Cloud Hosting Blog

Internet Explorer general manager Dean Hachamovitch revealed details about the upcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 9 web browser at Microsoft Mix10, a conference for web designers and developers held at Las Vegas, Nevada, United States.

The biggest announcements about Internet Explorer 9 were perhaps the browser’s full support for HTML5, hardware-accelerated graphics and text rendering, and a faster JavaScript engine.

As Hachamovitch detailed in the Internet Explorer 8 Platform Preview, Internet Explorer 9 will support CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SV), XHTML parsing, and the video and audio tags using the industry-standard video codecs (H.264/MPEG4 , MP3,AAC), among others. The demo in the event also exhibited the new JavaScript engine working together with Direct2D and taking advantage of multiple CPU cores making web pages load “more quickly and consistently.”

Internet Explorer’s Reputation to Web Developers

Windows Internet Explorer has had a bad reputation with many web developers.

Experienced web developers are aware of the compatibility, cross-browser issues they have to go through when they initially design websites and web applications using the previous versions of Internet Explorer browsers. By solely following Microsoft distinct web standards for IE, website designs may be rendered incorrectly and may cause usability and accessibility problems when they are opened using other web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

Microsoft’s defiance to completely follow the World Wide Consortium (W3C) web standards has made it obligatory for web developers to check the compatibility of their websites across all web browsers. However, things have improved dramatically since the release of Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8; Microsoft has begun to support many long-sought web standards in IE although it’s still far behind compared with other browsers. And with the upcoming release of IE 9 supporting many of W3C standards, web developers are optimistic to see a more standards-compliant Internet Explorer.

Combined web statistics show that Windows Internet Explorer browsers still holds the majority of Internet users worldwide amid stiff and growing browser competition. Internet Explorer leads with 54.50% usage in the worldwide market, followed by 30.96% usage of Mozilla Firefox, 5.61% Google Chrome, 5.21% Apple Safari, and 12.10% Opera. The positive trend that has favored other web browsers in the recent months has prompted Microsoft to listen to the demands of web developers, industry experts, and just last year, they even resorted to charity programs to promote Internet Explorer.

Web Developers: Question of the Day

If you’re an experienced web developer or a frequent Internet user, we’d like to know here at Top Hosting Center which web browser you prefer to use and tell us why. We are looking forward to knowing your thoughts in the comment section below.

Many people have asked us if there is a significant difference between our new Cloud Shared Hosting plan and the traditional web hosting plans offered by our competitors. We were also asked if Cloud Shared is better than the previous shared hosting plans that we’ve offered – Speedy and Rudolf hosting plan, to name a few. Well, the answers are a resounding “Yes.”

Cloud Hosting Has Something for You

Traditional shared web hosting plans run in an architecture where a server crash – regardless whether it’s caused by hardware failure or software bug – can cause all websites in a shared server to go offline and halt all web operations.

The scenario is quite different when it comes to cloud shared hosting. A single point of server failure cannot cause any website in a shared cloud hosting to fail.

In a cloud hosting, there’s a network of servers working together as a single, virtual infrastructure dynamically reserving a pool of resources – CPU, RAM, disk space and bandwidth – and provisioning them to hosting accounts that demands them.

The amount of resources in a cloud hosting is relative to the number of servers joining the cloud network. A cloud network is highly scalable as the infrastructure itself – it can have hundreds of physical servers located from around the world. A cloud therefore can have virtually unlimited hosting resources that the customers can enjoy whenever they need to extend their default hosting specification. This unique feature certainly breaks the fixed resource limits of traditional shared web hosting.

Existing Shared Customers: Why Upgrade?

Besides the fact that the Cloud Shared Hosting takes advantage of cloud computing, it also distinguishes itself from other previous shared hosting by offering greater benefits, free services like website transfer and web application installation, and extended hosting functionality.

Unlike Rudolf and Speedy hosting plans, Cloud Shared Hosting plans are much more inexpensive. For starters, one can experience the benefits of cloud hosting with the THC Special plan, which only costs $4.95 per month. Most of the Cloud Shared Hosting plans also offer SSH access with no additional cost. SSH is a useful functionality that advanced web developers use and it is also something our previous plans lacked in their default specs.

Cloud Shared Hosting plans also feature R1Soft Data Protection service that ensures security and reliability of your website data. They also include a free domain name registration (or domain transfer), and dedicated IP address if you sign up for at least 12 months.

If you’re an existing customer who owns an older hosting plan, you can easily switch to cloud hosting by selecting your desired plan. You may also want to check out our Cloud Storage to extend your hosting space.

We recommend that you contact our customer support department if you have questions of Top Hosting Center cloud products. We’re very excited to see how you will use our cloud hosting for your business competitive advantage.