UK Web Hosting with a Difference
October 23, 2005 (PRLEAP.COM) Technology News
With so many hosting companies climbing over each other to win your custom by offering endless (and often useless) web applications, unlimited disk space (which is nonsense by the way) and very bold uptime guarantees (which don’t actually guarantee anything) you might think it impossible to for any of them to stand out from the crowd. Not so with Net Explorers ( http://www.hosting-netexplorers.co.uk ), a UK web hosting company with a difference. They actually provide a service!Granted, they offer most of the features you would expect e.g. 24 hour technical support, x MB of disk space, a certain number of mailboxes and a burst-able monthly bandwidth allowance. Nothing new here. Then there is the excellent Plesk Control Panel, access to your own cgi-bin, server side includes, PHP, MySQL, spam filters, email anti virus, firewall and the list goes on. Now it starts to get a little more interesting…
Urchin web statistics (recently acquired by Google) is by far the most advanced, comprehensive and user-friendly web site visitor statistics system on the market. Whereas most hosts will charge you a premium for this service, Net Explorers provide it for free with every hosting account. So if measuring the effectiveness of your website is important to you they may be a very wise choice indeed.
If you have ever been unlucky enough to experience data loss as a result of a virus, hardware failure or a severe crash you will probably appreciate the importance of backing up. How many hosts do you know of that will back up all your MySQL databases and all your website files every day, to a remote server, at no extra charge? Well you can add Net Explorers to that very short list!
Although you can host pretty much any popular web application you care to mention on a Net Explorers server (except for Microsoft-based products e.g. ASP, Access, Frontpage extensions) if you are a fan of Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, osCommerce or X-Cart then you could do a lot worse than host your site with these guys (and that list of applications is growing all the time). Not just because they will do a full professional installation of the latest stable version into the bargain, they will also provide you with help, advice and support along the way. Guess what… the technical support staff at Net Explorers are not just server administrators, they are experienced web designers and developers who all use these applications every day for developing websites for their clients. They understand your needs and have most likely encountered exactly the same issues in their daily work so they can provide you with a much higher level of support on these applications than your average host. Their support team is very responsive and you will never get a response like, “We do not support third party applications”, which may be all too familiar if you have tried to get help with this kind of thing with other hosts. Even most Open Source projects provide some kind of forum or mailing list but having a dedicated support team on hand who generally respond within 30 minutes can be a real life saver.
Another very important consideration when choosing a host is their geographical location. Not just because of time difference and communication issues but also because of the effect it has on search engine results. Net Explorers are a UK web hosting company and all their servers reside a state-of-the-art UK data centre. Your website will be hosted on a UK IP address which means major search engines like Google will give your site a positive bias to UK search engine users i.e. it is likely to rank higher than if it was not on a UK IP address.
In short, if reliability, high service levels plus friendly, knowledgeable and responsive support is more important to you than saving a few pounds then it would be well worth investing in a proper, business-class hosting service from Net Explorers.
Visit http://www.hosting-netexplorers.co.uk/web_hosting_uk/web_hosting_packages.php if you want to know more about UK web hosting from Net Explorers.