Best Cheap Web Hosting

Serve-Hosting is joining forces with Webafrica, with its customers' accounts to be migrated to Webafrica's systems.

"Webafrica's stellar track record speaks for itself and the fact that they can migrate your services to their platform with virtually no disruptions cemented the relationship," said Serve-Hosting.

It said all services will continue to work with almost no visible changes.

"You will be hosted in a state-of-the-art data centre in Cape Town and backed by a company we trust completely and endorse unreservedly."

Webafrica CEO Tim Wyatt-Gunning said this is their eighth hosting acquisition.

Under the terms of the deal, Webafrica has acquired Serve-Hosting's 7,000 customers.

While customers will be migrated onto Webafrica's infrastructure, Wyatt-Gunning said they will continue to support the packages they currently have with Serve-Hosting.

Serve-Hosting clients migrating to Webafrica

Webafrica told clients their existing services will be imported into a new Webafrica account that will be created for them.

"For those who are already our customers, we'll be importing your existing Serve-Hosting services into your active Webafrica account," said Webafrica.

Once the migration is complete, customers will no longer be able to access the Serve-Hosting Member's Area – and will need to order and manage services via the Webafrica Customer Zone.

The migration of hosting services to Webafrica will begin on 31 March, and run until 15 April.

It will be a phased migration roll-out, and the migration will only be done after hours.

"So you don't have to worry about any downtime."

More hosting news

2016 MyBroadband Cloud and Hosting Conference registrations open

Teraco building Africa's biggest data centre

Facebook building one of the world's most advanced data centres

Source: Webafrica buys Serve-Hosting

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Source: Get a two-year subscription to Face Hosting

SANTA FE, NM --(Marketwired - March 02, 2016) -  The leading provider of crowdsourced reviews, CrowdReviews.com, has released their list of the best web hosting solutions based on customer feedback and testimonials. While the rankings are based on the use of an algorithm in real-time, CrowdReviews.com has decided to highlight the web hosting companies featured at the time of the announcement. Customers of web hosting solutions are invited to share their own experiences on the web hosting solutions they have experience with.

The top web hosting companies featured by the algorithm include:

1) BlueHost

2) 1 and 1 Internet Inc

3) Website World

Website hosting companies can compete in the rankings by inviting their customers to leave their own reviews about the hosting solutions they have used. Visitors to CrowdReviews.com are able to leave reviews on the services and software they have used in the past or are actively using. In addition, employees, competitors, and other audiences are invited to share their own experiences on services and software vendors alike.

The placements of companies on the rankings are primarily influenced by the reviews offered by web hosting customers, but are determined based on five primary factors. These factors are review strength, reputation strength, reviewer strength, profile strength, and verified status. Each of these factors are determined based on numerous sub-factors which can be reviewed in the following "How Do We Rank" page:

http://www.crowdreviews.com/how-do-we-rank

To view the list of the best web hosting companies based on user reviews visit:

http://www.crowdreviews.com/ratings-of-best-web-hosting-companies-based-on-user-reviews

Those interested in joining CrowdReviews.com can visit the following page to register or claim their profile:

http://www.crowdreviews.com/#registration

About CrowdReviews.com

CrowdReviews.com is a crowdreviewing platform which ranks over 500 software categories and 200 service categories.

Embedded Video Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1jr1EFpug4

Samuel Powers941-257-4559530-B Harkle Road,STE 100,Santa Fe, NM 87505

Source: CrowdReviews.com Announces the Rankings of the Best Web Hosting Companies

Thanks to Adrian Sandu, Panayiotis Velisarakos and Tim Severien for kindly helping to peer review this article.

The Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) is a revolutionary model that could change the way we use the Internet. Unlike the typical server-client model we're accustomed to, IPFS is something more like BitTorrent. Does that grab your attention? Then read on!

The Problems With Today's Web

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the backbone of the World Wide Web. We use HTTP to access most of the Internet. Any website we visit, typically, is via HTTP. It's essentially a server–client mentality, where our computer sends requests to the server hosting a website, and the server sends back responses.

HTTP, though, lends itself naturally to a narrower and narrower subset of services. It's natural for large services to emerge as the sort of structure of a large portion of the Web, but that sort of centralized environment can be dangerous. If any of the large hosting companies and/or providers of services – such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, Rackspace, and the like – were to suddenly falter, the results to the Web would be disastrous in the short term. And herein lies the problem (at least one of them).

In addition to the natural process of centralization that's occurring, there's also a troubling reliability issue with today's web. Most websites and applications are hosted by a single server, or by a redundant array of load balanced servers, or whatever the case may be. If the owner of those servers, or the datacenter's management, or even a natural disaster, takes those machines out, will the application continue to run? Backups and redundancy can be put into effect by organizations with enough resources, but even those can't stop a company which simply decides to take down their website or application.

Reliance on Hosts

If and when the server hosting a site goes down, we're now reliant on the hosting company to have fail safes, redundant systems, backups, etc. They must recognize that your service is out, and assist you in restoring it. If it's a hardware issue, they should have alternative systems they can port your setup onto. They should have backup networking systems, and they should be keeping at least a backup of your data, whether they advertise it or not, in the event of a data loss situation that is their fault.

What if they don't?

Reliance on Site Administrators

Now the impetus falls on site administrators to keep a service going and data backed up. If you've ever been an avid user of an application that was suddenly removed, you know this feeling.

Movements to open source help tremendously, allowing multiple forks of a project to take off, and allowing things that are more static – like documentation – to be preserved in multiple locations and in multiple formats. But the fact remains that the majority of the Web is controlled by people like you or me, maintaining servers.

Some freelance developers even manage the hosting and maintenance of some of their smaller clients' sites. What if they forget to pay their bill? Get angry with a client and lock them out of their site? Get hit by a truck? Yes, the site owner may have legal options in any of these cases, but will that help you while your site is completely inaccessible?

Reliance on Users

Yet one more problem is that of the users of any web application. Content often must have a critical mass of users or visitors to even merit hosting. Often low-traffic applications or static sites are shuttered simply because they aren't cost effective to run. Additionally, the reverse problem is also very real. Users of the modern Internet are still clustering together. Facebook – which is a single social network – has somewhere in the ballpark of one out of every five persons on the face of the Earth reported as active users. There are countless businesses who entirely depend upon Facebook to exist. What if it shut down tomorrow?

Of course, Facebook won't shut down tomorrow, and neither will most of the apps you love and use. But some may. And the more users that have flocked to them before that happens, the more damage that will cause to everyday workflows, or even to personal and business finances, depending on what kind of applications you use and for what.

The Answer is IPFS

So, you may be asking, how does IPFS solve these problems? IPFS is a relatively new attempt to solve some of these issues using distributed file systems. The IPFS project is still fairly low on documentation, and is perhaps the first of many different solutions.

IPFS Nodes

First and foremost, you should understand a few things about IPFS. IPFS is decentralized. Without a typical server providing web pages for every client that arrives at the website's domain, a different infrastructure must be imagined. Every machine running IPFS would be a node as part of a swarm.

Consider the way torrents currently work. You choose a file to download, and when you use a torrent application to do so, you're essentially sending out a request to all of the computers attached to the same torrent network as you, and if any of them have the file you're requesting, and are able to upload at the moment, they begin sending pieces of it to your computer. That's a condensed version.

So how do IPFS nodes work? Each machine that's running IPFS is able to select what files they want their node to serve.

Hashing and IPNS

Every file that exists on IPFS would have a unique hash to represent it, and any minute change would result in a new hash being generated. These hashes are how content can be viewed. A client queries the system for a hash, and any node that has that content available can serve it to peers. The "swarm" provides a torrent-like experience, wherein peers are capable of serving each other content.

This system will allow content to be served quickly and accurately to clients, regardless of their proximity to the original host of the content. Additionally, because hashes are employed, both ends of the exchange can be checked for correct content, as a single bit out of place would result in a different hash.

The Inter-Planetary Naming System (IPNS) can be used to assign a name to mutable (changeable) content, so that your node publishes a piece of content, has a name attached to it, and then is able to republish changes with the same name. This, of course, could result in loss of available content, so IPNS entities, according to the developers, may some day function more like a Git commit log, allowing a client to iterate back through versions of the published content.

Advantages of Decentralization

So, you've heard all about centralization and decentralization. But what are the practical benefits of the fact that IPFS is decentralized?

Reliability and PersistenceThe content being served on the IPFS network is going to be around, essentially, forever, if people want it to be. There's not any single weak link, server, or failing point. With larger files, there may be a benefit to having multiple peers as options for your IPFS to choose from to acquire the file. But the real benefit comes from having those multiple options to start with. If one node hosting it goes down, there will be others.

Secured Against DDoS-style AttacksSimply by its nature, distributed peer to peer content cannot be affected by "Direct Denial of Service" style attacks. These attacks are primarily concerned with bombarding host servers to bring down websites or services. However, if the same content is being served to you from multiple peers, an effective DDoS attack would have to find and target all of them.

Previously Viewed Content Available OfflineWith the caching system in place with IPFS, it's entirely possible that quite a lot of your regularly viewed content would be available offline by default. Any dynamic content might not be up to date, of course, but previously viewed static content resources could be at your fingertips whether you were in range of your Wi-Fi or not.

How Would Things Change?

With IPFS as a major player, things would definitely change. Although IPNS nodes can be mapped to HTTP addresses currently, they would not necessarily need to be forever. Web browsers might change, or be removed entirely. More likely, given the transition, you'd simply begin using multiple protocols to access content (instead of typing http:// you might end up with several other protocols available in major browsers). These browsers would also need to be equipped with an automatic way to replace any locally cached content, if the node the browser attempts to contact has content that has been altered and is presenting a new hash.

Browsers, or other clients, might be the only necessary software. Remember that IPFS is peer to peer, so your IPFS installation is simply reaching out to locate others.

You also may wonder what happens with websites serving dynamic content. The answer here is far less clear. While updating static content and republishing to IPFS might not be such a challenge, dynamic, database-driven websites will be significantly more complicated. The challenge ahead will be for developers and proponents of the system to create not only viable, but also practical alternatives to cover these use cases, as a huge portion of the Web today is driven by dynamic database content. IPNS provides some potential solutions here, as do other services that are being developed, but a production-ready solution is yet to come.

The Future with IPFS

IPFS is definitely not a polished, well-oiled machine yet. It's more of a fascinating prototype of what the Web could look like in coming years. The more people who test, contribute, and work to improve it, the greater chance it will have to change the way we serve content on the Internet as a whole. So get involved!

Download one of the prebuilt binaries, or source files, here , or check out the documentation, to get a little more information on the subject, and get started today!

Source: HTTP vs IPFS: is Peer-to-Peer Sharing the Future of the Web?

SANTA FE, NM --(Marketwired - March 01, 2016) -  CrowdReviews.com, a platform for reviewing and ranking online services, has released a statement urging buyers of web hosting solutions to reference online reviews and recommendations as a starting point to their research. With many companies offering or reselling web hosting solutions, it will become increasingly important for buyers of web hosting solutions to find vendors which have been thoroughly reviewed by their clients. It is important to select a vendor which consistently meets their expectations of their clients and offers a professional hosting solution. CrowdReviews.com offers a web hosting rankings platform based on user reviews.

Before making the decision on which web hosting service to use, CrowdReviews.com urges those search for web hosting solutions to utilize online reviews and ratings as a means of identifying potential hosting companies. Since web hosting companies often differ in how they handle customer information, support, and maintenance, it is important to find a web hosting company that operates as your business would expect. If possible, connecting with a web hosting provider prior to signing up for service can reveal not only their level of professionalism, but can ensure that their services match up to expectations.

CrowdReviews.com provides rankings of the best web hosting companies based on a transparent algorithm which favors customer reviews above all other factors. Web hosting companies are invited to become a part of the rankings by creating or claiming their profile and inviting their customers to speak for them. Both satisfied and dissatisfied web hosting customers are urged to voice their opinions on the quality of the service provided to them.

To view the rankings of the best website hosting companies visit:

http://www.crowdreviews.com/ratings-of-best-web-hosting-companies-based-on-user-reviews

To review the algorithm and how it affects providers of web hosting solutions visit:

http://www.crowdreviews.com/how-do-we-rank

To register or claim a profile on CrowdReviews.com, please visit:

http://www.crowdreviews.com/#registration

About CrowdReviews.com

CrowdReviews.com is a crowdreviewing platform which ranks over 500 software categories and 200 service categories.

Embedded Video Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1jr1EFpug4

Contact InformationSamuel Powers941-257-4559530-B Harkle RoadSTE 100Santa Fe, NM 87505

Source: CrowdReviews.com Urges Buyers of Web Hosting Services to Select Reviewed Hosting Companies