And they’re really doing the right thing, because cloud hosting will allow customers to have any processing power they need, and pay only for what they use, which is much cheaper than dedicated servers or clusters. If the client’s site is loaded one day and idle the other, he will pay more for the first day and less for the other. And probably the best thing is that the website will never be inaccessible or slow, because it’s got the power of hundreds and thousands of physical machines behind it, allocating as many resources as it needs.

If you are thinking of switching to cloud hosting or are only looking for the best first host (for which cloud hosting is just as good, if not better, than even shared), here is a list of some of the best cloud hosting providers.

Amazon. This company’s cloud hosting services (the EC2 computing and S3 storage) are very popular among developers and businesses that need a lot of flexibility and reliability. They’ve been among the first to start offering cloud hosting, and they’ve had enough time to perfect the technology and introduce new, advanced features. The bad thing about Amazon’s services is that there are quite hard to setup for anyone that is not an IT specialist (Amazon themselves say that it’s for professionals and businesses), so if you are just starting out and want to try cloud hosting, you’d be better off trying another provider.

Slicehost. This is one of the first companies that started up offering exclusively cloud hosting services, and a lot of webmasters and developers swear they’re the best. They certainly do have the time advantage, but their prices are quite a bit higher than other offers. At least they offer excellent support and uptime guarantee with their packages. Rackspace has recently bought the company, which will still continue to work under it’s own name, but thanks to the data centers owned by Rackspace, we hope they’ll bring the prices down and increase the amount of resources.

Cari.net. This is one of the best providers of dedicated servers in the hosting industry, and while they’ve started offering cloud hosting servies only recently, it quickly became a success and their number one seller. That’s probably because businesses are indeed better off on a cloud server than a cluster of dedicated servers, plus Cari.net has a lot of nice features and innovations that make its offers unique and customizable for each client.

1and1. This company has a long history and has been offering great dedicated servers in their own data centers around the world since the beginning of commercial Internet. They’ve had their fair share of problems, mainly with their shared hosting packages, but as of late, they’ve dealt with them and their 4 million+ clients are quite happy. They’ve recently built another data center in the US, and started offering the Dynamic Cloud Server at the lowest prices possible, which continues their tradition of offering high-performance, low-price servers. The only drawback would be their customer support, which is notably slow, but they do at least keep the hardware in working order, so you’ll only have to deal with software problems yourself.

Rackspace. This provider is also well known in the hosting industry, and their dedicated, VPS and shared hosting packages have received a lot of good user reviews and awards. They’ve recently got into cloud hosting and started offering their own services. What sets them apart from other companies is the fact that they acquire a lot of great cloud hosting startups with their unique technologies and implement them in all of their offers, which makes them great for people who need a lot of extra features. Rackspace also offer their own separate file storage, remote backup and computing services.

GoGrid. This company is relatively unknown among users of traditional hosting, but that’s because they specialize in clusters, dedicated and cloud servers, plus offer a unique technology that allows the clients to interconnect them and use all 3 technologies at once, which can be very useful in a number of situations.

Softlayer. Another company that also specializes in the so-called “hybrid hosting”, which like GoGrid, means their clients can use any of the available hosting technologies (dedicated, cloud and clusters) interconnected together. Their offers are also cheap (a bit lower than the other companies), and their API is very advanced and tested by time, plus they’ve got very good customer support – just what a professional webmaster, developer or startup needs.

If you need a dedicated server or VPS for any application or just want to switch from your current hosting solution, there’s no reason not to choose cloud hosting. It has better performance, reliability and stability and is much cheaper in the long run – a seemingly excellent choice.

Any of the existing issues will no doubt be fixed in the following years, but users that wish to switch from the usual cluster, dedicated, VPS or shared hosting do have to take them into consideration now.

Less security. This is the single most important issue. In a cloud hosting setup, all of the servers are connected together and run one central OS, which controls everything, so all of the subsequent virtual servers are easily susceptible to any attacks and hacker intrusions. This has been a serious problem with VPS servers (and still is!), where one breached user account can relatively easily give the attacking hackers access to everything else on the actual physical server, including the ability to control it. As you may have thought, this is extremely undesirable on any machines running VPS servers and having dozens of clients on each one. Now imagine the same problem at a level about 1000 times higher. It would be extremely bad for any business and especially its privacy and security.

Stability problems. Due to cloud hosting being a relatively new technology, stability problems are unavoidable no matter how well have the first versions of the software fared on various synthetic tests, as real life usage always introduces and reveals new potential issues. And, unfortunately for some people, this means that some data will inevitably be lost or corrupted. Even with all of the available backup and restoration systems, cloud servers are still not as safe as the existing tested by time solutions like clusters and dedicated servers.

Less flexibility. This is, of course, a temporary problem (as are all of the other issues on this list), but the existing iterations of cloud hosting technologies are still new and being tested, so they do not actually offer the flexibility they say they do. With time, that will definitely change, until then users will have to deal with the bad upgradeability and migration of their cloud servers, as an example.

Higher costs. In the future, cloud hosting will be much cheaper than the current technologies, but the fact that it is still new and has to be worked on and developed further means that it costs more for the time being. Data centers have to develop or acquire the software that the cloud will run on, re-arrange the physical machines and fix any appearing problems (that will always be there). This will make all of the initial cloud hosting offers a bit more expensive. Initial adopters have to take more risks, pay higher prices and deal with more problems than the users that will come later.

I’ll repeat myself and say that these issues are temporary and will no doubt be fixed in the following years and new generations of equipment and software, but if your business seriously depends on the reliability of the hosting and your current processing power and expenses are at relatively normal levels, you could benefit more from cloud hosting by waiting a few years before making the switch.

The base of all the software of any web server is the operating system. It is the single most important thing that you’ll install on a machine, and it is quite difficult to replace without down time, which is bad for any web site or application you host on it. Sometimes, especially if you have a lot of customizations, it is literally impossible to replace the OS.

That’s why you should take extra care when choosing your server’s operating system, or alternatively optimize all of your software to work independently, which may be very hard to do. Some operating systems work better for some purposes like stability, reliability, upgradeability and others work better for totally different purposes like performance, speed, support for the newest features, etc.

To get you started, here are some of the best operating systems for web servers, which can be used for various applications and are the most popular among users and webmasters.

Oracle Solaris OS. This is one of the top OS choices for large scale applications that require the best stability, performance and reliability possible. It has a long history of development and evolution, and it started from a UNIX OS created by Sun Microsystems back in the 80’s. It was only recently acquired by Oracle, which hasn’t yet removed the free version of the OS, so everyone can enjoy one of the best enterprise-level operating system on any of their servers.

The latest version includes a lot of useful features like Predictive Self Healing, which automatically repairs any problems that may occur, and DTrace, which helps the administrators observe and optimize how the operating system works. The code optimization for various platforms practically guarantees a high performance; along with the ZFS file system, one of the best in its class, hardware encryption acceleration and virtualization support, and a lot of other great features.

One of the bad things about Solaris is the lack of support for the free version and the very small base of open developers and community members, which leads to a lack of drivers and 3rd party software for the OS, but if you are knowledgeable enough or have a great IT team, you can relatively easily overcome these obstacles.

FreeBSD. A lot of webmasters and server admins swear that this OS is the best ever for any web server applications, and they are probably right. It has a UNIX core and a long history of being used for enterprise applications, and it was specifically created for big, large scale applications, unlike Linux, which was started as basically an amateur project. FreeBSD is an excellent choice for web sites and applications that require it to handle extreme traffic level.

Just to give you an example, Yahoo! uses the FreeBSD OS for all of their servers, and Microsoft uses it for their Hotmail servers, preferring it over their own solutions, simply because it can handle the tens of millions of users better. FreeBSD has the same troubles as Solaris – not enough developers and a small community of open users, but that can be easily solved with knowledge and/or a paid team that would work on porting/creating the software and drivers necessary for this great operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux. One of the most popular operating systems for web servers, created based on Linux and maintained by the Red Hat Corporation. It is often THE choice for a lot of big scale applications, when stability and reliability are vital. The OS is extremely well maintained by developers and any bugs are fixed in no time. The only bad thing is that they choose extreme stability over a bit of performance gain, so it’s not as fast as other operating systems.

Being based on Linux, its source is of course open and free for anyone, and that’s the main reason there is a whole open source and completely free community that created and maintains CentOS – a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, supported for free by the community’s developers and users.

SUSE Linux Enterprise. This is yet another great Linux-based operating system built for web server applications and focusing on stability and reliability first and foremost. You can think of it as Novell’s response to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but having a different package system. Performance isn’t a top priority for this OS, either. But it is a good choice when you want your OS to be easy to administer, have a large choice of software packages and keep your data safe. There is a completely free version named OpenSUSE that is officially released and maintained by Novell and supported by a great community on their own forum, so if you don’t have the money, you can get this excellent OS for free.

Windows Server 2008 R2. This is Microsoft’s own OS for web servers and the business and enterprise industry. While they have the same name, the R2 version is vastly superior to R1, because it’s based on Windows 7, not Vista (which as you may know, is a failure of an OS and a great resources hog). You should be careful when buying it, and make sure it says Windows Server 2008 R2.

Why would you want a paid and mainly inferior OS, with a closed source to boot? Well, if you need great ASP.NET support or you want to run Microsoft’s IIS web server software that has an advanced and very good API plus a lot of unique features like the IIS Media Services, you basically have no other choice, as they only run on Windows. The performance is actually not that bad, R2 is quite fast, especially when compared to R1, and if you don’t count the closed source, lack of great free software and lack of a lot of customization options that are normal for an open-source OS, it is actually a great operating system for a web server.

BONUS – Mac OS X Server. Since its first release, Mac OS X Server was quick to become a popular choice for web servers, mainly because it was already a great, stable and tested desktop OS and it’s very easy to administrate. On top of that, it can work with custom built packages (unlike Windows) and is based on BSD, which guarantees its reliability. Apple has definitely created a good OS and made a good first step into the servers market with it.

It is vital that you consider and choose the operating system you will use for your server, because if you go big and you run into any limitations or incompatibilities related to the OS, you will have a very hard time fixing things.

But what do you do if you don’t want your web site or application hosted in the US? You could have plenty of reasons for this: no presence or customers in the country (although this is a bit far fetched, it’s possible), no copyright licenses for your content (but you have a license in the EU, for example), privacy concerns (right now, the USA, UK are having some big debates about whether data centers can just take any info on clients’ servers and give it to the governing authorities).

Well, you still have the choice of hosting your stuff in any other countries that have data centers and work worldwide (more and more do these days) and with companies that have normal, acceptable prices (not pay $70 per Gigabyte like you see on Google, which are simply people that rent servers in foreign countries and resell them to you at these crazy rates). It would be better if you knew the language and laws of the country where you choose to get the hosting, but it’s not necessary, as a lot of them have an English language option and accept foreign credit cards and other payment methods.

Of course, all of these companies have their own data centers in those countries and are not just foreign representatives of American or British hosting companies.

1und1 (Germany). This company does have a couple of data centers in the US and UK, but their origins are in Germany, the country where they incorporated back in the 90’s. An amazing offer from 1und1 (that is possible only in Germany and France because of their high-speed country wide fiber network) is the 100Mpbs, unlimited bandwidth, which is really unlimited and you can use tens of terabytes per month without being charged a dime. This could probably change as the network gets more saturated, but for now, 1and1 Germany is one of the best and cheapest choices for data-intensive sites. Germany also has favorable laws on copyright, which makes it a better choice a better choice for running sites that host content like video sharing, file hosting, torrent trackers, etc. They are also very cheap for what they offer and they of course have a cloud hosting offer if you’re interested.

OVH (France). This provider has a data center in France (where they’re apparently pretty well known) and works with clients from all over the world. They do have an English site, but their support is French, so you might have to know the language if you need their help (though they do advertise English support). Thanks to the French national fiber network and relative lack of big data centers, they can afford to offer a super speedy 200Mbps, unlimited bandwidth connection for their higher-priced servers, which is just great for any data-intensive sites, although the country’s new privacy and copyright laws, which allow the ISP’s and hosting providers to deliver any data from your server to the authorities might be bad for some people.

Hosting.ua (Ukraine). This provider operates from and has a data center in Odessa, one of the biggest cities in Ukraine. They have nice hardware at good prices, an English site, Terms of Service and Control Panel language, and a few varying connection speed options: 1Gbps with a 2000GB/month limit, 10Mbps unlimited bandwidth and 100Mbps with automatic switch to 10Mbps after 3000GB per month are used, which is great for a variety of uses. You might doubt the security and reliability of the data hosted in any Eastern European country, but that’s not true anymore. Their data center (along with many others in Eastern Europe and Russia) are built to modern standards and are the same as any other good data center in the world. And because they have a new high-speed fiber network at their disposal and don’t know what to do with it (the population is quite scarce for such a big country and most of them don’t use the Internet, even thought they have a great 20/1 Mbps ADSL all over the country), they can offer those in
credibly high speeds that only big corporations like Google have access to in other countries (1Gbps is VERY speedy).

eName (Romania). This company has a brand new data center in the heart of Romania, at the fringe of civilized land, as they say . They have VPS and dedicated server packages to offer for anyone who needs them. They also have an English version of their site, which is simply great. The only bad thing about them is that the bandwidth is quite limited compared to other countries, but that might change when the country rolls out their own national fiber network.

Serverboost (Netherlands). This is a great offshore hosting company that has its servers in the Netherlands and offers some of the lowest prices for international hosting. They have VPS and dedicated server packages and work with anyone that has a Paypal account (which is almost everyone). They have a pretty standard site in English, not much different than a lot of other hosting companies anywhere in the world. I think they’re worth checking out.

There are a lot of other hosting companies in countries other than the US and UK that work with international clients and offer great hosting packages, so if you can’t or don’t want to host your stuff in those countries, you can easily go with a foreign one. The above companies are some of the best and most well-known, so they can be trusted.

Having a dedicated machine also means that your site will never be down because of resources overuse, it can only slow down if it’s heavily overloaded.

Dedicated servers used to be expensive, but nowadays they’re pretty cheap and affordable to almost everyone. They also come with guaranteed RAM, disk space and bandwidth; no one else can use them and you can’t run into the situation when you’re supposed to have 300GB, but filled only 100GB and your disk is full (which happens because of the data centers and hosting companies overselling their servers).

1and1. Having some of the best data centers in the world (two in the USA, one in the UK and two in Germany) and over 4 million clients, 1and1 have proven themselves to be a very good dedicated servers provider. They offer only top of the line Dell servers, with the most reliable hardware inside them. The prices are very cheap, especially for what comes with the server: hardware firewall, hardware RAID drives (software for the cheapest servers, but RAID nonetheless), dedicated separate FTP backup storage, custom automatic OS reinstallation panel, serial console access (access the server even when the network is down), a lot of monthly bandwidth on a 100Mbps connection and much more. The only drawback is the customer support for emergency hardware faults; they’re just too slow (it takes a few hours to a few days to replace something). But they do monitor and check the servers daily, so you shouldn’t have any problems.

Cari.net. This is one of the most popular dedicated servers and collocation hosting company among professional developers and business owners. They have a wide variety of offers, from basic servers for beginners to whole clusters and cloud virtual servers for big businesses and websites. Their prices are a bit higher than other companies, but that’s because they promise excellent and fast support for any software or hardware issues.

Rackspace. This is a well-known company in the hosting industry, with a lot of positive and negative reviews (although the negative ones are about their cheaper web hosting offers). They offer managed dedicated servers, where they configure everything on it and let you customize it, too. Like Cari.net, they have their own version of excellent support, called Fanatical Support, which promises fast response and quick fixes for any of your problems.

iWeb. A lot of people say that this is one of the best hosting companies ever, providing the best service and support for all of their packages, whether it’s shared hosting, VPS or dedicated servers. Their dedicated servers are also quite cheap (on the same level as 1and1), though the monthly bandwidth they offer is a bit too low. They also promise a 1 hour setup and activation of a new server, which is useful when you need one fast, and have a 100% uptime SLA, which is quite unique for hosting companies.

SingleHop. A relatively new company in the hosting industry, SingleHop already has 2 data centers at their disposal. They offer a large variety of dedicated servers, with unmanaged, semi-managed and managed options and a lot of helpful features like remote reboot and KVM over IP. Their main goal is to provide the best service ever. To do this, they hire only the best technicians, do not outsource anything, including customer support, and provide the best technical support possible, whether it’s for hardware of software issues. They’ve won many awards over the last 3 years and have proven themselves very reliable, often being featured on popular websites and magazines.

There are a lot of dedicated server providers available online. The above have proven themselves to be reliable and offer the best bang for the buck. If you go with any of them, chances are very high you won’t be disappointed.

But there are alternatives for it, if you need even more performance or want a web server for a more specific application. Here are some of the best:

Lighttpd. This is the most popular alternative to Apache, used by sites like Youtube, SourceForge and Wikipedia, which handle a lot of traffic. Their choice wasn’t random: Lighttpd was designed to be lightweight and handle a lot of concurrent connections. It supports most technologies that Apache does (HTTP compression, fastCGI, SSL, etc.) while being able to handle 2-4 times more parallel connections when fully optimized.

Nginx. This server is gaining popularity in the English speaking online community and it’s always been a serious competitor to Apache in RuNet (the Russian nickname for all the Internet pages written in their language). It’s used by one of the biggest search engines in the Runet, Rambler, and it performs at a very high level. It’s perfect for serving static pages, but it’s hard to get it to work with PHP/MySQL due to it not supporting fastCGI.

Cherokee. This is a very user-friendly, fast and flexible web server that also comes with it’s on web administration interface (useful if you hate tinkering with all those configuration files) and supports most of the widespread technologies like FastCGI, PHP, SSI, load balancing, virtual hosts, video streaming and others. It’s a great lightweight alternative for Apache because it’s like a more optimized version of it (even the log files are compatible with Apache).

Boa. Thousands of server admins say that Boa is the perfect choice if you want to get the most performance out of an old machine. It’s a single threaded (which, by the way, means it doesn’t create child processes for itself, just one main process handles all requests), very light web server that is ideal for people that don’t want to spend a lot of money on renting expensive servers. It’s also perfect for any VPS server.

Yet Another Web Server (or YAWS). This is a great multi-threaded web server written in Erlang, a language designed for performance and scalability for enterprise level applications. The documentation is very bad and you’ll have to customize the code yourself for the best results, but once it’s set up, few alternatives can come anywhere close to its performance: while Apache handled about 4000 concurrent connections, then died, YAWS went on to successfully work with more than 80,000 parallel connections, which is 20 times more than Apache! If you need a really powerful web server, have enough good hardware and can set up and customize it, YAWS has a high chance of being your final choice.

There are a lot of other good alternatives to Apache, but you should consider everything carefully when deciding whether you want to make the switch. Although some of these web servers are better suited for specific applications like high loads or better stability or performance, Apache is still the most popular web server available, which also means it has the most developers working on it and the most detailed documentation.

If you’re planning to switch completely to another web server, you’ll have to learn how to use it effectively, and lack of documentation can be a serious problem in this case. A good solution would be to just use Apache together with another web server for different purposes. Yes this is possible, and you can easily configure, for example, Lighttpd to handle all static file requests and Apache to serve the dynamic requests. Setting everything up is a bit harder, but once you learn how, it’ll be as easy as re-installing Linux .

The first thing you need to do is think: “If I were to get a web host, where would I look?”. There are tons of hosting directories out there that are already dominating the search engines, and guess what! You can get listed on most of them for free. Think about how difficult it would be to build up enough Google seniority to dominate the already top web hosts. With directories, you can get your site viewed by most Google traffic instantly.

There is also a place where people come to find web hosts, and that is forums. Many business forums have places where you can list your hosting plans. There are many people who come to forums to buy hosting. Usually they are after either cheaper rates or a loose hosting Terms of Service, like an adult-related site would need. These places are also usually free to list on and you’re likely to get a lot of reviews. It is a great way to build your service’s reputation.

Web 2.0 sites aren’t a bad place to list your business on either. MicroBlogs (like Twitter) can generate a lot of views if your account is popular. Similar MicroBlogs could even give you backlinks, such as Indenti.ca. There are a lot of people asking questions about Web Hosting on Yahoo Answers as well. Answering some difficult hosting questions can make you look reputable, and answering more common questions will ensure more views. All you have to do is place your link in the “sources” box.

eHow is also a good way to advertise a web host, and make money at the same time. Spend time answering some of the more difficult questions. Look at Yahoo Answers and just watch the types of questions they ask. eHow is good about ranking above any other article directory, and there are a lot of people that go there to get information. Just remember that commenting on other’s eHow articles will build up backlinks to your profile, and in turn your articles. So, make sure you spend the time to tell other eHow members how their doing.

It really isn’t that hard to start a Web Hosting business, you just need to know how to reach your customers. Following these steps and coming up with some of your own will guarantee you enough buyers to keep you occupied. Becoming a web hosting reseller is one of the most easy and profitable things you can do.

Most people who are searching for web hosting type in something like “Cheap Web Hosting” into Google search. This… is wrong. Anyone can offer a cheap web host, it doesn’t mean it is going to be a good one. Yes, you haven’t started your business yet and have no idea how well it is going to do, but a more expensive web host won’t run you more than 10 dollars a month. That is probably a fraction of what you pay for your internet service.

Script support is overlooked by a lot of webmasters. You’ll see many of them complaining in their web host’s forums about the inability to use certain features. Most of the time it is proven that they didn’t purchase a plan with such support, assuming that all web hosting plans offered the same features. Spending days and days creating a perfect good looking website only to find out you can’t use it can be very discouraging. A lot of webmasters end up giving up on their projects all together.

Your website will use up certain types of resources on the server, such as memory and bandwidth. Bandwidth is the measurement of data transfer, usually per month. The web server can only transfer so much data at a time. Most will cut off a client for the month once they’ve used their fair share of bandwidth. They’re hard drives are also limited, and in turn, they have to limit the amount their clients get.

Some people don’t realize that certain web servers prevent the storage of different file formats. Common files that are associated with piracy such as mp3 files or video’s won’t be accepted by some web hosts. Some even prevent ZIP files. Take a good long look at your terms of service before purchasing any web hosting plan. Make sure you can upload what you need to.

So I hope you’ve learned that the cheapest web hosting plan is often times not the best for you. If your website cannot function properly, then in all honesty what is the point of building it. Websites that are used for business purposes have to function perfectly in order to make the business look good. If your business’ web site is offline all the time or has “Free Web Host” written all over it, what do you think your customers will think of you?

One of the first things you may be looking at is web space. It can be difficult to find a service that will support a large enough chunk of space to host multiple websites on. Sometimes your clients will require a lot of hosting space, and some will only be setting up things like blogs and personal web sites which barely take up anything. You should be sure that you can calculate how many customers you’ll need to make your reseller’s plan profitable, and in turn be able to give them each a decent chunk of space. The same amount of care has to be taken while looking at bandwidth as well.

Scripting is also very important. Very few business owners don’t want a site where they can’t use eCommerce software, build mailing lists, use databases, and other such advanced things. It is very important that your hosting plan offers such things. You can’t predict what you customers will want before you have them, so the best thing you can do is overshoot your expectations. Having the ability to offer everything will make your web hosting not just appeal to some webmasters, but to all of them.

One of the most difficult things about reselling web hosting is the fact that you have to manage all of your own finances. You must be able to develop an automated payment system and make sure your customers are paying their bills on time. Some services you can join, such as Host Gator, include an application which will do all of this work for you. Most, however, expect you to do it yourself. Often the software to keep track of web host financing can cost hundreds of dollars, so be sure that you have that expense worked into your budget.

Reselling web hosting plans can be one of the most easiest and profitable business’ you can get into, but you can’t forget that it is still a business. No matter how simple or advanced the service, you still have to make sure it looks professional. Having a service that is down all the time, treats its customers poorly, and doesn’t offer enough features for the customer’s use will guarantee that your business fails. Web hosting is a funny thing though. They are one of the most discussed things in terms of online business, and new services can spread quickly from positive customer reviews.

Here are the most important things you need to do before deciding on the best cheap webhosting to use.

1. Search for cheap fast webhosting using any major search engine. You will get a lot of results that you want to start looking through. Be sure that you look at more than one webhosting. This will help you see what they offer, what their price is and many other important things.

2. Once you have found about a dozen hosting sites that you are interested in, go through each site thoroughly. Read their website, contact them with any questions and be sure that you learn all you can about them from their site.

3. The next thing that you need to do is to research using forums and review sites. This will give you the opinion of others that have used the webhosting. If there is a lot of negative information about them, then this is a good indication to move on to another hosting.

These are the most important things that you must do if you want to be sure to find good fast cheap webhosting. If you don’t do these things, then you are taking a chance on hosting. This means that you shouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be the wrong hosting for your business needs. Always take time for research before making a final decision.