidth usage so that you can plan accordingly as your site grows in popularity.
Some hosting companies offer an unlimited bandwidth package – be wary of this. There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, so what they are selling is unmetered bandwidth. Many of them with unmetered offerings will inform you after you purchase an account of what their acceptable use policy is concerning bandwidth and disk space, disallowing you from performing nightly 500gig backups of your personal computer and such activities. In fact, many of these policies also stipulate that you must upgrade to bigger packages if your website begins to infringe on the bandwidth of others on a shared hosted machine. Once again, this is not a bad policy; if you get notified of infringement due to the activity of your website, then it is so popular that your revenue stream covers the additional expense of a bigger package.
4. Disk Space
This is the allotment of bytes on the hard drive given to you for your website. A large website with 100s of pages can easily fit into a gigabyte of space, so you actually do not need that much for a typical website. If you website has a catalog of thousands of items for sale, stored in a database with several images apiece, then you will need a significant upgrade in disk space. Usually as your site grows in popularity and content, you will be upgrading for bandwidth first, and get more disk space along with the upgraded package.
Some of the hosting companies will include your database space and your email space in this disk space allotment, so plan according to how they segregate the space.
As it was with bandwidth, many web hosting providers offer unlimited disk space, and there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. What they are selling is unmetered disk space, with an acceptable use policy. It is difficult to breach their acceptable use policy with a normal website, only by doing something outside the norm, such as hosting and anonymous ftp site of spurious files.
5. Domains
This is the number of web addresses that can point into your web hosting account. Almost all of the providers offer sub domains, where your main site is YourSite.com and you have sub domains of www.YourSite.com and files.YourSite.com. Many will allow you to point externally hosted DNS entries pointed into your account s folder, but some do not. This may be referred to as Add-on domains, and most will offer in one of their packages multiple add-on domains. This allows you to purchase additional domains and point it into separate folders within your hosted account. This way you can run multiple websites, which appear completely unrelated, to be physically located and managed together.
Many of the web hosting providers offer a single or even multiple free domains with their accounts. Some even offer lifetime free domains, saving you the 10 dollars a year for the domain. Be sure and shop for that option if you want to save a few dollars a year.
6. Email
Almost all of the web hosting providers offer email accounts, which gives you an email address of YourName@YourSite.com. Most of them also offer web based email, POP and IMAP access, and spam filtering. Where they will differ is the number of emails accounts they provide, the disk space total or per mailbox, and advanced features such as mail list management. It is up to you as to how important email is to you and your website – there are plenty of free email providers on the internet so this has never been an important set of features for me.
Many of the web hosting providers offer unlimited emails, but again there is no such thing. As your email accounts grow, the bandwidth and disk space used will also grow, and neither of those is unlimited. So you eventually break their acceptable use policies and are forced to upgrade into a bigger package – again, not a bad thing if it is your website that is growing and creating revenue for you.
7. FTP
FTP is the file transfer protocol used to send and receive files back and forth to your website. This feature may or may not be important to you, depending on if you wish to server files up to anonymous people through this protocol. Most websites today deliver files through HTTP through your website, which allows you to manage access and users through your website instead of through the FTP accounts.
8. Database
A database is server package that structures data into an easy to store and retrieve manner. The database is one of the items used to create dynamic websites such as content management systems and blog engines. You will want to take advantage of the database also if you intend to create any sort of ecommerce website to store your user’s information, catalogs of items for sale, and orders placed. Separation of applications into distinct database instances is important.
MSSQL is available on most of the Windows hosting packages, but is usually slightly more expensive due to its commercial licensing restrictions, and usually has lower instances and disk space available. But some website applications are built to take advantage of its feature set, so you may require this as your database. You could still take advantage of MySQL with as many applications as you could, there is not any reason a single website could not use multiple different databases.
MSAccess is the openly available database for Windows that is more of a file level database and not a dedicated server running it. It provides adequate storage for lighter database usage, but would not be sufficient for any larger data storage needs.
Researching the needs of the applications you intend to run on your website, and planning the database requirements needed for each, will drive you to a conclusion of which hosting package to use based on these database needs.
9. Control Panel
The control panel will be the location you will manage all of the details of your web hosting account. All of the providers give you a web based control panel that is easy to use and provide sufficient help to understanding all of its features so that you can avoid calling them for help.
The web hosting providers will vary in the type of control panel they provide, however. The two main control panels are cPanel and Plesk, which are found on about 80% of the providers. The remaining 20% give you a custom built control panel. cPanel and Plesk are so popular because they provide feature rich management utilities right out of the box and both can be branded to appear like the host provider’s pages, but they are expensive to license. Both work on UNIX and Windows hosted accounts and allow for complete management of the underlying operating system configuration, web server configuration, web site configuration, email ,ftp, DNS, etc.
If you are new to web hosting then it really does not matter with control panel you choose, but if you are familiar with cPanel or Plesk you may prefer to go with a hosting provider which provides you with the control panel you are comfortable with.
If you are interested in getting into being a hosting reseller, then you will want to ensure you get licenses provided to you for your reseller account through the web hosting provider so that you can brand it and give it to your sub-hosted customers (and not have them call you with configuration needs).
Many on the internet recommend removing cPanel and Plesk from your virtual private server since both can be major bandwidth, CPU, and disk space hogs. One of the great benefits of a virtual private server is being able to login as root or administrator and manage the operating system and web server directly, removing the need to obfuscate into a web GUI those tasks. Of course you would need to be a lot more technically keen on doing those tasks yourself, or you could pay a few dollars more a month and get a managed VPS package.
10. Applications / Programming
No matter the type of website you plan to build, you will most likely use a few pre built packages as the foundation of your site. The pre built packages are built with some sort of programming or scripting language. They may be using PHP, PERL, Python, Java, Ruby, ASP, ASP.Net, or Coldfusion. Most of these languages run on any operating system, except for ASP and ASP.Net, both of which are Microsoft technologies requiring windows (and application probably requires IIS and MSSQL database as well). PHP, PERL, Python, and Java are cross platform, but UNIX runs them slightly faster than Windows and is usually a slightly cheaper package. Ruby is a UNIX only language, and it may be referred to as Ruby on Rails. Not all web hosting providers give access to all of these languages with all of their packages – make sure you shop it carefully to ensure the host and the package you purchase has the language you need.
The applications you decide run will tell you what their requirements are. In fact, the web hosting provider will give you the tools you need to install the applications from the control panel, which makes it a breeze to get up and running with the base installation of whatever application you choose. These days all of the web hosting providers allow you to get up and running with the base installation of the most common blog engines and content management systems within minutes after purchasing.
If you are interested in a blog, read up on WordPress and BlogEngine.Net. If you are interested in a content management system, read up on Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, and mojoPortal. For a message forum, read up on PHPBB and YetAnotherForum applications. There are many more pre built applications to help you get up and running including shopping carts, mail list management, web authoring tools, and catalog databases.
Conclusion
I hope that this article provides you with enough understanding to make a wise decision when selecting a web hosting package. Happy shopping!
Web Hosting Features To Look For
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
When you are looking for a professional web hosting service, you want to look for certain features and services. Do not worry about knowing exactly what all the technical terms mean, just look for them! You should always shop around, phone the hosting companies and ask questions as part of your qualification process.
1. Reliability and Speed
Look for a hosting service that owns their own equipment, with high-speed connections to multiple Internet backbones, backup power generators and backup systems in place. The hosting company will generally brag about their high-speed connections and will usually guarantee 99% or better availability of your web site.
Many hosting services are operated by resellers. This can be a good thing if they bring better and more knowledgeable support to their resold services. Unfortunately, many resellers do not really have the resources or knowledge to adequately support you.
Years in business are something you should take a look at. Three years or more is a pretty good yardstick of reliability.
If they offer a trial period, take advantage of it and actually try the service out.
2. Operating Systems
Do they use a standard operating system configuration that they keep updated on a routine basis? If they do not, you may have trouble getting newer scripts to work. On Linux servers, look for Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, SuSE, Slackware and CentOS. On Windows servers, look for recent Windows operating systems with all patches kept current. If they do not publish this information, email or phone them to find out.
3. Language and Database Support
They should support the key programming languages and databases that are used by newer scripts and should keep these up to date as well. On Linux you should look for PHP and Perl at the least. For a database, look for MySQL. You should be allowed at least one database. You should have your own CGI Bin. On Windows systems, look for MS Access at the least and MS SQL Server for power and speed. If you want to use the Microsoft NET framework, your hosting will need to support that.
4. Support
Check their support. The minimum support is email support. The better hosting services provide 24/7 email, ticket system and live telephone support. Actually try their support and see if they respond quickly enough for your needs and if their support staff is helpful and knowledgeable.
5. FTP Access
Many inexpensive hosting services do not provide FTP access. You will need FTP access if you plan to add much material to your website or if you need to install scripts on your website. Also check that you can change permissions on your files via FTP or through SSH.
6. Email
How many email accounts do they provide? Are they POP email accounts? Can you add forwarders and email aliases? Look for web mail access as well. The better the service, the more options they will provide for email.
7. User Control Panel
Look for a comprehensive user control panel that allows you to manage your hosting account. The better control panels also provide automatic script installers like Fantastico or Elefante. Cpanel, Ensim and HSphere and Plesk are all well known and well supported. There are many more control panels than these and they are good too, but you should probably check them more thoroughly and take a look at their demo system if they have one.
8. Domain Names
You should be able to host at least one domain name. The better hosting companies will generally allow you five or more domain names. There should be no restrictions on sub-domains.
9. Statistics
Does your hosting service include a statistics program so you can monitor your website traffic?
10. Disk Space
The absolute minimum is 50 MB, but you should be paying very low prices for that little disk space.
11. Bandwidth
The main difference between the basic and expensive plans of any hosting service is the amount of bandwidth allowed per month.
To figure how much bandwidth you need, multiply your visits per day X page views per visit X average page size X 30 days.
Example: 100 visits per day, 5 page views per visit, with a page size of 45 kb: 100 X 5 X 45 KB X 30 = 675,000 KB = 675 MB.
Try to get as much bandwidth for your dollar as possible, but beware of web hosting services that offer unlimited bandwidth. Read the fine print and their terms of use carefully. There is usually some kind of restriction that you will need to be aware of.
Make sure you read up on how they charge you if you exceed your monthly bandwidth and what upgrades they have available.
12. eCommerce
If you plan to run a shopping cart or secure payments or data transfers on your website, you need to make sure that the hosting service supports SSL.
Some Closing Thoughts:
Typical prices for professional level hosting range between $6.99 and $45.00 per month for a reasonable level of disk space and bandwidth on shared hosting. Below that you are asking for trouble because they probably do not make enough money to adequately support their equipment, systems or you.
Windows servers are usually more expensive than Linux servers because the Windows operating systems are not open source. The hosting company has to pay for using them.
When you are comparing plans, keep in mind that you are getting a better deal at $25 per month for eight domain names than $10 per month for one.
When you are looking for hosting don’t be afraid to ask questions. Good hosting services have no problem directing you to helpful information or answering your questions in a way that you can understand.
I need to find adult web site hosting with these features:?
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010I have an adult domain name that I own, I bought it recently from ipower.com. The reason I didn’t go with them for hosting is I wanted a host that didn’t charge a setup fee when I pay a few months at a time.
I’d like to keep the domain with them if I can, and just have the traffic forwarded to where the site is hosted
The hosting I’m looking for has to offer each of these:
I want cheap hosting, about $10 to $15 USD a month.
Montly payments, or 2 payments at a time
file manager access where I can copy and paste htmlcode straight into a file
ftp access where I can upload photos
24 hour support tech support by phone
The hosting I need has to have all of the above. Does anyone know a company that offers all this?
Downtown Stillwater shop features decades-old architectural drawings
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010Downtown Stillwater shop features decades-old architectural drawings
Walk past St. Croix Booksellers, and it won’t necessarily be the books that grab you. The window near the store’s main entrance is filled with hand-painted architectural drawings from the late 1800s.
Read more on Stillwater Gazette
Hosting Features You Must Have to Publish Your Blog
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
We have seen a phenomenal rise in the number of blogs published in recent years. A large number of webmasters (amateur and professional) are making use of blogs to accomplish one of many services that a blog can provide. Some are using blogs to promote other websites that they manage. Some are simply using blogs to get out a message they are passionate about. Blogs have become much more than just a passing fad. Blogs are earning common people in the web hosting game, huge sums of money on a daily basis.
Possibly you have decided to join the masses participating in this fun and profitable activity. The first important step is to ensure you are working with the correct tools. You website hosting provider may be one of the most important resources you need to consider. Web hosting services vary in cost and features today due mainly to the fact that there are such a large number of webhosting services available.
A few key features included with your hosting package play a big part in the success of your blogging efforts. You must have the capability to produce a database to store blog information. These databases will be created in an area of your control panel called MySQL. The most recent version of MySQL standard is MySQL 4, although a newer version is slowly being introduced labelled MySQL 5. You should have version 4 available if you select one of the many top rated website hosting service providers.
Reliability is very important to blogs. You want your readers to be able to access your blog when they visit it. Since blogs can produce heavy traffic and high bandwidth, quality hosting that permits that level of traffic is essential. Basically the blog user submits a message online that is actually spread to other blog services and search engines, telling the internet that “here is a new message”.
Web hosting providers define allowed limits available for quantities of incoming and outgoing traffic. This measurement of that quantity is called your bandwidth. If the scope and popularity of the website is relatively small, it will operate just fine with low amounts of bandwidth. As soon as it starts to receive larger quantities of traffic, you are going to require greater quantities of bandwidth for both incoming and outgoing data.
Web hosting providers will define the quantity of bandwidth that you have been allocated with your particular hosting package. In fact though, many webhosting services don’t expect you to actually utilize that amount of traffic or bandwidth. Try to ensure that the host is prepared to handle the traffic you will require.
A slow server is like having a low speed limit on a highway. Although this can be difficult to determine, there are websites that will measure the speed of a particular hosting service. You can conduct a search on Google to locate one of these services.
Do some research to determine the reliability statistics of your potential hosting service. Reliability figures should indicate performance in the area of guaranteed 99% uptime. Internet surfers are an impatient people and if they try to access your website a few times and find it unavailable, chances are very good that they will go away forever.
What do you require?
If the website does not experience heavy traffic you will find that a relatively inexpensive shared hosting solution will serve your needs. However, if you expect higher levels of traffic it may be best to consider a dedicated hosting solution. Dedicated hosting is typically more expensive but greater allotments of bandwidth are guaranteed. One of these two solutions will most likely be all you require to get in and start blogging.
Features to Look for When Buying Cheap Web Hosting
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Just because a company offers cheap web hosting does not mean that their service is no good. In fact, some of the best web hosting companies out there actually offer great prices on their web hosting. Of course, before you join a cheap web hosting company, there are a few things that you are going to want to look at first. Today we are going to talk about a few of the features that you may want to look for in a cheap web hosting company to make sure that they are offering the service that you want!
First of all, the main thing that you are going to want to look for is their up time. This is the time that the web hosting company is actually going to be online. Now, no web hosting company can have a 100% up time, because they have to close down at some point to do work on the server. However, what you do want is a web hosting company that is going to offer you more time than what other companies offer you. After all, the more that their servers are up, the more that your web site is online.
The next thing that you are going to want to look for is how much space they are going to give you. This is referred to as disk storage. The more space that you get, the bigger you web site can be. Of course, you are also going to want good bandwidth. This is how much traffic your web site is going to be able to take to your web site. The more bandwidth you have, the more people you can have visiting your web site.
You are also going to want to look for any kind of start up fees. A lot of cheap web hosting companies can actually offer very low monthly rates, because they have very high start up costs. So what you want to do is look and make sure that there are no start up fees that you have to pay to get your web site up and running. For example, sometimes you have to pay for your domain name.
Last, you need to check and see if the web hosting company offers any kind of templates that you can use. Templates are things that make designing your web site easier. This goes double for people who do not know how to make a web site. If this is your first time building a site, then you may want templates to help you. This way you can make your web site look professional without actually having to know a lot of HTML.
How to Choose a Good Web Host? Discover Which Features You Should Take in Consideration to Choose a Good Web Hosting Company and a Good Hosting Plan
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Are you confused while choosing a good web host? Don’t worry I am there to tell you how to choose your web host provider wisely. First of all look for the host who can provide you with good maximum services. Go for reliable host who has a high rating, who can provide you good space for your site, memory, good customer support, good bandwidth, and good server maintenance with fast technologies.
What to look for before joining a web hosting company:
Check out your pocket first to see what you can afford and compare the prices and the services you are offered by the host.
The other important thing to look is the space they are giving, if prices are same or near about. The more they offer the better.
Always make sure that the webhost provides good bandwidth, if it is a small site, or a personal site you usually do not require a lot of badwidth, but you never know for sure how much your site will grow in time so good bandwidth space is important.
Check that they have good servers and that they should not crash, to avoid this thing, you can ask someone who is already using this site to host his website/s and do a little search. Who should I ask? There are multiple webhosting forums around, you can ask people there and see what they recommend the most. Also type in the company name on google and check out for reviews and make sure to check out the company’s rating.
Those are the main options you should consider before you buy a hosting plan from a web hosting company.
But to make things more easier for you I’m going to suggest a good one for you myself. This company is one of the top 10 hosting companies in the world and all of their plans provide Unlimited bandwidth and diskspace. Their prices are affordable for everyone, they start at $4.95 like most of the companies around.
Click here to check out this web hosting company.
Where can I find a free web hosting service with these features?
Sunday, March 7th, 2010Where can I find a free web hosting service with these features?
1. Multiple file upload
2. No ads (or at least no popup ads)
3. Around 20MB to 200MB disk space
4. Free subdomain or subdirectory address
Top Web Hosting Features
Friday, March 5th, 2010
Web hosting is something that is all around on the internet, simply because there is so much demand for it now in the market place. It’s actually quite ironic if you think about it, but the lowered prices have actually made people warier of these types of deals rather than more receptive to them. In one sense it is ironic, but in another sense not really so. After all, there are a number of reasons why a person might distrust a site that is initially quite a bit cheaper in the hosting packages they offer and therefore it is understandable why this phenomenon would occur. Nevertheless, there are a number of things that factor into what actually makes a top hosting website and these things are discussed below.
First and foremost, if the website hosting site that you are looking at has name recognition, then certainly you are likely to be looking at some of the best web hosting available. The reason for this is that web hosting is an extremely competitive and extremely cut-throat market. With that in mind, it is difficult to get out of the market unless you offer something genuinely worthwhile. The logical conclusion of that line of thought is that website hosting sites that have been around for a long enough time to actually have name recognition must be doing at least something right; or must be offering a service that is at least somewhat unique when compared to the competition.
A lot of the top web hosting websites do have the name recognition that comes with years of good work and indeed a lot of their peers must give them the grudging admiration that comes with the territory. However, name recognition comes about as a result of a number of other things, the primary one of which is dependability. Forgetting all of the statistics that companies brag about when they try to get you to buy their products, the dependability of the servers that you will be hosted on should be paramount in your concern about how things are supposed to work.
But since dependability is not a statistic that they offer on their website (ever notice how every single company in the world seems to have a greater than 99% dependability?), you have to find out about it independently. The best way to do this is to take a look at some web hosting reviews from trusted websites and see what those websites say about the actual hosting at hand. The main problem with this strategy is that if the website you are looking at happens to be actively promoting that particular web hosting service, then you might be a bit out of luck. However, it is reasonably easy to tell a promotional review from a real review; the promotional review will only outline good points about the web hosting, while ignoring any bad points if they do exist. But it is very important that you learn about the dependability of any web hosting you might be interested in; therein lies the secret to a top web hosting site needs.