Best Web Host - Advice On Choosing A Web Host

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Go Daddy SOPA Controversy - Enemy Of The People

Internet domain name registrar and web hosting company Go Daddy was recently embroiled in controversy when they came out in support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently under consideration in the United States Congress. Go Daddy, which was purchased in July 2011 by a small group of private equity firms in a deal valued at $2.25 billion, has now reversed course--somewhat--and now has publicly stated that they are neither in support nor in opposition to SOPA.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, which Go Daddy fully supported initially, is a law that will be harmful to the internet if it becomes law. The law would force web hosting companies, internet service providers, and webmasters to act as the police of the internet. Under the law as originally drafted, a copyright holder could get a court order to force companies such as payment processors and advertising networks to stop doing business with a website that is allegedly "enabling or facilitating" copyright infringement and prevent search engines from linking to those sites. Providers of DNS services could be ordered to stop resolving domain names to IP addresses for sites a court deems to be in violation of the Act. The maximum penalty for infringing on copyrights would be 5 years in prison. You can kill a person and get less time in prison than that.

In a nutshell, an entire website could be shut down if anyone on that site, including a forum poster, posts a link to a copyrighted file or image that is allegedly infringed.

Go Daddy is the enemy of the internet.

Citizens of the internet are not taking Go Daddy's actions lying down. A boycott of Go Daddy has begun. People are transferring domain names out of Go Daddy. Hopefully, people will be moving their web hosting to better companies as well. The fact of the matter is that Go Daddy's hosting sucks. It is terrible. Go Daddy is a notorious overseller. When I hosted my sites on Go Daddy, the server got slower and slower over time. Eventually, it was taking 20 seconds to generate one forum page, as indicated by the page generation time at the bottom of the page. It would take 30 seconds to load one page from click to render.

Then I moved to A Small Orange web hosting. I recommend A Small Orange highly. If you look over on the right side of this blog you will find some money-saving discount codes.

If you are a Go Daddy customer of domain name registration or web hosting or any of their other lousy services, please support the freedom of the internet and stop doing business with Go Daddy. Move your web hosting to another host such as A Small Orange (a great web host). Transfer your domain names to another registrar.

Go Daddy does NOT deserve your business. There are much better web hosts and domain name registrars that are opposed to SOPA and the harm it will do to the internet. Go Daddy sucks. There used to be a website called "No Daddy" that was set up a few years ago to warn people about Go Daddy. When the private equity firms bought Go Daddy, they also bought the NoDaddy.com domain name to silence the criticism.

The big private equity firms have a lot of money to lose if customers vote with their feet and leave for better domain and hosting providers. By virtue of their support of SOPA, Go Daddy does not deserve your business.

Transferring your domain names to a new registrar is not a complicated process. It can be accomplished in a few days without any disruption to your visitors. Two domain name registrars I recommend are Namecheap and GKG. I have used both and recommend both of them highly.

As for web hosting, you should transfer that out of Go Daddy as well. I recommend A Small Orange and, as you can see from this blog, I can not sing the praises of ASO highly enough.

Do the right thing and stop doing business with Go Daddy. Transfer your domain names and web hosting out of GoDaddy.com. The internet belongs to all of us.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Wordpress Upgrade Released

The developers of the popular Wordpress blogging program have just released an upgrade. The current version is Wordpress 3.3.

Among the new features is a drag-and-drop file uploader, hover menus for navigation, improved support for multiple article editors, and more.

All users of Wordpress should upgrade. While there were no security vulnerabilities in the prior version of Wordpress that I am aware of (version 3.2.1), it is a good idea to upgrade whenever possible to avoid getting hacked.

I upgraded my Wordpress blog this morning using the automated upgrader in the administration panel and it only took a few seconds. I had no problems at all.

Wordpress

Many people complain of Wordpress running slow on their server. Wordpress loads fast on my web host, A Small Orange. See the information on the right side of this blog for great coupon codes to save money on A Small Orange webhosting.

Namecheap Coupon Codes For December 2011

Namecheap coupon codes for money-saving discounts on domain name registration. Enter these coupon codes in the code box when making your purchase.

XMASJOY - Enter this discount code when registering a domain name to save.

WGSPECIAL - Get Whoisguard privacy protection for only $0.99 per year (save $1.89 per year). This will keep your personal information like your name, address, and phone number off your domain registration information when someone does a whois search.

SWITCH2NC - Coupon code to save $1 dollar for every domain name you transfer from another registrar like Go Daddy.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

The Best Web Host Ever!

The best web host is A Small Orange. If you are looking for a new web host or a competent, quality host to start your very first website, A Small Orange is right for you.

Click Here To View A Small Orange Hosting Packages

A Small Orange has professional hosting packages for everyone. Tiny inexpensive hosting accounts for hobby webmasters to professional business hosting services to Cloud, VPS, dedicated servers and everything in between. ASO is a great e-commerce host.

Coupon code: - Save a total of 15% of your initial order. This coupon code is best for bigger packages.
Coupon code: - Discount of $5 off your initial web hosting order. This coupon code is best for smaller packages.

Be sure to include the underscore character (_) in the coupon code!

Sign Up with ASO today and you will be glad you did! See the coupon codes above for money-saving discounts. I know you will be happy with A Small Orange web hosting as I am. :-)

The Best Web Host Ever!

As someone who has been creating websites since 2005, I know a few things about what makes a good web hosting company. A good web host is a joy to use and a bad web host is a frustrating, painful experience. I will share the important considerations when choosing a web host with you and tell you which one I use and highly recommend. The web host I have been using since June 2007 and the one I recommend very highly is A Small Orange.

I've tried a number of different web hosts and by far ASO is the best of the best. Whether you are a small hobby blogger looking for an affordable web host or a business or online store, A Small Orange has hosting services to meet your needs.

Click Here To View A Small Orange Hosting Packages

A Small Orange has professional hosting packages for everyone. Tiny inexpensive hosting accounts for hobby webmasters to professional business hosting services to Cloud, VPS, dedicated servers and everything in between. ASO is a great e-commerce host.

Regular discount codes:

Coupon code: - Save a total of 15% of your initial order. This coupon code is best for bigger packages.

Coupon code: - Discount of $5 off your initial web hosting order. This coupon code is best for smaller packages.

Be sure to include the underscore character (_) in the coupon code where necessary!

Learn from my experience and save yourself the time, hassle, expense, and hair-pulling frustration of picking a bad web hosting company. Comparison shopping web hosts and reading web hosting reviews can take you days. I will tell you why A Small Orange is the best and what they have to offer you. There is no better testimonial about the quality of a web hosting company than a long-term client like me. I would not have hosted my sites on ASO for years if they were not the best.

If you make the wise decision to sign up with A Small Orange I promise you will be happy. So does A Small Orange. ASO offers a 45-day money-back guarantee. If you are not satisfied with your hosting plan (next to impossible), ASO will give you a complete refund. You have nothing to lose and a great web host to gain!

What makes a good web host?
Why is A Small Orange the best?

There are a number of factors that separate good web hosts from the crowd of bad ones, and all are important. Let's face it, most web hosting companies out there today suck. As the cost of hosting packages has declined over the years, hosting companies have responded by cutting corners and by cramming as many accounts on a server as they can to wring every penny out of their equipment as possible. The quality of the hosting always suffers. These hosts are called "oversellers" because they sell more than they could ever possibly deliver. Slow-loading websites, clueless technical support, run-arounds and endless excuses, you can expect these headaches with most web hosting companies. But not with A Small Orange! ASO has differentiated itself from the crowded marketplace of oversellers promising the undeliverable by only offering what they can deliver and by providing top-notch support to its clients. A Small Orange's strategy has been successful as they continue to grow. As a result you the hosting client get the highest quality web hosting on the market today.

These are the features you should look for in a competent, quality web host and how A Small Orange meets the criteria.

Speed - A good web host should have fast servers. In our modern era, people are not going to wait 8 - 10 seconds or longer for a page view to be generated. They will leave your site in frustration at how slow it is. Even worse, Google is now using site speed as a factor in its search engine ranking algorithm. A slow-loading website can hurt you in the rankings, and that means less traffic coming to your site. A Small Orange servers are fast. Big bloated programs like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and even lesser resource hungry scripts like phpBB load quickly. My Wordpress blog hosted on A Small Orange can generate a page, return the content to my browser, and be fully rendered in 2 seconds. On my ASO account, I have used or tested Wordpress for blogging, Drupal and Joomla content management systems, and phpBB and SMF forums and all load quickly. Faster loading sites mean happier visitors and more page views. If you generate revenue from advertising on your site, you want as many page views as possible.

Competent Support - A Small Orange has a strong reputation for having the best customer support around. When the company was first started customer support was defined as one of its key competitive advantages. If you have any problems, you will get a prompt response from technical support and they will be working to solve the problem right away. You won't have to worry about having too many problems on A Small Orange. Their hosting is rock solid. And their tech support team knows their servers. If you have any questions about PHP configuration overrides, htaccess directives, and a whole bunch of other things they will get you an answer quickly.

Value - Naturally, people want to get the most for their money. ASO has competitive prices and, best of all, THEY DO NOT OVERSELL! You may find web hosts that are a dollar or two cheaper per month. But you get what you pay for. A Small Orange is worth every penny.

No Overselling - If you have never heard the term "overseller", you should do a search for it and some other well-known web hosts like HostGator, Go Daddy, BlueHost, DreamHost, and others. Overselling is when a web host promises "unlimited" resources. Many of the just mentioned web hosts are notorious oversellers. They promise "unlimited" disk space or "unlimited" data transfer (bandwidth). But in the real world, these resources are not unlimited. There is only a fixed amount of disk space and a limited amount of data transfer possible on a server. These deceptive oversellers appeal to those who are trying to get as much as possible for as little as possible. Oversellers operate on razor-thin margins and try to compensate by stuffing as many accounts on a server as possible. Inevitably, performance suffers. As more and more clients compete for limited resources, quality declines noticeably. The quality of customer support is bad. Web servers load pages slowly, and it is a frustrating experience. A Small Orange is not an overseller. They don't promise more than they can deliver. And they make sure there is plenty of extra capacity on a server so they don't run into situations where performance declines. If you see a web hosting company offering "unlimited" disk space or data transfer, run away. You do not want to do business with them. Oversellers are bad news.

Features - The features on A Small Orange hosting rival and exceed those of other hosts. As you would expect, you get visitor stats, email accounts, web-based email, and DNS, but you also get more than what some other hosts offer. A Small Orange uses cPanel as their web hosting control panel. cPanel is widely regarded as the best control panel available. Someone with no experience with web hosting will find cPanel to be intuitive and easy to use. ASO also allows users to make configuration changes to override server defaults. If you need more memory than the default allotment, you can increase it. And you can use mod_rewrite to rewrite URLs using htaccess files.

Host Many Domains - A lot of web hosts allow you to host only one or two domain names on an account then charge you extra for hosting more. Not A Small Orange! They know that hosting additional domain names does not take any additional resources, and they do not impose artificial limits to squeeze money out of customers. As long as you stay within the limits of your hosting account, you can host as many domains as you want. So if you get an idea for a website and register a domain name, you can host it on your account without having to worry about paying any additional fees. All of ASO's hosting packages allow you to host as many domains as you desire. This was one of the key features that drew me to A Small Orange in the first place.

High quality is worth paying for. With A Small Orange, you get high quality at reasonable prices. You get great service and support, lightning fast servers, knowledgeable and helpful technical support, and all the features you expect with high end web hosting. I have been with A Small Orange for several years and this is my web hosting review of A Small Orange.

Sign Up with ASO today and you will be glad you did! See the coupon codes above for money-saving discounts. I know you will be happy with A Small Orange web hosting as I am. :-)