Web Hosting India

India is one of the largest populated country in the world and is in development stages. Life has been competitive as unlike previously when ways of life were simple and technology had a last say in generating business, now it is vice versa as technology is one of the most important factor for growth and expansion. Effective Communication is the essence of success and is the most important tool for business expansion. Internet has made communication easy, cost effective thus businessmen are always in search of new area's and opportunities. Business have websites offering information about the services/products they offer, but due to ignorance and being non technical many webmasters do not realize what yardsticks one should take into account while looking for a web hosting provider in India. Question : First and foremost one should remember to ask a web hosting India provider as to how many websites they host per server. Answer : Many companies offer cheap packages by hosting more websites on a server which optimally should be running per server. Although there is no fixed criteria or parameter as to how many websites should be hosted per server as a simple gaming website less than 20 MB even can use whole of server resources but such is not the scenario with normal business websites as they consume very less space and resources. Shared Hosting Servers are more like Bus or Taxi, in order to have a better ride/experience one should check as to how many websites are hosted on a particular server. To the best of our understanding and experience one should not host more than 200 websites on a PIV Server and 600-700 Websites on a Dual Xeon Server with maximum 20-30 mysql database per server on PIV and 50-70 database on a Dual Xeon server to offer best of performance, whereas many web hosts offer mysql db indiscriminately and offer to sell everything unlimited which is a farce as they only try to befool customer by making claims to sell which is unattainable level of performance from a shared server. One should know that a Server is nothing but a better form of a personal computer. In layman's language it looks like your personal computer only but is a refined or upgraded version of a PC as it's job is to serve pages. We try to explain this as most non technical guys who are simple businessman do not even know what is a server and how it looks. They live in their own myth that server is some sort of a super computer in some gizmo world. Please understand Server is an upgraded form of Personal computer which has its own limited resources so whom so ever says unlimited is doing nothing but trying to fool customers of their ignorance. Question. How many web hosting companies offer unlimited space or many offer GB's of web space for extra ordinary low price. Answer : A simple answer to this issue is that previously hard disks used to be of lesser size and now we have much bigger hard disks so one can offer more space but even then anything which comes for pitten's has to have riders as no one is here to run others business. Any web hosting company which offer extra ordinary cheap space like for example one offers free database etc. than beware that the server performance will surely be compromised and one will see lot of downtimes. Further many companies hide their interest in their Acceptable Usage Policies and Faq's linked very discreetly on their website so please make sure that you read their acceptable usage policy and Faq's. We know of couple of companies in India and USA which offer unlimited space or more space but then they put few clauses in their Faq's and AUP's. For example they only allow linked html and php/asp files only. Allowing linked html or asp/php files only means that any file which is not linked to each other and has no relevance to the website will not be allowed to be hosted and if this is the case then one does not need huge space or unlimited space as 90% of the business websites are hosted within 20 mb of space. A normal website does not use more than 5 MB to 20 MB space, so even a smallest of package any web hosting company offers maybe sufficient to serve one's purpose. Website owners are made to pay for the space which they will never use as web hosting providers will put a clause in their Policy or Faq' that one cannot upload unlinked html files thus 99% of the people will never ever reach 20 MB limit so what to talk about GB's of space. Question : Many hosts claim big so how to check their credentials. Answer : The easiest way to do is by asking them about the big names they host and for how many years they are hosting them or other good names. Also what is the percentage of customer retention has to be checked by asking few names which are hosted by service provider over a period of 2-3 years. One can read more about hosting providers from forums and blog's taking into account views and reviews offered about them from their existing customers. Secondly one should not forget to ask as to how many servers they have and what are the number of websites they host per server. For example if they are selling a website for Rs.100-200 per annum to the reseller or bulk buyer and on the other hand they claim that they have a Xeon server than one needs to do little mathematics to come to the conclusion as to whether they are speaking truth or not. Here is a simple way to do some logical calculation. 1. To lease a Xeon Server one needs to spend close to $350/Rs.14000 per month which will have a backup drive and at least RAID1. 2. On a Xeon Server one should host not more than 600 websites and if someone is selling the webspace for Rs.100-Rs.200 per annum per website then the total earning per server will be Rs.200 per annum x 600 websites = Rs.1,20,000 per annum where as the cost of the server will be Rs.14000 x 12 months = Rs.1,68000 per annum. So to break even one will need to host at least 840 websites @ Rs.200 per website per annum. Thus to break even either one is overloading the server by hosting more websites as it should have thus for sure leading to poor services or one is lying that he has so many customers as many hosts in India lease servers and not able to use them optimally so in order to get their monthly rent out they sell it at whatever price. You can very well understand how one who is incurring losses will be able to survive or offer good services. Please bear in mind that when one buys server it take some time to add websites/sell web space on it and to break even for a new entrant or even few old ones it may take many months and up to a year. On reaching the point of renewal the host finds that lot of his customers are not ready to renew due to the bad service it offered thus he is again in the same vicious circle of trying to find customers. At times many host buy another server after it gets full within couple of months for the fact that they are selling cheap but once the year is completed and they do not get renewals the issue crops in that none of the server is optimally used thus brining in more frustration to sell at whatever price but to get money to pay for rents. So please make sure that do not get biased by the prices and few false claims made by some host, think twice and try to make some logical conclusions as to whether a hosting provider is old enough to withstand such issues and is it financially sound. Visiting one's office can make you understand its financial standing for the fact that how many people work for the host and if one cannot make a physical visit then how many good names are hosted by the service provider and whether it has some other valid credentials. 3. One other way to check it is to find how many employees are their in an organization and how many they are able to retain from last many years.