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Best cheap web hosting providers

After I started maintaining quite a few blogs I have been asked this question several times, and my answer has remained the same ever since I hosted my first website. Initially I was using blogspot for my blogs, but when I realized the benefits of having a proper domain name, i registered through  the default host of Blogspot, godaddy.com.

And when i realised advantages of using WordPress for my blogs, I had to make a choice of webhost. So I researched a little and found that godaddy.com was the cheapest available option andtheir hosting was also the feature packed. It even supported Java (deploying WAR files) in a PHP hosting account.

Its almost three years since I hosted my first website with them and not a single minute  did I have a downtime or performance issues. The basic hosting used to cost 3$ but now it costs 5$ with  unlimited domains (any number of subdomains and domains), 10 different SQL Databases(with unlimited data in each of them), PHP 5 and many more features.

But when I wanted to host JSP/Java godaddy wasnt the best option, as godaddy doesnt provide a private JVM (virtual), the advantage of which is you can deploy any time and you can restart the server. Thats when i found EATJ.com which even provides a free trial (which will need you to manually restart tomcat server every 6 hours).  So here are my suggestions.

PHP/ASP.net / Basic Java hosting – godaddy.com

JSP/Java private JVM       – EATJ.com

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Google to launch Browser Sync for Google chrome

Of all the softwares I miss the Browser Sync for Firefox the most, when Google withdrew the plugin late last year, I thought probably Google was worried about privacy concerns and dropped the plugin. Only after the launch of Google Chrome I realized the real reason. Maybe Google was little selfish in pulling the plug of a very popular plugin, but then thats how the industry is.

But now Google is launching the plugin again but only this time the plugin will stay much longer thanks to Google Chrome. A sneak peek was given in Google’s development blog about the launch of the Browser Sync. It is expected to be launched in a week and it will not have all the features of the firefox plugin.

The first beta of the plugin will have ability to synchronise only the bookmarks and later versions will add other features like History,Passwords etc. All these information will be stored under your Google/Gmail  Account.

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How to setup a permanent domain redirect ? How to change your domain name ?

This post answers the following questions

How to redirect your website to a new address ? or how to change a domain name ?

How to setup a 301 permanent redirect ?

How to setup .htaccess file?

Most website owners might end up facing these questions, when we start our website we would be happy with a name but at a later stage might find some other name more suitable for the website. So how to set up a new domain name without losing your existing subscribers, Google Search rank and old website name ? Well it is actually very simple, setup a 301 Permanent redirect. It will redirect every url of say site x.com to y.com.

For example you currently have website named my-shop.com and you want to rename it to myshop.com. Then you need to setup the 301 redirect in the root directory of my-shop.com.

In your domains control panel my-shop.com might point to folder named /myshop or even the root directory / (if you have only one website).

So everytime a request to access my-shop.com will be serviced from this folder’s content.
For changing the domain point your new website name myshop.com to point to folder /myshop and my-shop.com to point to a new folder /oldshop. Then in this oldshop folder create a file .htaccess (only extension no actual file name). In that file enter the following

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.myshop.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If user clicks a link of the my-shop.com .. say www.my-shop.com/files/index.html the 301 redirect will instead load http://www.myshop.com/files/index.html. Basically it replaces the x by y or old site name by the new name and preserving all the urls.

Typically search engines like Google will learn to go to new site and index its content automatically within a month. And meantime you will not lose any visitors/search results.