The website hosting business is expanding with increase in Internet traffic. Many new service providers are entering the market and the technological advancements have made it possible to realize the changing business requirements of today. Customers as well as service providers have a lot options to choose from to receive and deliver the required services respectively.

Linux Hosting

One of the most popular web hosting servers, Linux servers have always delivered what they have promised. The popularity enjoyed by Linux server is unparallel in hosting servers' history. There are many other server side suites, but Linux servers still maintain the reputation of being formidable rivals. Being cheap has further prompted the service providers to offer discount Linux hosting to customers. The popularity of Linux is due to number of reasons.

• Linux servers are cheap and offer better performance

• Being one of the safest servers, they are less prone to viruses. Seldom anyone has heard a Linux server getting crashed because of virus attack.

• Downtime of Linux server is very low making them suitable to run some of the busiest websites. The Linux architecture has made it easier to debug a Linux server than other servers. The result being that administrators find it easier to debug a Linux server, thus raising the uptime of the server to above 99.5% which is the best in the industry.

Apart from this since Linux server are cheaper, everyone want to have a Linux server. No doubt service providers are leveraging the price advantage to offer discount Linux hosting, something which would have been difficult in case of other servers.

International Hosting

The nature of business has changed today. Companies are now selling their product and services globally and the consumption has shown a upward trend more in International markets than in domestic markets. This is the reason theta every MNC company has an International arm that looks for overseas operations. The latest technologies are fully providing IT support to these companies. This is the reason that having servers located at geographical separated regions (like in two different countries) has shown a positive trend in last 10 years. Some of the main features of International Hosting are

• Fast accesses to regional customers as the servers are located locally.

• Faster debugging support by local technical staff in case there a problem appears.

• Storage of data at multiple places so that in a disaster situation, the operation of the site could be transferred to another server which may be located anywhere in the world.

Email Hosting

Before subscribing to service provider's email service, there are some points that should be kept in mind. The points are

• The service provider should have the latest implementation of IMAP protocol which is now being used to send emails. Earlier PoP was being used. IMAP has certain performance gains as compared to PoP and is now the preferred protocol for Email operations. It's important that email hosting uses IMAP protocol.

• Service provider should provide for unlimited aliases on the same mail account. Generally this is not a problem since the email domain is the same domain which has been registered for the site, but it should still be checked. Auto-responders and web-based access must be provided.

• If file operations have to be performed, file size restrictions should not be there or should be set to a high limit.

Top Website Hosting

Reviews and critics of webhosting service continue to select the top service providers. These ratings not only help the customers to know which service providers are best, but it also helps the service providers to bring efficiency in their operations. The rankings are awarded on the basis of the parameters such as customer support, Tech support, Reliability & Uptime, Software, Space, Traffic, Price, User friendliness, Software, etc. "www.phphost.org" is among the leading top website hosting that has created a niche for itself in hosting PHP websites.