Shared Hosting

If you've ever had to go to your colocation facility to work on your server, you know how long it can take and how tedious it can be. It's not unusual to work on your server for a few hours at a time. Many colocation facilities recognize this reality and offer some additional perks to make your time at the facility more productive and more pleasant.

Coffee. Coffee breaks are much needed when you're working on your server. Not only for the caffeine fix you may require to keep your eyes open, but it's a much needed break. Many facilities offer complimentary coffee for their customers. You can sit in the facility's lounge and enjoy a cup of freshly brewed coffee while chatting with other customers who are also working on their servers at the same time.

Tea, Water and Refreshments. Don't like coffee? It's okay. Most facilities that offer coffee will also offer complimentary tea, water and refreshments. You can enjoy a small snack while you're sipping your tea and hydrating with fresh, purified water.

Wi-Fi. Business doesn't stop just because you're working on your server. Many colocation facilities provide their customers with complimentary Wi-Fi access. Bring in your laptop and you'll still be able to stay in touch with your employees, boss and customers while you're working on your server. You'll also be able to check your email, download programs or just take a break and watch a funny video on YouTube.

Video Games. Yes, it's true; some colocation providers even have video games for their customers to play while they're at the facility. These providers realize how important it is to de-stress while you're working. Video games are the perfect way to re-focus your mind, take a much needed break and socialize with the other customers. Not only that, but it's a nice bonus to entice you to chose them as your colocation provider.

Colocation doesn't have to be only about racks and servers. In addition to the core services, many colocation facilities are offering additional bonuses and perks as an incentive for you get your colocation services from them. So, if you know you're the type to spend lots of time working on your server, you may want to consider collocating with someone who can offer you some extra comforts and perks.

For more information on colocation services, visit Vancouver Colocation, one of the leading colocation providers for small to medium sized businesses in Western Canada.

Most of my web design is based around simple HTML pages with a limited amount of ASP and often a lot of media, including my photo galleries and my video portfolio of animations. As a result my requirements for a host aren't that severe and I consider myself a basic user so because of that I really don't like paying over odds for hosting. Thinking back, I've probably paid a lot more in the past than I've needed to for features I just didn't need! Hence, whenever I look out for a new host I tend to be incredibly scrutinizing in terms of exactly what features I'm receiving and love stripped down packages which offer great bandwidth.

Whilst this seems like quite an easy thing to do, it is in fact really quite hard to do! Most hosts love to create a one size fits all solution rather than allowing a basic solution to be built upon as and when a user needs it to be. In the market today there are perhaps a couple of companies that do offer this sort of add-on based hosting plan and the one I decided to go with is easy CGI.

Their basic feature set is quite limited with no support for sub domains or a shopping cart. However, to balance that out there is support for ASP, Perl and PHP as you'd expect. But the real bonus of Easy GCI is their bandwidth and storage amounts. The basic packages comes with 1000Gb of bandwidth coupled with a ton of storage! For me this is perfect as it means storage will never be a concern and I'm not paying a lot of money for things like FrontPage support although I do realize for some the lack of these facilities would be an issue. As a result it's good that Easy CGI offer each of these features in other plans and via add-ons.

Fortunately, the stripped down approach though doesn't apply to their unique control panel and customer service both of which are fantastic. The knowledge base and help section offer a lot of information and can help users out with a lot of their problems. Join this with 24/7 phone and email support you have a really strong package. Unfortunately there isn't a dedicated messaging support service, if there were then I'd be a lot happier but so far I've had email responses very quickly (typically 5-10 minutes) and the service has been good.

In conclusion, a good company offering something a little bit different at a decent price!

There are hundreds of Web Hosts out there. Find out everything you need to know about how to choose the RIGHT web host for your needs, and see the reviews of this weeks top picks at Five Star Web Host Reviews and at Top Ten Reviews for Webhosting

Congratulations! You joined an affiliate program, wrote your sales copy, bought a domain name, and created your website. Now it's time to host your website, but your not sure what to get or how much to spend.

Web hosting comes in many sizes and flavors. You can get a ton of storage space and all the bells and whistles, but it will cost you. The more stuff you get the more you're going to pay.

So what exactly do you need for web hosting? In my personal experience I found that I could usually spend around $20.00 US dollars a year and that would get me everything I needed. Plenty of space, bandwidth, a control panel, and a few extras. Please keep in mind that this is for a simple website that may promote or sell a digital product such as an ebook or articles sprinkled with AdSense ads. I'm not talking a large ecommerce site with shopping cart and all that.

First let's talk about space. Web hosting space comes in all sizes from a couple hundred mega bytes (MB) to several giga bytes (GB). If you're not sure how much a mega byte of storage is an example would be to think of a normal 3.5 inch floppy disk. A typical 3.5 inch floppy disk is about 1.44 mega bytes (MB). So 200 MB of hosting storage would be the equivalency of about 138 floppy disks give or take a little. Most ebooks would usually fit on one disk maybe two if it's a large ebook. So you have to have an idea of how much data you're actually going to store to determine how much hosting space to purchase.

If you have a sales page or two chances are you won't need much at all. If you have a bunch of digital products such as ebooks you may need quite a bit more. A good way to determine the amount you need is to look at the size of the folder(s) on your computer where you have created all your content. Add that amount to the size of your digital products and that should give you a good ballpark figure to work with. You should always go for more space than what you need to allow for future expansion.
Just don't go too overboard.

Next thing you want to know is what kind of bandwidth you're going to need. What is bandwidth? Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred over the network in a fixed amount of time. One popular analogy is to think of bandwidth and data as a pipe with water flowing through it. In other words, as the bandwidth increases, so does the amount of data that can flow through in a given amount of time, just like as the size of the pipe increases, so does the amount of water that can flow through during a period of time.

If you're going to be sending a lot of data across the internet such as videos or MP3 audio then you'll probably need a lot of bandwidth. If you're planning on selling or promoting an ebook, unless you sell a lot, chances are you won't need as much bandwidth.

Most hosting offers some sort of control panel that you log into. The control panel will let you create email accounts, check web status, upload files, and more. If you search the internet you can find a control panel demo to get a feel for what it actually looks like and how it works.

Many hosting companies offer Fantastico. Fantastico gives you the ability to automatically install popular Open Source Applications. Applications such as online retail sales, online auctions, wikis, discussion boards, Weblogs, and many other functions. Keep in mind though with the less expensive (cheap) monthly hosting you may be limited to setting up only one application.

Fantastico is very good for automatically setting up these applications, but because they are basically free and Open Source there usually isn't any support from the hosting company in case you need technical help. You'll need to go to the source of the application perhaps a forum to seek help if you have any problems.

One of my favorite sites to look for hosting is www.FindMyHosting.com You input the options you want such as monthly price, bandwidth and so forth and you will be given a variety host and hosting packages to choose from. From there you can study what each company has to offer.

Again, there are plenty of hosting companies with all sorts of options to choose from. Put some real thought into the structure of your affiliate site and what it will take to host it. Take it one step at a time and do your research. You'll save yourself time, money and
headaches in the long run!

AssociateTactics.com - Get the tips, tricks and resources used by some of the most successful Affiliate Marketers on-line.

About The Author
Deron Dohanich is a systems engineer by day and an author-publisher by night, specializing in making money with eBay and Affiliate Marketing.