web hosting article - web hosting - affordable web hosting plan

Choosing your web host

There are literally tens of thousands of web hosting companies, all trying to capture your attention and ultimately your business. This has lead to extravagant use of numbers and phrases describing affordable web site hosting plans in order to make them appear more impressive, which can lead to even more confusion!

So what, exactly are you looking for? What host is best suited to you? What are your requirements?

You need to take into account some key factors that will ultimately determine what hosting account you sign up for. They are as follows:

Web space
Data transfer allowance (monthly)
E-mail support, accounts

You can take it as red that the average web site for a personal and small business user will always remain within the limits of today's affordable web host plan hosts. Usually, companies offer far more account resources than what you would ever need for a web site - which give you room to trade off some of the massive resource offerings for extra support services or a lower monthly fee, for example.

You may also need to take into consideration server configurations - such as, does the server come with PHP and MySQL support (a scripting engine and database engine (respectively) that would power, say, a shopping cart web site or online bulletin board).

Transferring a domain name to a new web hosting account

You have already registered your domain name with a registrar - rather than have a free domain name come with your web hosting account. This is quite common, as it allows more control over your domain name.

Domain names point to name servers. When a domain name is called (browsed to), a lookup is performed on the "name server" which then tells the client what address they need to go to access the web site on the domain name. This is all (luckily for us) automatic and seemless.

If you are moving from one host to another, you will undoubtedly need to update the name servers of the domain name you are moving. These will have been provided to you're by your host when you signed up for your web hosting account. If they were not, you must request the name servers to which you have to point your domain name.

Until you do this (and after you have entered the name server information it will take around 18 hours to fully propagate), you will not be able to access your new web hosting account through your existing domain name.

If you are moving from a host with whom you also had your domain name registered with, you will have to contact them to find out what procedures need to be taken for the transfer to take place.

Moving your web site from an old host to your new host

More often than not, if you contact your new host's support desk asking them to do a transfer for you, they will be more than happy to (as it ensures your custom - without your web site on your new web hosting account, it will render your account useless!).

If there are issues (such as your new host refusing to do the transfer for you), you may have to bite the bullet and do it yourself.

If your old web host and new web host is running cPanel as their control panel, it will be easy to do a site transfer. On your old web hosting account control panel, browse to Backup > Full site backup. Then from here, generate a full site backup and once complete, download the back up file. You will then (in the same area of the control panel on your new web hosting account) be able to "Restore a backup" by browsing to your saved backup file.

If both of your web hosts are not running cPanel, you will have to transfer your data manually, as follows.

Firstly, you should transfer all of the files by downloading them (through FTP) from your old web hosting account, and then uploading them to your new one (see the "Uploading your web site" guide).

Then, you must ensure you recreate all of your mail boxes on your new web hosting account - with aliases and passwords to match (see the "Setting up e-mail on your web hosting account" guide).

Following this, you must transfer any MySQL databases you have set up on your web hosting account. You can download copies of these using the Backup feature in your web hosting control panel. Or, you can browse to MySQL > PHPMyAdmin (in most web hosting control panels) and from there do a "SQL Export" of each of your databases, which will allow you to download and save a file containing your database structure and data.

Website-hosting-plans.net's
Step-by-Step Web Hosting Guide