2008年1月2日星期三

Criteria of Choosing an Ideal Web Hosting Company

Before we talk about what it takes to be a cheap and good quality web host, lets get to the fundamental first. What is a Web Host?
A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. The term for this computer is called a server.

A web hosting provider will typically have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web.

With a well-managed web host, you can free yourself from worrying the up-keep of complicated server technology and proper technical maintenance. Thats the whole purpose of the web hosting companies. You should leave the technical work to web hosting professional while you focus on your own internet business.

Lets begin...

Feature Offered
The features that web hosting companies are offering are getting quite standard nowadays.

The followings are some of the common features you'll see in most web hosting plans: Control Panel
Control Panel is an interface where you can access your site on the web server, allowing you to set-up and subsequently update and customize your web site. Though cPanel is by far the most popular control panel, some hosting providers customize their own so that they can up-grade and expand it at will. Diskspace
A vast majority of sites that don't have tons of graphics, sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit in 50 MB of disk space. You should always leave yourself some room for growth or check if the host has a bigger plan in case you need to upgrade. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted or received through a unit of time. In web hosting, bandwidth is consumed when visitors make requests for files on your web site and download them to their personal computers. Email Account
With POP3 email accounts you can check email from Outlook, Netscape Mail, Eudora or any other Email software. Scripting language
As all our top 10 listings are using Unix and Linux platform, php, perl and CGI are the languages we are talking about here. It is best to choose a host that supports the latest version to maximize the latest web technologies for the fee that you pay. Database
If your web site is going to store a lot of data that should be dynamically accessible (like user accounts, stock prices, maps, Interactive news, message boards and forum etc.), you'll need to look for an account that offers a database. MySQL is a powerful and most popular database program that runs on the Linux operation system. It is able to handle million of entries all at once. Its flexibility and speed allow you to also store logs and pictures. MySQL is designed to scale well under heavy traffic conditions and is ideal for database-intensive or e-commerce-enabled Web sites. Customer Service/Support
No matter if you are an expert or a novice in web hosting, you need a web host with good customer support system. What is the criteria of an excellent customer support? Let us explain. How big is the knowledge base?
This is particularly important for those who want to search for quick answer without seeking direct assistance from customer support staff. Due to the huge database, normally its searchable. Some web hosting providers will even make your life easier by making a video tutorial guiding you step by step in setting up your new account. Very useful for beginner. Responsive customer service staff.
If you are too lazy to find the answer out of a big pool of database, get the direct answer from someone who knows it. Direct customer support comes in a few forms.
a. Email support

b. Phone support: Normally, sales and technical support uses separate phone line. A good phone support staff knows what your problem is and answers with relevance.

c.Web Host like Lunarpages and Globat even have live chat support. However, its not how many support channels that are available but how responsive it is of the staff. You can find out the hosting reviews and ratings of each of our Top 10 Cheap Web Host.

Price to Disk Space / Price to Bandwidth Ratio
Are you paying too much for your Web Hosting Plan?
Having done the research on hundreds of web hosting companies, in general, weve come to this conclusion: the more disk space and bandwidth you are getting, the more expensive is the monthly price.

To help you understand which price is competitive enough for you to take up the offer, we have categorized 5 different price range. For each price range, a score of maximum of 10 is assigned. To understand the concept behind this, please refer to the details here.

Popularity
A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer support and reliability in place but without an effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Lets face it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady growth of new members, its very difficult to survive in this highly competitive industry.

We judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider by looking at the number of awards won, the reviews of other websites and the Alexa traffic ranking.

All the hosting providers listed on our Top 10 Cheap Web Hosting Directory are among the top 40,000 most visited websites in the world.

Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee
Nothing can hurt you more than this: your visitors come to your web site only to find that its not accessible. You lose credibility and possibly even a sale. If your web host does not guarantee at least a 99% uptime, leave the web host now!

To ensure maximum uptime, installation of redundant back-up systems is essential. Each web host has their own management systems to minimize downtime. "Redundant" means that if any of the Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet connection will take over.

We use Alertra software to monitor the uptime of each of our top 10 web hosts.

As for speed, even though routing, web server set up and local area networks play a part in determining the speed of a site, the main concern of how fast your site is depends very much on the types of network connections.

Many hosting providers still connect to the Internet through T1, or T3 connections. This is not the case for our top 10 hosts- they are using OC (Optical Carrier) lines.

A T1 line will offer data transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second), while a T3 line can supply data transfer rates of 43Mbps. OC-1 refers to a circuit that transmits 51.85Mbps. Higher levels are multiples of that speed. Ultra-High Speed OC3 and OC12 lines offers 155Mbps and 622Mbps respectively. Some hosting providers have connections to major internet backbones at the speed of OC48 (2488Mbps) and OC96 (4976Mbps).

What You Need to Know to Stop Hair Loss Caused by Stress

Hair loss is of concern to most people at one point in their lives. When the time comes they want to know how to stop hair loss. Stopping hair loss can become an easy solution when you first notice that you are losing hair. If you ignore this condition hoping it will go away, you are making a big mistake.

Hair loss is a reflection of your general health. It is a major warning that you have poor health. The poor health condition that you might have can be complex and to reverse it will require some work, since this condition has taken a while on your part to create. The other thing that complicates your poor health condition is that there might be a psychological or stress problem that needs correction.

The first thing you need to look at is if you have a lot stress going on. This stress can come from a recent or past change is your personal relationships. These relationships can be at home, with relatives or at work. You could be working late hours working on difficult problems that create a lot of pressure on you. It could be a divorce you going through or a financial crisis. These problems can be worked out but it takes patience and sometimes courage.

Psychological problems are more difficult to work through. These types of problems create a complete imbalance in your body's chemistry and over time create hair loss. Stopping hair loss from this condition requires therapeutic help and a good nutritional and diet program.

Any stress or psychological problems requires a base line of good nutrition and diet, if you want to stop their effects on hair loss. These problems create a massive depletion of vitamins and minerals that are needed for hair health. Some times it is difficult to get into the habit of eating food that you need to stop hair loss. Changing habits that have been instilled in you since birth are not easy to change. You have patterned you eating habits based on your psychological issues and the stress you have in your life.

If you are experiencing stress, than you need to start changing your diet to replace the depleted nutrients caused by stress. The first vitamin you need to supplement with is the B-vitamins. These vitamins are always used up when you are stressed and they are critical in providing you with good hair. Then, you need to supplement with anti-oxidants. Stress and psychological problems create a lot of free radicals in your body. These free radicals lead to poor blood circulation throughout your body and including your scalp.

Most of us have stress and psychological issue we need to take care of. Start looking at how you can reduce these issues and start supplementing with B-vitamins and anti-oxidants so you can prevent or stop hair loss. You can learn what foods contain the B's and anti-oxidants, but you need therapeutic levels of the B's and anti-oxidants and you can not get these levels from food. You need to get them from supplements.

2008年1月1日星期二

Mp3 Player Buying Advice

Music is one of the best sources of entertainment. It is music that can work wonders at times. Even medical science believes in the miracle of music, and incidents are not very rare where the so-called `music therapy` has cured diseases that medical therapy has failed to do. Hence, the popular propensity towards music has improved considerably.

However, this interest for music has increased in an unprecedented fashion ever since the market was flooded with gadgets like MP3/MP4 players and iPods. These gadgets are widely popular due to their portability. But, portability is not the only deciding factor that you should consider while buying an MP3 player. There are several other elements that have to be taken into consideration before buying an MP3 player.

1. What do you want an MP3 player for? Choose according to your needs, listening to music in your bedroom is different from doing so in the kitchen or living room. In such cases, go for an MP3 player with an optional stereo dock. If you want to listen to tunes during work-out, then opting for a flash-based MP3 player is a wonderful idea.

2. It is always a good idea to spend some time with the MP3 player in person instead of assuming that it would be as good as it is shown in the ads. Incase, you want to buy it online, visit an electronics store to physically handle it and see if it is suitable in all circumstances of your day-to-day activities.

3. Always make a research before by an MP3 player. You can read magazines such as CE Lifestyles or take the opinions of your friends, colleagues, acquaintances and relatives who may have used it before. It will save you a great deal of time and after-buy regret.

4. It always pays off if you carry a small notebook to compare different shops before buying an MP3 player. Note down the standard features of each edition or brand and take the decision on the basis of that.

5. Though buying an MP3 player online has its own advantages such discount, but when it comes to possibility of return and exchange, it is actually difficult doing so online. On the other hand, if you buy the same from an actual electronics store then you are most likely to get the exact model you want.

6. Check out the earphones to find if they are really compatible with your need or if you are feeling comfortable using them. Check the battery back-up capacity and other features as well. Besides, it is worth spending some time playing the MP3 player to get used to the functions and applications of player to prevent any possible future damage due to mishandling.

Tip 1 - Know your music files.

MP3 players can play music of different formats. Some popular digital formats are WMA, ATRAC3, OGG and AAC. However, not all MP3 players can play all formats. For example, if you buy songs from an iTunes store, they are in AAC file and your MP3 won`t play them unless its software favors these formats. Hence, knowing about this will avoid future tense and disappointments.

Tip 2 - Keep your music organized with ID3 tags:

ID3 tags enable you to store data along with your MP3 files such as title, artist, album, and track number. It also allows you to edit your PM3 ID3 tags using Windows XP or any other music software such as iTunes or Musicmatch Jukebox. ID3 tags are the best way to keep your music organized.

Tip 3 - Back up your digital music:

Be on the safer side by having a back-up of your purchased tunes against any unforeseen computer crash. Most online music store including iTunes do not allow redownload facilities to the purchased files.