Do You Want to Host Web Sites?

Are you interested in what it takes to host web sites? Do you think that this could be a business that could make you a lot of money? If you answered yes to both of these questions, you may be onto something. There are many companies that host web sites for hundreds of thousands of people. As you can figure out with some simple math, this turns out to be quite the income each month. But of course this it not all pure profits. And on top of this, you need to consider the fact that there is a lot of competition among people and companies that want to host web sites.

If you are going to get started in this industry, there are quite a few things that you will first need. In other words, you cannot simply jump into hosting web sites and think that you are going to be a huge success. There are hundreds of companies that offer a great service, but when it comes down to it, the competition is smothering them because their name is not quite as big. With all of that being said, there is no reason that you should be afraid to move forward with this business idea if you are truly interested.

In order to host web sites, you are going to first need reliable servers. These are the machines that you will actually use in order to meet all of your clients needs. Keep in mind that as you grow, you are going to need to purchase more and more servers. And remember, these are anything but cheap. Of course, as you add more and more sites to your company, you are going to make more and more money.

In addition to servers, you are going to need to make sure that they are housed in the proper environment. If something happens to these servers, your ability to host web sites has gone right out the window. And in turn, this means that your client’s sites are not going to be live. The second that you get the reputation for not being reliable you are going to start struggling.

Once you have at least one server, you will then need to have a web site of your own that sells your services. You will probably want to start putting this together as soon as possible. This is what you will use in order to sell your services to potential clients. Make sure that you know what most people want as well as the special needs of some webmasters. Also, take a close look at what your competition is doing before you decide on a set price and package levels.

If you want to host web sites you can get involved. This is not to say that you are going to have a low barrier of entry, but with hard work, you can become a player in the web hosting industry. It may take a lot of time and a good bit of money, but if you stick with offering a reliable service, you will be able to build a client base.

Criteria of Choosing an Ideal Web Hosting Company

Before we talk about what it takes to be a cheap and good quality web host, let’s get to the fundamental first.

What is a Web Host?

A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. The term for this ‘computer’ is called a server.

A web hosting provider will typically have a fast connection to the Internet and they may host thousands of web sites on many servers. The web host essentially rents out space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web.

With a well-managed web host, you can free yourself from worrying the up-keep of complicated server technology and proper technical maintenance. That’s the whole purpose of the web hosting companies. You should leave the technical work to web hosting professional while you focus on your own internet business.

Let’s begin…

Feature Offered

The features that web hosting companies are offering are getting quite standard nowadays.

The followings are some of the common features you’ll see in most web hosting plans:

Control Panel
Control Panel is an interface where you can access your site on the web server, allowing you to set-up and subsequently update and customize your web site. Though cPanel is by far the most popular control panel, some hosting providers customize their own so that they can up-grade and expand it at will. Diskspace
A vast majority of sites that don’t have tons of graphics, sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit in 50 MB of disk space. You should always leave yourself some room for growth or check if the host has a bigger plan in case you need to upgrade. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transmitted or received through a unit of time. In web hosting, bandwidth is consumed when visitors make requests for files on your web site and download them to their personal computers. Email Account
With POP3 email accounts you can check email from Outlook, Netscape Mail, Eudora or any other Email software. Scripting language
As all our top 10 listings are using Unix and Linux platform, php, perl and CGI are the languages we are talking about here. It is best to choose a host that supports the latest version to maximize the latest web technologies for the fee that you pay. Database
If your web site is going to store a lot of data that should be dynamically accessible (like user accounts, stock prices, maps, Interactive news, message boards and forum etc.), you’ll need to look for an account that offers a database. MySQL is a powerful and most popular database program that runs on the Linux operation system. It is able to handle million of entries all at once. Its flexibility and speed allow you to also store logs and pictures. MySQL is designed to scale well under heavy traffic conditions and is ideal for database-intensive or e-commerce-enabled Web sites.

Customer Service/Support

No matter if you are an expert or a novice in web hosting, you need a web host with good customer support system. What is the criteria of an excellent customer support? Let to explain to us.

What is the Knowledge Base?
This is especially important for those looking for the quick answer, without assistance aimed directly by the customer support team are looking for. Due to the huge database, normally it takes research. Some web hosting providers will make life easier by creating a video tutorial takes you step by step in creating a new account. Very useful for beginners.
Responsive customer service staff.
If you are too lazyfind the answer out of a big pool of database, get the direct answer from someone who knows it. Direct customer support comes in a few forms.
a. Email support

b. Phone support: Normally, sales and technical support uses separate phone line. A good phone support staff knows what your problem is and answers with relevance.

c.Web Host like Lunarpages and Globat even have live chat support. However, it’s not how many support channels that are available but how responsive it is of the staff. You can find out the hosting reviews and ratings [http://www.top10cheapwebhosting.com/services/cheap-web-hosting-criteria.php] of each of our Top 10 Cheap Web Host.

Price to Disk Space / Price to Bandwidth Ratio

Are you paying too much for your Web Hosting Plan?

Having done the research on hundreds of web hosting companies, in general, we’ve come to this conclusion: the more disk space and bandwidth you are getting, the more expensive is the monthly price.

To help you understand which price is competitive enough for you to take up the offer, we have categorized 5 different price range. For each price range, a score of maximum of 10 is assigned. To understand the concept behind this, please refer to the details here. [http://www.top10cheapwebhosting.com/services/cheap-web-hosting.php]

Popularity

A web host might have the best feature offered, unbeatable customer support and reliability in place but without an effective marketing plan, it will go bust too. Let’s face it. If a web hosting provider does not have sufficient members and steady growth of new members, it’s very difficult to survive in this highly competitive industry.

We judge the popularity of a particular web hosting provider by looking at the number of awards won, the reviews of other Websites and the Alexa traffic rankings.

All hosting provider directory on our Top 10 Cheap Web Hosting is among the top 40,000 most visited websites in the world.

Reliability, Speed and Uptime Guarantee

Nothing can harm more than the visitors come to your site only to find that is not accessible. You lose credibility and possibly even a sale. If your web host does not provide at leasta 99% uptime, leave the web host now!

To ensure maximum uptime, installation of redundant back-up systems is essential. Each web host has their own management systems to minimize downtime. “Redundant” means that if any of the Internet connections get interrupted, the alternate Internet connection will take over.

We use Alertra software to monitor the uptime of each of our top 10 web hosts.

As for speed, even though routing, web server set up and local area networks play a part in determining the speed of a site, the main concern of how fast your site is depends very much on the types of network connections.

Many hosting providers still connect to the Internet through T1, or T3 connections. This is not the case for our top 10 hosts- they are using OC (Optical Carrier) lines.

A T1 line will offer data transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps (megabits per second), while a T3 line can supply data transfer rates of 43Mbps. OC-1 refers to a circuit that transmits 51.85Mbps. Higher levels are multiples of that speed. Ultra-High Speed OC3 and OC12 lines offers 155Mbps and 622Mbps respectively. Some hosting providers have connections to major internet backbones at the speed of OC48 (2488Mbps) and OC96 (4976Mbps).

Web Hosting Technology

There are a variety of technologies involved in the task of web hosting. Most individuals who manage their own web hosting account are familiar with their differences in name only but, if one decides to take on a more complex server arrangement, the differences between these various technologies will become readily apparent. It’s important to remember that all of these technologies offer reliable and secure service when configured and maintained property. The question of which one is the best for any given user is usually only a question of that user’s personal preferences.

The biggest choice one will make where server technology is concerned will involve the operating system. The choice is usually Windows or Linux. Windows is manufactured by the Microsoft Corporation and constitutes the server incarnation of their popular desktop operating system. Using this technology requires a licensing fee. Linux is an open source-meaning that it’s free-operating system which is very popular. There is no licensing fee required but the applications generally require more skill to operate and certain commercial packages may not run on this operating system. In most cases, however, either operating system will prove more than adequate for most user’s needs.

The next choice will be in control panels. There are various types of this technology available and they offer different levels of complexity and user-friendliness. Generally, most web hosting companies will provide a very simple user interface as their default choice. Those users who need more power and who have the technical ability may wish to move up to a panel such as C-Panel or H-Sphere, both of which are popular and widely-used. Be aware that they require significant skill to operate and that, when using such a technology, one is fully capable of accidentally erasing their entire website with an accidental command.

Email servers are a bit different. Like web servers, most web hosts will allow their clients their choice of operating system. This will usually mean either a commercial product or a Linux-based variant. These programs require a different set of skills to operate. They also require great attention to security. Keep in mind that every email sent to a server is a potential security breach and, for that reason, one must make diligent efforts toward making certain that anti-virus and other software is monitored and updated on these machines. This is a task that should certainly not be left to amateurs.

What to look for a Small Business web hosting package

Now, when you think stronger border around small business, web hosting could answer, the. Why not art? Give your business a boost by subscribing to this service.

'Server' or web-hosting provider, rent a virtual space. With this virtual space, you can use to set your online business. This is an offsite (not physical) position. The best thing is, potential customers are endless. How isyour business online, the chances of new customers coming in and browsing through your site go higher. With Search Engine Optimization, your site can make it to the top results.

Web hosting also allows you more advertisement. You can place all the information you want people to know on your site. Anybody can visit and read, even at the same time! Besides information, you can set-up business transactions online. This means more income for you.

Don’t just get any Package, though. Getting a good mix of features in the package. The packages are so varied, with prices falling between free prohibitively expensive. Features vary between companies. Look around and compare packages then buy the best you can afford on your budget. However, do not set your budget too low. You want to end with a good hosting service, increasing the financial limit on a bit 'higher.

Virtual space is provided with a package, the amount of storage space andthe bandwidth will be two of the most important features you must look for. Purchase a plan with good disk space. More disk space means more information and details you can put into your business site.

Get a good bandwidth. Bandwidth is important because it’s the feature that determines the amount of traffic that can go on in your site. More bandwidth means more traffic, which means more people visiting your site. Be informed that free web hosting services often provide little disk space and low bandwidth. If you’re serious about your business, you are encouraged to purchase your web hosting plan.

After sales service should be good for you are most likely to encounter technical problems now and then. Poor technical support and problem resolution will cause your web site to become inaccessible. With this down time, you will surely lose money. See company policies on technical support and customer service before subscribing to their service.

Other features that should be considered would be admin accessibility. Accessing your own directory should be easy. Also, modifying and adding to your web pages should be uncomplicated. Else, you will get a headache each time you want to make some improvements on your site.

If you are in the business of selling products, make sure the security features of a web hosting company are excellent. Learn how business transactions will be protected and encrypted. If you are unable to protect customers, then you will lose them guaranteed. Also, without an HTTPS feature, buyers will opt out of the transaction, thereby causing you to lose a sale.

Getting the Best Value With Paid Web Hosting

Free web hosting services can be very tempting to many of us, especially for newbies as it is really difficult to resist such offers where one does not need to pay anything to get his sites hosted by the free web hosting. Well, if you step back and think about it, have you ever wonder what really drives these free web hosting? We all know very well that there is no free lunch in this world, so what really drive these free web hosting services?

If you thought about this further, you will realize that if these no-charge hosting services are so great, then probably there is really no reason why paid web hosting needs to exist in the first place! No doubt that these web hosting provider offer their services for free, but apart from this, as a wise consumer, we need to seek for further clarifications in terms of: types of Functions available, the amount of bandwidth and disk space is exhausted, the type of safeguards in place, the quality of customer service, the frequency of downtime, and many others.

Free web hosting usually do not get to vendors offering the latest advanced features, or Their customers, such as PHP, MySQL databases and FTP accounts, paid hosting, which are Offered by most.

Free web hosts did their advertising, andneed to capitalize their users’ websites to place these ads, banners, and links at. The free web host owns the “control” over your website in this case as you don’t have the rights to stop these ads and banners getting all over your website in the first place. While for the case of a paid web hosting, this will never happen. In a paid plan, you would place as many of your ads in the website as you love to, and no one has the right to place any of their ads or banners at your website without your approval and consensus.

With a charged hosting plan, the service satisfactory level is definitely much greater. With a paid plan, you can be assured for higher quality service, such as the volume of bandwidth and disk space offered will be higher, great customer service and technical support, greater security features to protect your sites, faster loading time and accurate e-commerce online shopping cart to facilitate your online sales.

At the same time, paid web hosting is better in providing technical support which is of higher quality than free web hosting. They offer 24/7 support, toll free escalation contact number, online chat, email for escalation need. They are committed to provide a reliable, quality and affordable web hosting services for all their existing as well as potential customers. Furthermore, those servers which are used by the Web Hosts are usually not reliable as they are used to crowded with many unplanned downtime.

Finally, a free web host, not with, you are not entitled to register the domain but your web page to register the sub-domain hosting companies free main PDC. With a paid plan, there are no restrictions in more and register your domain, it must be given the opportunity to update yourwebsite in the most efficient way.

Sell Web Hosting for Fun and Profit

The market is good for new Web hosting companies.

According to Forrester Research, there is now “positive — if modest — growth for Web hosting and managed IT services, at both the enterprise and SMB levels.”

This is an especially good business to be in if you are a web designer or IT consultant. It fits naturally with the business

model of such small consulting firms. Why refer out or miss out on selling a service that most small businesses need? Hosting is an excellent source of monthly recurring revenue.

The hosting industry is one of the few profitable sectors of the Internet. As such, large corporations such Yahoo are offering Web hosting services. You, too, can join this highly profitable business and reap the financial awards — but only if you do it right.

To build a successful Web hosting company, I offer the following two time-tested and proven rules: Focus on offering high-quality

services in a two-tiered pricing schedule.

In addition, it is essential an automated infrastructure to create self-sufficient customers. For marketing, it is crucial to maximize intelligent marketing opportunities.

Automation will create a self-sufficient client-base and reduce your expenses down the road. In order to provide the best-possible service, you’ll want a minimum of the following processes automated: order forms (for new customer account set up or existing customer updates), billing system, administration system, end-user control panel, and technical support interface.

Order Forms

The front end of your order form should serve an minimum of these four key functions: 1) verify domain information for registration purposes, 2) validate entered results, 3) process the customer’s credit card or create an invoice, 4) enter the customer’s information into billing database for future use.

The Back to consider the ordering process of domain registration (if customer has to register hosting), and generate the web.

System administration

The administration is required to manage accounts ordered. You might want to manually remove or add, edit new domains, passwords, etc.

End-User Control Panel

The control panel of end users that your customers need to manage their accounts. Tovery least, customers

should be able to set up their own e-mail accounts, view Website statistics, and manage their files.

Billing System

An automated billing system is an absolute must! The billing system should e-mail invoices, charge credit cards, and suspend overdue accounts. The system should also allow the you to issue credit or discounts as needed.

Technical Support Interface

By technical support interface, I’m not referring to a system that merely generates trouble tickets. An effective tech-support interface automatically generates an FAQ-interface that customers can search before submitting trouble tickets. These interfaces can reduce technical support requests by a factor of 10!

Also, be sure that the company you go with offers the option of taking care of technical support on your behalf but branded with your brand. You can then focus your energy on your core competencies and growing your business.

Maximize intelligent marketing opportunities

You know what platform you want to use, you’ve figured out what packages to offer, and set up a tiered pricing schedule and

automated systems. So how do you get the word out about your new hosting service?

Pay per Click

Pay per Click can potentially allow you to reach large numbers of customers. Although you don’t pay to list your site, you do pay when a user clicks on your listing and connects to your site. How, then, do you get your site high on the results lists? You must engage in a bidding war over how much you’re willing to pay for each person who clicks through to your site. The stakes have recently grown pretty high, so be careful about bidding too high. Just because someone clicks through to your Web hosting site, doesn’t mean they’ll convert into a new account. Also be sure to select targeted keywords not competing with everyone else for the same keywords. That is a very difficult game to win. Find your niche.

Hosting Directory Sites

There are numerous Web sites known as hosting directories — that attract Web hosting customers. These hosting directories are an excellent place to advertise, but be selective in your placement. Many offer banner placement, spotlights, search enhancements, and other forms of advertisement. As a general rule keep in mind that banner ads are better for creating brand recognition than generating new accounts, so advertise based on your budget, not on your expectation of new clientele.

Leverage Your Current Client Base

If you run an established Web design firm, information portal, or domain registration service, you can immediately begin marketing to your current clients. A simple e-mail to your customer base can quickly generate a large number of accounts. There are permission-based email marketing services that work very well for earning more revenue from your current customers and gaining additional customers. Try a free trial of one or more of these services to find one that works well for your needs.

Offer New Products and Services

Keep in mind, once you acquire a solid customer base, you can consider developing new products and services to keep your customers happy and to generate additional revenue. But always remember: Quality is key!

A simple way to Cool Web Hosting Search

If people have been telling you that it’s too hard to have a web page and operate your business online, don’t believe them. People who have their own businesses usually set up a blog or website for themselves. You will find a huge array of choices in web hosting and domain name providers. You will have no problem setting up the site you need at a price you can afford.

Utilizing the internet has developed into a cornerstone for lots of businesses. Lots of people blog – both for fun and for business. These people also represent a variety of businesses, such as MLM promoting and affiliate marketing, among others. For this reason, you will find lots of website and web hosting companies today. They can offer you a wide variety of services to meet every need of your business and provide you with a unique website and domain name.

So, for example, if your business is in North America, but you want to do business worldwide, you Perhaps you want a domain name, which has several extensions to choose from. If so, then people who are trying to address your.COM automatically e a.EU the.COM are redirected. You must submit an application to extend the target the.EU the.COM are transmitted. And 'cheap and easy to create a basic website and set up your domain name.

A good thing is that if the title is the exclusive domain, other people can not collect on yourmarketing by opening a site with a similar name. Therefore, if someone searches your address using a .COM extension, but you really have a .EU extension or some other, a person using your same name with a .COM extension would get your business. Keep this idea in mind when you set up your name. If there are similar domain names available, you should buy them, too.

Remember that you need to safeguard both your website and your company to the best of your ability. The web hosting/domain provider you choose should be trustworthy, supportive, and offer great security. You will probably all enjoy a happy and successful partnership, so it is a win-win situation, all around.

A Beginner’s Guide to Web Hosting

What is Web Hosting? Each time you visit a site, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page, Web browser, is downloaded from the Web server to your desktop. In general, the site is a site of many Web pages from the web. And a website is basically composed of texts and graphics. All these websites are stored on Web servers so that online users can visit on yourwebsite.

Therefore, if you plan to own a new website, you will need to host your website on a web server. When your website goes live on the web server, online users can then browse your website on the Internet. Company that provides the web servers to host your website is called web hosting providers.

A well-established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For example, iPowerWeb is a popular web hosting company that hosts more than 300,000 websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to ‘store’ the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called ‘data center’. In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, a data center is a physically secure 24/7 environment with fire protection, HVAC temperature control, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.

What are the different types of web hosting?

There are different kinds of web hosting companies out there with different characteristics. The main types of web hosts can be organized into the following Categories:

Shared Hosting

In shared hosting (also known as virtual web hosting), many websites are sharing space on the web server physical same. Depending on your web host, a web server can host physical Several hundred or thousand different sites simultaneously. You might wonder if a website is physically shared by many, the power of the Web serverdeteriorate? In fact, web servers are usually equipped with high-end powerful computer, therefore it can support up to a certain number of websites without any problem. But when the web server is overloaded and exceeded the reasonable number of websites that it can support, then you will begin to experience a slower response from the web server.

However, a reputable and experience web hosting provider will constantly monitor the performance of the web server and will add new web servers when deem necessary without sacrificing the benefits of the website owners. Since a physical web server is shared (diskspace, computer processing power, bandwidth, memory) by many websites, the web hosting provider can therefore afford to offer a lower hosting price. For the same reason, websites on the shared hosting would have to accept slower server response time. Typically, shared hosting plans start at $5 – $20 per month.

Dedicated Hosting

In contrast to shared hosting, dedicated hosting assigned a specific web server to be used only by one customer. Since a dedicated web server is allocated to only a single customer, the customer has the option to host single/multiple web sites, modify the software configuration, handle greater site traffic and scale the bandwidth as necessary. Therefore, dedicated hosting commands a higher premium and typically starts at $50 per month and can range up to $200 – $500 per month. As a result, dedicated hosting is regularly used by high traffic and extremely important website.

Co-location hosting

In dedicated hosting, the web server belongs to the web hosting providers and customers only rent the web server during the hosting period. While in co-location hosting, the customer owns the web server hardware and only housed their web server within the web hosting provider’s secure data center. In this way, the customer has full control over their web server and simultaneously benefit from the 24/7 server monitoring and maintenance provided by the secure data center. Depending on the monthly bandwidth and rack space required, typically co-location hosting range from $500 – $1000 per month.

Reseller

In reseller hosting, web hosting provider offers web server storage to third parties (eg retailers) at a low price, then resell the web server storage to their customers. Typically, resellers are web consultants including web designers, web developers, system integration, or companies that resell web hosting services as an additional service to complement their range of others. Usuallyresellers can receive up to 50 percent discount on the price of a hosting account from the web hosting provider. And resellers are allowed to decide its own pricing structure and even establish its own branding (in other words, reseller setup its web hosting company on the Internet and start selling web hosting plans under its brand).

To the reseller’s customers, the reseller is the web host provider. In cases when technical problems such as server down and access occurring problem is that retailers must immediately with the actual web host provider. The communication between dealers and distributors to place customers web hosting provider and real back and forth, no doubt for solve problems even more time. If with your personal website or non-profit website and willing to take risks to support the poorreseller, reseller hosting is generally not a good option.

However, the web hosting market today is filled with resellers that sell lowest price web hosting plans. So, how do you tell between a genuine web hosting provider from a reseller? You don’t judge by the availability of toll-free number alone because some web hosting providers even offer their resellers with their own toll-free number for co-branded technical support. When the reseller’s customer calls the number for technical support, the web host uses the reseller’s name so the customer thinks that the support is coming from the reseller directly. Likewise, don’t be fooled by the professional designed website alone because it is extremely easy to create a professional looked business website nowadays.

In general, resellers can be distinguished from their hosting price and company information. In most cases, a genuine web hosting provider has solid company information such as iPowerWeb.com where they publish its financial background, offices and data centers. In contrast, resellers usually do not have solid company background (here is just an example out of thousands out there). Moreover, the hosting price by resellers is generally below $5 per month. So, why settle for resellers when you can find genuine web hosting providers offering superb quality web hosting at the hosting price ranging between $7 – $10.

Therefore, you should not strive to find the cheap web hosting companies without first considering the quality of the service and support provided. Don’t expect to find any top-level support if you choose to pay only $2 or $3 per months for your web hosting plan. On the other hand, by paying just slightly more for your hosting plan, you can now discover a list of low cost yet high quality web hosting plans to host your important website. Look at our high quality and cheap web hosting review and recommendation at http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com/top5.shtml

What is PHP Hosting?

PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor was originally developed to create pages to a dynamic and interactive websites. It 'an object-oriented programming language commonly used by programmers and web developers. It comes with a relational database application called MySQL, open source for their reliability, accuracy and flexibility is unknown. PHP is ideal for beginners because of its user-friendly features that are easily understandable and applicable.

PHP uses PHP HostingThe programming language is completely free and the commands are written in HTML and will be done on this page to the server. If you're new to programming of the sector and have no experience at all PHP is a great way to start.

PHP has a lot of popularity because of certain advantages indicated. Most of its components are available free of charge, responds to queries and fast programming tutorial on the building of web page can easily access the network. You can be incorporated directly with HTML programming and Web servers can be used for all major operating systems like Linux, Microsoft Windows, RISC OS and Mac OS X has supported and probably a lot today, including Apache, Microsoft Internet Information System, Personal Web Server others. In terms of market cost PHP is one of the most reasonably hosting solutions available on how technology is an open source.

And 'known to most customers> Web-hosting hosting companies prefer to work with the most advanced and latest tools and techniques.

Switching Web Host

Moving a web site to a new host is not as difficult as you may think. If you follow the tips below carefully you should be fine and have your site up in no time at all.

First Off:

Do not get over excited when you see an extremely cheap hosting plan, look carefully at what the plan they provide and always read the terms and conditions for tricks or hidden fees. Define your own requirements before hand and look for a hosting plan that match closest to your soon to be old web host. A 24/7 support with phone support is a must! Try to find a host that uses the same operating system as your existing host. Get a web host that has a fast Internet connection and has fast servers and good up time (95.3, 99.0, etc)

Scripts:

Make sure if you use php, CGI, Perl or ASP that your new web host supports it. On php make sure they support all the php functions you need and make sure they have all the Perl Modules that you need to use or plan on using. Many scripts need Mysql, so check to see if they support that as well.

Backup:

Backup should be done regularly and not during any major change like moving your site. Make sure you backup everything on your site or you risk losing it all! Save all of your site’s files on a disc or you could signup for a data storage service and they will save it for you.

Testing:

You need to be sure that your site is functioning before you cut off from the current host. It’s always a good idea to get someone else to test out the new site, if you have more than one computer than use both computers and have a friend to take a look at it too, if you can get more than one person to test it do it. I would also suggest that you test everything from links to images three or four times to make sure things are fine.

Once all this is done you can switch your web hosting and go live. For the next 48 hours check your site often as you can because you never know what may brake or happen. If you do all the above you should be fine and good to go live!