If you are into business, you know how important email communication is now a days. Every email could be a potential opportunity and every email lost or not received is a lost business opportunity.

If your existing web hosting provider is not providing you with a reliable business email hosting service, it’s time to switch over to a reliable email service provider and not lose an email and business opportunity again. Don’t think about the money you will spend in getting your business emails hosted by a premier email hosting provider because the cost of a lost opportunity could be actually much higher that what you will pay to host your mailbox.

Mentioned below are some of the best email hosting service providers who are not only most reliable but affordable also.

Business email hosting by Rackspace – Rackspace is one of the most reputed web hosting companies in the world. They offer business email hosting at $2 per month per mailbox. In just $2 you get 10GB of mailbox storage space, access to 250MB of SharePoint storage for free, send 50MB attachments and spam and anti-virus protection. Your mailbox could be accessed using Microsoft Outlook, Web client or mobile devices such as BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, or other mobile device. For more information, visit Rackspace business email hosting.

Google Apps for business – Gmail for business offers 25 GB of storage per user, powerful spam filtering, BlackBerry and Outlook interoperability, and a 99.9% uptime SLA. All this for just $50 per user per year, which is ~$4 per user per month. For more information, visit Google apps for business.

Customized hosted email solutions from GoDaddy – Hosted email solutions by GoDaddy starts at just $1.19 per month. Plan features a mailbox with 1GB of storage, POP3 connectivity, free personal calendar and 1GB online file folder storage. For small and medium size businesses GoDaddy offers Deluxe and Unlimited plans with 5 and 10 mailboxes respectively. All the plans include webmail, mobile email access, spam and anti-virus protection and 256-bit encryption. For more information, see Group Email from GoDaddy.

A lot of people do it. They ping the web hosting servers of the company they are interested in and check the response time before they make a decision. I guess, the response time is of a great concern to a lot of us. But should you be relying on the ping response time numbers to make a decision?

Why people check the ping response time of web hosting servers?

A lot of people believe that the lesser the response time is, the faster will their website be if hosted on the server that responds faster. This is actually true. If a server responds faster to your ping requests, your websites are also going to open faster (given the assumption that your server’s hardware is processing your website at optimum level). If you place two identical servers on two different networks, your website will load faster from the server which has faster response time.

What factors affect the ping response time of servers?

There are several factors that affect the ping response of servers. Some of the important ones are listed below.

• Their physical location makes a lot of difference. If they are located in another country, the response time will be high. Likewise if they are located in the same state as that of yours, you will experience much better response time.
• Your network also is important. If your computer is connected to faster Internet connection, you might see good response time. Try pinging a server you are interested in from a dial-up connection and you will see what difference it makes.

How important really is ping response time?

I would say that ping response time is an important factor but only when you are going to host games or applications that will require a lot of back and forth communication between your servers and client browser. For general purpose websites, blogs and business websites more important factor is the bandwidth throughput of the servers the websites will be hosted on. Also remember that the response time you see could be high but for a vast majority of your website visitors, the server could actually respond much faster. So, don’t base your decision on the response time you see on your computer.

Based on our understanding, an average response time of upto 100ms should be considered good. Only when response time goes higher than 150ms to 180ms, you might experience a slight slowness in loading a website but that will also not make a lot of difference.

An example in case – the server that hosts this site responds to my pings at avg of 350ms while google.com responds in 400ms. But when it comes to opening the website, Google opens much quicker than my blog. Got the point?

Use the comments section below and let us know what you think.

NaviSite today announced the launch of their cloud based managed infrastructure, applications and messaging services for enterprise customers in North America. The new platform from NaviSite is called NaviCloud and offers services with guaranteed infrastructure and application SLAs and predictable usage-based pricing.

“What we’re seeing in the enterprise space is a desire to have a solution wrapped around their business productivity applications, with the presumption that the underlying infrastructure will be flexible and in sync with those overlay applications,” according to Antonio Piraino, Vice President of Tier1 Research. “Being able to control both aspects of IT environment is fast becoming critical to this sector.”

NaviCloud managed hosting and applications services are available on a limited basis immediately in North America. General Availability in North America is June 1, 2010. Managed messaging services will also be available in June 2010. The London Data Center will be fully cloud-enabled by September 2010. source

Web hosting provider TurnKey Internet today announced the launch of their new all-inclusive reseller hosting package featuring an all-in-one program to help resellers build their privately‐branded web hosting reseller business. The new all-in-one package offers a collection of many web hosting softwares and scripts. The new package offers a private label end user help desk, private billing system, knowledge base and helpdesk ticket system for resellers to use for their clients. The package also features ability to private brand cPanel skins, dedicated IPs and custom name servers for resellers. The collection of web hosting softwares includes many of the popular softwares such as Fantastico, Softaculous, R1Soft, RvSkin, RvSiteBuilder, WHMCS, cPanel/WHM, WHMXtra and much more.

Along with the package you also get over 3,000 web scripts and 20,000 website templates. The reseller package allows overselling, so you can manage the size and bandwidth limits on your own according to your client’s requirements.

“Our all‐inclusive, ultimate reseller package provides top‐of‐the‐line features and an unprecedented collection of add‐ons and bonuses, combined with our unmatched customer service and support,” said Adam Wills, President and CEO of TurnKey Internet. “When we say ‘all‐inclusive,’ we really mean everything. To use the car dealer terminology, we’re offering the ‘fully‐loaded’ package.” source

The web hosting charges have come down to such an extent that now a days reseller hosting account and a VPS (Virtual Private Server) are available for the same cost. But what should you choose between a VPS and a reseller account? Let’s find out.

What makes a VPS better than reseller account?

VPS is a virtual server which means it’s entirely yours, basically private and the resources of the VPS are not shared with other users. VPS virtual servers are available as managed, unmanaged and also unmetered depending on the offer. You get the root access of the virtual server and mostly free to install softwares of your choice. In short, you are the administrator of the server and have the ability to manage every aspect of it. If you have the time and skills to manage the VPS server, VPS is what you should opt for. But if you have no intention of installing softwares such as IRC on the VPS and not even need root access, reseller hosting should be considered.

What makes reseller account better than virtual private servers?

Reseller accounts share the common server resources and most often are a result of oversold resources of the dedicated server. A reseller hosting will not require a lot of technical experience or hosting expertise. If you need to host multiple websites or if you are new to hosting and want to start your own hosting business, reseller account is what you should consider. But if you want to install softwares, use command line, need access as root user, then go for VPS.

We hope you find this information useful and it will help you choose between a reseller account and VPS.

cPanel is the most widely used hosting control panel to manage websites that are hosted on remote servers. Using cPanel, one can administer various features of a website such as email account setup, FTP account management, File Manager, database setup and installing applications using Fantastico.

The following cPanel 11 video tutorials will help you manage your websites using cPanel.

Manage Email Accounts in cPanel

• Manage the email accounts associated with your domain – cPanel official tutorial
• Manage Email forwarders – cPanel official tutorial
• Manage Email Auto-responders – cPanel official tutorial
• Manage Email Mailing List in cPanel – Official cPanel tutorial
• Learn how to enable/disable Spam Assassin
• How to use cPanel Webmail in your domain

General site maintenance activities using cPanel

• How to set the Preferences in your cPanel – SiteGround Hosting
• How to manage Domains via cPanel – SiteGround Hosting
• Updating Your Contact Information and Preferences – cPanel official tutorial
• Learn all about creating and managing subdomains via cPanel – cPanel official tutorial
• Learn to manage parked domains – cPanel
• Learn web page redirects in cPanel
• Password protect directories of your website via cPanel
• Hotlink Protection – Prevents other websites from directly linking to files on your website.
• IP Deny Manager – Block a range of IP addresses to prevent them from accessing your site.

Manage database in cPanel

• Learn to create and modify MySQL databases in cPanel
• MySQL Wizard – Create and manage MySQL databases with this step by step wizard.

Manage site backup via cPanel

• How to make Website backup via CPanel

There are a lot of other cPanel tutorials that we will be adding to this post, so you may want to bookmark this page and come back again.

Are you planning to host your personal website and trying to find how much of space and bandwidth is needed to host your website? This mini tutorial will help you calculate how much of those resource is needed.

Let’s start with determining the space that will be needed to host your website. Almost all websites consists of various files such as html, jpg, txt, zip etc. If your website is already designed, calculating how much of space it will take to host it on a server is quite easy. Just place all the files in their respective folders on your hard disk and then right click to find the size of the main folder that contains all the files of your website. That’s it! That’s exactly the space you will need on the server where you wish to your host your website.

Let’s now see how to find the bandwidth you will need on a monthly basis. Although most of the hosting packages offer plenty of bandwidth now a days, in fact much more than what most of us actually need, we will still look at the formula to calculate the estimated total bandwidth consumption every month.

The formula is actually quite simple, here it is.

[total size of all the files of your website including graphics] x [number of visitors everyday x number of pages each visitor will view] x [number of days in a month, i.e. 30 in our case] = Total monthly bandwidth required

Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose, you have a website that consists of 10 html pages and 2 images. All the html pages put together is 100KB and 2 images are 100KB in total. Your site might get 100 visitors every day and each visitor might see 2 pages of your site, then using the formula we arrive at the monthly bandwidth required.

[ 200KB ] x [ 100 x 2 ] x [ 30 ] = 1200000 KB which is ~ 1.2GB of bandwidth

In the formula mentioned above, the total size of the files can be replaced with average size of the files and you will still be able to calculate estimate bandwidth. However, one thing to remember is that browsers cache static content such as html pages and graphics files, so your actual bandwidth required may be less if there are a lot of repeat visitors.

Easyspace has announced the addition a new range of low cost, feature rich, shopping cart solutions to its product portfolio.

A new e-Commerce solution from Easyspace offers an intuitive way for users to start or improve their business online. The solution has the ability to accept payments via a number of the most popular methods already built in (including Paypal and Worldpay), as well as exporting options allowing you to easily list your products on sites such as ebay, Google Base and Kelkoo as well as on your own site.

“We’ve offered off the shelf eCommerce solutions in the past,” states Errol Vanderhorst, Sales and Marketing Director for Easyspace, “but in all honesty, the high price associated with them in relation to the price of our other services, meant that they weren’t a natural fit or upgrade option for the customer. Our new Online Shopping packages have been developed specifically with the customer and our general pricing in mind, meaning the customer can now add a shopping cart with an extensive range of features for a low monthly cost.”

The Shopping Cart range from Easyspace is delivered in 3 packages – Starter, Business and Pro – ranging from £14.99 per month through to £44.99 per month depending on requirements.

Easyspace via press release

GoDaddy recently announced the launch of their new hosting related products to help businesses and online entrepreneurs excel by saving their money and also make money for them at the same time.

These new products include simple-to-use survey tool for instant customer feedback, a service allowing access to hosting accounts while protecting the owner’s confidential information, a new catchy domain extension and a product providing a hassle-free way to make money with parked domains.

Go Daddy Site Surveys makes it easy to request, track and measure customer attitudes and preferences anytime.

Go Daddy Hosting AccountExec allows any person or business to assign trusted individuals limited access to a hosting account, while passwords and account details remain confidential and the domain owner remains in control. Very helpful feature for those domain owners who want their friends or anyone else to manage their domain without losing the control.

Go Daddy Quick Content is an easy-to-use service that can instantly boost the value of parked domains by turning them into fully functional Web sites. Go Daddy Quick Content provides professionally written search engine optimized content and allows you to enable monetization options like Google AdSense, Kontera and Shopping.com. Hosting comes built-in and it’s easy to tie it to your Google Analytics account and monitor traffic.

GoDaddy has now started to offer domain registration for .BZ (“Buzz”) extension. Originally, .BZ is the country code Top Level Domain of Belize on the east coast of Central America.

GoDaddy via EarthTimes

MD based hosting firm, WebNet Hosting, has begun offering a new suite of tools aimed at small-business webmasters.

The website editor tool will allow a great degree of control over the look and feel of the website and structure management of the website without having to spend in expensive site development software. People who are not skilled with HTML and other essentials skills will be able to edit the site using this tool’s simplified GUI. This tool is included with Business Builder, Reseller, and E-Commerce accounts.

The next tool that comes from WebNet hosting is Site Studio. WebNet is offering 600 template themes for users to build their site from scratch and that too rapidly. Site studio is a quite popular tool that many web hosting companies have been offering.

Urchin 5 is the next tool in offering which is a website-statistics tool that enables owner of a website to capture and manage site traffic data. Analyzing website analytics is very helpful and offers great degree of insight into your website’s visitors. Urchin V5 is standard with WebNet Hosting E-Customize and Business Builder e-commerce and hosting plans.

WebNet Hosting via WebHostingDir