Ask Mr Hosting collects REAL user reviews of web hosting providers from around the web, with NO bias, and posts them here with a link to the originating site. Instead of reading reviews from us, which may be biased due to monetary connections, read comments from forums and blogs about each web host.

Getting started:

For advice, tutorials, and help, read our web hosting help section.

If you are a regular user who would like a hosting account for your own website, you probably want shared hosting.

If you are a business looking for a business hosting account, try looking at business hosting.

If you are looking for a little more power than a regular user, but not enough to pay for a dedicated server, then you probably want virtual private server hosting.

If you are just looking for an eMail-only hosting account, check out email hosting.

For dedicated hosting, try dedicated hosting.

Or browse our other categories to the right.

Google has a good quick guide to the more common types of hacking attacks made on typical websites.

They cover SQL injection:

SQL injection is a technique to inject a piece of malicious code in a web application, exploiting a security vulnerability at the database level to change its behavior.

Attacks on content management systems:

Many web applications are built around big communities, offering constant support and updates.

And how to spot non-obvious attacks, such as spam:

They can also exploit a site for spamming, such as by hiding links pointing to spammy resources or creating pages that redirect to malware sites.

This very site has been hacked twice, fortunately by "conscientious hackers," but keeping up to date on potential security flaws is critical. Read the whole article here.

One of the core factors of getting your website to the top of the search results is getting other websites to link to it; this is seen as a "vote" of confidence for your site. The more websites you can get to link to you, the better. One good way of doing this is in offering great content and then spreading the word around that it exists, and other websites, finding this content useful (or funny, controversial, etc) will link to it.

With the dawn of bloggers and social networks, there are some new strategies in town. One of these is to create content that panders to the ego of the potential site owners that will link to you. On SEOMoz there is a good article about this:

• Twitter users, forum posters and bloggers all like to link to things that will make their visitors/audience appreciate them and come back to them
  
• Social media users want to vote on things that excite them, inspire them or amuse them (the last one appears particularly strong). The ease of consumption plays a big role here, too - the faster something is to digest and enjoy, the more Stumble thumbs, Diggs and votes it earns. More complex pieces don't earn that ability with the same ease.
  
• Site owners, particular those in the SMB or personal website arena are incented to link to stories and content that backs up their point of view or re-inforces a long-held or long-argued position.
  
• People everywhere want to link to things that show off how cool/impressive/important/interesting they are

Read the full article here.

WebHostingSearch has an excellent guide to domain names; in fact, probably more than you need to know. But you'll find out about the history of DNS, the dos and don'ts in choosing a domain name, registrars, and transferring. Read the whole article here.

We'd like to interject a little though. We highly believe that choosing a brandable domain name is much more important that choosing a name with your keywords in it. A company called Lending Tree is well known and trusted, but what about Best-Loan-Offers-Online.com? Would you trust a company with a name like that? Maybe, maybe not, but it has a chincy sound to it.

Go with a brand, not a keyword.

Color schemes should not be chosen at random; some colors go together well for certain reasons. For instance, colors opposite each other on the color wheel generally go together well, but there are tons of other schemes as well.

For an excellent list of tools that will help you decide, check out Lunarpages blog.

Web Hosting Geeks has a good article on what to look for in a colocated hosting company. It covers the obvious, such as knowing what you want before hand to avoid being pressure-sold to, but also offers some other simple tips on things to keep in mind. Read more here.

The Planet Hosting is now offering an affordable cloud storage distributed method for its existing customers. In the past, this method has been expensive, but now has become affordable for the average customer. Read more about it at Web Hosting Geeks.

With the advent of Blogger and similar sites, anyone can create a blog for free and host it for free by barely lifting a finger. But are their advantages to purchasing a domain name and paying for hosting? You bet! For instance, branding is becoming more and more important as the line between the offline and online worlds blur. Web Hosting Mindhere.
has an article describing several other reasons you may want to consider in deciding between free and paid. Read the full article

Web Hosting Geeks has an article about the increasing popularity of content management systems. These are terrific programs that allow you to build a large social website and add to it seamlessly, without having to know any HTML or CSS coding. And the best part is, most of them are 100% free! Web Hosting Geeks report that...

...due to mass popularity, web hosting customers with a large amount of content now have various options for implementing content management systems. With the development of open-source solutions, providers are offering these programs for next to nothing as a part of their monthly hosting plans. Some of the options you will commonly find are Joomla, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, Mambo and Xoops to name a few.

Read the rest here...

What is a parked domain name? If you buy a domain for future development, you can just "park" it and sit on it until you are ready to build a site, in order to keep cybersquatters from purchasing it. Another option, however, is to add advertising to it and have it dynamically update the ads to pull in revenue while it is parked. David's Web Hosting talks about parking domain names on his blog.