10 Vital Tips for Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company

By Amy Armitage (c) 2008

The Web hosting firm you choose can make or break your small business. Good ones can run things smoothly, are easy to reach, and fix problems efficiently. But bad ones can have more problems than they are worth, be unreachable at critical times, and bring your business to a screeching halt. Finding a good one is crucial to your success.

Here are some tried and true ideas for how to select a host that will save you money, avoid technical snafus, and build your online platform for the future.

1. Choose a Service that Primarily Does Hosting

Although it might be tempting to sign-up with a firm that provides an umbrella of services in addition to website hosting, a good rule of thumb is that if a company overly-diversifies its services, it won't deliver top quality in any of them (e.g. tech support, updates, maintenance, etc.)

GLOBAL DOMAINS NAME STATISTICS

The following chart represents current statistics for many of the worlds most popular domains.  

Updated May 2008.

Domain	Amount Registered	Country
.com	76.063.148	Global Generic
.de	12.024.088	Germany
.net	11.361.663	Global Generic
.cn	11.439.479	China
.uk	6.826.199	United Kingdom
.org	6.761.801	Global Generic
.info	5.041.001	Global Generic
.eu	2.884.199	European Union
.nl	2.702.754	Netherlands
.biz	1.968.075	Global Generic
.it	1.526.208	Italy
.us	1.411.729	United States
.br	1.300.184	Brazil
.ch	1.119.012	Switzerland
.ru	1.243.362	Russia
.au	1.117.393	Australia
.jp	1.009.602	Japan
.fr	1.125.195	France
.ca	1.009.602	Canada
.kr	902.051	Korea
.dk	904.086	Denmark
.es	941.585	Spain
.mobi	898.916	Global Generic
.pl	993.308	Poland
.be	781.997	Belgium
.at	751.867	Austria
.se	725.984	Sweden
.cz	417.376	Czech
.no	383.469	Norway
.nz	328.951	New Zealand
.mx	252.750	Mexico
.pt	211.259	Portugal
.fi	177.835	Finland
.hk	160.336	Hong Kong
.tr	156.358	Turkey
.sk	154.251	Slovakia
.ie	100.997	Ireland
.lt	76.106	Lithuania

Cybersquatting Increasing

By Mike Sachoff - Fri, 03/28/2008 - 11:25am.

Complaints reach record level

Complaints of "cybersquatting" where a person sets up a site using a trademarked name and profits by selling the name to the owner reached a record level last year according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Cybersquatter

The U.N. agency based in Geneva, received 2,156 complaints alleging abusive registration trademarks on the Internet representing an 18 percent increase over 2006 and a 48 percent increase over 2005.

"These increases confirm that 'cybersquatting' remains a significant issue for rights holders," said Mr. Francis Gurry, WIPO Deputy Director General, who oversees WIPO's dispute resolution work, noting that a number of developments in the DNS are also cause for concern from the perspective of intellectual property holders, as well as Internet users generally.

The majority of complaints came from pharmaceuticals, banking, and Internet, retail and entertainment industries. Pharmaceutical makers remained the top filers due to "numerous permutations of protected names registered for web sites offering or linking to online sales of medications and drugs," WIPO said.

WIPO parties settled a quarter of all cases without a panel decision. Of the remainder, 85 percent of the panel decisions ordered the transfer of the domain names in question to the complainant and 15 percent of the complaints were denied, leaving the names in the possession of the registration holder.

Most of the complaints came from the U.S., France and Britain, while respondents were mainly in China, Britain and the U.S.