When it comes time to upload your first website, and if possible long before that you will need to establish some type of web hosting solution.

There are several typical types to consider or that come up during a simple Google search.

• Shared Hosting – On a Hosting Companies Server, you essentially buy as much space as you need, prices typically start at about $5 per month, but usually hosting companies bill a year in advance.  Its lean and mean and cheap for a reason, like taking weight loss pills as opposed to exercising.
• Virtual Dedicate Server Hosting – A company leases a partitioned section of a server configured itself as a server for you to host multiple websites.  Rates usually start at about $50 per month.  Can be a great fit for someone with under a hundred websites to manage.  Typical configurations are 1-2 dozen sites.
• Dedicated Server Hosting – Ergo you lease an entire server from another company located outside of your office to host your website. Usually necessary for websites with very heavy traffic and bandwidth requirements.
• Purchasing Your Own Server – Just as it implies, you purchase a hosting computer and configure it run your website.

DreamHost came out of the holidays and noticed that billings were a little light.  They dug into their billing process and reran some server jobs to make sure everything had been covered correctly.  As they did this, they noticed some accounts that had not been charged.  Eventually they isolated the issue relating to a missing upgrade for 64 bit something or other, and then went back and reran the server jobs to the date when the upgrade had gone in (with the missing something or other).

The only problem with this tactic is that when they reran the job, they used the year 2008 instead of the correct year of 2007.  Their system then processed a years worth of charges in advance and that triggered  their Um, Whoops. blog post.

Now on the serious side, its good that they figured things out.  The bad thing is that a few accounts reportedly may have been shut down temporarily due to lack of payment.  Its unclear if any customers credit cards were actually billed for a years worth of service in advance.

From our perspective here, its great that DreamHost figured out the problem, its nice that they have a sense of humor in diffusing the situation, but if you are one of the customers that may have been impacted by the mistake, we hope that you get a little something for your time and trouble, maybe a discount, maybe a free month of service, maybe a free trip to Branson Missouri, but something to take your mind off the problem.

There could just be as many websites out there offering reviews of hosting companies as there are actual hosting companies.  The two are about as bountiful as all the fiber cables running through a fortune 500 high rise.

As an example I came across a new reviewing site called Hostpedia.org. They have a name that plays off of the concept of Wikipedia, but to the best of my knowledge they are not by any means a wiki themselves, just another site providing hosting reviews.  I have to give them kudos for a catchy 2.0 sounding name, although I do not necessarily agree with their push for HostGator.com.  It wouldn’t necessarily be my top choice on any given day of the week.

LunarPages Hosting offers a very powerful service offering at a very low price.  They also have an attractive affiliate program for webmasters.

For $6.95 per month you get access to Ruby on Rails, PHP 4 or 5 and 15,000 GB of transfer bandwidth, just to name a few perks.

LunarPages also offers a relatively inexpensive quick website creation serivce for $12.95 per month.  Not bad if you want to throw up a site that is essentially a glamorized business card or a niche site selling specific products like espresso machines or dead sea salt cleanser or something relatively novel.

For anything more powerful than that, their Business Hosting plan might be more appropriate as it comes E-Commerce Ready with a shopping cart.

GoDaddy.com has increased its market share and they now are number 2 in the market for overall SSL Certificates.

Go Daddy’s Secure Certificates market share has increased 63% over last year. They now hold the second spot in over all SSL Certificates market share at 16.4 percent. This is thanks to more small and medium size businesses going online. It also has to do with Go Daddy’s lower cost and excellent customer support.

Web Hosting Sites Reviews – Go Daddy’s SSL Market Share Growth

There are other reasons why GoDaddy has grown into the number 2 spot for market share besides the growth of medium sized business websites.

• Web site login forms
• Online banking institutions
• Charity donation Web sites
• Even Sites selling Diet Supplements to treat fibromyalgia

You can learn more about GoDaddy’s SSL services to learn how it might impact your own website or web business.