Reliable Web Hosting Services

In order to allow visitors to access your website over the internet, you need to rent a website hosting space on a web server.

A web hosting provider often bundles web server space rental with other services e.g. email hosting, into a so called "web hosting package".

Web hosting packages vary in price, depending what is included in the bundle. There are providers which offer free web hosting but they are generally not recommended.

Those providers often are unreliable, use inferior infrastructure and frequently force you to display ads on your website to cover the cost of maintaining their web servers. They maybe ok, if you want to host your personal website, but for business purposes, you need reliable web hosting services.

Web hosting options

There are three types of hosting accounts: shared hosting (where many companies share disk space and bandwidth on the same server), dedicated hosting (where you have the server and the bandwidth all to yourself) and Virtual Private Servers (VPS) - that offer you performance similar to dedicated hosting at a much more affordable price. Each VPS runs its own operating system, has its own bandwidth and disk space, and can be individually rebooted.

Dedicated hosting is obviously better, but it is ten to twenty times more expensive. Therefore most small businesses opt-in for shared hosting or if security and performance is of paramount importance - VPS hosting.

Independent vs Managed Web Hosting account

We can offer you two types of web hosting accounts:

• an independent hosting account - you get your own hosting management panel, your own IP address, your own user name and password. This option is great if you intend to upload your own web files, maintain your own website, play with DNS records and look after your own email mailboxes. You have a choice of shared hosting, VPS hosting or a dedicated server.
  
  As hosting resellers, we can provide you with independent hosting account with the hosting provider of your choice, in 3 different countries, at a price frequently better than it is advertised on the hosting providers website.
• a managed account -  is a hassle-free shared hosting account, where we actively play the role of your webmaster. This means that you don't worry about any aspects of your hosting (see above), it is all managed for you.
  
  If you experience any problems with your website performance or your email, you come to us and we take care of it. If you run out of space or bandwidth, we upgrade you to a bigger package. We can also add webmaster services to an independent shared hosting account, giving you the best of both worlds.

How to choose a hosting provider and a hosting package?

Before you sign up for a hosting package, you need to analyze your hosting needs, such as the amount of web space, FTP access, file types you need to host, how critical it is for you that the website can be accessed 24/7, what scripting languages will you need and how many visitors do you expect to visit your site per month. You also need to analyze your needs in terms of number and type of databases, email facilities and technical support.

Web Space

Most sites use less than 5 MB of space on the server. Your needs will vary according to number of pages on your website and the page content. Media-rich websites which include a lot of graphics/pictures, video or sound may require more space.

With most hosting packages your web space is shared between your website and your email accounts, so if you have a number of email accounts and don't download your emails, you may quickly run out of your allocated space.

Reliability and Speed

For business hosting you need to look for the hosting provider which guarantees 99.99% server uptime and fast access. If the access to your site is slow, or even worse, unreliable, potential visitors to your site will go elsewhere.

Bandwidth allocation

Most web hosting packages come with a specific bandwidth allocation. If this allocation is low and you have a lot of traffic, your web host may disable your site or bill you extra for exceeding your bandwidth. A bandwidth of 100MB per month is probably sufficient for a small, static site, while a 3 GB bandwidth maybe not sufficient for a very busy small business website, that has videos on it and a blog.

Pre-installed scripts

Pre-installed scripts are programs that are already installed on the web server and are included in your hosting package. Depending on the host, these can be CMS programs, shopping carts, programming languages, web design software, Wordpress installation scripts and many more.

With managed hosting services you don't have to worry about any of these, as we assess your needs and take care of your hosting for you. To provide you with the best possible service, we work with six hosting providers in three different countries (the USA, UK and Ireland), so there are many options to choose from.

Web Hosting - Server Location and SEO

Depending on your particular requirements, we can provide you with web hosting on professional, business servers located either in the US, UK or Ireland. We only use the most reliable hosting providers, that invest in the very best technology, infrastructure and people.

Why do we offer hosting in 3 different countries?

If you want your site to rank well in country-specific Google results, you should fulfill one of the following conditions:

• your site should be physically hosted in the targeted country (the server IP must be located in that country)
• your domain should use the extension of the targeted country

Matt Cutts, the official Google spokesman, has recently confirmed that the geographic location of a web server affects SEO. Watch this short, 1.5 min video below:

So, it seems that if you want to target your local audience e.g. appear in the ‘pages from Ireland’ search results, your website should ideally be either hosted on a server located in Ireland, your domain should have a .ie extension or your company should be registered in Ireland.
As Ireland has very strict rules related to registering .ie domain names, if you want to get a slice of traffic in Ireland, your best option is to host your website on an Irish server. Similar rules apply to other markets, i.e. the US and the UK.

We offer a choice of web hosting providers with servers in the USA, the UK and Ireland

We have evaluated several web hosting companies in those countries and selected the best value for money web hosting providers.

To improve the SEO and response time of the websites hosted by us, our non-negotiable evaluation criteria was the location of the data center (and the web hosting servers).

We were surprised to find out that many "US" or "UK" hosting companies, have their servers located elsewhere. You might be interested in reading our findings:

• Best hosting companies with servers in the USA

• Best hosting companies with servers in the UK

• Best hosting companies with servers in Ireland

Web hosting - how to order?

To order a self-managed web hosting package with one of our recommended hosting providers, just click on the appropriate banner. You will be taken to their site, where you can simply select one of their packages (to get a discount, remember to enter our discount coupon code). Alternatively, if you would like us to manage your hosting account (provide Webmaster services), just Contact us.

We bundle managed hosting with all our web packages (unless you request otherwise). Your hosting is automatically adjusted to your specific needs and we make sure that you never run out of bandwidth or disk space. For a small monthly fee, we also take care of your email setups, software configuration and all technical aspects of hosting your website.

Streaming video hosting

Apart from web hosting, we also offer inexpensive streaming video hosting using Amazon S3 cloud services. The monthly cost of this service is negligible (a few cents a month). However configuring this service can be a bit tricky. If you need some help here, contact us for details.

We also encourage you to read our blog post "Video Hosting - Amazon S3 alternative to YouTube". You will find there some helpful instructions on how to upload, host and play your videos using Amazon S3. If you would like us to manage your video hosting, contact us.