It is possible that you may even have read articles that praise free web hosting and convince you how others have made tons of cash using only free hosting services. It is also possible that you have been recently exposed to the extremely enticing advertising techniques used by promoters of these free web hosting programs who usually emphasize how easy it is to use their services and the huge benefits that you will enjoy includinh slick, free web design templates and so on.

But you need to be very careful here, because not all that glitters is gold. Let us start by examining the disadvantages of going with free hosting.

While many beginners swear by it and tell how they started off and learnt their trade with free hosting the truth is that sooner or later it catches up with you.

For starters there are restrictions to the amount of bandwidth you can enjoy, meaning that a sudden surge in traffic will put you out of business pronto and your site will suddenly be inaccessible to the world.

Actually this kind of hosting sometimes means page hosting, which means you are just one page in a certain web site of numerous other pages. There are numerous disadvantages here. For instance leading search engines have rules and it is possible for your web page to be banned for the sins of other web pages in the same site. Search engine robots automatically assume that all web pages in a site belong to the same entity and person. Interestingly this is what makes free hosting very lucrative for some people. They have a bunch of numerous different individuals helping them to drive traffic to their site and doing all the hard work of developing content and so on and they quickly cash in. The whole idea here is volume and that explains their enticing content to get as many people as possible to sign up.

Then you will also need to realize that there are many online opportunities for which you will not qualify if you do not have your own domain name and web site.

With web hosting services being so affordable these days, you really cannot blame folks for not taking you seriously when you do not have your own domain and independent website. And that includes prospects and would-be clients and buyers at your site. The minute they realize that yours is a free hosted site, they will begin to ask themselves lots of questions and will quickly rule out the possibility of doing any business with you.

Inevitably you will quickly find that free hosting is actually the most expensive hosting you will find anywhere. You just need to do the sums of the many losses you will suffer and it will swiftly become clear to you that paid hosting is a lot cheaper at the end of the day.

While it is true that everybody with any online presence requires a web host and therefore demand has got be high, it is also true that many have tried to launch a successful hosting business and have ended up failing miserably. So the question is what usually goes wrong?

Actually, to successfully launch a web hosting business, you must have an effective strategy, which is what this article will help you formulate.

If You Don’t Have Clients You Certainly Don’t Have A Hosting Business

There are many ways to launch a hosting business, but the easiest is to join an affiliate program where you can concentrate on getting clients and leave all the other numerous technical details to be taken care of by others. This is what I would recommend for somebody starting out in the web hosting business.

The reason is simple. You will get to learn the hardest part of the business, which is landing clients. Once you have mastered this aspect of the business, you can confidently go ahead and launch your fully fledged hosting set up with confidence knowing that you have the ability to land clients pronto, anytime you wish.

Start Your Hosting Business With A Blog

Blogs are amazing and can be used very effectively in generating traffic and business for anything you can care to think of including your affiliate web hosting site. For starters blogs tend to rank better than sites in search engine results. The simple reason is that search engines are always looking for plenty of quality content and blogs tend to have lots of this.

To generate the content for your blog, you will need to focus on common problems people face from their web hosts and suggest good workable solutions. Then place your link to your hosting affiliate sign up page at appropriate places. It is important that you carefully research the keywords that you are going to use for your blog content and anchor text for links because this will impact on your SEO success.

Then, to further boost your blog traffic, rewrite your content and also post them at popular high traffic article directories. Each article should have links pointing back to your blog. The effect of this, apart from giving you traffic will be to enhance your ranking with leading search engines for the keywords that you will choose to use.

The Most Important Marketing For Any Web Hosting Business

Right from the beginning it is of utmost importance that you create a system for harvesting email addresses from your regular visitors to your blog and affiliate site. The way to do this is to offer a regular email newsletter or ezine that will be of great interest to your audience. Naturally your weekly ezine should go out with links to the latest articles at your blog.

Not only will this enable you to retain a steady flow of clients, but the hosting business is such that most people will not sign up immediately but will need to be constantly reminded of your business until that inevitable time when they will need to sign up with a new web host. There is no better way of staying in touch with your prospects than through an interesting ezine emailed out regularly.

Using the simple strategy suggested in this article, you should be able to build a huge profitable hosting business within no time, even as you continue to learn other methods to market and promote such a business successfully.

Most people are ecstatic when they get a good deal, like a dirt-cheap web host who offers too much for next to nothing. In actual fact instead of joy, this kind of deal should send alarm bells ringing loudly in your head and here’s why.

Two Dirt Cheap Web Hosting Possibilities

When your hosting deal is just too good to be true, more often than not one of two things has happened both of which are not good for you.

Either the web host is overselling hosting resources, which means that you will inevitably end up with lousy services and a site that loads at snail pace and many times is not even accessible at all. In other words, the cheap will end up being so expensive that it will clearly be unaffordable to you in terms of lost clients and revenue because people cannot access your site most of the time.

The second reason could be that the web hosting business is out to try and grab as many clients as possible collecting the maximum amount of revenue in advance and then filing for bankruptcy. This has happened many times and naturally chances are that you will never see a refund. This is the only road such a business strategy will end up on. Many have had the idea of using a business model where they go out for as much market share as they possibly can at a price that is below cost with the intention of raising prices later. In reality this will hardly work in an industry that is as competitive as web hosting is.

Hosts Who Oversell Resources

Overselling refers to the situation where a host goes out for more clients than what their available resources can support. Webmasters usually sign up like crazy and at the beginning when the resources are yet to be stretched all looks well and happy webmasters refer the cheap service to others and the result is that the client base grows at blinding speed.

What follows after that is disaster as suddenly users find that their sites take too long to load and inevitably they lose many hits in this way, because impatient prospective visitors just click their way out of the site that is taking ages to load and end up going elsewhere. Downtimes also become so frequent that your site ends up not loading at all most of the times. The result is a classic illustration of why cheaper can often end up being much more expensive.

Hosting Business Model From Hell

An increasing number of new web hosts have been offering increasingly more bandwidth for less. This has really not caused concern because most people have heard that the prices of resources used in web hosting have been dropping in price in recent times. However the truth is that some hosting rates have been dropping much faster while offering virtually unlimited bandwidth and resources. There is no such word as “unlimited” in business because somebody has to pay the bills.

The whole idea here is to secure as many hosting clients as possible and then raise prices in future. Or in some cases declare bankruptcy. Both options will leave you, the hosting client in big trouble.

In Conclusion

This article has clearly shown some of the reasons why you need to get very nervous when the hosting deal is too good to be true because even when everything appears to be okay at the beginning, you may well have signed up for a disaster that is waiting to happen.

The title of my blog post says it all - I have found a web hosting service which I feel is a ‘diamond in the rough’. I am absolutely thrilled and in love with my web host, Third Sphere Hosting!

Okay, let’s put my uncanny infatuation aside and let me proceed with what you need to know if you want to know if your web host (whichever it is, right now) is truly a diamond in the rough.

Let’s face it. There are literally thousands of web hosting providers all over the internet, seeking to profit from the 1 Billion netizens (non-official count as of this writing) looking to achieve fame, fortune or just an audience for their voices.

1 Billion people online is a huge number. It is about the size of a world religion, or the population of a nation. 1 Billion people will have a diverse range of needs, wants and motives to get online and have a presence online via their own websites and thus, the thousands of web hosting services out there should also provide a myriad range of services catering to the unique needs of their clients.

How do you, one out of the 1 Billion, find the one web host out of the thousands available, that would be your diamond in the rough, the partner that would serve you well and be your launchpad to the your attainment of your online dreams?

Simple, you act like an employer filtering the list of prospective employees looking to get a job from your company. You are in control here. The money is in your pocket (or wallet, or bank account), so you can afford to pick and choose which web host is the best for your online needs.

How does an employer look for the best person for the job? You look for qualities. Here are the qualities that you should look for when assessing whether or not a web host is perfect for you:

The first quality is Reputation. This is where social proof plays an important part in your decision-making process. If many people say that a certain web host is great and then you also compare that with the number of people who disagree (which is lesser or non-existent), then most probably you have something worthy to consider.

You can gauge the reputation of a web host by doing a search for phrases such as “[Name of Web Hosting Service Here] reviews” or if you want to find out what negative things people are saying about your prospective web host, “[Name of Web Hosting Service Here] sucks”.

Read everything that people have to say about your web host and decide for yourself. Usually the best indicator or helper that you can have in making a decision is another human being.

Go to the web hosting review forums and search for posts or articles that talk about the particular web host you are assessing. You have to be cautious here as some websites that review web hosts are actually just fronts to promote all the web hosting services as affiliates, even though the website gave a negative review of the web host.

Be very critical even when it comes to reading other people’s reviews. Some reviews are not honest. Double and triple check by running that web host name in a search engine and look for negative reviews of it. This is where negative rather than positive thinking will serve you well.

At this point, you should have a list of about 2 to 3 web hosting services that are possible candidates for you, based on the web host research you had just performed. Ideally, looking for a good web host based upon the honest opinions and truthful recommendations of other people alone should suffice. But you don’t want to be someone who just follows the crowd, do you?

This is where the second quality comes into your assessment - Satisfaction of your Needs.

What are your needs?

What do you want from a web host?

What do you seek to achieve online with a website (or websites)?

List down all your needs, from the mundane technical details to the grandest of your ambitions. Then, one by one, place all these needs of yours with respect to the features provided by the web hosting service you are reviewing.

Does the web host serve your every need? Most of them? None of them?

How much traffic do you want to get? How much bandwidth do you need?

How much space do you need? These are the questions you need to ask yourself.

There is a catch, though. It is not necessarily wise to pick the web host that offers the cheapest plan on Earth for the most amount of web space and bandwidth on the Internet. Eye such “cheap” plans with extra suspicion as you would a snake oil merchant. Of course, I’m not saying that all web hosts which offer competitive pricing are sneaky. I am just saying that you should be careful for your own good.

Third Sphere Hosting offers (as of this writing) only 500MB of web space and 40GB of bandwidth, plus a host of other useful e-commerce features, for $24.95 per month. At one glance, this plan seems unattractive compared to other hosts that offer Terrabytes of space and Terrabytes of bandwidth for only $7 a month.

Do not be tempted by the dark side. Use the research skills I have explained in the previous paragraphs to see if these web hosts are any good.

This brings me to the third quality - Price.

By saying ‘Price’, I do not mean that the lowest one is the best one.

You need to move away from that cheap mindset and take on the mindset of a webmaster, an Internet business owner (if you happen to be one in the first place) or an investor.

Which of the web hosts you are considering offers the best value, has the highest reputation and charges the best, most affordable fee? You need to put value, reputation and quality above price. Price only comes after everything else.

If you put price above value, quality, reputation and reliability, you will end up losing more money (plus time and energy) than if you had put price after everything else that matters.

Looking for a great web host should be like looking for a great house or a great car. A house or a car is not only something that you need but also something that your life would depend upon. It would be foolish to pick the cheapest house and the cheapest car and then jeopardise your life, your safety and your comfort.

Same goes for your website and your choice of web hosting service.

The fourth quality is - Service or Support or Reliability.

How fast does the web hosting company’s customer support respond to your query?

Do they respond to you as if you are the King or Queen (you are!), or do they seem to treat you like some ignorant and hopeless tech-illiterate inferior to their geeky tech-savvy status?

My experience with Third Sphere Hosting’s customer support has been really pleasant. Their very CEO usually takes the time and trouble to respond to their customer’s often hard-to-satisfy queries.

A great web host must understand everything you need and then give them to you.

Notice that I have so far only highlighted the mostly non-technical qualities of a good web host. This is fitting because when their Reputation, Needs Satisfaction and Reliability are in place, everything else should fall into place.

You may not know this but right now, your very source of livelihood could be seriously bleeding, slowly and steadily, and before you know it, it will die.

What do you think I’m talking about?

It is an asset that your business must have, but if you’re not careful, it can be your liability, or worse, it could cost you your livelihood.

What is it?

Your marketing expenses? How much you spend on advertising? Your little indulgences, unnecessary gizmos and “showing off” stuff?

No, what I’m talking about is basic and fundamental to the very survival if not the existence of your online business.

What you need right now is not a stopper to plug the bleeding of your internet business. What you need is a machine.

A proven machine that will channel all that is outflowing from your reserves and return them to you in profits month after month.

What is this machine? It is your choice of a good web hosting service.

You have been bitten many times before by web hosting companies that promised you the sky but could not give you a decent service. You are now wary of any new web hosting offers that are mushrooming on the internet every day. You do not want to be cheated again. It is understandable. Here are some tips on how to dig up the truth about any web hosting company before you fork out even a single cent.

Steps

1. Create a list of the features that you require in a web host, as well as those that you may require in the near future.
2. Go web host shopping - use your favourite search engine to look for web hosts that offer the features you have listed, at a budget comfortable for you.
3. Bookmark as many web hosts as you can, ideally those with very close and competitive plans that you need for your web hosting account.
4. Collect the technical support email addresses of these web hosts. If they use a customer help desk system, register and bookmark the help desk URLs as well.
5. Begin by testing the efficiency of their customer support services. Before you do this, prepare a list of questions, concerns and issues that you need addressing when you have a web hosting account. Write as many questions as possible.
6. Start posing your questions to all the web hosting companies’ customer support emails or help desks, one question at a time and wait for their replies. Gauge how quickly they respond to your query.
7. Once the first question has been answered, proceed with the second question, posing it to all the web hosts you have listed. Repeat this process indefinitely.

Tips

• Go to Google or your favourite search engine and look this phrase up: “Name of Web Hosting Company reviews”. You are sure to hit upon a number of sites that give user reviews of said web hosting company.
• You can also search this phrase: “Name of Web Hosting Company sucks”. This will yield a list of sites, blog posts and other rants that have a negative review of the particular web hosting company you are intending to sign up with.
• Read and absorb everything there is about the web host, both the good and the bad, and judge for yourself.
• Scour the web hosting forums and get the opinions of others concerning the particular web hosting company you are reviewing.

Warnings

• Do not be tempted by dirt cheap deals. Price is often an illusion when it comes to the web hosting industry. You are better off paying a little more for a web host that offers much less space but is reputed and has a proven track record for stability and excellent customer service, than paying only a single digit monthly fee for one that offers gigabytes of space and bandwidth but is wanting in terms of service and server stability.
• Apply the same discretion when scouting for good domain registrars. Your domain registrar is just as important and crucial to your webmaster life as your web host.

Things You’ll Need

• Good search engine skills
• A ruthlessly discerning, critical mind
• Good ‘arm-wringing’ skills

Switching web hosts should not be such a difficult thing to do smoothly and with minimal hassles. Yet the truth is that usually plenty of things do end up going wrong and the probability of a site being down for several days during a change over is very high and tends to happen rather frequently.

Still by taking a couple of simple precautions you can easily avoid all the common pitfalls that often accompany a simple change over.

The first thing that you must never forget is the fact that you have to establish a new hosting account long before closing your old web hosting one. In fact you should even go further and ensure that your old web host keeps a copy of your site for several weeks after the switch. There are some important technical reasons for this, which I will now go into.

Firstly, it takes a couple of hours, and this can stretch into a day or so, to establish a new hosting account. If you have shut down everything at your old hosts, then it means that your site will not be live or reachable by any of your visitors during those hours or days it takes you to establish the new account.

Secondly the reason for keeping a copy of your site with your old host for a couple of weeks after you have changed hosts, has to do with something called DNS. DNS stands for domain name server. It is critical for anybody in the web hosting business to understand that computers do not use domain names to trace websites. Instead IP addresses are used. To perform the conversion and find the domain name that has been requested, a number of computers are usually involved which act as domain name servers that are able to attach certain IP addresses to specific domain names that have been requested. A DNS cannot handle all conversions so what happens is that it converts local domain names on which it has information on and passes on others to the next DNS. This will continue until the information reaches a DNS capable of making the conversion.

Now when you make a switch, it will take a while for all domain name servers to update their information on you. So some domain name servers will initially refer surfers to your old host. What this means is that if everything has been shut down then the surfer will get a page not found error message. This is precisely why it is advisable to keep a copy of your site with the old host for a few weeks after the switch to a new host so as to ensure a smooth transition free of any glitches.

Actually the root cause of most trouble when webmasters and site owners are switching hosts is that most people are very upset at the time of the switch and just want to get rid of their old host as soon as they possibly can. This emotional approach when switching web hosts can be extremely damaging and should be avoided at all costs.

From the words of the legend himself:
Mark Joyner is jealous!

Go to Third Sphere Hosting to read for yourself (on the first page) what the Godfather, the Tiger Woods, the Maestro of Internet Marketing himself had to say about Third Sphere Hosting.

Don’t get jealous! Get wiser.