Hope you will like reading my blog.

If you have arrived through a link or a bookmark, please note that HostPK is moved to another location and our new URL is www.hostpk.info.

Please update your bookmarks & RSS feeds.

HostPK was cancelled because I was not finding time to update this blog. My current job is keeping me very busy. Whenever I find some time I work on my WordPress themes site. Hope you will also like my themes.

Packages
Currently they are offering 4 packages (check this page for details).

Basic Plan cost Rs 1200/ year, 1000MB space, 20,000MB bandwidth, One free domain, 5$ e-mail advertisement credit, 5 domains hosted (you can host 5 websites), unlimited ftp accounts, unlimited e-mails. As compared with other Pakistani hosts their Basic Plan comes in price of a domain name. See other plans, specially the Unlimited Space package and Unlimited Domains packages. If you are planning to built a bigger site then these packages are best for your needs.

Free Domain
All of their packages come with a free domain for life i.e. register a package and get a domain free of any charges.

Free 5$ e-mail marketing Credit
All these packages come with 5 $ credit for e-mail marketing.

Supported Features
MySQL, Front Page Extensions, CGI, PHP, Perl, Server Side Includes (SSI), Cron, Curl, GD.

Support
Their customer support is fairly good, at the moment they are building their site, updates coming daily. A few weeks back they started with a support forum but a Joomla based community has replaced their forums now.

Exclamation!
Server uptime isn’t mentioned at their site. Ask them about server uptime before sign up.

Links
UA Communications
Pacakages
Support Site

• Free
• Instant activation
• URL clocking
• Advance stats
• Simple Domain Control Panel
• Unlimited domains under one email

Net1.pk is in its alpha stage and like fresh breeze in unpleasant scenario of web hosting business in Pakistan.

How do you find this service? Don’t forget to comment.

Picking the right Web host isn’t an exact science but its a tough job. Your decision relies largely upon what you plan to do with your site, how much time and expertise you have available to devote to it, and what you can afford to pay. Here are the basic types of users and the kinds of hosts that are right for each.

User types.

• Solo operator
• Small business
• Online store
• Medium-size business
• Big enterprise

Solo Operator

If all you want from your Web site is a place to post pictures of you and your friends or announce your presence to the world, there are plenty of low-cost options. Armed with little or some HTML skills and a few Web tools, newbies should start with an account at a site such as Yahoo GeoCities or Atspace. Both hosts provide free hosting, as well as modest amounts of storage, bandwidth and sub domain name. Among Pakistani hosts there are many such as Nexus, their 12$ basic plan comes with a Domain name, 15 MB Hosting, with 5 GB transfer per month (Unix), unlimited e-mail address and with webmail access.

Small Business

If you run a small business, you need to hang your shingle on the Web. But don’t let running the site turn into a full-time job. While thousands of small businesses use shared hosting services. A shared host is generally a better bet. You’ll be able to give your site a more customized look, though you’ll have to design it yourself or pay extra to have a host do it for you, and you’ll have more room to grow as site traffic increases or you add employees and e-mail accounts. Prices are extremely competitive; you can get a fully functional site for less than 9$ to 2$ per month. But you’ll also be sharing one machine with potentially hundreds of other sites, so if sites on your shared server get hacked or blocked for spamming, your site could be shut down for a time.

Key Features

• Personalized domain names: Having your own domain (www.yourowndomain.com) marks you as a serious business and one that’s more likely to stick around.
• E-mail and Web marketing tools: Want customers to find you in search engines or keep in touch with clients? Some hosts offer tools that let you do both.
• Site design services: Templates are too limited at this level, and your expertise may not be in Web design.

Online Store

It’s one thing to advertise your wares on the Net and quite another to sell them. If you want to conduct transactions and collect money, your needs go up. Here, the kind of hosting package you pick depends highly on whether you’re selling 20 items or 2,000 and whether you expect 10 customers or 10,000. A low-volume shop could get away with a Yahoo storefront that accepts PayPal payments, but serious stores will want a host that offers a full e-commerce package with all the trimmings: a shopping cart; security certificates; an online catalog tool; payment gateways for accepting credit cards; and ways to drive traffic to your shop, such as advertisements, search engine placement, e-mail newsletters, and so on. You’ll also want a host that can integrate these tools with your back-office accounting and inventory-management apps. And you’ll want rock-solid security and uptime guarantees; if your store is hacked or goes down, you lose money.

Key Features

• Web advertising and marketing services: Advertisements, search engine placement, and e-mail newsletters.
• Server redundancy and regular backup: You’ll want your product lists to be regularly updated (hourly, if you have a busy or complex shop), and you’ll need multiple copies in different locations. That way if there’s, say, a major power failure in the Northeast, other shoppers can get to your servers in the Southwest.

Medium Size Buiness

With a midsize business, a robust Web site is de rigueur. But the kind of hosting resources you need depends more on what you want the site to do than the size of your company. A large informational, or brochureware, site that doesn’t change often has lower bandwidth and storage needs than a smaller site that conducts transactions, creates dynamic Web pages, or delivers streaming-media files. For online brochures, a moderately priced, shared-hosting account may be more than adequate. Heavily interactive sites, such as those that serve up audio and video files or those that need to run their own apps, might opt for a virtual private server, a shared host that splits one machine between a handful of customers, or a dedicated server that’s theirs alone. Again, the staples here are security and reliability–the host must provide uptime guarantees, built-in redundancy, and superior tech support.

Key Features

• Robust security: Having your site hacked or taken down by a worm can be a nightmare for any business, so ask about the host’s firewall, antivirus, intruder detection, and other security services.
• Service-level agreements with uptime guarantees: At this level, you’ll want an SLA (service loan agreement) that spells out the uptime that the host will guarantee, as well as how the host will compensate you if that agreement isn’t met.

Big Enterprise

Large organizations are complex enterprises, so it’s no surprise their hosting needs can be complicated as well. Traffic and e-mail volume alone may dictate the need for a dedicated hosting solution. In fact, most big enterprises will engage several servers–some for delivering Web pages, others for handling e-mail and database calls. The question for many is what kind of dedicated service. Businesses with large IT staffs that need more control over their Web sites generally opt for unmanaged or self-managed dedicated servers, where the hosting company provides the hardware but it’s up to the customer to load apps and keep the site running. Firms that want to outsource their entire Web operation can go for a managed dedicated host; these are pricier, but they may also offer site development and design services. Companies that have their own hardware and staff but need a place to put them can seek out a colocation provider, which will rent them rack space in a secure, bandwidth-rich facility.

Key Features

• State-of-the-art virus protection, a firewall, and intrusion detection.
• Offsite data storage and backup.
• Secure facilities: Besides network security, you also want to make sure the company controls the personnel who can access your machines on the inside. This may include biometric scanners on the doors of the server cages, if necessary.

Internet users are getting mature, their trends and habits are changing. Matured Internet users are building their own websites. It is creating opportunities for more hosting providers to enter the market and the existing hosts to expand their business operations.

But general scenario isn’t good, most service providers doesn’t possess good technical skills. Many are charging hidden fee, hosting services are too costly, customer support isn’t active. All of these problems require complete posts. I’ll discuss these problems later on separately.

These are the charts for Top 10 web hosts of Pakistan by their customer strength. Except CyberNet (correct me if I’m wrong) all of these hosts are resellers.

The host that tops this list is AABCA.com and when I’m writing this blog post their site is down. With every passing day their market share is decreasing, you can see this web hosting report for AABCA.com here at Webhosting.info.

The main problem with resellers is their reliability, the uptime and server performance depend almost entirely on the upstream provider (the host behind the reseller). Considering that the reseller did a good job in finding a great upstream host, these things should be fine, but, unfortunately, in their search to get the best deal out there, many hosting resellers (if not most of them) end up being hosted for just a few bucks a month on highly overcrowded servers with stability and performance problems, frequent downtime etc. which will in turn translate into poor service for the end user.

What Is Web Hosting?
Before you working with your plan, take some time to familiarize yourself with your web hosting plan. Let’s start with a few definitions:
Server
A server is a computer attached to a network whose function is to provide (or serve up) data or other resources to client computers. A web server, for example, sends web pages to the Internet when asked for them by a browser. Other kinds of servers you might encounter are email servers (which manage email distribution), application servers (computers that run applications used by other computers), and workgroup servers (which allow multiple users to share data).
Web host
A web host is an interconnected group of web servers containing web site data that other computers can access through the Internet. Web hosts, such as Yahoo!, may also provide technical resources and site maintenance.
web site
A web site is a collection of web pages, usually linked to each other, that are made available on the World Wide Web by an organization or individual.

You might think of a web host as a landlord. A landlord builds and maintains the structure, then rents storefronts to other businesses. Each business designs and operates its store differently and leaves building maintenance to the landlord.

Likewise, a web host such as Dreamhost rents space on a web server to businesses and individuals like you. Each web hosting customer builds his own web site, while Yahoo!, the host, maintains the network of servers. Paying for a web hosting service means you don’t have to invest lots of money or endure technical headaches to create and maintain a world-class network. Your host monitor the network and protect your data so you can focus on your web site.