A shared hosting package may not offer you a lot of resources, but it is ideal for testing and hosting new sites and services that are just getting started. But you have to be careful to choose a good provider with good offers, so you won’t have to deal with any issues when you need it for work.

Here are some tips and tricks that you can use to make sure the hosting package you just got is good and won’t cause you problems when you need it the most.

Find reviews. The first thing you have to do, even before buying the hosting package, is search for reviews from real users on the Web. There are literally hundreds of such sites, and you can find reviews on any company you want. You need to be careful and check that the review was written for the specific package you want, and also check the reason why the user liked it or hated it. Sometimes people just rate a company negative because they didn’t know how to use an FTP server or set up their WordPress blog (those are really not valid reasons).

Test the server. If you have SSH access to the server (which is a useful feature provided by many hosting companies nowadays), you should definitely run some tests on it. You can check the average loads (they must be at normal levels, not 20-30 like on some shared servers), view the hardware specs and check the number of users on the system (though not many companies allow that). If you don’t have root access, you can use external testing utilities like McAfee Secure and Load Impact, which will give you a pretty good idea about the overall security and performance of the server. You can also test transfer speeds from another server or online service and see if they’re at least close to what the hosting provider told you.

Find out the real limits. Often times, hosting companies try to tell you that their shared hosting packages are “unlimited” or have very high resource allotments (500 GB hard drive space, 5 TB monthly transfer speeds), but that turns out to be false most of the times. That’s why you have to find out the real limits. You can start by reading the full Terms of Service, which should contain a clause stating how much is considered fair usage (if you use more than that, your account gets locked). If you can’t find a good answer, you can contact the sales representative or customer support and ask them. Another possibility is to use your root access to find out what the server specs are, as I mentioned above.

There are many other ways you can test a server or a hosting package, but the above methods will help you cover more than 90% of the whole thing. By doing a proper research and having due diligence, you can save yourself a lot of headaches and money in the long run. The hosting market is very competitive, that’s why most companies in the field will do anything to get people to sign up with them, including lying. Just follow the above tips and I am sure you will find a good shared hosting package in no time or find out if your current one is good enough for your applications.

Delivery of the products has also changed a lot. While in the past, you had to go to stores, find and buy a CD with the program you needed (or even worse, wait for it to arrive because it’s out of stock), today you can download it online in mere seconds or at most a few hours (for really big files).

But as if that wasn’t enough, various forward thinking individuals and businesses thought up an even simpler (for the end user) process that would make even a 3 year old child or a 70 year old grand pa able to access and use any application: Software as a Service.

You’ve most definitely already used at least some of the most basic forms of this kind of software. Forums and online chat rooms are some of the oldest forms of Software as a Service. Google Wave, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter (especially Twitter) are some of the newest SaaS products on the market.

Basically, a Software as a Service is a program that could’ve easily been a desktop application, with the whole installation, configuration, restarts and activation things, but the developers chose to make it available online and be useable right away, with no hassle. The ever increasing Internet connection speeds have made this possible, and it really is the future.

The main idea of SaaS is to eliminate the need for downloads, installation, activation, various problems with incompatibilities and other issues that will undoubtedly appear on a desktop application. The need for manual updates is also gone, as developers need to simply update the software on their side, so they can do it much faster, as fast as the users can point out the bugs or write up their feature wish lists for the future.

Google went as far as to create a whole operating system that consists only of a browser, saying that it is the future. And we don’t doubt it – a browser is literally all you need nowadays on a portable device in order to do most of the things you could do on your desktop – listen to music, chat with your friends, make appointments, read your email, watch videos and do many other things.

What used to be installed on your computer is now accessible from any device in the world using the Internet, which makes things much easier (but also a bit less secure). Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook are replaced by Google Calendar, Docs and Gmail, video players (and long video download times) are gone in favor of Youtube and other streaming sites, even games are now “made for Facebook” instead of “for Windows”.

That is what SaaS basically is, and the phenomenon will certainly grow bigger in the future, especially when Internet connection speed and worldwide penetration will become greater and greater. Now is the time to get into this thing and develop online apps that can replace the old desktop ones (there are thousands of examples where this would be a good thing).

And they’re really doing the right thing, because cloud hosting will allow customers to have any processing power they need, and pay only for what they use, which is much cheaper than dedicated servers or clusters. If the client’s site is loaded one day and idle the other, he will pay more for the first day and less for the other. And probably the best thing is that the website will never be inaccessible or slow, because it’s got the power of hundreds and thousands of physical machines behind it, allocating as many resources as it needs.

If you are thinking of switching to cloud hosting or are only looking for the best first host (for which cloud hosting is just as good, if not better, than even shared), here is a list of some of the best cloud hosting providers.

Amazon. This company’s cloud hosting services (the EC2 computing and S3 storage) are very popular among developers and businesses that need a lot of flexibility and reliability. They’ve been among the first to start offering cloud hosting, and they’ve had enough time to perfect the technology and introduce new, advanced features. The bad thing about Amazon’s services is that there are quite hard to setup for anyone that is not an IT specialist (Amazon themselves say that it’s for professionals and businesses), so if you are just starting out and want to try cloud hosting, you’d be better off trying another provider.

Slicehost. This is one of the first companies that started up offering exclusively cloud hosting services, and a lot of webmasters and developers swear they’re the best. They certainly do have the time advantage, but their prices are quite a bit higher than other offers. At least they offer excellent support and uptime guarantee with their packages.

Cari.net. This is one of the best providers of dedicated servers in the hosting industry, and while they’ve started offering cloud hosting services only recently, it quickly became a success and their number one seller. That’s probably because businesses are indeed better off on a cloud server than a cluster of dedicated servers, plus Cari.net has a lot of nice features and innovations that make its offers unique and customizable for each client.

1and1. This company has a long history and has been offering great dedicated servers in their own data centers around the world since the beginning of commercial Internet. They’ve had their fair share of problems, mainly with their shared hosting packages, but as of late, they’ve dealt with them and their 4 million+ clients are quite happy. The only drawback would be their customer support, which is notably slow, but they do at least keep the hardware in working order, so you’ll only have to deal with software problems yourself.

Rackspace. This provider is also well known in the hosting industry, and their dedicated, VPS and shared hosting packages have received a lot of good user reviews and awards. They’ve recently got into cloud hosting and started offering their own services. What sets them apart from other companies is the fact that they acquire a lot of great cloud hosting startups with their unique technologies and implement them in all of their offers, which makes them great for people who need a lot of extra features. Rackspace also offer their own separate file storage, remote backup and computing services.

GoGrid. This company is relatively unknown among users of traditional hosting, but that’s because they specialize in clusters, dedicated and cloud servers, plus offer a unique technology that allows the clients to interconnect them and use all 3 technologies at once, which can be very useful in a number of situations.

If you need a dedicated server or VPS for any application or just want to switch from your current hosting solution, there’s no reason not to choose cloud hosting. It has better performance, reliability and stability and is much cheaper in the long run – a seemingly excellent choice.

Cloud hosting is actually a mix of two other popular technologies, namely Virtual Private Servers and Shared Hosting. You could say that it’s the next step in the natural evolution of hosting. Just like in any other industries in the world, hosting companies are looking for more effective and simple ways to provide their services, and the cloud is the best answer to all their problems.

You see, with the ever increasing need for more processing power for the virtual world, the providers can’t keep up the pace in the real one. Whereas you can relatively easily launch a site that will be viewed by millions in as short as a few days (best case scenario, of course), the data center that hosts it can’t just pull out more resources out of nowhere.

So, there was a tendency of many data centers to be overloaded, causing a lot of sites to be loading slower and data to be lost. But engineers noted that the overload wasn’t even across all resources, and some machines had more free resources or even idling, while others were working at 100% all the time.

That is because of the traditional hosting methods, where people buy dedicated servers for their own use, and only their own use. They do not share their machines with anyone, and if their site is not popular or they just keep it for testing purposes, it mostly sits idle. Meanwhile, other servers in the data center are overloaded and need to be upgraded, which is very expensive, plus it leads to site downtime. This wouldn’t be a problem if space and energy were unlimited, but unfortunately, they aren’t.

Virtual Private Servers and Shared hosting remedied this problem for a while by allowing multiple users and their sites to be located on the same physical machines, but they still weren’t robust and dynamic enough to support the current growth. And that’s where cloud hosting comes in.

A cloud is basically a cluster of hundreds, thousands or even more physical machines that are combined to form one big and powerful virtual machine, with all the resources fully shared (that’s thousands of GigaHertz and MB of RAM and Petabytes of storage). Inside that machine, a hosting company can have anything its clients want, from dedicated servers (which are just the resources that would normally form a server allocated for a single user) to simple user accounts for those who just need a site hosted and don’t need access to developer tools or a separate OS environment.

This allows data centers to function much more effectively, because they can now keep the load always under control at about 100%, which saves energy, space and a lot of money. As you know, a physical machine uses about the same amount of energy when its idle as when its fully loaded, that’s why the fewer machines there are idling, the more energy is saved.

With cloud hosting, users get a cheap and practically unlimited amount of resources (one can always allocate more if they run out of their current allotment, without interrupting the work of their site), which makes it more desirable for anyone who needs to host something online. That’s basically why cloud hosting is better than traditional technologies and why it is the future of web hosting.

But what do you do if you don’t want your web site or application hosted in the US (for whatever reasons)? Why, you go to hosting providers from other countries!

Of course, all of these companies have their own data centers in those countries and are not just foreign representatives of American or British hosting companies.

Serverboost (Netherlands). This is a great offshore hosting company that has its servers in the Netherlands and offers some of the lowest prices for international hosting. They have VPS and dedicated server packages and work with anyone that has a Paypal account (which is almost everyone). They have a pretty standard site in English, not much different than a lot of other hosting companies anywhere in the world. I think they’re worth checking out.

1und1 (Germany). This company does have a couple of data centers in the US and UK, but their origins are in Germany, the country where they incorporated back in the 90’s. An amazing offer from 1und1 (that is possible only in Germany and France because of their high-speed country wide fiber network) is the 100Mpbs, unlimited bandwidth, which is really unlimited and you can use tens of terabytes per month without being charged a dime. This could probably change as the network gets more saturated, but for now, 1and1 Germany is one of the best and cheapest choices for data-intensive sites.

OVH (France). This provider has a data center in France (where they’re apparently pretty well known) and works with clients from all over the world. They do have an English site, but their support is French, so you might have to know the language if you need their help (though they do advertise English support). Thanks to the French national fiber network and relative lack of big data centers, they can afford to offer a super speedy 200Mbps, unlimited bandwidth connection for their higher-priced servers, which is just great for any data-intensive sites.

Hosting.ua (Ukraine). This provider operates from and has a data center in Odessa, one of the biggest cities in Ukraine. They have nice hardware at good prices, an English site, Terms of Service and Control Panel language, and a few varying connection speed options: 1Gbps with a 2000GB/month limit, 10Mbps unlimited bandwidth and 100Mbps with automatic switch to 10Mbps after 3000GB per month are used, which is great for a variety of uses.

Their data center (along with many others in Eastern Europe and Russia) are built to modern standards and are the same as any other good data center in the world. And because they have a new high-speed fiber network at their disposal and don’t know what to do with it, they can offer those incredibly high speeds to anyone.

eName (Romania). This company has a brand new data center in the heart of Romania, at the fringe of civilized land, as they say . They have VPS and dedicated server packages to offer for anyone who needs them. They also have an English version of their site, which is simply great. The only bad thing about them is that the bandwidth is quite limited compared to other countries, but that might change when the country rolls out their own national fiber network.

There are a lot of other hosting companies in countries other than the US and UK that work with international clients and offer great hosting packages, so if you can’t or don’t want to host your stuff in those countries, you can easily go with a foreign one. The above companies are some of the best and most well-known, so they can be trusted.

A database is much more organized, which makes it much faster than other data storage and retrieval methods. The information contained inside it can be easily edited and transferred anywhere you need (like an RSS feed, or a new Content Management System, for example).

They are more secure because they are separate from the scripts and files that run the site. Just a decade ago, a lot of sites were keeping user passwords inside the very pages they were displaying to the readers, and as you could’ve guessed, it was very easy to get them. Databases sit behind a few layers of security in the background.

Most major media companies (like Google, Youtube, Facebook, WordPress and others) run on clusters of dedicated machines, most of which actually run databases, as they are the most accessed part of a site or application. They specifically assign a completely separate cluster specifically for the databases, even though it would be easier and better to have them on the same machines as the other components.

Even if you have a small site that is accessed by a few hundred thousand visitors every month, you can still greatly benefit from having a separate dedicated server running the database, and another one running the front end (i.e. what the users see, the design, functionality scripts, etc.).

First of all, you would see a major increase in performance, especially if you chose a good dedicated machine with fast hard drives and lots of RAM (which is important because all of the information is stored there; the CPU is not nearly as important as those two, because all it needs to is transfer the data from the hard drives to the RAM, then to the server running the front end, and any dual core or quad core can do that with ease).

The second reason for hosting your database on a separate machine is the security of your data. Even if someone managed to hack into your front-end server, they would still not have any access to your database, which holds the really important information. If you configure it correctly, there will be only one way to access it, and that’s via your administrative user name and password, which should be very hard to guess. The database server shouldn’t run anything else and shouldn’t be accessible from outside by any other means (except SSH, but you can lock that to your own IP addresses).

A third reason would be reliability of the server and the data itself. Because the database machine has no other software installed than the database server (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, etc.), there is almost nothing that can go wrong or break, aside from the hardware of course (you should be safe if you have at least 1 mirrored RAID array). Even if the front-end fails because someone uploaded a video too long (it can happen), the database and maybe other parts of the site will still be running, which means you can easily and quickly fix things and restore normal functionality.

The only reason against getting a separate server for your database is the more complex set up procedure and the price, which will be about twice as high as having just one dedicated machine. But if you have an important or at least popular site or application and you can afford to pay, you should definitely do it.

Shared hosting package have only one major drawback: you have very limited resources. Sure, they give you a few hundred gigabytes of hard drive space and a couple of terabytes of monthly bandwidth, but because your account’s access to the processor and RAM are limited, you can’t even take advantage of that.

But that’s only if you use default software installations and don’t perform any customizations. If you’d just optimize the way your sites and scripts use the resources, you could definitely use any shared hosting package to its full potential, all while spending nothing more than a few hours on setting everything up. Here’s what you can do to lower the load on your shared hosting package’s resources and maximize the performance and amount of benefits you get from it:

Use caching. This is the most widely known trick. Just by installing a plugin, you can get 4-5 times the performance and lower the resource usage by the same amount. Caching is simply storing a copy of a web page in ready HTML format, instead of building it every time from the various PHP scripts, CSS files and the information stored in the database. The most popular such plugin for WordPress is WP Super Cache, and most other major CMS have a similar extension available.

Aggregate scripts and CSS files. This is another method of reducing the load on your hosting plan. Usually, there are dozens of small CSS and Javascript files present on a site, and sending them separately is pretty resource intensive. It’s much better to unite them into one big file and sending it to the visitor’s browser. There are many plugins that can do that, especially for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

Use external image hosting. A relatively unknown technique, this wasn’t even possible to do a couple of years ago. The trick is to host all of the images on your site on external services, like Flickr and Imageshack. There are plenty of free services out there, they are very stable and fast, so they can easily take over the load that is imposed upon your hosting package by pictures, especially if they’re big. You can even host your theme’s images and backgrounds on external services!

Use Content Distribution Networks. This is one of the newest methods, and it’s very effective. It consists in shifting the load from your server to the so-called CDNs,which are basically large networks of servers around the world that store all of your pages and serves them to the people visiting your site. Your hosting package serves only the first request, with all of the following ones being taken over by the CDN. This allows you to serve literally millions of pages without worrying about your hosting being shut down. There are relatively few CDN’s available, especially free ones, but their number is growing. 2 of the best are Coral CDN (free) and MaxCDN (paid), you should definitely check them out.

By using at least two of the above techniques, you can significantly lower the load on your shared hosting package, which will allow you to serve a lot more people (with a proper configuration, you can actually serve hundreds of thousands of requests without losing performance or going over your resources limit) while saving tons of money, which you would’ve otherwise spent on getting a VPS or dedicated server.

The strongest part of Joomla is its template engine. It’s very simple to use, and it’s powerful, allowing anyone with even basic designer skills to create very beautiful site templates. No other CMS looks as good as Joomla on the front end (although WordPress is slowly catching up).

But that templates engine is also its biggest drawback. The more beautiful the theme is, the more resources it uses, and the more powerful a server must be to run it well, especially when the site it’s installed on gets thousands of visitors per day. If you are on shared hosting, as most people are, you’ll find that it can actually make your account go over limit pretty quickly. But there are a few great solutions for this problem in the form of extensions. Here are some of the best (as voted on the Joomla web site):

IceSpeed. This should be the first extension you install. It’s free, and it does a lot to decrease not only the load on your hosting package’s resources, but also decrease the page load time by reducing the number of HTTP requests. It works by compressing all the CSS and JS files and also compressing all the responses that it sends to the client browser.

CssJsCompress. This extension works in similar way to the one above, but it is meant only for compressing the Javascript and CSS files, just as the name suggests. It has a couple of unique features, too, which may make it a better choice than IceSpeed: it can aggregate all of the CSS and JS files into one big file and have it cached on the client’s side, so the visitor only needs to load the page once and it will become much faster on all the subsequent loads.

JA Compress. JA Compress is another great extension, which does everything the above two ones do. IT is worth mentioning though, because it can also combine all the images of your template into one file (a zip archive for sending the response to the client browser, to be precise).

JCH Optimize. JCH Optimize is the fourth most popular extension that can help you speed up your Joomla site and reduce the load on your server’s resources. Aside from the usual CSS and JS aggregation and compression, JCH is well known for its great compatibility with most other plugins, so it will cause no problems if you have a lot of other extension installed.

Another way to significantly lower the load on a shared hosting package, no matter what CMS you’re using, is to use a Content Distribution Network. They are a relatively new technology available for the masses, and there are few public networks out there, but you can find them. The most popular right now are Coral CDN and MaxCDN, and the former is also absolutely free.

A CDN is comprised of thousands of servers connected together to form a network, which caches your pages and displays them to the visitors instead of your server, which means that you can get millions of page views per month while your shared hosting package is idling and you save hundreds of dollars!

There are other great plugins for Joomla that can significantly speed it up and reduce its load on a shared hosting package, but the above are the most popular and have recommended themselves as the best first choices. You should definitely try them out (the CDN trick, too)!

Content Management Systems make it very easy to personalize the theme and layout of the site, install new plugins that will extend its functionality (like adding a blogging platform, integrating the current users and their accounts with a new forum software, or doing almost anything else you may need).

You will most likely use a CMS for any of your future online project, so here is a selection of the top 5 ones that can be used for any purpose.

Drupal. This is an open source CMS, very popular among developers and used for a lot of big sites that handle millions of unique visitors per month. Its modular design and clean code allows for a very deep customization of everything from how the site looks to what rights different users have (to write/read articles, to post in the forum, write blog posts, upload files and a lot more). There are hundreds of free, useful modules available, which will add a lot of much-needed features like internationalization and localization, video embedding, private messaging, email newsletter sending, and other things.

Joomla. This CMS was the most popular among webmasters for a few years. It is still widely used, although it has lost its edge due to an old core and not too friendly administration. Despite that, it can run sites of any size and purpose, from small blogs and article directories to big media streaming hubs that handle dozens of terabytes in bandwidth every month. There is a wide selection of free and paid extensions (the latter are usually much better and are supported by the developers) that will help you improve and modify your site. A very strong point of Joomla is the ease with which designers can create mind-blowing, very beautiful themes (Drupal has the most trouble with this). Plus, there are a lot of sites that sell pre-made themes that you can easily customize for your application.

WordPress. Another very popular CMS, WordPress is technically a blogging platform, but because of the thousands of free plugins and themes available and its extremely easy to customize code and templates, it can be used for almost any other purpose, like a forum, a social network, an article directory or an e-commerce site. The 2.9 version has a very user-friendly administrative interface and a lot of new useful features, like the mass plugin auto-update. Version 3 will be even more advanced, and will also not break compatibility with older themes and plugins due to its modular fallback code.

ExpressionEngine. This Content Management System is different than the above three, mainly because it’s commercial (though they do have a free version) and has a limited developers base, which isn’t a good thing. But the owners say that it’s the most flexible CMS ever, and looking at the code, one would tend to agree. It is very easily customizable, has a reliable modular architecture that will keep the site working even if you mess something up and has the possibility to create and use add-ons to extend its functionality. A great choice if you also need guaranteed support for your CMS.

vBulletin. Another paid solution, this CMS was originally (and still is) used to create forums and communities, but has evolved into something bigger, better, that can be used for a lot of other applications. More than 70% of all popular forums use vBulletin as their CMS, because it’s the fastest, most reliable solution with hundreds of developers working on it and selling excellent plugins and themes that can extend its functionality. The most obvious use for it would be communities and forums, but you may also use it for a specialized community/e-commerce site, for example.

If you are planning on starting a site, blog, online shop or any other venue on the Internet, you’ll absolutely need to check out the above CMS solutions. One of them will definitely fit your needs.

But there are some established operating systems that are very popular with the users and have already recommended themselves as universally good for most applications, and more importantly, they have a large base of developers working on improvements and killing bugs (the software ones and big communities of users that are eager to provide feedback.

Those two things are very important for any piece of software, and when it comes to such an important part of a server and your business, you simply can’t ignore them. So, here are the best operating systems you can find which are ready to be deployed on any production server for any purpose and not fail to deliver:

Red Hat Linux. This is one of the most popular open source OS based on Linux that is developed and maintained by Red Hat, Inc., and a ton of paid developers. It is very stable, fast and it has a lot of software packages that you can use to turn it into anything you want, from a fast MySQL server to a main Web server machine for your web site.

CentOS. Being open source, Red Hat simply has to release the code for their OS. And a big community of people who liked Red Hat Linux but didn’t want to pay for it, took that code and created CentOS, a free copy of the most popular enterprise OS! If you want a free and most importantly, stable and fast operating system with a lot of packages and options, this is practically your best choice!

FreeBSD. FreeBSD isn’t Linux – that’s what the developers and users of this OS say, and they’re right, none of the packages are directly compatible. That is a bad thing, as you are quite a bit limited in choice, but if you want a super fast, stable OS for which you can easily create your own packages and software (if you are a developer), FreeBSD should be your number one choice.

Windows Server 2008 R2. Many people don’t like Microsoft’s server products, and that’s a shame, because just one look at the performance of MSSQL under high loads can make you change your opinion about it (it’s about 40 times faster than MySQL!). The Windows Server OS was pretty good before the 2008 edition, if a bit buggy, but it worked fine. The Server 2008, based on Vista, was an absolute hog, though and everyone would want to forget it as soon as possible.

But Windows Server 2008 R2 is a completely different beast – it’s fast, stable, supports the latest technologies (including better streaming and compression for Windows PCs) and is definitely a good choice for any production server. Granted, it’s not free or open source, but on the bright side, it is very easy to administer and you have a large choice of software for it (including some of the best automation tools on the market).

There are a lot of other OSes, but most of them are specialized for various niche purposes. If you don’t have the time to check all of them out and need something that will definitely work out of the box, one of the above operating systems may be just what you’re looking for.