Oh it was a panic situation for me just some minutes back. I got a mail from someone who was looking for Google AdWords Coupon. I have sent the related links and then after some minutes he responded that the links to my posts returned a 404 Error. I immediately checked that and find that all my posts returned a 404 Error. I thought everything was gone as it remind me a similar situation happened last month with PowWeb Web Hosting.

But this situation was even worse as I thought someone gained access to my HostGator account. Because the error pages contained Google AdSense ads and HostGator’s affiliate link. But then their support team told me that it is HostGator’s default error pages.

I contacted the HostGator Support team via Live Chat. I wait less than one minute and got the attention of a HostGator’s Support member. I explained the situation to him and within minutes the site is up again. It was a problem with the .htaccess file. They didn’t gave me the time to take a screen shot of the same before that the problem was resolved. Thumbs Up to HostGator Support!

Here is the Transcript of my chat with HostGator Support Team

HostGator Live Chat Transcript

info: Please wait for a HostGator operator to respond.
info: Welcome to HostGator Live Chat! You are now chatting with ‘William B’
William B: Welcome to HostGator, how may I assist you?
Mahesh: hi
Mahesh: am in a big trouble
Mahesh: check out my domain
Mahesh: http://www.minterest.com/
Mahesh: and click a post
Mahesh: it returns a 404 error
William B: Please wait while I check.
William B: I do see the error 404.  I am looking into this issue.
Mahesh: please be fast
Mahesh: something serious out there
Mahesh: i think someone has access to it
Mahesh: i see affiliate links
Mahesh: in error pages
Mahesh: those are not mine
William B: I am still looking into this issue Mahesh.
Mahesh: ok
William B: That is a standard error 404 page of hostgator.com.  
William B: http://www.minterest.com/2007/10/22/list-of-over-250-dofollow-blogs/ does not exist in the filemanager.
Mahesh: Oh ok
Mahesh: hey
Mahesh: no
Mahesh: it was available before
Mahesh: check this page
Mahesh: http://www.minterest.com/2007/08/17/free-google-adwords-promo-code/
Mahesh: i have visited that some 30 mins. back
Mahesh: and then I send that url to someone else
Mahesh: just before sometime
Mahesh: he told me that its retuning a 404 error
Mahesh: it was working correctly 30 mins back
Mahesh: u cant see that file manager
Mahesh: as its a blog
Mahesh: and am using WordPress
Mahesh: I guess its because fo some data base problem
Mahesh: please check it
William B: May I have the wordpress login information?
Mahesh: login is XXXXXX
Mahesh: password is XXXXXX
Mahesh: oh
Mahesh: yes
Mahesh: i can login to wordpress
Mahesh: so its not because of database i think
Mahesh: i had a similar situation earlier
Mahesh: at that time i deleted the database
Mahesh: but then the wordpress was not available
Mahesh: this case is strange
William B: One moment please.
William B: The issue is now repaired.  The issue was located in the .htaccess file.
Mahesh: Wow
Mahesh: which .htaccess file caused the problem?
William B: The .htaccess file was blank and caused the pages not to load.
Mahesh: which .htaccess file?
Mahesh: i mean the location
Mahesh: of that file
William B: The /public_html/.htaccess was blank and so was causing the issue.  We added this code to fix the issue.
William B: # BEGIN WordPress
William B:
William B: RewriteEngine On
William B: RewriteBase /
William B: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
William B: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
William B: RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
William B:
William B: # END WordPress
William B: /public_html/.htaccess
William B: You should backup that file so that you can easily fix this issue if it happens again.
William B: The missing code caued the permalinks to stop functioning.
Mahesh: ok
Mahesh: but now is that changed back to the same file
Mahesh: before i had an issue
Mahesh: ?
Mahesh: just want to make sure that none of the settings are changed
William B: Yes, we have fixed the .htaccess to include the necessary information for the permalinks to function properly.
William B: You should backup the .htaccess file and save it where you can restore the .htaccess if you experience this issue again.
Mahesh: Okay I understand that
Mahesh: and will do that
William B: Excellent.
Mahesh: I appreciate your quick support
Mahesh: I will blog about this incident
Mahesh: and will give a thumbs up to HostGator’s support team
Mahesh:
William B: Thank you.
William B: You’re welcome!
Mahesh: Thanks again
William B: We are always glad to assist.
William B: You’re welcome!

Related Links:

» The Most Reliable Web Hosting Companies on the Internet
» Ultimate Guide to Web Hosting, Review of Best Web Hosting Service Provider and its Coupon Code
» HostGator Web Hosting Review and Coupon Code
» HostGator Web Hosting Official Website

Today, it’s possible to host your site for as low as $1/mo. to as high as $50/mo. It depends on the disk space and bandwidth of your plan.

Features of a Web Hosting Service

Disk Space

Disk Space or server space is the amount of space (in MB or GB) you get to host your website on the internet. Most websites need less than 10 MB disk space. But it depends upon the type of website you are going to start.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data transfer per month in Gigabytes or even in Terabytes you get with your account. Now, what does it means to you? Let’s say your homepage is 50 KB in size including all graphics and text. Suppose your web hosting service gives you 5 GB monthly bandwidth.

Then it means that your web host allows a maximum of 100,000 visitors per month to your home page.

CGI Scripts

Make sure that the web hosting service you choose allows you to run CGI or Perl scripts.

Traffic Analysis

It’s important to analyze your traffic so make sure your host provides you a website statistics program which gives information about your unique visitors per day/month/year. And also about your traffic referrers i.e information about the source of your traffic.

Recommended Web Hosting Services

Never go for an unbranded web hosting company or web hosting services offered by members from forums. It’s because they don’t offer a reliable service. They may gain some customers today and may shut down their service tomorrow. Web Hosting Services offered by such members from forums are usually one-man web hosts. It means that the tech support, sales, billing and accounting are all done by a single person and he might be a reseller of a bigger hosting company. So never trust such people.

Now, I am going to introduce you three web hosting services namely GoDaddy, IXWebHosting and HostGator. Each of these web hosting company falls into a specific category. GoDaddy offers the cheapest web hosting service, IXWebHosting offers more features than the other two hosts. HostGator is my recommended web host and the most reliable web hosting company.

GoDaddy

If you are looking for a cheap web hosting service then I really recommend GoDaddy.com. Checkout their Economy Plan as well as Deluxe Plan.

Economy plan costs $3.99/mo. or $3.59/mo (12 months plan). It gives you 5 GB of disk space and 250 GB of bandwidth. It allows you to host only domain name.

Deluxe plan costs $6.99/mo. or $6.29/mo. (12 months plan). It gives you 100 GB of storage and 1,000 GB of bandwidth. Deluxe plan allows you host unlimited domain names. It means that you can host multiple web sites within a single account, sharing the same disk space and bandwidth.

Both the Economy and Deluxe plan comes with $20 Google AdWords Credit and $50 Microsoft adCenter Credit. If you don’t have a domain name then that is additional and it costs additional $1.99 if  you opt for annual plan or additional $6.95 if you opt for monthly hosting plan.

IX Web Hosting

IX Web Hosting is rated as the top web hosting company by several web hosting review sites. Checkout their Expert Plan and Business Plan.

Expert Plan costs $4.95/mo. and it allows you to host two domain names within a single account. It even offers you a FREE Domain Name. Expert plan gives you 300 GB web space and 3,000 GB bandwidth.

IXWebHosting’s most popular is their Business Plan. It comes with 2 FREE Domain Names and offers you 500 GB web space and 3,500 GB bandwidth, it allows you to host 8 domain names within a single account. Business plan costs $7.95/mo.

IXWebHosting offers you FREE marketing credits too. It gives you $50 Miva Credit, $25 Google AdWords Credit, $50 Yahoo! Credit, $50 BidVertiser Credit, and up to $100 ABC Search Credit with their Expert Plan. And with the Business plan you get all the above plus $25 additional Google AdWords Credit.

HostGator

HostGator is my favorite web host. HostGator is also ranked as the top web hosting company by several web hosting review sites. HostGator’s most popular plan is their Baby Plan. Read my full HostGator review here.

Baby plan costs $9.95/mo. It allows you to host unlimited domains within a single account. It comes with 100 GB disk space and 1,000 GB bandwidth. It is one of the most reliable web hosting company with excellent support.

HostGator doesn’t gives you FREE marketing credits. But never mind that as you can get all those credits for free from other source. I’ve coupons for $50 Microsoft adCenter Credit, $199 Yahoo! Search Marketing Credit and $50 Google AdWords Credit.

From My Web Hosting Experience

I have recommended HostGator web hosting in my last article The Most Reliable Web Hosting Companies on the Internet. But I didn’t tell you the reason why I recommend HostGator.

When I registered this domain name minterest.com I hosted the domain in my own reseller web hosting then it was a finance blog and last month I have redesigned  the website and made it a blog portal that covers all categories. I redesigned the website early august and I selected PowWeb as my web hosting provider.

Experience with PowWeb Web Hosting

After I sign up with PowWeb I was dissatisfied because their support is not so good and takes too much time for a response. Also their control panel is not cPanel based and moreover their Live Chat Support team is always busy, you hardly get a Live Chat support representative’s attention in 15 minutes (from my experience). If you need support by email then you have to login to the control panel and then write the mail from there and that also takes unusually longer time. As I use Google AdSense to monetize my blog I want to use AdLogger to track the clicks but I was unable to install that sucessfuly in PowWeb server the reason is unknow any way it failed. So I began to think about changing the host but then I didn’t have any idea about how to transfer my WordPress blog to another host. So I stick to PowWeb itself.

Then the worse happened, last week it was a terrible week for me, I deleted my WordPress database accidentally from my web host and that deleted all my blog posts, categories and I didn’t have any back up of WordPress. I contacted the Live Chat Support at PowWeb but they didn’t have any backup of my site or database even though I contacted them in 15 minutes after deletion happened.

Anyway now I have to republish my blog from scratch so I decided to change my Web Hosting Provider and I choose StartLogic as my new hosting service provider and then I changed the Name Server of my domain to that of StartLogic’s, even before I filled their Sign Up form. I did like that because I thought by the time I receive my Account Setup Information from StartLogic the domain name would propagate to StartLogic’s server so that I can start the work early.

Experience with StartLogic Web Hosting

So I signed up with StartLogic and contacted their support team via Chat and Email telling them to setup my account at the earliest but again the worse happened. Their database had a problem at that time and their support team told me that it will be resolved in two hours time. I became crazy! And I waited for a couple of hours, nothing happened and at last I decided to change the hosting again and planned about switching to HostGator Web Hosting. So I filled up the signup form and got their confirmation letter and in 3 minutes I got my account setup mail from HostGator. Yes, in 3 minutes! But the DNS has changed and it is now pointing to StartLogic I waited for some three hours and checked my domain http://ww.minterest.com but it was still poiting to StartLogic but when I checked just http://minterest.com it was pointing to HostGator so I began the work immediately by installing WordPress on my new host. Luckily I had only 42 posts in my blog and I used Windows Live Writer to publish the blog so I had 39 posts in my Laptop and then I collected the rest 3 entries from Google’s Cache. Thanks to Google Search as I got the categories, posts and the latest design from Google’s Cache as Google used to index my site every two days.Google’s Cache was important as the posts in my Laptop were outdated as I used to edit the posts online too. And at last after 12 hours of continuous work I collected all the data and uploaded my site to HostGator and my site became fully functional in less than 12 hours.

Experience with HostGator Web Hosting

I know HostGator for a long time and it’s my favorite hosting company. I believe HostGator is the world’s best web hosting company. And, I choose PowWeb and StartLogic at first because of their discounted price. When I signed up with PowWeb it was just $5.77/mo. but now its $7.77/mo. and for StartLogic it is $5.95/mo and earlier it was $6.95/mo. These prices applies when you pay opt for annual payment. HostGator too have a $6.95/mo. plan called Hatchling but that offers 99.5% uptime and not 99.9%. Again, in that plan only one domain is allowed to host. Moreover the Hatchling plan allows only limited Sub Domains, FTP Accounts and POP3 Email Accounts. In terms of storage and bandwidth it offers 50 GB Disk Space and 200 GB Bandwidth.

HostGator’s most valuable web hosting plan is their Baby plan which  offers 100 GB Disk Space and 1000 GB Bandwidth and it costs $9.95/mo. But is that really worth??? Let’s see!

I recommend HostGator’s Baby Hosting plan as it allows Unlimited Domain Names to host on a single account with out any setup fee. StartLogic charges a onetime $10/domain as setup fee if you want to host additional domain names and PowWeb too charges $25 for each additional domain name. These setup fees are not the domain registration fees and that is additional.

Other unique features of HostGator are that they allow Unlimited Sub Domains, Unlimited FTP Accounts, Unlimited MySQL  Databases, and Unlimited POP3 Accounts and they are cPanel based Web Hosting and offers Fantastico Deluxe Scripts which PowWeb and StartLogic lacks.

Now the most important feature of a web hosting company is their Support and Uptime. HostGator’s support is awesome. They offers 24 hours support via Telephone, Chat and Email. Most other web hosting companies offers support via email only during their day time. Support via email is the most important as if you have any tech related problem then the live chat team cant help you they will ask you to contact the tech team via email. HostGator’s offers email support 24 hours a day and you get fast response from them. They are really so fast that they answer your questions more quickly than other web hosts live chat team as they are always busy. Yes, HostGator also have Live Chat support and that also rocks I hardly wait for than 5 minutes to get a response from them when I wait for than 20 minutes to get the attention of an executive from other hosts.

HostGator offers 99.9% uptime they are so confident that if your site experience any downtime then they will refund your money and you can host for free.

After all account setup is really fast with HostGator I signed up with them on Sep 20, 2007 1:11 PM IST and I got the account information mail at Sep 20, 2007 1:14 PM. Yes! that’s in 3 minutes I got my account setup mail even though it was midnight in U.S.

Finally, HostGator’s billing is smart as they provide unconditional money back guarantee for 30 days. No questions asked! All you need to do is to fill their cancellation form. Don’t have a credit card? HostGator accepts PayPal too! Also, HostGator Web Hosting Provider have a fixed rate for its baby plan. No matter you pay monthly or annually it’s $9.95/mo. always. YES! You can pay the hosting fee monthly (not for the $6.95/mo. Hatchling. HostGator doesn’t charge any setup fee for any of their hosting and offers you the option to pay the hosting bills monthly when others charge setup fee of US$ 10-100 when you pay your bills monthly.

The only complaint I have is that HostGator don’t give a FREE Domain with their hosting plans even if you pay them annually. Otherwise it’s the perfect web hosting company. But that doesn’t matter as you can get a Domain Name for just $1.99 from Yahoo! Domains and all you need to do is to change the name server of that domain to the one that of HostGator. It’s that simple!

HostGator Web Hosting Discounts & Coupon Code

HostGator have only one coupon code as of now which gives you a discount of a flat $9.94.

Try HostGator Web Hosting FREE for One Month!

Do you want to try HostGator BABY Plan for FREE? Simply follow the link below and enter the coupon code “JURY” without quotes that gives you a discount of $9.94. And you pay just 1 Cent for your first month of hosting. If you are not satisfied then you can cancel before one month and can ask for a refund of that 1 Cent too.

So, What Exactly Are You Waiting For? Sign Up HostGator!!!

Today I came across the website Netcraft.com. Which lists the most reliable web hosting companies in the world. It sorts the list according to the number of failed requests and connection time. It means they sorted the list according to their uptime, number of failures and reliability.

I’m really a bit surprised to see that list because I didn’t see the names of some web hosting companies which I assumed as the world’s best web hosting provider.

I thought these were the top five web hosting companies:

1. Yahoo
2. Network Solutions
3. GoDaddy
4. iPowerWeb
5. HostGator

When I browsed the list, surprisingly a company called INetU has topped the chat and is ranked number one and a company called New York Internet is the second. These two companies are not new to the list they topped the charts several times. Now, the third one is new to that list it’s Acens.

Top 10 Web Hosting Companies by Netcraft:

1. INetU Inc.
2. New York Internet
3. Acens
4. Easynet
5. iPowerWeb
6. GoDaddy
7. DataPipe
8. Netcetera
9. WebFusion
10. SwishMail

Want to see the full list of the best hosting providers? Then Visit Netcraft’s best Web Hosting providers list for the month of August 2007 here!

As you probably know there are many web hosting review sites on the internet and if you visit their websites then you may notice that none of the above web hosts other than GoDaddy and iPowerWeb are in their top web hosting companies list.

I used Google to search the term “Web Hosting” and the first result was Web Hosting Blue Book which reviews the Top 10 Web Hosting Companies. Then I Google search for the keyword “Web Hosting Review” and I clicked the first sponsored link for that keyword which directed me to The Hosting Chart.

Now, Which are the Top 10 Web Hosting Companies according to these two web sites.  Let’s see!

Top 10 Web Hosting Companies by Web Hosting Blue Book:

1. Host Monster
2. StartLogic
3. IX Web Hosting
4. InMotion Hosting
5. BlueHost
6. Globat
7. Lunarpages
8. Yahoo! Web Hosting
9. HostGator
10. GoDaddy

Top 10 Web Hosting Companies by The Hosting Chart:

1. IX Web Hosting
2. Host Excellence
3. Dot5Hosting
4. Vista Pages
5. BlueHost
6. AN Hosting
7. Lunarpages
8. 1 and 1 Hosting
9. iPowerWeb
10. Host Monster

Top 10 Web Hosting Companies from Google Search Results:

1. Site Ground
2. Yahoo! Web Hosting
3. 2MHost
4. Network Solutions
5. FortuneCity
6. iPowerWeb
7. UK Web Hosting
8. Bravenet
9. Bizhostnet
10. HostGator

So I guess you noted that the Top Web Hosting Companies by Netcraft is not listed in Google Search Results, Web Hosting Blue Book, and The Hosting Chart. Now which web hosting service should you choose from the above?

I really recommend HostGator. Wanna Know WHY? Click Here!

Problems With a Bad Web Hosting Company

The main problem with a bad hosting company is that they host a large number of domains on a single server and that affects the reliability of their services and it overloads the server and may cause downtime.

If your site is down then you may lose potential customers and the search engines may not be able to crawl the site.

(more…)

Get your website online today! Netfirms provides the tools you need to make building and hosting your business website quick and easy.

 

$10 for one full year of Netfirms Advantage Hosting!

2 FREE Domain Names

20GB 250GB of disk space

750GB 2,000GB data transfer per month

Host Unlimited websites with a single account!

Support for PHP, Perl, and MySQL

24-hour technical support

Easy Setup and Management

• Simple one-click installation of e-commerce and blogs
• Share your photos online with Netfirms Picture Pro
• Easy to use web-based account management with Control Panel XL6
• Website visitor statistics, raw log files, access management

E-mail and Security

• 500 e-mail addresses that match your domain
• Spam and virus filtering
• Web-based e-mail (WebMail) and POP3 e-mail (Outlook)

Technical Features and Reliability

• Your website hosted on an enterprise class clustered platform
• Multiple data centers ensure that your website is always available
• Same trusted infrastructure that keeps millions of websites up and running

Netfirms hosts more than 1 million websites, e-commerce stores and blogs, and serves more than a billion page views a month. You can rely on Netfirms to handle your most advanced hosting needs.

Special offer expires September 30, 2007. Offer includes the full Advantage hosting plan with all of its standard features, including free .com domain names. Offer valid for new account activations only.

Source: Netfirms