JPstream Blog

Official Blog on Web Hosting, Web Design, Email Hosting, SEO

Top 9 Web Hosting Question

1. How often do you back up the files?

The answer you should be looking for is that they backup every night. You should also keep a up to date copy of your site on your computer to be on the safe side.

2. What sort of equipment and software are in place to ensure that my site is up?

Most Internet Hosting Companies use some combination of equipment and software to ensure that the servers are up and working. You want to make sure that the server is hooked up to an UPS (uninterrupted Power Supply). The UPS is just a big battery that will provide the server with power for 30 minutes to several hours. Also most Hosting Companies have software and equipment that monitors the servers and restarts them if they quit serving pages. You will also want to know if this fails, does the company have a way to restart the server manually.

3. How many domains can I host per account?

If you have 2 domain names, say momotaro.com and kintaro.com, and wanted them to both go to the same site, would they charge you extra for the domain names or since it all goes to one site will you be charged just for one. If you plan on hosing several sites to see which ones will be successful, you might want to ask for a volume discount or ask if they have a reseller package.

4. What are their billing policies?

You need to find out who to contact if you have a problem with billing and what is the process for resolving problems.

5. What is the procedure for uploading files to your account?
You want to know if you will have 24 hour FTP access. Some hosting companies restrict how you can upload files to the servers.

6. Do they provide log files or Stats?

Hosting companies usually do one or the other, either provide you with the raw logs for you account or provide you with some sort of online statistics. You will want to make sure that the logs contain information from search engines on the words and phrases used, how long the visitor stayed at the site, entry page, number of page visits, broken links and errors, and exit page.

7. Do they provide Form to email processing?

Nearly every hosting company will provide atleast a basic form of this. You will want to know if there are any limitations on the size of the form. Also you might want to ask if there is a way to encrypt the form. If so you could use this for an ecommerce solution until you are ready for a shopping cart.

8. What exactly is included in the monthly charge?

You want to know what the features of the account are, but you also want to know if you need them to do something extra whether there will be a charge for it.

9. How quickly they respond when you have questions?

Before choosing a hosting company call them up or email them with a question and see how quickly they have an answer for you.

JPstream is an award winning web hosting company with years of experience with the best infrastructure to host your application and mission-critical data in Japan to Asia.

All About Dedicated Hosting Provider

Unless overtly listed otherwise, most web hosting packages you‘ll come across in your search are what are called shared hosting providers. What this means is that the server or servers that host your website are simultaneously hosting numerous other websites also. This gives you a discounted rate on web hosting services in exchange for tolerating certain technical constraints, like bandwidth, disk space, upload and download speeds, security and privacy, traffic, and probably the most notable restriction — total control.

If you want total control not only over the administration of your website but also over the very hardware and software used to run it, then you should be evaluating not shared hosting providers, but dedicated hosting providers. If your business is large enough or growing fast enough that it requires its own internet connection and server, you may need a dedicated web host.

What‘s the downside to going with dedicated hosting providers? In a word: responsibility. In most areas of life, with total control comes total responsibility, and it‘s no different with hosting providers. With a dedicated server, the onus is on you to buy, install, and maintain the actual equipment — the server itself — mounted in the dedicated hosting providers‘ data center.

Fortunately, you still get the benefit of their presumably top-notch, around-the-clock security over the physical premises, but you remain fully responsible for the security of your cyber-premises. Likewise, dedicated hosting providers will ensure that the systems in the building are all provided with redundant uninterruptible and backup power and environmental controls, but it‘s you who must keep your machines and cables maintained and functioning in this idyll environment.

How do you identify whether it‘s time to switch from a shared host to a dedicated host? There are 3 main indicators to stay alert for:

Speed

If the traffic streaming through your shared server is slowing down your customers‘ pace as they browse your site (or your employees, if an in-house site), it may simply be time to look for more unencumbered shared hosting. But if you‘ve tried several shared hosting providers with the same results, then it may be time to remind yourself how impatient the average web surfer is. While you‘re jumping from shared host to shared host trying to save a buck, your customers are jumping ship. Your ability to respond promptly and effectively to customer transactions and inquiries cannot be overemphasized either.

Reliability

The limits to your control are nowhere more apparent than in the areas of reliability and security. It’s not simply that problems can arise: problems do arise. It‘s the nature of the biz. And if you don‘t have unlimited access to your own operating system, software and database apps, etc., there‘s not much you can do when one arises.

Customizability

If your company is growing fast, you‘re going to be changing many aspects of your web presence along with it. You may regularly need to tweak your disk space and bandwidth and experiment with using different applications to better serve your changing needs. On a shared host, upgrading in such a way usually involves leaping from one package or plan to another. These packages are generally preset and may or may not serve your immediate needs. They may be riddled with programs you don‘t yet need, for example, yet lack in the one singular program you do. Or the next leap up from your current plan has way more disk space and bandwidth than you need at the moment. With a dedicated server, you can make changes incrementally, step forward, step back, heck, step sideways if you need to — and when you need to.

In large part, it‘s the size and growth rate of your business that will dictate whether you need a shared or dedicated host. Affordability and personal time commitment are nice secondary considerations, but if your business is booming, you would do it a great injustice to try and save on a few bucks and few extra hours per week of your time in exchange for slower and poorer quality of service for your customers.

By the same token, however, if your business is small enough to function quite smoothly on any of the shared hosting providers out there, don‘t squander your precious capital on a dedicated server just so you can have total control. Because sometimes total control isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

How to Market Your Domain Name

Domain Names and Anchor Text

Branding vs Naming

Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name should not be generic.
The truth of this matter is that branding is more developed by how you interact with people than by what your name is. Your name can be used to help develop brand, but many smart webmasters use their domain name for more than just branding.


Superstar Websites
 People take the branding idea one step further and rattle off some of the best technological leaders. Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, etc.

None of these sites say what they do in their site name.
Google is so powerful because it is the only Google. It was a wide open market. Yahoo! became Yahoo! because there was no great well marketed directory on the web. Ebay became Ebay because nobody else had a PEZ trading marketplace and it’s creators wife needed a place to trade her PEZ. (Ebay is yet one more great thing we all owe to PEZ).
Business Facts
Most successful businesses or websites will not be like Google.

Most will not be a runaway technological success. Most businesses become successful from soft innovations. Small focused consumer centric changes can help you craft a successful business model.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is extremely important to search engines. What a link says is as important as who is saying it. When I link to your site with the words “I eat cats” as the link text a search engine will evaluate that link and assume you eat cats.

You can’t control all the links you get (meow), but you can help control some of them. People often link to you using the words in your domain name as the link text (also known as anchor text.) If your domain name has your primary keywords in it then you have an extremely powerful business advantage over your competitors.


Using Dashes in Domain Names
 
Most of the benefit of dashes in the domain name have eroded in the last year or two. Domain names themselves have been greatly devalued in search engine algorithms, and most links use the site name vice the domain name as the anchor text.

I am of the opinion that you usually can pick out a keyword rich domain name without needing dashes. It may take a bit of creativity and a bit of time, but it is possible. If you are aiming to sell products vice become a consultant you may be able to do well making a living from search engine traffic and not need as strong of a branded name behind your domain.

Brandable Generic Domain Names

High quality directories usually prefer to list sites by their name vice “insert keyword phrase here.”
Having a domain name like mine makes it very easy for me to get inbound links with “SEO Book” or “Search Engine Optimization Book” as the link text. This allows me to rank better for those search phrases, and eventually it will allow me to rank good for “SEO” and “search engine optimization.”

All About Cloud Hosting

Otherwise known as cloud computing, cloud hosting is a process that involves the combination of a number of servers for the sole purpose of providing a more stable hosting solution. This is a more commonly used hosting system as it maximizes the use of the available resources as opposed to other systems.

The idea of combining several servers together was preferred as it improves the overall performance of all servers and the output is much better. Generally, the process involves an advanced form of web hosting that is designed to massively increase its hosting power whenever you have a huge traffic on your website.

By so doing, the visitors do not have a difficult time navigating through the site and they end up getting to fulfill their mission of visiting the site. The server design is quite resourceful as it lowers the hosting power when there isn’t much traffic so as to avoid wastage .

Cloud computing is entirely useful as in as much as it is effective in its operations, it is also cheap to have. The system works like the prepaid electricity billing method where you only pay for what you use. You will get to save on human resources costs as you don’t need to hire someone to take care of the servers for you. Another thing to say goodbye to are installation and maintenance costs as there is no such thing in cloud computing. There is no doubt that cloud computing has indeed gone mainstream . In as much as not every of its aspects is entirely perfect, there are quite a number of services that it is able to deliver successfully . That is why there is growing popularity on the use of the cloud hosting service .

The load of the servers is entirely taken care of by the combination of several servers. The system ensures that the work at hand is shared and none of the machines on the shared platform is left idle or overworked. This is a great idea to avoid a failure of the system, should any of the servers fail. By switching your systems to use the cloud computing technology, crashing servers will be a thing of the past .

Under cloud computing, the server to be used is never set up at the customer’s location. The servers are randomly distributed so that there is absolutely no chance of them experiencing any faults and should that arise, the system will work just fine without shutting down.

JPstream offers shared Cloud hosting service popularly known as Cloud Sites. With full redundancy and high uptime guarantee, it provide next generation hosting for web site with high requirement. Cloud Sites only starts from ¥ 990 monthly.

Dedicated Server Your Perfect Web Hosting Choice

Hosting your personal or business web sites on your own dedicated server may seems expensive choice in comparison to shared web hosting, but at the end, it proves a smart choice.

Shared web hosting, no matter how well managed, cannot be 100% reliable and stable. However if you have your own dedicated server you can manage to avoid most of the variables affecting the reliability and stability of a server, commonly experienced by shared hosting accounts; variables such as: overload, bad codes and scripts from other users (especially beginners); and, too many applications and components uploaded, and so on.

On a dedicated server you will install only software and applications you want to use, while on a shared hosting server you will find a host of other software and applications installed for other users.

By the very nature of the account, a dedicated server: reduces your dependency on the web host; and bypasses time delays and possible expenses incurred from these. With dedicated server hosting you can provide instant support to your own clients whenever required, which is not possible if you are on a shared server. A reliable and fast support service is vital for your own business growth just like the stability and reliability you wish for your own website. In business, reliability is reflected through word-of-mouth as one of the most effective promotional activities.

For people with clients, such as Graphic Designers and Web Designers a dedicated server is invaluable. A dedicated server will bring extra income into the studio, not just as a hosting facility, but, as a designer knows only too well, for the extra ‘bread and butter’ income value. If you have 24hour access to your own dedicated server then you can adjust, correct or update a clients website in minutes, allowing you to keep the dollar back in your studio and not in someone else’s. Ready availability results in reduced labour costs for the client, but higher studio-income frequency for the designer. Hence you will see the return of all your regular offline clients, bringing their web work with them.

The need for a dedicated server to your average shared server user is realized when stats tell you: how quickly people left your site because it was taking too much time to download; or how many daily visitors you are down by, because your site was not up. The true negative is the worry of how many lost visitors could have been your future paying-customers. The loss could easily equal the value of the upgrade to a Dedicated Server!

For a business, a website that is quickly downloadable and up all the time gives the visitor encouragement that your service is just as reliable, hence you will be more likely to make a sale. It will also enhance the company’s image and encourage existing customers to refer your service to others. This will result in more sales for less promotion.

If you are serious about your online presence you need to get a Dedicated Server.

http://www.jpstream.net

What is IMAP and what are its specific advantages over POP3?

IMAP stands for “Internet Message Access protocol) - a email service which helps accessing your mailbox from different computers and locations. The IMAP service allows the user to download only the message headers and decide if they want to actually download the rest of the message and the attachments.

IMAP was designed to overcome some problems with POP behavior and provide more features for delivery and management of e-mail. With IMAP, mail is kept on the mail server and is managed there by a series of commands sent to the server by your client. Copies of messages and attachments are transferred to a email client only when one request them.

By default, only descriptive information about your messages is sent to your client. This works very well over slow links or for access from devices with limited computing or storage capacity such as a PDA, mobile phone or dialup internet access.

This feature makes downloading large attachments on a slow connection more manageable and efficient. In addition, the IMAP service provides folders for the user to store emails and attachments on the server so that they can retrieve those stored messages when they log into the server from different computers.

In practical areas where POP is weak, with respect to online/disconnected operation, are strengths for IMAP, since online access was its original design center. These new features provide powerful benefits that allows the user to create folders for received and sent messages to be retrieved from any computer.

The advantages of IMAP is that it is more feature-rich and allows you to read your e-mail from any location and any device with IMAP support.

Some specific advantages of IMAP over POP include:

* Robust folders for storing received and sent messages
* Freedom for user to download attachments at will
* Provision for determining message structure without downloading entire message.
* Selective fetching of individual MIME body parts.
* Server-based searching and selection to minimize data transfer.
* Ability to append messages to a remote folder.
* Ability to set standard and user-defined message status flags.
* Support for simultaneous update and update discovery in shared folders.
* New mail notification.
* Ability to manipulate remote folders other than INBOX.
* Remote folder management (list/create/delete/rename).
* Support for folder hierarchies.
* Suitable for accessing non-email data; e.g., NetNews, documents.
* In IMAP, when a client program performs any operation on a mailbox, the server will automatically include in its response notification of any new messages that have arrived since the last notification.
* IMAP’s ability to manipulate remote folders other than INBOX is fundamental to online and disconnected operation. This means being able to save messages from one folder to a different one, being able to access archived messages subsequently, and allowing for multiple incoming message folders.

Premium Email Hosting

Web Design Firm Can Be Successful Web Hosting Reseller

By becoming a reseller, not only can web developers create websites for their clients, but they can provide their clients web hosting, as another studio service. All you need to become a reseller, is to find a web host who: offers multiple website hosting accounts; along with reseller services; and then its up to you to host your clients’ web sites from your own account. Your clients will be happy with the low fees you can offer; and, you will have yourself a very profitable side business.

So what do you need to be a successful website hosting reseller?

Multiple domain hosting - To become a web hosting reseller, the first step is to get yourself a multiple domain account. For example, if you take out an account that allows up to 6 websites (or domains), you can use one of the domains for development of your own site; and, still have 5 domains to allocate to your clients sites. All you need to do is pay your regular fee to your web host; then, you can charge your clients what ever you like.

Control Panel - It is preferable to have full administrative control over your client’s web sites. Make sure that, not only does your web host provide you with a control panel that includes full administrative facilities to easily manage your multiple account, but that your host provides your clients with their own control panel too. Most importantly your web host should give you the facility to “hide your web hosts identity” so clients are unaware that you are offering a third party service. Ensure that you can customize your clients control panel to suit your own requirements.

Terms and conditions - Terms and conditions are essential when offering any service, ensure that all your clients have a copy of your terms and conditions. Many resellers forget to create their own terms and conditions, as they are often very time-consuming to write. If you ask a web host you will find that some of them will either let you copy theirs or they will just supply you with terms and conditions specifically written for this purpose.

Fast and reliable support - Fast and reliable, service and support, is essential, from your web hosting company. If something happens to your client’s web site it is important to be able to get the problem solved as soon as possible. You don’t want clients being unhappy with your hosting services, as this will reflect badly on your other services too.

Reselling can be a very profitable side business if you find the right host. It may take up some of your time, however, if you put the time and effort into providing a little bit extra in your services, not only will your clients be a lot happier you will have a rewarding total web services business.

JPstream Reseller Plans

Cloud Hosting or Dedicated Hosting?

At nearly all webhosting companies websites now a days, you will see the two terms “Cloud Hosting” and “Dedicated Hosting”. What is the difference between these? Well its fairly simple.

On a Shared Cloud Hosting network you have your website placed on a computer (The webserver), that has other websites on it - anywhere up to 350 or more. This has a number of down sides, such as being slower, less secure, as well as giving you less access to edit things on the server, such as installing & updating the system software. One the plus side however, it is much cheaper then going for a dedicated server, as well as being easier to administer.

On a Dedicated Server, you have the entire machine to yourself. This is fast, secure and you have full control. You can install any program your heart desires and update programs as often as you wish. This is a good choice for sites that get a lot of visitors, use a lot of system resources (through the use of CGI scripts), if you are holding very important data, or if you need special software that is not available on virtual servers.

  • To sum it up, you need a dedicated server if ::
  • Your site gets so many hits your Virtual Server account cannot handle it.
  • You want to host many sites on the one server.
  • You need a feature that is not offered on a Virtual Server.
  • You require a high level of security.

JPstream offers highly reliable dedicated server on our high speed network as well as cloud hosting for daily business email communication. Contact us today to see how we can assist with your business.

Six reasons to not choose cheap web hosting

Of course nobody wants to spend more than they have to when purchasing anything, and for this exact reason there are many businesses providing cheap services for people. This includes web hosting. There is a difference between cheap web hosting and low-cost web hosting. Cheap is where there can be serious issues, whether it be with support or poor quality servers. Below are six reasons for not choosing cheap hosting.

1. In order for web hosts provides you with very cheap hosting they must make cuts so they can profit. These cuts tend to mean that the service offered is not good quality. Hosts will ram lots of web hosting accounts onto one server which can degrade it greatly.

2. Cheap Web hosting tends to apply limits on how much bandwidth and server space you can use. Of course, this can be a big problem if you have a large website as it means slower speeds and less space for you to host your files.

3. As you may or may not know, Google can be very helpful for driving traffic to your website. Google doesn’t like slow websites, so keep that in mind as it may mean less visitors for you.

4. Server security is very important. When the hosting is so cheap that staff aren’t hired security tends to lack. Low security means that people may attempt to hack into your website cause havoc.

5. Server downtime is an absolute nightmare. If your site will not load then customers can’t use it, which means a loss of revenue. Cheap web hosts will use bad hardware, which could mean lots of downtime. Another thing is cheap web hosts will not hire lots of staff, so when there is downtime it will take a long time to get it back up.

6. Technical support is very important when choosing web hosting, as a lot of things can go wrong and you may not know what to do. Cheap web hosts will not hire lots of support staff, if any at all, as they eat away at their profit. Without support staff you could be left with a broken website, which in turn will lead to the loss of profit.

Since 1994, JPstream has been powering more than 25,000 clients worldwide with superior network connectivity and highly reliable cloud computing hosting with fail-over capability. We have empower thousand of businesses every day to their business success. Learn how JPstream Internet can help you with your business today.

VPS Hosting Advantage

If you are relatively new to web hosting, then some terms like VPS web hosting (Virtual Private Servers) may sound like a foreign language to you. But as you spend more time on the web doing business or research, you will eventually learn about it. And once you’ve learned about it, you will then realize how much you need it for growing your business or improving your website.

To begin with, the VPS is an arrangement where you and other clients of the provider share the same server resources. The server is normally split into smaller ones but although divided, each one has its own operating system. This means, all of them can be rebooted independently if needed.

VPS webhosting is the opposite of dedicated hosting where you will pay the provider for the entire server and use it for your own convenience. With dedicated, you don’t have to share the server with others. So, if this is the case, why must you go with VPS Hosting?

Well, VPS web hosting is the most excellent alternative that you can get out there if you don’t like the idea of having to contend with server instability that’s commonly associated with shared web hosting. Additionally, if you don’t think that the high price of dedicated hosting doesn’t give good reasons for going dedicated, then VPS is for you.

Yes, you can save money for choosing cheap shared hosting, but it will not give you the kind of traffic that you need to make your site profitable. But if you will spend a bit more money every month, be sure that the service that you get is worth exactly what you’ve paid for.

Alternatively, the dedicated hosting is pretty costly and there’s no sense in paying more especially if you don’t really require all of those extra resources that comes with dedicated hosting. In conclusion, with VPS hosting, you will surely get what you’ve paid for. You can choose from the array of plans that is best suited for all your needs. Also, you can make the most of its quality hosting services as well as stable server at a price lower than dedicated hosting. Definitely, VPS is one good investment to have.

(Source: jpstream.net)