Unix Web Hosting and Linux Web Hosting

Top Unix Web Hosting Providers

What is Unix?
UNIX is a text-based, multitasking Operating System suitable for Web and network administration. Unix has spawned numerous popular spinoffs, including Linux and FreeBSD. Most Unix-based Operating Systems are open source, meaning the source code to the Operating System has been made freely available to the public for modification. Most Web hosting companies and resellers offer Unix hosting in some capacity or other.

What to look for in a Affordable Web Hosting company
When shopping for a Web host, a couple of things you want to keep in mind: Do they have good support and how is their uptime (meaning, how good are they at keeping your website up and running).

Do they have good support? You do want to have the best support possible. If you have a question, you want it answered, fast. I look for web hosts that have 24 hour support, if not anything else, at least 24 hour email support.

How is their uptime? Everybody can say they guarantee 99.9 % uptime, but are they just pulling your leg, find out for sure, ask them for statistics. Basically anyone with 99.5% uptime is good in our book. Mostly all the better host will give you that. Ensure that there is some sort of written agreement regarding service, which ideally will provide you with financial compensation in the event of failure.

What is Web Hosting?
A company stores your website on their servers and then displays that website on the internet. You can have a shared web hosting account for smaller web sites (many website on one server) or a dedicated server, for larger website with a lot of traffic (your own website on one server). You will need to purchase a domain name, without this, you can not be placed on the internet.

What is Monthly Traffic, Monthly Transfer or Bandwidth?
Basically, all three of these are the same, it just that web hosts like to call them differently, you will only see one of these being used on a plan. Here is what it means: Everytime your page is loaded, or you FTP a file to your site, traffic is generated. All the images on the page and the file itself are calculated. Your total transfer amount is the sum of all in-and-out-bound traffic (Web, e-mail and FTP). Here is an example; if all your pages added up to 1MB and 2,000 visitors viewed every page on the site, the total data transfer would be 2 GB (2,000 x 1 MB = 2,000 MB) or a single 50 KB file could be viewed 40,000 times and the data transfer would be 2 GB. On average, most start ups will use less than 2 GB bandwidth per month.

What is Disk Space or Disk Storage?
The amount of space you have on your account. All your images, HTML files, and all other files that make up your website are calculated to gove you your total disk space. Each hosting company gives you a maximum amount of disk space you are allowed. Usually it is far more than you will ever need. The better web hosts nowadays give you plenty of storage space.