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Greetings!

Are you looking for a really great web hosting provider for your small business or even personal web hosting needs? This section contains our independent reviews and recommendations for web hosting providers. Our web hosting reviews are quick and informative to enable you to make the best decisions possible.

Web hosting performance should be right behind price in your decision making process because studies have shown that consumers purchase more often and in higher amounts from high-performance web sites. Web hosting companies can be classified into 2 performance categories:

1) The 1% of companies with publicly published performance data;
2) The other 99%.

A web hosting provider whose performance (uptime, connect speed, DNS speed, etc.) is publicly available means that you the customer can easily verify the quality of your web service 24 hours/day free of charge! With the other 99% of web hosting companies you get no clues about the performance of their web service or your hard-earned hosting dollars. Only companies that have made a public commitment to performance by appearing on Netcraft's "Hosting Providers Network Performance" report qualify for review by iTechGuide. Each of these companies has made a "public" commitment to performance that consumers can check at any time!

Make the best choice by selecting a web hosting provider who has made a public commitment to performance. iTechGuide's "Best Performance Web Hosting Picks" table will save you many hours of research.

Best Wishes,

Jason Canon over 20 years of hands-on computer networking experience.  He has authored numerous technical publications including: photonic switching, gigabit networking, VoIP E9-1-1 and others. He is an expert author for EzineArticles.com and Vice-President of Technology Research for iTechGuide. E-mail: jmc at iTechGuide.com.

 Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting

Introduction:

The web hosting division at Yahoo! has been growing strong since 2002. If you are looking for small business web hosting services you might be well advised to consider the fact that Yahoo! is already home to more than 30 million web sites and they manage over 50 terabytes of data. Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting provides a very simple to use templates that even a beginning webmaster will appreciate.

Pricing and Value:

Yahoo! Small Business is especially competitive if you are developing a new business web site because they do not require a long-term contract but allow you to rent their service on a month to month basis. Yahoo! Small Business offers three virtual hosting plans for small business. Each plan provides free domain name registration with no renewal fees for as long as you host with Yahoo!

Yahoo! Small Business web hosting accounts come with a $50 Yahoo! Search Marketing credit and a $50 Google AdWords credit. Your business web site will need these advertising services and this also provides a great opportunity to learn valuable skills that you will use over and over again.

Reliability:

Yahoo! has a record of outstanding reliability performance and web hosting accounts enjoy the same hardware and software infrastructure as that used for the search engine. This means state-of-the-art server hardware, software, and distributed redundant Internet connections. Yahoo! also operates multiple domain name servers (7 were online when we checked) to insure uninterrupted rapid domain name lookups.

Customer Service:

Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting provides you with 24 hour toll-free telephone and email support. On every occasion we have rated their customer service support to be excellent.

Traceroute:

We performed a traceroute from our site in Washington, DC to Yahoo and found a Yahoo node interconnected to Level 3 in Washington.

"Traceroute has started ...
traceroute: Warning: yahoo.com has multiple addresses; using 216.109.112.135
traceroute to yahoo.com (216.109.112.135), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 xe-11-2-0.edge1.washington1.level3.net (4.79.231.13) 41.675 ms 42.025 ms 21.140 ms
2 ae-31-89.car1.washington1.level3.net (4.68.17.131) 31.191 ms 22.842 ms 28.173 ms
3 4.79.228.2 (4.79.228.2) 20.219 ms 19.348 ms 32.563 ms
4 ge-0-0-0-p110.msr2.dcn.yahoo.com (216.115.108.5) 47.153 ms ge-1-0-0-p100.msr1.dcn.yahoo.com (216.115.108.41) 24.112 ms ge-1-0-0-p110.msr2.dcn.yahoo.com (216.115.108.45) 44.549 ms
5 ge7-1.bas2-m.dcn.yahoo.com (216.109.120.207) 38.865 ms ge2-2.bas1-m.dcn.yahoo.com (216.109.120.142) 30.953 ms ge2-2.bas2-m.dcn.yahoo.com (216.109.120.153) 47.791 ms"

Try a traceroute to Yahoo from your location to view the network connections and transit times.

Strengths:

Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting is highly recommended for beginning web masters who want to develop and publish a web site with little or no computer programming experience. We also highly recommend Yahoo! if you are looking for one of the most reliable services on the Internet. Finally, you should consider Yahoo! if you want to work only with the most highly-skilled customer and technical support staff the Internet has to offer.

Weaknesses:

Some customers have complained that Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting prices are too high. We believe that if reliability, network bandwidth, redundance, and personnel skill levels are considered that Yahoo! is easily a better bargain than most bottom-dollar web hosting operations that don't come close to the technology infrastructure of Yahoo!

Visit Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting now. 

More Yahoo!...

Yahoo! Domains Full story...

Yahoo! Search Marketing Full story...

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Full story...

by: Jason Canon

With more than 5,000 web hosting companies on the Internet, consumers are looking for a short cut to finding the best service for their business and personal requirements. A little known secret from the “geek” community can greatly simplify the process of finding the perfect match for you.

Since the mid-1990’s, a company in Bath, England called Netcraft has been providing free research data and analysis on many aspects of the Internet. They are a respected authority on web hosting providers, operating systems, ISP’s, electronic commerce, encryption, and content technologies, to name but a few. Netcraft is the place where webmasters and other information technology professionals go when they want answers to solve real-world problems. Fortunately, one of the best reports Netcraft produces is an on-line near-real-time web host performance report. It provides performance data on about 50 of the top web hosting companies on the Internet. Incredibly, the report is free and updated every 15 minutes.

Netcraft's Hosting Providers Network Performance report can best serve those who are seeking to locate a reliable hosting service. It tracks outages over the past 24 hours providing the hours, minutes, and seconds information. Performance monitoring agents are operating in the USA and UK so that the network performance can be determined from different points. Web hosting performance is comprised of the time to process the http GET request and return the page contents. The time reported depends on the speed of the processor, the size of the data, the number of concurrent requests being processed by the web server and so forth. Dynamic content generally requires more time than static content. During the http GET request Netcraft records four times: (1) DNS (2) connect (3) first byte, and (4) total.

The DNS category provides performance information on the time it takes for the Domain Name Service (DNS) to lookup the hostname. The customer's local name server as well as the authoritative name server for the domain affects DNS response time. Due to the wide variability of this performance parameter it is not part of the total time recorded. The connect performance parameter is the first phase of the http GET request when the TCP/IP connection is made to the web hosting server. Connect is typically reflective of network latency but if the web host is under heavy load the time recorded will increase. The first bye performance parameter is the time from when the last byte of the http GET request is sent until the first byte of the response header is received. Although many different factors, including application associated processing, are involved this performance parameter is generally useful in determining how fast the web hosting server is responding. From a performance perspective this is the silver bullet because studies have shown that consumers purchase more often and in higher dollar amounts from fast performing web servers. The last performance parameter is the total, which is the time from when the http GET request is started until the last byte is received.

Can selecting a great web hosting provider really be so simple as looking at web hosting performance reports? Well, yes and no. If you are simply looking for the best virtual web hosting company using Netcraft's web hosting performance report can help you select from the 1% of hosting companies who are so confident in their service that they pay Netcraft to monitor and publish the results for everyone to see. The chances are very good that companies willing to do this will do everything possible to keep their operation running as competitively as possible. Of course, you still need to determine which of these best 50 companies can satisfy your needs in terms of operating system support, programming languages supported and so forth. You can save yourself lots of valuable research time by using iTechGuide's Top Performance Web Hosting Companies table to help further identify the best web hosting company for your needs.

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