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Let’s face it - a lot of companies are offering very similar products and services, and that’s especially true in the web hosting industry. Simply do a search for ‘shared web hosting’ and up comes a seemingly endless list of companies whose offerings could meet your needs. There really is nothing in it – many companies offer an unlimited number of websites, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth and 24/7 support, thinking that somehow this differentiates them from the next “unlimited” company in the list. As someone who has been in the Internet field for over 2 decades, I have met a lot of people using web hosting companies. While often people seem to be happy to have an opportunity to bitch about their web hosts, others are fascinatingly loyal to their providers. It is almost as if there is a sense of pride in the fact they have they found a web host that provides the type of service people want. Whether that’s an indictment of the web hosting industry in general, I don’t know, but I ...

VPS stands for virtual private server. It's very similar to a VM (virtual machine) but generally associated with server operating systems (OS) whereas VMs are more commonly referenced when running a desktop OS. In a standard VPS hosting situation there is a physical server that is running special software called a hypervisor. This hypervisor creates "virtual" machines within the single main server that are each isolated and have their own specific resources - RAM, CPU, Disk, etc. Popular hypervisors include VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, and both Xen and KVM running on Linux. VPS hosting is great because for the most part it looks just like a physical server to both the administrator and the end-users. The fact that the hardware is actually shared (aka multi-tenant) though gives the added benefit of cost savings since the instance effectively costs only a fraction of the physical server. Standard VPS hosting is not without a couple of challenges though. One challenge ...

Finding your first host can be intimidating. Although hosting will seem simple once you’ve been around awhile, at first it’s all very opaque. Part of the problem is simply that there’s a lot of misinformation out there. There are hundreds of hosting providers, and all of them are trying to convince you that they’re the right choice for you. Often, they do this by advertising features and services you don’t really need. Other times they do it by advertising features and services that aren’t really features and services at all, but simply part of hosting; like a gluten-free sticker on an apple, they’re trying to make their product seem better by highlighting a feature which intrinsic to all such products. Despite this, it’s not too awfully hard to differentiate the good from the bad in this regard. It’s more just about deciding what you really need. The Big Players The big players, like GoDaddy or WordPress.com, tend to be a bit pricier, and what they give you in return is great customer...

If you want to take part in the internet as a business, information resource, directory, or as a hobbyist wanting to share data, information and knowledge with the many people and communities on the internet, you have to contain this in a central spot on the internet. You have to own a piece of space in cyberspace. Web hosting empowers you and anyone with a computer and internet connection to own a piece of cyberspace. In your space, you can have news, bulletins, documents, data, files (your web site) and your own post office (mail server) to accept mail, all in the context of you or your business. This is your space and to get this space you either have to own a piece of the physical internet with a network connection to the internet backbone and computer(s) operating as server(s) offering access to your files and post office, for people on the internet to view your web site or send and receive email with you. The cost of owning a direct connection to the backbone and a server dedicat...

What is Managed Hosting?  When I first heard about managed hosting, I thought it was more or less the same thing as dedicated hosting. In both forms of hosting, you have a server with your web host that is completely dedicated to your web site. Keep reading to find out why that’s almost the only thing they have in common. Dedicated hosting has long been an option for companies whose web presence is such that they can’t put their web site on a shared hosting plan without someone taking a big hit. Maybe their web site is really huge, with lots of interactive elements; or perhaps they get a lot of traffic, especially ecommerce. There might be any number of reasons a company needs a dedicated server. While a dedicated server can provide a growing company with the space, bandwidth, and reliability it needs, there is a potential downside (other than cost). With most dedicated hosting plans, the server is effectively yours – which means you handle most of the server administration tasks. ...

Setting Up a Dedicated Mail Server In this article we will go through the general process of setting up a remote dedicated mail server to send your emails to your customer list, and we will also look at the reason you would bother doing it considering the cost. We will look briefly at some of the commonly used alternatives to send and receive email and why they end up being inadequate as a business' and web site's customer database grows. Why to do it Hosting packages are very convenient; you can easily start with the minimum requirements and upgrade when necessary. Many times, non-technical staff know little or nothing about the details or why an upgrade is needed, or take the default service for granted, which is inconvenient. Apart from that, there are certain precautions which need to be taken when using a dedicated server or some ISPs will consider that you are spamming. First Things First: Reasons I have a colleague who runs a non profit ezine. She currently sends 5000 em...

Keeping Connected to Your Web Hosting Business A web hosting business is a 24/7 concern. How do you stay connected to your business when you're not at the office? These days, you can go way beyond cell phones and pagers to take a truly proactive approach to being accessible to your customers. When you’re a web host, your clients expect you to be able to keep their websites online 24/7. Their businesses depend on it, as does yours. But, with few exceptions, you can’t actually live at your place of business. How do you stay in touch when you are away from your office and your clients need you? Fortunately, there are many solutions to this problem. Some of these even go beyond merely being available, to the point that, depending on the job you actually do, you might not need to come into the office for days at a time. Pagers and cell phones were the first steps. Obviously, this technology is hardly new; pagers date to the 1950s, and the first cell phone call was made in 1973. Now page...

How to Pick a Free Web Host  You finally decided to build your own Web site, but you don't want to spend a lot of money to have it hosted by someone else, and you don't want to host it yourself. What do you do? There are a lot of free Web hosting firms, each with their pluses and minuses. Krissi Danielson explains what to expect from a free Web host, how to choose one, and the pros and cons of using some of the better known free Web hosts. It may be true that there's "no free lunch in this world" and that "you get what you pay for," but it's still nice to get stuff for free. This is certainly true of Web hosting. While you can expect a higher quality of service and feature packages from paid Web hosts in nearly all cases, free Web hosts still serve a fun and important purpose for personal Web pages and hobby sites. In addition, they offer a great way to put up a site and build a regular readership without spending any money; you can always switch to ...

Businesses Turn to Reseller Web Hosting for Additional Revenue  Most of us already know that web hosting is the practice of using an Internet server to link websites stored on a hard drive to the Internet. All websites across the Internet are hosted on such Internet servers. There are countless web hosts that offer a myriad of services, from dedicated support of a single website to mass public offerings of small websites crowded onto single servers. Many companies are now looking at reselling web hosting in order to earn additional revenue during this recession. Reseller web hosting is not much different from standard web hosting. A standard web host will rent an Internet server or own its own server on location. They will have full physical and digital access to this server to do with it as they please. This gives them a large degree of control over the services that they offer. It is also a lot of work. Reseller web hosts rent web space from these standard web hosts. However, res...

Choosing a Web Host if You`re a Reseller If you're a website owner, choosing a web host is one of the most important decisions you will make for your business. If you're a reseller web host, that's even more true. The services you can deliver will directly depend on the service your web host delivers. In effect, you're going to be the middleman, so you'd better have someone backing you who will help you stay in business. So what should you, as a reseller web host, be looking for in a web host? In many cases, you should be looking for some of the same things your clients will be looking for. But you will find that you actually have less flexibility than they do, because you have a lot more riding on your web host. For example, let's say that you host a lot of little hobbyist websites, a few not-for-profit informational sites, a smattering of artist/artisan sites that sell their wares online, maybe even some sites for the local garage bands. They may or may not be...

Virtual Hosting versus Dedicated Hosting: Which is Right for You  So you’re starting a website, and one of the first things you’ll need to do is to find a web host. After searching all of the hosting possibilities, you find there is more than just one type of hosting. So what do you do? A successful web site depends on a good web host, but it's just as important to select the right kind of hosting account.  Most web hosting companies offer a choice between virtual shared hosting and dedicated hosting.  The basic difference between the two types of accounts is whether a site has its own server or shares one with other web sites, which determines whether that site has its own IP address or shares one with other sites.  With a virtual host, many websites are sharing a single machine with a single IP address.  In a dedicated hosting situation, a single machine is “dedicated” to a single customer. In this article, I wanted to show you the major differences in the two...