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.

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.

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.

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.

What is the Intent of Your Site?

When it comes to choosing a service, the first step that needs to made is determining the purpose of your site.  Some people use a website as a convenient means of sharing photos and information with family and friends while others are looking to start a business online.  Although every website is based on the same general concepts, there are extremes that greatly differentiate business sites from their personal counterparts.  Knowing the purpose of your site will make it much easier to decide between free and paid hosting.

What will it Include?

After determining the needs of your website, you should then have a better idea of the content it will include.  Some websites consist of a single homepage and others contain multiple pages with dynamic features.  If you only need to upload small text documents and photos, you will not require tons of disk space and bandwidth in a web hosting solution.  The same holds true if you only anticipate a minimal amount of traffic.

If the above sounds like your plans, you can probably get by with free web hosting.  Free services are typically easy to use and cater to individuals with no experience at creating web pages.  With the right platform, you can learn more about HTML programming and put those skills to use for a professional site in the future.  Many have used these services to build their presence online before moving on to a paid solution.

Can You Afford to be Limited?

Although a free hosting service can help you get a website, there are several drawbacks you should take into consideration.  First and foremost, you have very little control over your hosting environment.  Because of this, you may be forced to allow the hosting provider to place third-party advertisements on your web pages.  Secondly, features are quite limited in comparison to a premium hosting solution.  You only have a small amount of disk space and bandwidth to work with and technical support is almost non-existent.  Such disadvantages are the very reason free hosting services are best suited for personal websites.

Paid hosting gives you more flexibility and control with a variety of packages to choose from.

You will have access to more disk space and bandwidth along with a number of highly sought after features.  This ranges from powerful databases and dynamic programming languages to multiple email accounts and free domain names.  These are features you just won’t find in a shared hosting plan.

Conclusion

As you can see, free hosting has its purposes, howevef, the usefulness is primarily limited to personal sites.  Anyone who plans to make a serious impact on the web is better served with a premium hosting solution.  In this case, it pays to have a service that provides the features and reliability you need to achieve your goals online.

Shared Hosting

For someone who only requires a small, basic website, leasing an entire web server just isn’t practical.  If this sounds like you, then shared hosting would be the perfect solution.  It is cost effective and specifically designed to suite the needs of small websites.  With shared hosting, the web host stores multiple websites on single server, allowing them to offer a service that is much cheaper than dedicated hosting.

Web servers are more powerful than the average computer used in the desktop setting.  They offer plenty of disk space as well as RAM and CPU.  The catch is that you are required to share these resources with other customers, a factor that could lead to performance and security issues. If your requirements are minimal, you should be able to find a shared hosting provider able to supply all the resources you need.  However, as your site becomes more popular, it is very likely that you will exceed the resources the web host is able to provide.  In this case, you need to either consider purchasing upgrades that supply you with additional bandwidth, storage capacity and other essential components.  If the provider is not able to accommodate your needs, it is time to move up to a dedicated server and possibly consider managed hosting.

Managed Hosting

Websites that experience a high volume of traffic and run mission-critical business operations are best suited for a dedicated server.  Unlike shared hosting, a dedicated server provides you with all the resources on the machine.  This includes disk space, RAM, CPU and guaranteed bandwidth as well.  On the other hand, a dedicated server calls for you to deal with server administrative tasks that can be very complex and time consuming.

In its purest form, having a dedicated server means you are responsible for all the maintenance.  This includes basic administration to keep the machine thriving on a day to day basis as well addressing any security issues that may arise.  Those who require a dedicated server but are not up for all the technical challenges often opt for managed hosting.

Managed hosting offers benefits to the website owner or business that either lacks the skills required to maintain a dedicated server or simply do not have the time to invest.  You can generally select the options that best suit your needs, freeing you up to concentrate on other vital aspects while the server is maintained by the web host.   When viewing it from this perspective, managed hosting is pretty much like outsourcing your dedicated server tasks to a third-party company.

Making a Choice

Managed hosting is the perfect alternative to the limitations of the shared server and complexity of a dedicated server.  Keep in mind that these benefits come with a higher price tag.  Therefore, it is very important to make sure you truly require this type of service before making an investment.

The major issue with shared hosting has always been the same – the availability of security and the fact that this platform can only be so secure.  Without adequate protection, the web host’s server is vulnerable to a wide range of threats including DDoS attacks, malware infection and network intrusion.  You could also be exposed to attacks such as SQL injection, cross site scripting and even the malicious actions of your neighbors on the server.  When your hosting environment isn’t properly secured, you stand the risk of losing the most sensitive of information.

Security is definitely an issue in the shared hosting environment, one that could make the low cost an uneven trade.  The good thing is that several web hosting providers are aware of these vulnerabilities and they are taking the necessary approaches to deliver a secure service.  When looking for a company to host your site, we recommend keeping the following security considerations in mind.

Protection from Thy Neighbor

When assessing the security of a particular web host, you must not only analyze the protection offered against outside threats, but security that keeps you protected against other website owners on the server.  You never know who you’re sharing the server with, as they could be into dealing porn, distributing spam or malicious software.  A few of your next door neighbors just might be prolific computer hackers.  To keep yourself protected in this regard, you should make sure the provider doesn’t allow any unsolicited code to be executed or access to your directories.

Clean Code

One of the biggest threats to your website lies in the code used to build your applications.  When they are not properly scripted, intruders can use them as an entrance to your data and reap major havoc.  You can minimize the possibility of common website exploits by ensuring that the web hosting company offers the latest in development tools whether its PHP and MySQL or ASP and MS Access.  Most importantly, it is up to you to make sure you are coding your applications and web pages in a secure manner.

Security Features

There are also a number of features that will give you an idea of how secure a particular web hosting platform is.  This includes protection for the actual server such as software that defends against DDoS attacks and viruses as well firewalls and network intrusion systems to fend off hackers.  If your site is to involve online business transactions, you will also require SSL support to protect your customers’ credit card information.  When making sure all the vital security issues are addressed, you can better your chances of enjoying a smooth run in the shared hosting environment.

Saving Money on Your Web Presence

Owning an entire web server isn’t practical for every company.  After all, purchasing the hardware is quite expensive and the operation becomes even more costly when considering administrative tasks.  This is where web hosting comes in as it allows you to establish a web presence for a fraction of what it costs to maintain your own internet-based infrastructure.  Web hosting companies give you the power to run your business online while bypassing the cost associated with housing and maintaining a server.  Not only do they provide you with the hardware, but also vital resources such as memory, bandwidth and disk space.  They set you with useful features that allow you to create a dynamic site with relative ease.  You can pay a premium price for such a service or save yourself a bundle by opting for cheap web hosting.

The Evolution of Cheap Hosting

The birth of cheap services can be attributed to the highly competitive market that is the web hosting industry.  Whereas such services were simple and limited in the past, today’s web hosts offer a greater range of options at a price most small businesses can afford.  Although a dedicated server is a totally different environment, cheap web hosting isn’t necessarily limited to a shared server.  For example, you can easily find a VPS (Virtual Private Server) plan at a very reasonable price.  A VPS is the perfect medium in between a shared and dedicated server.  It provides the stability and performance that may be jeopardized by sharing resources with thousands of website owners and a level of flexibility that is similar to dedicated hosting.  Fierce competition in the market has raised the standards of cheap hosting, meaning you shouldn’t have to sacrifice on much of anything.

Cheap Isn’t Always What it Seems

Many people have a misconception of cheap web hosting, believing it requires you to trade features, flexibility and quality of service for an amazingly low price.  This is understandably so, as a number of companies have blemished the market with their shady practices.  Fortunately, there are several outstanding web hosting providers that offer a wide range of features and services to their customers.   Some of the most inexpensive hosting packages will provide you with numerous email accounts, e-commerce tools, security mechanisms and enough server capacity to support the growth of your website.  Can you accomplish more with a high-end web hosting solution?  Probably.  Be that as it may, a cheap alternative can set you up just as well and put you on the path to success.