Hosting categories. There are different types of web hosting, and you should know which is right for you. Shared hosting means you and the host’s other clients are sharing the host’s resources. This means low cost, but slow load times if other sites get a lot of traffic. Co-located hosting means you provide the server for the host to use. That means your host provides the network and you maintain the server. Unmanaged dedicated hosting is the same as co-located hosting, except that you lease your server from the host and your host provides only limited technical support. Managed dedicated hosting is the same as unmanaged dedicated hosting, except that you receive full and comprehensive support from the host.

Security. You need to know if your host is selective about the types of clients it will and won’t take. Certain sites – porn sites and spammers, for example – present security risks to everyone on the network sharing the host, and you need to know if your host supports such sites.

Support staff. You are not a systems administrator, so you should not be expected to understand and execute the functions of a systems administrator when you are paying for hosting. Verify that your hosting provider of choice employees qualified systems administrators who will be providing you with technical support.

Storage space and bandwidth. A good hosting company will be able to provide guidance on your storage space and bandwidth needs and help you choose a hosting package based on those needs.

Company strength. Your hosting provider of choice should have been in business, with a solid reputation, for at least two years. Additionally, it should have an uptime of at least 95 percent and a firm technical foundation. Search the better business bureau and also research hosting provider reviews online to get the most accurate information regarding the strength of hosting companies you are interested in.

Finding a good hosting provider does not have to be a confusing or scary task. Use these guidelines to query some basic information about hosting providers before making your choice.

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You will also need to find someone to do your email hosting for you, since you may end up with far larger number of emails than you had anticipated or can handle yourself. You can chose from individual accounts, business accounts or group accounts. Some features include junk email filters, anti-virus scanning, security, email forwarding and more.

A website like Hosting Observer is ideal because they have done the work of investigating each company’s services and reliability, and they provide side-by-side price comparisons so that you can chose the one that works best for you. They rate services on reliability, control panel interface, and the quality of their customer support. You can read individual user reviews as well as find out pertinent information such as whether the company is a member of the Better Business Bureau or not.

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Here’s the story. When I created this blog, I never thought that I would exceed the 1GB bandwith limit offered by the free hosting service that comes with my domain registration. I was planning to upgrade to a free hosting after one year – just in time for the renewal of my domain. And besides, the Asus Eee Reader is not to come out until 2010 so I was just readying the blog. But it turns out that as early as now, things are getting pretty active in the ebooks and ereader market, so I decided to cover other topics.

To cut the long story short, my new blog started to pick up in terms of site traffic. And so the unexpected happen. When I was about to cover an important post the blog went down. The web host said I exceeded the bandwith limit allocated for my free hosting. And were not even half-way through the month.

So, I was forced to upgrade the free hosting to a paid one. But it took several hours for the web host to move my blog to the new hosting plan.

In the meantime, I’ve lost potential hits and visits during those few hours. Figures that would have matter a lot especially since my blog was starting to pick up some mileage.

Bottomline – If you’re creating a new blog, get the best hosting deal and avoid settling for the free or cheap ones. It could make or break your new  blog’s fate.

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ICANN members will also deliberate on whether to allow the full internet addresses, that is including the name preceeding the “.com” to be written in other scripts not based on Latin letters.

If you’re in a country where English is not the primary language, you might as well think of the coolest domain name that you can possibly think written in your own language’s scripts.

“This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, said, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature”.

Mr. Thrush is hoping the ICANN member will approve such change in domain naming. ICANN’s new president and CEO Rod Beckstorm is hoping that the first domain names in non-English scripts will go live sometime in 2010.

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The amount of server resources used by WordPress varies wildly for these people, with some coming across horrible performance walls with less traffic than myself, and others having much lower usage levels on their servers than I do. The part that bothers me so much is that there isn’t a nicely compiled guide out there to performance tune WordPress hosted blogs.

Sure, there are caching plugins, but going beyond that Matt Mullenweg has said that Automattic has helped hosting environments with their situations so that they can better support more traffic with the resources they have available, and so why isn’t there a basic server performance guide for WordPress? A best practices guide when setting up a server for displaying the PHP pages that WordPress needs to generate, or dealing with MySQL calls, or best practices for caching. Which applications should we be using to get the most performance from our WordPress blogs?

If there are so many great tips out there for making WordPress run effectively in high traffic situations, where is the organized guide for web hosts, or server owners? This could resolve so many issues that my friends are having, and help me reduce the load on my own VPS. Sure, it would take some time to compile, but the guides out there for serving up PHP pages and optimizing MySQL are currently difficult to understand, with little information on the overall benefits with relation to WordPress itself.

Come on WordPress ninjas, it is time to write a best practices guide for server administrators.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on WordPress
• Top WordPress Plugins For Every Type of Blog – The Best of the Best!
• Thesis – a WordPress Theme Design Worth Considering
• WordPress 2.6 Goes Live

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Web Hosting Rating looks like they are going to do everything I had original set out to do. The main thing that people are looking for beyond just the “who is the best?” are web hosting tutorials, tips and tricks, as well as the normal personal reviews by clients that have liked and disliked the service provided.

Despite not having many hosts within the directory yet, they have already set up a web hosting awards section, where they will hopefully continue to update which hosts are the absolute best for various specific needs as hosts change in service, price and quality.

Overall, I really enjoyed the article section the best, as it extends through many pages (thirty-two pages of web hosting artices to be exact). The biggest issue with it though is that they don’t interlink their articles very well, and seem to almost assume that you have read all of their previous posts, referencing topics they have discussed before. Without a link, I had to search for a few things, and that was a little frustrating.

In the end, directories like these will fail or succeed based on how may hosts they talk about, how trust worthy of a brand they can build up, and the secondary/extra features they employ. I think Web Hosting Ratings is on the right path by working so hard on an article section which after reading, could easily be turned into some compiled e-book guides on various levels of hosting.

I currently use a Managed VPS, and would love to know more about the industry, equipment needed, staff experience and requirements per server, and whatnot as those types of things really interest me.

I really hope the owners do a great job with this, as I believe that there is no such thing as a niche that is over saturated. If you have passion to succeed, it doesn’t matter the topic.

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Jeremy and Robert were both amazing at keeping e-mail communication open. Robert even took time out of his day to talk to me over the phone in hopes of resolving this all as quickly as possible.

Robert was both knowledgeable and funny. I could hear him trying to do everything he could to figure out how he could optimize the site on his end so that I would have a better experience.

Even better, he explained some of the basic elements of their architecture, as well as opening up with minor issues that they had been experiencing, which showed to me that he was well-informed, and that they were attempting to not only be proactive, but not fall into the PEBKAC experience that I have received from other hosting companies. You know the ones, where you call in and it is all your fault. “Why did you install WordPress? Are you using plugins? Did you edit a file? Must be your fault!” I hate those types of hosting companies, and I have to admit, I was very defensive in e-mail communication because I didn’t want them to treat me with the same type of handholding that some of their customers might need.

I don’t think I can communicate in writing how absolutely impressed I am with Mosso right now. Their immediate communication with me, their brand awareness online, and their constant assistance in trying to quickly and easily resolve this problem for me immediately turns around any negative feelings I had about them, and makes me ten times more likely to recommend them in the future.

+1 to Mosso

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I have never felt so defeated in my whole life, and even worse, the work I am doing is for a client, and not myself, making it all feel like a waste of time and effort.

Over the last few years, I have become more and more used to Windows Vista and its quirks, as well as OS X on my mac. Everything is fairly easy on those two machines, and installing software doesn’t require a strong understanding of dependencies.

Even my normal Linux experience has been a breeze with tools like Apt-get, Yum and other “quick” install tools now available, but when working on a web server that you didn’t set up yourself and co-locate somewhere, it can almost be like sailing unknown waters.

I have worked hard to get everything to work, but had to give in and contact support for assistance. I wanted them to blow away the operating system and start over after the mess I made, but they seem confident that they can undo the damage that my usage has caused.

What a day…

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I want to say again, that Host Gator has been, and continues to be really great to me, but I wanted to move all my hosting under one account for me to manage better.

Mistake in Moving the WordPress Blog

One of the biggest mistakes I made in moving this site to its new hosting was getting overly excited about setting it up via Subversion. Instead of moving the site over from Host Gator to WiredTree and then setting it up to be able to be upgraded through SVN, I downloaded the latest stable release of WordPress through SVN and then had to deal with the situation I had made.

I imported the posts, moved over my themes and plugins folder, but of course all of the settings that were in the database, were not exported from the old site, and I had to set up all of my plugins once again.

Not that big of a problem, but a bit annoying. It did allow me to audit my plugins, and only activate those that I really needed.

FTP Issues

Another issue I had, which seems to be something on my end, rather than my hosting is my inability to transfer everything I had for the site in one fell swoop. I had to uploaded only a few folders at a time or it would time out. It was very frustrating.

File Ownership and Permissions

One other side effect of using Subversion the way that I did was that I was root when I installed the blog via the tool, and that meant that all files were owned and grouped under root. This meant that when I logged in using the normal user name and password I had, I wasn’t able to overwrite files or folders at all. A quick chown and chgrp fixed this, but I have definitely learned my lesson.

DNS Issues

One of the cooler things of having a VPS with WiredTree is that I have my own domain name server address. This also created a small issue for me as I wasn’t used to setting it up. I wanted ns1.xfep.com, but Xfep.com wasn’t pointed to my new IP address yet. Thankfully, I was able to figure it out with a quick bit of support from WiredTree, and adjusted my Godaddy information as needed.

This means that when dealing with the rest of my domains, they will all point to the name servers that I have created, which, to me, is very cool.

The Next Steps

Now that this blog is set up correctly, and there doesn’t seem to be any huge issues I have to iron out, I can work on streamlining the process and move all of the other sites I currently have over to my VPS.

Hopefully, I can get all of this done by the end of this month, and start canceling all of my other hosting.

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If you notice anything strange, please let me know as I made some mistakes in how I moved the site, but I think I worked them all out.

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