web hosting

Top Reasons to Use Clustered Hosting Services

Clustered hosting services have received a lot of attention lately, in fact even services such as Flickr and email platforms such as Yahoo Mail make use of the clustered hosting concept. Whether you know it or not, you also use a similar concept to this kind of service every time you execute a web search! Let’s delve deeper into the application and benefits of cluster hosting.

What is Cluster Hosting?

Clustered hosting, sometimes called cloud hosting is a web hosting service that uses virtualization technology to further enhance security and system resources spread across several servers. In essence , clustered hosting gives you and your website the benefits and added resources of using several servers at once.  With a normal web hosting service, you are usually limited by how much bandwidth, disk space, processing speed, RAM, and other resources that have been allocated to your hosting account.    With clustered hosting, you are not bound by these restrictions, because your hosting account has access to hardware that is practically infinite. This clustered server infrastructure allows you to upgrade with ease, and places no limits on your productivity.

Why Would You Need Clustered Hosting?

Many people find themselves in a situation where upgrading is absolutely necessary, and sometimes the limits they have placed on their won website is what ultimately results in downtime and lost business.   Even if the site does not go down for a long period of time, it may become sluggish, causing visitors to abandon your web site.  However, with clustered hosting you have access to a cluster of web servers,  giving your website all of the resources it would ever need to succeed. The best part about clustered hosting is that you don’t need to plan ahead to upgrade. As soon as your website is in need of some extra power, it will be drawn from the cluster of available services, ensuring you always have the resources needed.

Additional Benefits to Clustered Hosting

The advantages of clustered web hosting are obvious, in that it presents unlimited efficiency and scalability. Your website literally has unlimited potential with clustered hosting, as it is not restricted by  the confines of one server. Sudden traffic surges will no longer cause your website to run slowly, and your visitors will continue to return because of this. You may be wondering how you have access to these features without having to upgrade. The answer is simple, and it is one of the biggest benefits involved with clustered hosting. Clustered hosting services are paid ion a similar manner to a pay-as-you-go service, meaning you are billed at the end of each service period depending on how much resources are used during the billing period.

For these reasons, you’ll never have to worry about predicting how busy your website is going to be, and you will be sure that it can handle even the most incredible traffic surges.  Clustered hosting is perfect for a confident entrepreneur that believes their new website may be capable of out performing the limits of a shared hosting plan.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Host

With so many hosting services available online today, it can be very difficult to decide on one. Even worse than the sheer number of hosting providers is the fact that all of them promise to be the best, making the process daunting and confusing. With that said, it is obviously not very easy to choose a web hosting provider, however it can be with the right guide by your side. Here we will discuss the most important features of a web hosting service, giving you something to base your decision on other than propaganda.

Stability

Professionalism and stability are extremely important attributes for a web hosting service to have. You want to make sure you are giving your money to a company that is going to be reliable and offer you all of the services you need without a hassle. The fist step in determining the stability and professionalism of a web hosting service is by contacting their customer support. If it takes longer than 24 hours for you to receive a response email then you know you are dealing with a company that doe snot pride themselves on their reliability.

Try calling your prospective hosting services one at a time and inquire about features such as bandwidth, uptime, and quality assurance. Ask them questions like: “What is done to ensure the security of my website?” Or “ Do you offer a money back guarantee?” If a company does not offer a money back guarantee then you can rest assured that their service is not really the “best.”  Also it is a good idea to find out how many employees they have and also if their customer support center is available 24 hours out of the day.

Performance

Performance is also an extremely important factor when considering a potential web hosting provider, especially if you run a large business website. Find out what kind of bandwidth they offer, how many domains you are allowed to register with them, what kind of server disk space are you allocated, how many email accounts you can have, and anything else that you think would be crucial to the success of your business. If you are going to be running an e-commerce then you may want to consider web hosting services that specialize in this field. Make sure they offer basic features such as shopping carts, SSL certificates, PayPal integration and merchant accounts. Without these essential features, your e-commerce site will be a complete failure and you will be susceptible to hacker attacks.

Popularity and Price

They say that the most popular services are not always the best, however in the web hosting industry this is not necessarily true. The more popular a web hosting company is, the more you can be assured of it’s ability to satisfy it’s customers. Signing up with new web hosting companies is very risky, and doing so should be done with caution. Most of the time, the most popular web hosting services will offer the best prices for the most feature-rich packages. The reason why this is possible should be obvious, as they are making a lot more money then the smaller web hosting companies and so therefore they can afford to offer lower priced packages for their users.

A Closer Look into APS Hosting

APS is a unique hosting solution that offers some very unique features to the domain owner. APS (Active Server Pages) technology allows the design and creation of an interactive website to be completed via server-side scripting. Examples of interactive websites and/or features would be: forums, blogs, search bars, calendars, newsletters, email, surveys, polls, and hit counters.  Unlike HTML scripting, APS scripting will allow your website to be displayed equally on any web browser. The overall compatibility of APS hosting stems from the fact that the APS server decodes and translates the .aps info into .html info before it is received by the browser. This is the primary reason why it is called APS hosting, as it is more than just a type of scripting. In order to use .aps scripts, your hosting company must have APS servers available.

Finding an APS Web Hosting Service Provider

Even though most web hosts claim to support the majority of scripts out there, this doesn’t mean that they all support ASP scripting. ASP scripting is relatively new so it is important that you find a web hosting company that specializes in this area of expertise. Many times you can find out all you need to know form a companies FAQ page, however if you still have questions it may be best to call their customer support number for further inquiries.

ASP Server Details

ASP servers are Windows based virtual servers, much like  Microsoft’s Personal Web Server. While Windows Vista carries support for ASP servers,  XP Home Edition and Windows ME unfortunately do not support ASP scripts. However if your operating system does not support ASP hosting then it is still possible to take advantages of this kind of hosting, thanks to a program known as “Chili” made by Sun Microsystems. Chili allows users to enjoy the benefits of  ASP hosting even if they are using operating systems like Linux, AIX or Solaris, or even if you are using an incompatible server such as Secure Server, Red Hat, and Apache.

The Ease of Transition to ASP Hosting

ASP scripting is also strikingly similar to HTML scripting, so anyone who is familiar with writing code in HTML will have no problem making the transition to ASP scripting. In fact, ASP hosting is just as easy to learn as HTML, so even if you have no experience in scripting, ASP is still an option for you as long as you have a little bit of motivation and the right guide.  In fact there are many tools available online that will help even the most inexperienced programmers in building interactive web pages for their website. If your web hosting company does not currently offer support for ASP hosting, then you can rest assured that they will within the next few years, possibly even months. Due to it’s seemingly unlimited compatibility with web browsers, ASP hosting is quickly becoming the industry standard in web hosting. Switching to an ASP hosting service as soon as possible will ensure that your website is viewable to more users, and more enjoyable to your visitors.

Understanding Your Community Hosting Options

You would be amazed at the amount of social networking and community software tools that are on the market today.  The immense popularity of MySpace, Facebook and YouTube has encouraged many people to create their own online community.  Community sites are expansive in topics, ranging from sites such as dating and video sharing to pets and video games.   Below are just a few of the many options that exist for online communities:

Social networking sites

Social media sites

News publishing sites

Dating sites

Blog sites

Video sharing sites

Photo sharing sites

What Type of Hosting Do You Need?

Web hosting plays a huge role in the creation of these types of community sites.  Such a website requires an added dose of power in comparison to the typical website.  However, what it requires the most is a scalable environment that supports the growth of the community.  As your site increases in popularity, it will attract more users, which means it will be populated with more pictures, videos and possibly other interactive features.   This tremendous growth means that the average shared hosting package may not suitable for the needs of your community.  You have to consider critical resources such as disk space, bandwidth, RAM and CPU, all of which impact the overall performance of your website.  While you might be able to pull this off on a shared hosting platform from a technical aspect, your community could be the one to suffer from slow loading pages and sluggish performance.

A dedicated server makes for one of the most reliable ways to host an online community.  This type of hosting will give you the scalability you need and dramatically reduce the occurrence of performance issues you would endure on a shared server.  The problem is that maintaining a dedicated server can be very complex and expensive.  Leasing the server can run you upwards of $100 per month – and this is just for an unmanaged service.  If you choose to run your community on a dedicated server, keep in mind that you will be responsible for updating the operating system and web server software in addition to managing all the applications and security mechanisms it requires.   This is something many people simply are not equipped to deal with.  For this reason, you should strongly consider looking into a service provider that specializes in community hosting as they are more likely to have the unqiue environment you require.

Conclusion

A community site can be very beneficial, but only when choosing the right web hosting solution.  Before heading out to look for a service, take both the present and future growth into account when factoring in your requirements.   Think about the features you need, the type of content and media you plan to host, and the volume of traffic you anticipate.  If you truly want your community site to be a success, don’t hesitate to ask prospective web hosts questions and find out exactly how they can suit your needs.  This will make it much easier to find the ideal solution for your online community.

Introduction to Video Hosting

Video hosting has become immensely popular due to the prevalence of video sharing community sites such as YouTube and MySpace.  If you have ever visited one of these sites, you know that it is possible to find everything from music videos and commercials to movie trailers and full length wrestling matches.  The best part of all is that you can upload and share your own content, which makes video hosting useful from a social or business aspect.

What is Video Hosting?

Video hosting is one of the many types of web hosting.  As the name implies, this service provides all the tools needed to create and manage a video-orientated website .  Most use these services to create community sites where visitors can watch videos, rate them, post comments and more.  Those looking to create a more interactive environment even allow memberships where register users can upload and share their own content.  The extreme popularity of video sharing sites have put video hosting solutions in great demand.

Who Needs Video Hosting?

Video hosting is the perfect option for users who want to share video content but do not necessarily require traditional web space to host an entire website.  This is mainly because most of these services are free to join as the companies that run them make their money via online advertising.   Video hosting benefits users seeking entertainment, as well as business professionals who want to market their products or services through the visual power of streaming of media.  Thousands of videos are added to the web on a daily basis and millions of people around the world tune in to watch.

A Growing Market

Today, video hosting is a huge segment of the web hosting industry.  As its popularity grew, so did the interest from big name companies looking to jump on the bandwagon.  For example, internet business guru Rupert Murdoch purchased the popular community site MySpace for the cool sum of $580 million.  Not to be outdone, Google when out and acquired YouTube for the unbelievable amount of $1.65 billion.  Whether you agree with the money spent or not, these deals received major attention and the participation in these respective communities is growing at a steady rate.

The Power of Social Networking

Video hosting goes hand in hand with the social networking phenomenon that has taken the web by storm.  Instead of just uploading videos, it also provides a way for users to express themselves and create beneficial networks.  As a member or even a visitor of a video community site, you can run across people who share your same interests and develop some key relationships.  When joining a site that encourages interaction, you can create your own page customized with the videos, photos or music that suits your preference.  You also have the option to purchase a hosting plan equipped with the tools that allow you create your own video driven community.  Video has become the new way to communicate online and at this point, it looks like it’s here to stay.