Web Hosting from Hostt

Well, as you may know, an effective web-hosting solution is an essential factor for every website or blog. So, when you have confirmed your decision in creating a website or blog, the first thing you should consider purchasing is web-hosting services from a reliable firm. However, if you would like to engage in a give-and-take policy, hosting that you can get from Hostt.com is completely free — wait before you get thrilled. Here are the details. You will have to purchase a domain name from Hostt.com for a period of three years. Currently, it costs $13.95 a year to purchase a domain name Hostt.com for one year. So, it will costs you $41.85 when you purchase the domain name for three years. Although it might sound a bit expensive, you will be relieved to hear that you get free, unlimited, and yet reliable web hosting for three full years!

Unlike most of free hosting services, Hostt offers top-notch web hosting with a bunch of impressive features. Those features include 24×7 support from dedicated team, full root access, free domain transfer, free file transfer, script to install popular CMSs, a customized version of cPanel to enhance usability, $100 credits in Google AdWords and deep level of integration with various web-based platforms. So, if you will love paying just $41.85 for a domain name and in turn skipping a payment of around $180 (average charge of $5/month for hosting), it makes good sense to try Hostt for your web hosting needs.

Creating a Website with Website Builder from IM Creator

Despite the fact that WordPress is a widely-used solution in creating a website or blog, it may fail to be an instant way to publish websites.  You have to first install WordPress in your server and follow several steps. Just as other website builders out there, you can make use of pre-built templates to power on your website or blog. Since IM Creator does offer complete customizability, you will be able to choose a template and then make necessary changes to suit your convenience and requirement. You will be able to integrate an existing domain name or a new domain when you like to publish a website through IM Creator; plus, you have nothing to fear as web-hosting is already integrated with IM Creator service. Talking of this integrated hosting feature, you can get unlimited disk space, bandwidth ad well as its expanding collection of website templates. In addition, IM Creator offers a Pro subscription version, where you get a solution to bring white labeled sites for your clients. So, considering these as a whole, IM Creator is a great choice if you want interesting in creating a website in just a few clicks.

Ecommerce from Pimwi

Undoubtedly, eCommerce is the new world’s way of buying things! And, if you want to be a part of that change, pursue a solution that lets your customers purchase your products or services online. Pimwi is a great option for you if you would like to include eCommerce when creating a website! Once you have decided to go with Pimwi, you can get rid of the actually-hassle-rich process of integrating a solution to process payments from your user and deliver the product or service.

To your respite, Pimwi offers a UI that is able to let you add elements of your site in form of cards — such as gallery image cards, Google Map cards etc along with product cards. These cards have customization options and you will be able to change them according to your requirement. Talking about eCommerce cards, you can assign certain product or service to a card and set up the eCommerce way of buying. When a user clicks on purchase button and processes the payment through PayPal, you will receive the processed amount in your PayPal account — simple as that.

In addition, you can find variety of cards in Pimwi dashboard, though the number depends upon the plan you choose from the list. However, basic fee to have this awesome website builder is just $25 per month and you can just forget about charges for both web hosting and domain names.

Email Marketing from MailChimp

Even after the revolutionary journey of social media and its influence among internet users, Email Marketing has not lost its popularity among web-based professionals, including bloggers, web developers and others. It is so because most of users consider email to be important and your marketing emails will hit the real place if you prepare them in an attractive way. However, you need a service like MailChimp to make sure that your emails reach the right place, without any fail!

So, if you have a list of emails, including those of your customers or followers, MailChimp opens up a way to reach all of them in a single click. You will have to set up your newsletter or other kind of email and hit the ‘Send’ button, and all your mails will be there at your customers’ inbox — doesn’t it sound simple? And the best part is that MailChimp offers a free plan, in which you can have up to 2000 subscribers and send up to 12000 emails each month. We hope this will be enough for a typical web-based professional. Plus, MailChimp offers affordable plans for each of you and you can choose according to your budget.  So, do be sure to add an email service, like MailChimp, when creating a website or blog.

Well, what do you think about these services? Don’t you think they are, at the same time, affordable and useful? Or, do you have any other recommendations? In both cases, do let us know through your comments.

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To begin with the basic idea and experience, Blogger is the best platform to introduce. Check out the description of each and choose one to build your dreams!

#1 Blogger

Let me start with my personal experience. Right after the local newspapers, I felt my technology publications should be read by worldwide readers, but had no clue where to begin with. Once just surfing around pages, I came across Google’s Blogger Site Builder, the one very famous for personal blogging. It was damn easy, and for a 15 year old student it didn’t end up as a big deal, to launch the blog as no extra-ordinary computer knowledge is required. Note that, the non-custom URL of your blog may consist of .blogspot.com domain since BlogSpot provides free domain services for the blogs on Blogger.

Pros:

• User-friendly and easy
• Best suitable for beginners and personal blogs

Cons:

• No complete authorization on blog
• Anytime termination without informing

#2 WordPress

WordPress is so far considered the best online site building platform. It stands over Blogger as users also build fine commercial and business blogs along with the personal ones. Yet beginners prefer Blogger primarily because of its ease and simplicity. WordPress is known for its themes and templates; the design layout is undoubtedly elegant and attractive. However, the customization is limited for the free domain hosting by wordpress.com.

Pros:

• Free upto 3GB of space
• No need to take care of backups

Cons:

• No control over advertisements published
• Themes modification is limited and you cannot install plugins

#3 Weebly

Weebly is known for its simplicity in site building. Wherein WordPress needs some study to expertise, Weebly doesn’t need any. Users who don’t have much time to invest in web developing must go for Weebly.

Pros:

• Extremely simple and reliable
• No much technical knowledge required

Cons:

• Page creation restrictions
• E-commerce tools are not advanced

#4 Tumblr

Tumblr is a multimedia buddy! A webmaster with an idea of sharing images, videos and rich multimedia stuff; this is the best choice he/she must go with. However, you cannot efficiently build a commercial oriented site with Tumblr; this is not its cup of tea.

Pros:

• Appropriate for multimedia content
• Fast site construction

Cons:

• Limited options of templates
• Less customization freedom

#5 Wix

With variety of eye-catching templates for each blog topic, Wix comes with an excellent platform to help you make your website a great success. It may not be precise at the services it provides but does offer all the necessary features (although average) required for creating a site. The reason why I have positioned Wix at the last in my list is its major drawback regarding template changing. You cannot switch to a new template once you have created your site. In order to get a new look for your page, you need to build the site again.

Pros:

• Amazing templates for all categories
• Outstanding customer service

Cons:

• Plenty of Wix ads on your webpages
• Lack advance e-commerce solution

How exciting it sounds when you hear about free online site building! And why not, when you have amazing options for creating your own blogs online along with the provision of blogging services and yeah, for free, of course. Apart from these, there are several other online site builders with provision of different features. Yola is other very beneficial drag and drop online website maker tool with wide range of widgets. I would also suggest you to look up for Medium, Webs, Jimdo and Squarespace as good online site builders. Do not forget to share your views about the tool you use.

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However, apart from the three basic web hosting services commonly known to all (Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting), there also exist few others that take the web hosting market to another level. Let us primarily look at the aforementioned fundamental web hosting provided by almost all the hosting companies.

Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting is the most preferred and commonly used hosting plan especially for the personal and small-scale websites. The main reason behind this is availability of necessary resources in affordable rates. Here, the administrative power and control minimizes since a single web server is shared by many users and so is the resources provided. All the features such as the RAM, disk space, Web mail servers, MySQL storage servers (database support) and so on are shared by the clients. Thus, this option may not be useful for the sites with high traffic and heavy data. Another downside is the security issues it falls short off!

Benefits of Shared Web Hosting:

• Cheap Hosting Plans
• Reliable Features
• Host looks after Technical Maintenance

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

By the name itself, one can get an idea of this hosting being private and more secured. Hence, it is somewhat expensive and definitely the cost is worth it since you have the power to control the system configuration and installations. Basically, it is a dedicated virtual machine allotted to the client in a shared hosting environment i.e. it shares the available resources without affecting other private servers. Briefly, it is combination of both dedicated and shared hosting in a more secured and accessible manner.

The benefits of VPS Web Hosting are:

• Dedicated Hosting Resources
• Controlled Configuration
• Privacy and Security

Dedicated Hosting

This one’s the most expensive yet trusted hosting service plan. The word ‘Dedicated’ here means the entire server is dedicated to the client’s website, and then be it a single website or number of such, all the resources available are completely allotted to a single developer. It is best suitable for commercial websites with regular heavy traffic. The Dedicated Hosting is a way more managed hosting and the client has control over both the Operating System and Hardware of the services provided.

Read: Virtual Private Servers (VPS) Vs Dedicated Servers Hosting

Benefits of Dedicated Web Hosting are:

• Flexibility and Customization Freedom
• Highly Secured
• Plenty of available resources
• Efficient Performance

Semi-Dedicated Hosting

Very few Web Masters are aware about this kind of hosting. It particularly serves those websites that have grown so extensive that they cannot be managed by the shared servers. You can better consider it the state of a site that is lying in between shared and dedicated hosting! There exists just a considerable amount of semi-dedicated host providers such as Bluehost, HostGator etc.

Interestingly, at some point it depends on the host company as to what kind of package they provide you under the name of Semi-dedicated plan. It can be either a VPS or Shared hosting with some additional amount of resources and facilities provided in order to let your site perform better. It is considered more reliable than the shared server as MySQL and E-Mail bases run on different servers thus deducting the load on the site. Note that neither too many customers share the server nor the server is completely allotted to a single customer.

Benefits of Semi-Dedicated Web Hosting are:

• Affordable
• Increased resources than Shared
• High Sustenance and Easy Upgradation

Reseller Hosting

This type of hosting is most probably handled and worked out as a business deal, especially by the newbie in Hosting Market. The reseller, one who holds the reseller hosting account, acts as a hosting provider. The account holder rents out part of his owned disk space and bandwidth to other customers thus providing them hosting services. This comes out to be a profitable deal to the reseller as he purchases wholesale hosting services and then sells some resource parts to other needy customers. The severe drawback of this service is the technical and customer care support. The reseller may not guarantee complete support to its clients in any manner.

Benefits of Reseller Web Hosting are:

• Cheap Packages and Less Expenses
• No Maintenance Burden
• Provision of Resources as per the requirement

Cloud Hosting

We all know that the Cloud computing technology is on high rise. With the hosting services being managed by the virtual servers on cloud networks of computers, it is claimed that in near future the entire hosting industry may turn into Cloud Hosting. The basic idea behind this hosting is that the resources are spread across separate servers so that hosting services are best offered in every aspect. The main concern is about the privacy of sites’ data. However, the fundamental theory of cloud hosting focuses on Pay for what you use i.e. you need not spend extra rentals for the resources you are no longer in need of!

Benefits of Cloud Web Hosting are:

• Least Downtime Risk
• Follows Divide and Rule Concept
• High Scalability and Reliability
• More Freedom and Power

Collocation Hosting

Paying for hosting services provided by some other web server rather than owning one is what we call collocated hosting. The server is connected to data center from where the data transfer takes place and the cost is estimated. The client has full authority to manage the entire working of the server along with the problem fixation.

Benefits of Cloud Web Hosting are:

• Complete Control over both Hardware and Software
• Cost Efficient
  

Free Web Hosting

Now this one’s an interesting stuff to go through, but on the other side it is less preferred by the web developers. The reason is straight forward: Low security, numerous apps and banner displays, no strong technical support and inclusion of host name in the domain name. Yes, it’s true that nothing is for free of cost in this world. For hosting your website under the category of free web hosting, you will have to pay the amount in some other term like by displaying the host banners and ads on your web pages. It is recommended that you should avoid free hosting if you really serious about your website. WordPress is the most popular among all.

Benefits of Free Web Hosting are:

• Free of Cost
• User-friendly Host
• Best for the Beginners

The hosting types are not only limited to these discussed above. File Hosting, Video Hosting, Internet Forum Hosting, Image Hosting, Internet Service Provider (ISP) Hosting, Email Hosting, Self-Service Hosting and many such fall under the different kinds of web hosting services. At the end of the day, it’s the decision of the Web Master that should be taken on the basis of site requirements, as to which web hosting to go for!

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Free Web Hosting

If you are one of those, or want to let someone know about disadvantages of free hosting, we will tell you five reasons, because of which you should not go for free web hosting services. Obviously, these are the same reasons why we never recommend free web-hosting services to anyone who asks about web hosting recommendations. We hope these reasons would teach you disadvantages of going with free hosting. And, thus, we would be able to move on in world of web with a motto – Invest & Earn.

Site Doesn’t Belong to You

Although the ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ page of your blog or site might say the blog belongs to YOU, until you move from free web hosting, the blog or site is not yours! Since you pay them nothing, except ads in some cases, they have all the freedom to do anything with your blog. Despite the fact that most free hosting companies have nothing to be considered as ‘Terms and Conditions’, your web-hosting provider can change those conditions at any time. So, if they decide to take your all sites down all of a sudden, you can do nothing but making a fruitless attempt to send a few e-mails to the so-called customer care section of provider. In other words, the website or blog is completely theirs until you pay! And, why would anyone give you a server, internet connectivity, power and other environment for free?

Your Site = Sibling of Hundreds of Spammy Sites

Do you know who do use free host most? Well, unlike you think, they are not bloggers or internet marketers! On the other hand, they are those who publish all sorts of spammy websites, such as porn sites, offensive sites etc. And, the hosting provider is never going to give you a dedicated IP address (you expect them to be that generous, huh?), sites you have hosted will be sort of siblings to those offensive sites. Obviously, in the search engine’s point of view, it will have enough points to either blacklist your site or restrain it from ranking high in SERPs. In that respect, if you like to stick on free hosting, blogging is not your cup of tea, and nor will your efforts pay you back.

Irritating Advertisements make your site USELESS

If you have been a reader before deciding to become a blogger, you know how irritating these advertisements are! It should be noted that, despite ruining simplicity of design of your site, it would cause irritation to each user, who is searching for useful information. Some providers are decent enough to mention case of advertisements in the terms and conditions section, whereas some other will just use some iframe-based ads in your site or site without concern from you (and, why should they ask when you pay nothing?)

Recommended Reading:

• Things to Consider Before Buying New Web Host
• Recommended Hosting Companies for WordPress Based Websites

Last but not Least – Reliability

Here comes the most important question – how do you trust them? And, just because of the fact you pay nothing, it is all about trust, and it is the same, what they do not value. There is no assurance that your site will be working fine tomorrow morning, though you might have seen it working fine just a few seconds. In free hosting, it takes only few seconds for your site to go down.

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