ZoneEdit

As we mentioned earlier, ZoneEdit is a way to manage your DNS records in a deeper way! When compared to actual way of managing DNS server, ZoneEdit offers plethora of features. To make use of ZoneEdit, you have to point your domain names to ZoneEdit, using provided details. And, using ZoneEdit, you can either point multiple domains to one website that is hosted in a single-domain-based shared server or point multiple domain names to multiple sites.  Firstly, we will go with the multiple domain one website method.

Pointing Multiple Domains to Single Website

1. Using provided credentials, log in to control panel of ZoneEdit.
2. Hit on ‘Add Zone’.
3. Soon, ZoneEdit will provide you two nameservers and IP addresses.
4. Open Domain Control Panel of yours and change the nameservers and paste those nameservers provided by ZoneEdit.
5. Get back to control panel of ZoneEdit and click on ‘Edit Zone’.
6. Hit ‘Web Forward’.
7. Now, you will have an option to redirect the added domain to a particular destination URL. In the destination URL section, enter URL of website or blog, to which you want to redirect the new domain name.
8. Save these settings and you can see them in action in a few seconds, minutes or hours!

Using these methods, you will be able to redirect multiple domain names to a single website that is hosted in single shared hosting server.

Pointing Multiple Domains to Multiple Websites

If your web host offers more than enough disk space to be used, you can use that disk space to store files of multiple websites. Despite the fact that your web host will be limiting number of domains to one, you can fool your host quite easily!

1. First, you have to create a particular directory in your web server and store website files in it. For instance, if the name of extra website is example.com, you can create a directory named public_html/example. You’ve to store your website files in the directory. And, these files will be available in fully functional form when one user enters yourwebsite.com/example.
2. Now, log in to ZoneEdit control panel and get nameservers to add new zone.
3. Once you have added the nameservers in domain control panel, get back to ZoneEdit control panel and click on ‘Edit Zone’.
4. There, you will be asked to give a destination URL, in Web Forward section.
5. Paste the URL of newly created directory in Destination URL section and save settings.
6. In a few seconds or minutes, your new website will be available under new domain.

What do you think about this sense-making solution to host multiple websites under one shared hosting? Won’t this be useful for a lot of newbie bloggers out there? We are eager to know your opinion about these.

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Bluehost Vs GoDaddy Comparative Review

Plans and pricing

Bluehost offers shared hosting, VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated hosting. In shared hosting plans, there are 2 plans named as Standard plan and PRO plan. With standard shared hosting plan, you’ll get unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. But on this plan, you can host only one domain. The standard plan from Bluehost will cost you $3.49 per month using our discount link.

In PRO plan from Bluehost, you’ll get Everything Unlimited, like unlimited bandwidth, disk space and host unlimited domains on a single account. You can subscribe to this plan by paying $6.f9 per month.

Now, we will check the plans from GoDaddy. GoDaddy is oldest web hosting service provider and offers some super cheap shared hosting plans. First and most cheap shared hosting plan from Godaddy is Economy plan. With an economy plan, you get 100 GB storage space and unlimited bandwidth. This plan has restrictions on hosting websites. You can host only one domain with this plan. The economy plan will cost you $4.99 per month.

Another plan in from GoDaddy is Deluxe plan. In this plan, you can enjoy unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space and you can host multiple domains. This plan is priced at $5.99 per month.

And now the last plan in shared hosting category from GoDaddy is ‘Ultimate’ plan. With this plan, you’ll get unlimited web space, host multiple domains and unlimited bandwidth. Also, you’ll get a Free SSL certificate for your website. Subscription of this plan is available for $7.99 per month.

Customer Support Staff

Customer support is very important for every web hosting company to solve problems of customers. Bluehost and GoDaddy are known for their customer support staff. But this time, Godaddy wins the race due to its 24/7 world class customer support staff. You can connect with GoDaddy Customer care executive via a Phone call, live chat from 5 AM to 12 AM or via Email. They’ll revert back to the help within minutes.

Bluehost also has superb customer support staff. You can connect with them via a Phone call, live chat from a website, Facebook, twitter or Ticket based response system (Emails). The average waiting time to connect with the support staff of Bluehost is 3 minutes.

1 Click Scripts Installer

GoDaddy and Bluehost offer Auto-installer program with their hosting accounts. This software helps users to install Content Management Scripts like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. with a single click. This auto installer will install selected script and will make your website ready to edit.

Free Domain Name

Another similar advantage of purchasing GoDaddy or Bluehost hosting is free .com domain name. You’ll get a free .com domain with all hosting plans from GoDaddy and Bluehost. You will get this free domain from initial plan term of 1 year. After 1 year, you’ve to renew domain name to use it.

Verdict

Bluehost and GoDaddy are well known for their best web hosting service. In this review, both web hosting companies share some similar features. If we look at plans and pricing, Bluehost wins the race because its Standard plan is affordable to newbies. In customer support, GoDaddy is known for their world class expert customer staff executives. They will revert you within minutes and will help you to solve your problems.

In this review, we did a comparison of these companies. Now, you can choose best web hosting service according to your needs. If you need web hosting with better uptime, you should choose Bluehost. If you are looking for web hosting with good customer support, go with GoDaddy. Choose your hosting company wisely after checking this review and your needs.

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All these websites are stored on a server that are either on remote locations or either in house. Many companies and people like to make their own in house server racks and use it as the server for their site. But most of the web sites on the internet use shared hosting as their hosting solution. In this post we will see how important the location is when it comes to shared hosting.

Without any further ado, let’s start by knowing what Shared Hosting really is.

What is Shared Hosting?

So, as the name suggests, Shared Hosting is the most basic type of hosting you can BUY from web hosting providers. As the name suggests, shared means a lot of other websites share the same server and use the same resources at the same time. The IP address of all those website is the same and if the server goes down, all the websites hosted on that server will go down as well.

Basically when you are using a shared web hosting, you are sharing the space, the bandwidth, the CPU as well as the load on the server with other users of that very server. If a site eats up a lot of resources, it will slow down other sites as well.

Now, the main reason why shared hosting is one of the most sold web hosting spaces is because they come for dirt cheap prices. Companies like HostGator even provide the first month for as low as $0.01. If you go with some other companies, you will see that the plans of shared hosting start from below $5 and they provide some great stuff like unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth and what not. These shared hosting plans are only good for those who want to host a basic website that doesn’t get many visitors. Even the hosting companies have restrictions like CPU usage that a site can use. But our main point of this post is how the location of the servers can affect the performance of the web hosting. So let us take a look on that.

Server Location and How it Affects Shared Hosting Performance

Server location definitely affects the shared hosting performance and in this section we will see what affects you are going to see when your server is at a remote location and the visitors are at different location.

For example, you have hosted a website with Africa targeted content and you have visitors from Africa but your server is located in Texas, USA. This is going to affect the performance of the server in many ways.

Latency will be high and hence waiting time will be more

Latency is a term that is used for describing the time a packet of data takes to traverse the whole system of network. In the case of web hosting, the request packet is sent by the user’s browser which requests the server to allow the browser to fetch the data from the server and serve it to the visitor.

Now since the location is far away from the location of the visitor of the website, the packet will take some more time as compared to a visitor who is near the server location and hence they will have to wait for more amount of time to get the data from the server.

All in all this boils down to the fact that higher latency can result in slow transmission of data.

High page load times result in lower search engine rankings

It is not a hidden fact that Google and other search engines will consider your page load times when it comes to rankings and faster loading pages are ranked higher in SERPs. So, if you page load time is low you should take a look at another host or a local host in the country where your target audience is.

SEE ALSO: How Shared Hosting can Affect Website Ranking in Search Engines.

CDN – A much needed helping hand!

So, Content Delivery Networks or CDN are used to mirror the cache of the page on servers that are situated around the world and then when a visitor wants to access your web page, they will be served through the server that is nearest to the location.

This can easily lower down the page load times to a great extent. These CDN services are provided by various companies around the world and you can choose one that you think will be suitable for you.

Verdict

All in all we can say that the location of the server does matter when it comes to shared hosting but not so much. Since each and every day we see the ISPs pushing the limits to provide higher internet speeds, the page load times are definitely going to increase.

But we should also remember that a good web design is the one that works on all system equally and hence solutions like CDN can make the whole experience a little bit better.

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The comparison is made based on the most basic features that make a difference to your site and to your pocket!

#1: HostGator Vs. GoDaddy Round 1: Performance

Both HostGator and GoDaddy invest millions of buck to give you maximum uptime and more than average speed. However, they are both different from each other not just by the name but also by their very basic hardware configurations.

HostGator has the robust Dual Xeon servers in their data center with more than 12,000 servers under management connected to 10 backbone providers equipped with Linux x86 operating systems. GoDaddy on the other hand runs on Core i7 processors providing an option to choose between Linux and Windows OS. Comparing the Dual Xeon and Core i7 you can see that Dual Xeon is more suitable for server type compatibility while Core i7 are better for desktop purposes and hence gives a +1 to HostGator. That was more about their hardware, lets now have a look at speed test, uptime and benchmark test results:

1. Speed Test  Results: HostGator amazes, when it loads within a second and outshines GoDaddy which has an average load time of 2 seconds.
2. Uptime Report: Although both the hosts boast about 99% uptime, recent outages on GoDaddy make us doubt the claim, while the HostGator has been more close to its claim.
3. Benchmark Test Results: In the GtBenchmark tests, HostGator beats GoDaddy with a margin of more than 3 seconds at various occasions.

Score Card:

HostGator: +1

GoDaddy: 0

#2:  HostGator Vs. GoDaddy Round 2: Look and Feel (UI and Control Panel)

HostGator uses cPanel, the most widely used control panel making the usage a cheesecake for even the first timers. The features are elaborate and advanced for the advanced webmasters and self explanatory and easy to understand for the freshmen of the web world.

GoDaddy, on the other hand uses Plex, the second most widely used control panel second to only cPanel. Plex can run on both Linux and Windows OS, and hence is a benefit depending on the infrastructure of your Website, but again is of little help if you are a newcomer and it’s your first website.

Another +1 to HostGator on behalf of every newcomer in the website business.

Score Card:

HostGator: +1 +1

GoDaddy: 0+0

#3:  HostGator Vs. GoDaddy Round 3: Package and Cost (Plans, Features and Price)

This Round explains why both of these web hosts are so close competitors in the market. The plans that they provide is similar in terms of costing and features.

At HostGator, you get three plans to choose from Hatchling, Baby and Business.  Hatchling and Baby are the same with the only difference in the fact that hatchling allows only one domain while with Baby you can have unlimited domains.

GoDaddy uses the name Economy, Deluxe and Unlimited to serve the near same business. Economy provides a single domain with 100GB space while both Deluxe and Unlimited have unlimited space and domains. GoDaddy also supports Business Class hosting with 5 different websites and 250,000 monthly visitors on it while HostGator serves a business plan with one dedicated IP.

A plus one to both for clear nice and competitive packages and slight differences in renew plans.

Score Card:

HostGator: +1 +1+1

GoDaddy: 0+0+1

#4: HostGator Vs. GoDaddy Round 4: Support and Assistance

All you need after paying for the services promises is a team with the ability to prompt response to your grievances. Their is no point in staying in queue without resolution or updates on your issues. HostGator has a brilliant ticketing system where you can see the prompt response about your queries. GoDaddy fails miserably here, as they have no such tracking tools or on-chat support so more often you are lost about what is happening to solve your concern.

Hence a clear and loud +1 to HostGator for that awesome teamwork.

Score Card:

HostGator: +1 +1+1+1

GoDaddy: 0+0+1+0

So the winner is!

With the above analysis and the game, I saw between the two, HostGator wins with a huge Margin of 4x points.

Final Score Card:

HostGator: +1 +1+1+1 = 4

GoDaddy: 0+0+1+0 =1

GoDaddy might be a great hosting company and with the amount that they are spending on commercials, it may also be a more known name, but it has a long way to go before it tries to outshine HostGator. Below you find what makes me say this with a lot of confidence:-

• HostGator has better and more reliable assistance and support systems that you will need the most when in a fix.
• If you are a new name in the website world , you get just the right and a very easy experience with HostGator’s UI and control Panel, motivating you to make new websites and stay longer and stronger in the market.
• The cost is near the same , so HostGator is a Value-for-money Deal.
• Uptime and Speed test give you the exact figures of why HostGator is better to use, than GoDaddy and how it makes your website more available and faster.

In case you still chose or have already chosen GoDaddy, pin in your comments, enlighten me with your experience, and if you are a proud HostGator consumer share your feedback and back me up! Kudos to all!

May the Best Host Serve!

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1. VPS Hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and the name itself indicates you may think that the web services offer a private server for a particular site. Well, hold on, your guess is incorrect! The site is hosted on a shared server except that there is more disk space, bandwidth and provision for hosting multiple websites using separate cPanel accounts.

2. Dedicated Server Hosting

The entire server hosts a single website in this type of plan.

All the services provided are remarkable: complete administrative control over server (inclusive of OS and hardware) with maximum customization. The sites hosted on this server have an overall excellent performance in terms of uptime, response time and traffic support as it does not share resources with other sites to get influenced and affected. Hence, the sites with high-commercial targets and heavy traffic choose the dedicated server hosting plan.

3. Shared Hosting

Shared hosting plan is very simple to understand. The websites hosted here share the server space with that of the other and so are the resources (CPU, Storage Space and RAM) shared. However, note that, the sharing results in compromise in site performance. If the site’s traffic, space or bandwidth crosses the limits set by shared hosting plan, then it needs to upgrade to the VPS hosting or dedicated hosting plan as per the requirement.

Besides knowing the details of each plan, the matter we are worried about is how much efficiently suitable is shared hosting for our website! Is the shared hosting a right choice to be made with fair enough justification to our site demands?

The very basic and logically comprehensible concept is about understanding the amount of server load put by our webpages. Based on this, we can comment on the space shared by a single server for multiple sites hosted on it and consequently its quality of performance.

A simple formula can best explain what exactly I want to convey:

Less multimedia rich content => Less load on server => Better server performance => More traffic support.

The above statement says if there is less multimedia content such as HD images, audio, video, etc on your web pages, then it has fewer load on its host server. Again, if there is fewer load on server, then it enhances the efficiency of server performance i.e. the uptime time and response time is well maintained and presented at least possible time. Furthermore, a quality performance by server results in handling of more and more traffic.

Now, the problem is that many webmasters in pretext of getting a cheaper plan go with the shared hosting option. Had they knew little that not all sites can successfully run on shared server due to the aforementioned factors, they would have taken a prudent decision for their web hosting. The server performance indirectly depends on the site content it hosts. The general shared hosting plans cannot handle more than about 20,000 visits/day; else there is compromise in site performance which might disappoint the visitors. In this case, the web host company will advise you to pay some bucks and upgrade to the Dedicated Hosting Plan.

The conclusion has it that shared hosting is best suitable for the small-scale commercial sites or even personal blogs and definitely a bad choice for sites with heavy content and traffic. Don’t go for it just because the packages are cheap; choose the worth for your site as right investment gives rightful profit! After all, compromising quality of your work is equivalent to compromising your dreams.

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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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In this post, we will have a glimpse on noticeable advantages and disadvantages of shared web hosting, with focus on practical aspect. We hope this will be, in some ways, useful for those who are still confused about choosing shared web hosting. Once you have checked out its advantages and disadvantages but still determined that these disadvantages will not affect journey of your site, blog or web app, you can just go with your favorite, shared hosting plan. First of all, however, we’ll have a look on notable advantages of shared hosting.

Advantages of Shared Hosting Services

• Affordable Pricing, Plans

When compared to those HUGE pricing plans of dedicated web servers, VPSs and other sorts of web hosting plans, it is a good choice to go with shared web hosting, especially when you do not have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend on it. In such a comparison, we can also find that shared web hosting products cost less than quarter of typical dedicated servers. Also, shared hosting providers offer different hosting packages, which will suit different kinds of requirements. Thus, if you are a newbie professional who is a bit hesitant to spend huge amount in purchasing web hosting products, you can undoubtedly go with shared web hosting.

• Easy UI and Setup

When compared to the code-based control section of dedicated web servers, it is a matter of a few seconds to use a shared web-hosting server. Most of popular hosting providers use control panels such as cPanel to let users manage their servers. In addition, they offer some web-based scripts that would be useful in installing CMSs and other web-based platforms in your server.

Disadvantages of Shared Hosting Services

• The so-called Unlimited-ness

If you have a look on shared web hosting plan from different web hosting companies, you can understand that major ones among those offer things, such as bandwidth, disk space etc, under unlimited label. Nonetheless, you’ll be able to understand the behavior of this particular label once you start really using your server. So, suppose your server is having an extremely huge amount of traffic one day, then we can assure you that your shared web server will have some serious issues in performance and stability. So, once your blog or the website have moved from the ‘new’ label and have acquired enough popularity to attract readers, shared web hosting would not be enough for you, mainly due to its lack of capability. In this case you can upgrade to VPS, Dedicated or Shared Pro plans.

• Security — Well, it’s Somewhat There

It does not matter how big or small your blog is, but security is an important factor that determines future of the site or blog of yours. However, it will be quite disappointing when you check out security section of shared web hosting. As you might know, in a shared web server, there will be hundreds/thousands of websites, hosted by various people. So it means that there are high chances for security vulnerabilities. If you have a website that handles confidential and sensitive information, it is not a good decision to go with shared web hosting services. Indeed, this is one noticeable disadvantage of shared hosting services, especially in a world where people give foremost importance to privacy.

• Limited OR NO Customizability

In various situations, you might have to customize your web server to suit your convenience. However, when it does come to the case of shared web hosting server, you can completely forget about customization or its application. In a comparison with dedicated servers and VPSs, shared hosting is the least option as far as you are concerned about its ability to be customized for different purposes.

Altogether, shared web hosting is an optimum solution if you have a website / blog that does receive medium traffic and uses moderate server resources. Yet, once it gets into the path of growth, you will have to be afraid of issues, we mentioned above, such as limitation of customizability, security etc.

Related Readings: Mixing Hosting with Email: A Terrible Idea!, Best and Worst Web Hosting Companies, Types of Website Hosting, Best Website Hosting Providers, Web Hosting: A Guide for Online Business Owners, Best Web Hosting Companies of 2017

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