Top Web Hosting Provider

You have been reading me blogging since past few months, and you must have read my post about moving from blogger to wordpress and the difficulties anyone would face. This was just about what you may need to take care of technically and on SEO front to set up a wordpress blog but if you are just starting from scratch, do you know there are few more difficulties in the line? Yes, I am talking about the one which I faced while setting up my own hosted websites and blogs.

I am sure you are not aware of the difficulties anyone would face, if it’s your first time setting a wordpress blog or simply forget about blog, difficulties in setting up your own hosted website. The difficulty is to choose the web hosting service! I will tell you the reason why it’s difficult; once you enter into the market of web hosting services, everyone looks cool, everyone offers millions of free domain names, a billion data bandwidth and trillion bytes of disk space. Won’t it be obvious for any new webmaster to get lost in it.


That’s where the reviews are born in this web world. You need to have a friendly website which will give you honest web hosting reviews and make sure you are getting the best deal and all freebies along with your hosting packages. For example, check this out - Free domain forever, Host unlimited domains, $50 Yahoo search marketing credit, 300 GB Disk space, 3 TB traffic for $6.95 per month - Sounds like a great deal, isn’t it? Yes, to me too. It’s just that I will take a step forward and read the independent review about this hosting service and see what experience other webmasters had with their great service. And yes, it certainly helped me to read these 10 independent reviews of the web hosting and make my decision in like 2 minutes.

I wish I could have known about http://webhostingrating.com before, and probably would have saved myself from lot of headache of selecting a web hosting that suits my needs and budget. As they claim, they have this list of 10 top web hosting services that are cheap professional web hosting services under $10 a month; all hosting plans include at least one free domain name registration and 30 day money back guarantee in their own words. I have used PowWeb and Yahoo in the past, and I shall go and add my reviews there as well so that rest of you will be benefited.

Everyone likes to get a second opinion. People and companies in need of web hosting services are no exception. If you find yourself in such a position where you need to find a source for web hosting, then you might take a look at WebHostgrating.com. Read on.

WebHostingRating.com has lists of web site hosting services to choose from, and they provide detailed information about each hosting company they mention. Some of the details they cover include whether a host supports any particular content management systems (CMS) such as web hosting, Wordpress hosting, or web hosting. They also mention whether or not a service provider has backup services, multiple domain support, Frontpage extensions, Windows or Linux servers, secure data connections, SSL (secure socket layer) certificates, and SQL database support. If you’re in the market for a web host then you may already be familiar with some of these terms.

Some categories are under supported. I found their 2009 lists for top Resellers, Windows, and Managed Web hosting to be empty at this time, but their 2008 lists had a few mentions in each category. There was no explanation for this, so I couldn’t tell if it was an editorial decision, or if there was a lack of guest input for 2009.

Another oddity on the site was the case of user reviews. Supposedly users of the various services could leave their own reviews and comments regarding the various hosting services. Each reviewer has a link attached to their name, but, strangely, on the few occassions I clicked on a hyper-linked name I found they only returned to the WebHostgrating.com home page.

I also found out that the address for WebHostgrating.com. (To find this out I went to Google.com and searched for “whois webhostgrating.com”. You can try this on any web address to find out who is the registered owner of the address.) Dmitry also owns the domain for WebHostingGeeks.com which I reviewed in an earlier post. WebHostingGeeks provides a similar service. I don’t know if Dmitry is the designer or manager of either of these sites. Regardless, I found the WebHostingGeeks.com site had more articles and more focused user reviews, but WebHostingRating.com had more detailed information about the companies thereby saving you a click or two per company listing.

Managing local group policy on Windows Server 2008 Core Edition

In Windows Server 2008 Core Edition, you can manage the group policy remotely through a MMC snap-in. To configure this, you’ll need to go through a few hoops. First, get a MMC snap-in pointed to the Windows Server 2008 Core Edition server. For a default configuration, you’ll need to configure Windows firewall to allow this traffic. This command will stop Windows firewall:

netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off

When the Group Policy configurations are finished, run this command to turn firewall back on:

netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state on

From a remote system, run MMC.exe, add the Group Policy Object, and point it to a remote system. Figure A shows a remote system being pointed by TCP/IP address.

Figure A

Click image to enlarge.

Once saved, the local console can interact with the remote group policy configuration of the core server. This can work in conjunction with a domain-based Group Policy configuration if applicable. Be sure not to overlap, as the domain configuration will override a local configuration by re-application. Permissions need to be in place for this to work correctly. This can include using domain-based credentials or passing administrative credentials manually with the ‘net use’ command.

The snap-in can be saved for future use, making it easier to access the core server’s local Group Policy easier. Figure B shows the snap-in being saved for the core server.

Figure B

Click image to enlarge.

Remember to turn the Windows firewall on if you turned it off. Now you’re finished!

It would be best to keep MMCs for the local Group Policy configuration of Windows core servers by computer name or IP address and store centrally for other administrators to access if required. This can save setup time for frequent access.