What is a Virtual Private Server?

A virtual private server is the next best thing to a private server, and it does not require nearly as much capital as a private server. By using a virtual private server you don’t have to worry about any limits being imposed on your hosting account as far as your website resources are concerned. This means your needs will be definitively met with regards to bandwidth and disk space. In addition your site will be able to operate at peak performance virtually without limitation. Therefore you won’t have to concern yourself with constant upgrades or multiple hosting accounts unnecessarily.

Who Needs It?

If you’re a personal website owner with a blog or a personal site that does not contain many files, then you probably would not benefit much from a virtual private server. However, if you are a business owner that is looking to expand in the near future, then you may want to expand your horizons by considering a virtual web hosting service. Virtual Private Servers are especially beneficial to business owners because they provide comprehensive administrative rights to the user which gives them complete control over their business website.

A virtual web hosting plan is also more reliable than your standard shared web hosting plan as the customer support is more personalized and the web server is not being used by other websites. With shared hosting, the web server is being shared by other websites, and if these websites conduct illegal or questionable activities, it is not uncommon for the entire block of IP addresses to be brought down. This could result in down time and even the loss of many potential customers.

Choosing a Virtual Web Hosting Plan

Choosing a web hosting plan of any kind requires a thorough process of elimination. Through deductive reasoning and a bit of research you can find the information need to make an informed decision in a timely manner without hesitation. Perhaps the most important factor in any web hosting plan is the companies reliability and the support they provide their customers. Try giving each prospective company a call several times and see which one answers your queries as quickly and as friendly as possible. Since this will be your first private hosting experience you’ll need to be sure you have access to all of the information you need this first time around.

The problem with most web hosting plans is that they claim to offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space, however they simply cannot truly offer this as they are not equipped to do so. Even Internet Service Providers don’t make such claims, as they know it is not possible to give this type of service to every customer. So then why do so many web hosting companies promise unlimited features that they cannot accommodate for?

All You Can Eat?

Think of it this way – when you go to a buffet, you are promised all you can eat. This means you are entitled to an unlimited amount of food, as long as you can swallow it. However, this does not mean that you are going to eat all of the food! In fact, most of the people at the buffet are not going to eat more than two plates! The buffet advertises unlimited food, even though both the restaurant manager and the diners know that this is not truly possible. How does this relate to web hosting? Because it is the same concept- web hosts offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space to attract customers. At the same time, they know these customers cannot possibly use all of their bandwidth.

Competition and Marketing

Due to the competitive nature of the web hosting industry, web hosting companies will do whatever they can to outbid the competition for your business. Web hosts know that most users are not going to uses even half of their allocated bandwidth, so they can offer unlimited bandwidth plans since there are so many server resources left over all the time. The sad part is, if the customer does happen to go over this hidden bandwidth limit, the hosting company may shut down their website without warning. While this kind of unlimited plan may be suitable for some webmasters, a rapidly expanding business should know their bandwidth limits to prevent from receiving warning letters and abrupt termination of service  from their web hosting service.

Conclusion

The saying “nothing is free” may be just as relevant as “nothing is unlimited.” When a web hosting company says they offer unlimited features, it may be best to speak with these web hosting company’s support staff to assure yourself that the features are actually unlimited.

How Much Space Do You Need

Purchasing a new storage device requires the assessment of your storage needs. If you only need to backup a few things, then a simple USB drive will suffice. Even though USB drives do not consume a lot of space, they are capable of holding vast amounts of data and are seen as a good way to backup your data.  If you need to store more then you may want to consider an external hard drive.

Outsourcing Storage Space

If you do not want to store your data on a physical device at your home or office, then you can always opt for virtual storage with a third-party provider.  With a good data hosting service, you will receive the benefit of an online interface that will allow you to easily transfer your files,  and you’ll also receive plenty of bandwidth. Before selecting a third-party data hosting service, make sure they are reputable and take plenty of security measures to help protect your website’s data. The data must be secure during the entire time it is stored on their server to prevent data loss.

Speed Necessity

If you need to transfer a lot of data at one point in time, then speed should most definitely be a determining factor. It is important to consider all of the aspects of the storage provider, including speed, memory and disk space. Normally the best speeds are provided by interfaces such as  IDE, Firewire, SCSI, parallel, and USB. These storage devices are of the plug and play variety and are very easy to use and maintain.

Making the Right Decision

There are plenty of options available concerning storage for your e-commerce website. It is not hard to find  a service that will accommodate your needs, however it is best to make sure you make the right decision initially.

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.

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.

Bandwidth and Storage

Bandwidth and disk space play a major role in determining the price of web hosting.  Determining how much of each you require can be tricky, but coming up with an estimate is important.  Whatever you determine, just make sure you understand how these crucial resources are allotted.  It is imperative that you understand the rules on overages and what will happen if you use more bandwidth or disk space than you have been allocated.  Simply knowing this will spare you the surprise of a huge web hosting bill at the end of the month.  A hosting company that will spill the details on allowances and overages ahead of time allows you to take the measures needed to reduce or properly plan for extra usage.  This type of host can be a real keeper.

Website Quantity

If you require more than one website, then you might want to consider signing up with a hosting company that allows you to run multiple domains on a single account.  This will help you save a lot of money over purchasing separate accounts from different companies.  Because you are essentially putting all of your eggs in one basket, you also need to consider the dangers of multiple domain hosting.  Should disaster strike the server, all of your websites could be compromised and unavailable to visitors.  You need to give this careful thought as crippling downtime might be the greatest cost of all.

Web Applications and Technologies

You can save yourself some money on web hosting just by ensuring that all the software applications and technologies your site requires are included in the package.  This includes programs such as FrontPage and WordPress as well as technologies such as PHP or ASP.NET.

If the host does not offer what you need, paying extra for it could end up costing you dearly.  Make sure you understand what is included and try not pay for features that can be obtained somewhere else for free.

Hosting Contracts

Many web hosting companies offer substantial discounts when paying for a year or two worth of service in advance.  Signing up for something like this may appear to be a smart move, but you need to find out how long you will be locked in first.  It is recommended to avoid any long-term contracts until you can assure that you are absolutely satisfied with a particular host.  For this reason, you may want to keep your options open to month-to-month contracts where the risks are considerably lower.

]]> http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/12/11/are-you-paying-too-much-for-web-hosting/feed/ 0 http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/11/02/do-you-need-cloud-hosting/ http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2009/11/02/do-you-need-cloud-hosting/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:07:23 +0000 CommunicateBetter http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/?p=599 Cloud hosting services have generated a lot of buzz in recent times.  While you may or may have not heard of this type of offering before, you are probably more familiar with it than you think.  In fact, if use Gmail for checking your webmail, Flickr for sharing photos and perform online searches with Google, you are making use of services that operate in the cloud hosting infrastructure.  Let’s take a closer look at this unique form of hosting to see what the cloud has to offer.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Also known as clustered hosting, cloud hosting is a solution that often uses virtualization technology to facilitate load balancing, security and system resources over multiple servers.  This basically means that instead of relying a single piece of hardware, your website and applications can benefit from the resources of multiple servers.   In the typical shared hosting environment, a website is limited to the bandwidth, disk space, RAM, processing power and others resources allocated to the physical machine.  Cloud hosting is a concept that frees you of these limitations, providing you with on-demand access to an infrastructure that is virtually inexhaustible.  The mere structure of the cloud makes it easy to scale up or down based on your individual requirements.

Who Needs Cloud Hosting?

Throughout the years, a countless number of websites have been the victims of their own success.  This is the website then ends up suffering because of its sudden boost in popularity and traffic.  The environment in which this situation occurs the most is shared web hosting.  Once your website exceeds the limitations of a single physical server, it is susceptible to choking.   Cloud hosting is the perfect alternative as it gives you access to a cluster of servers, allowing your website to benefit from additional bandwidth, RAM, processing power and other resources it might require.  The major selling point to this solution as that you can obtain this extra boost in computing power when you need it.  If the popularity of your website subsides a bit, you can easily place the resources back into the cloud and make them available to other users.

Are There Other Benefits?

Cloud hosting services offer benefits from numerous angles.  The most obvious advantages are its scalability and cost efficiency.  Being that cloud computing is a highly scalable technology, websites and applications can be expanded greatly thanks to the additional resources.  Dealing with slow responses and frequent crashes just because your site experienced a sudden surge in traffic is a common thing in the shared hosting environment.  The cloud’s scalability allows you to avoid this problem with ease.  Another major benefit of cloud hosting is the flexible pay-per-usage model.  When signing up with a provider, you are only charged for the amount of computing power you use, similar to how you pay for your gas and electrical bill.   No longer do you have to lease and maintain a costly and complex dedicated server just to improve performance.   These are a few of many benefits that have made the cloud the talk of the IT world.

Downtime

A web host could provide you with all the tools needed to create a professional, feature-rich website that garners the attention of your audience.  However, if your site is constantly unavailable, its beauty will not mean a thing to the users who cannot access it.  Realizing that excessive downtime is one of the easiest ways to kills your online popularity, it is critical to find a cheap host that is more committed to reliability than a low price.

Limited Bandwidth

Before entering any type of hosting arrangement, it is vital that you consider the monthly bandwidth allocated to your account.  It is a known fact that bandwidth is a key component needed to support website traffic and plays a huge role in its success.  If your site has a large number of visitors, it will obviously require more bandwidth.  The challenging part of it all is that you may experience traffic spikes when least expected and be left with a sudden shortage of resources.  This is definitely a situation you don’t want to find yourself in as it could once again lead to dreaded periods of downtime.  If traffic is of any importance, make sure your cheap hosting plan comes included with enough bandwidth to support your current and future traffic requirements.

Technical Expertise

The technical expertise of the hosting provider is one area that doesn’t get enough attention.  This doesn’t necessarily refer to the company’s infrastructure or hardware, but the people behind all the technology.  Web hosting providers must be technically inclined for the simple fact that many of their customers are not.  This expertise will be needed to provide you with support and encounter all the technical issues that might arise.  You may not know a thing about servers but there is no excuse for your web host, cheap service or not.

Level of Support

One of the biggest drawbacks of cheap hosting services has been the lack of support.  It seems as if some companies are cutting cost in various areas to provide affordable service and the critical department of support is often the one to suffer.  Support is very important and should come at no additional cost.  Even if you are only paying a couple of dollars per month, ensure that your plan comes with world-class support that makes you feel like a million dollar customer.

At the end of the day, it is not impossible to find a company that provides a cheap service yet works hard to keep up the reliability.  However, it may take you a little extra time so exercise a bit of patience and make your selection wisely.  After doing your research, it should be much easier to find a premium service that comes at a bargain price.

In order to estimate how much disk space and bandwidth you need, you should first determine what type of website you will have.  In general, small business sites fall into one of the following classifications.

Mini-sites - Also referred to as one-product sites, min-sites are small and usually consist of two to three pages.  The main focus of such a site is to sale a single product or collect contact information from visitors and try to market products to them at a later time.  This is the type of site you often find with a lengthy sales letter along with an order form and contact page.

Brochure Site – A brochure site typically has about 10 web pages that describe what the business does.  It goes over their products and services, location and targeted market among other details.  The site might also contain a contact page, an about page and other pages where items can be purchased.  These sites get their name because they essentially act as the company’s online brochure.

Theme-based Site - This type of website revolves around a specific niche market or topic.  It could be a site dedicated to freelance writers, web hosting or work-at-home moms.  These sites usually receive frequent updates and contain articles, tutorials and other resources.  A theme-based site can either sell its own products, items from affiliates or simply exist to provide a lot information.

Each website classification has different disk space and bandwidth requirements.

A mini-site usually does not require an enormous amount of disk space. On the other hand, if it starts to gain popularity through effective search engine optimization, affiliate promoting or word of mouth, it will likely generate more traffic.  In this instance, the amount of bandwidth becomes crucial.

A brochure site does not require a lot of disk space or bandwidth.  This is the average small business site, one that can get by with the basic offerings of a good web hosting provider.

A theme-based site usually does not require that much disk space or bandwidth.  In the beginning that is.  If this is a website that truly requires frequent updates, the requirements for disk space can increase quite fast.  Moreover, once you add more content and generate more traffic, your needs for data transfer will also increase.

Regardless of what type of site you have in mind for your small business, it is a good rule of thumb to expect the unexpected and take the future into account from day one.  The best thing you can do in any event is to make sure your host doesn’t charge ungodly amounts for overages and provides an easy path to service upgrades.

Disk Space and Transfer

Whether it is a blog, community or e-commerce site, disk space and bandwidth are the core elements of any hosting solution.  It is these two resources that will ultimately determine what size package you need.  Though making this determination can be difficult, it should help to know that most e-commerce sites require a little more than others.  This is because you have to factor in product images, shopping cart applications and hopefully, frequent customers.  Regardless of how much disk space and bandwidth you start out with, make sure you choose a service that has the future in mind with a path to easy upgrades.

Payment Options

The multitude of payment options is enough to keep you up for nights but this is a bridge that must be crossed.  Fortunately, the preferred method of payment online is by credit card and there are several ways to meet this need.  Services such as PayPal make a nice option for small start up stores that don’t have a need to sell a large number of products.  The service is free, very secure and virtually anyone can get an account.  The downside is the hefty transaction fees attached to every sale you make.  At the end of the month, you might notice that these fees are taking a sizable chunk out of your bottom line.  An alternative would be a merchant account as it shows more credibility and has considerably lower transaction fees.  The problem here is a strenuous review process in which only a select few qualify.  It would be wise to compare a few carts so you can make an informed decision on which method works best.

Shopping Carts

After getting your payment options together, you must then figure out how those transactions will be facilitated.  The answer here is an aptly named piece of software known as a shopping cart.  These days, hosting providers offer a wide variety of shopping carts to choose from, many of which come free in e-commerce hosting packages.  While the software is a matter of preference, it is best to choose one that has your customers’ best interests in mind.  The shopping cart should be simple for you to set up and easy for your customers to use. You can learn more about what’s available by reading shopping cart reviews as they generally give you a good idea of what to expect.

Conclusion

There is so much that goes into e-commerce hosting and most of it has to do with your personal requirements.  Aside from the factors mentioned here, you will need a special set of management tools, security features and an overall reliable service.  These are easily obtainable when purchasing service from a reputable provider.