The way unlimited bandwidth hosting has flooded the market; you’d think it’s the best thing that ever happened since sliced bread. And that’s exactly what the web hosting service companies want you to think. But does this marketing hype, which you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to, have any grain of truth in it?

Or is it really just that – a hype; an alluring marketing strategy meant to entice customers? It’s high time that you know some basic hard facts behind this hot issue; and this article aims to clear the controversies surrounding unlimited bandwidth web hosting, once and for all.

The Twofold Meaning of Bandwidth

If we want to be precise about terminologies here, bandwidth is defined as the measurement of data transfer rates, otherwise known as data transmission rate; or more accurately, the speed of data transmission/transfer. In computer networking or computer science, it is measured in terms of bits/second.

However, the terms “digital bandwidth”, network bandwidth” or simply “bandwidth” has been rampantly misused in the web hosting world. When hosting companies refer to bandwidth in their hosting packages; they actually mean “data transfer” and not “data transfer rate”.

Thus, the second meaning of “bandwidth” came about: the amount of data allowed to be transferred within a certain time period – or more specifically, the maximum amount of data that can be transferred each month from the web space in a hosting account. This second meaning does not refer to the speed at which the data is or can be transmitted.

Web Hosting Service as a Commodity

The basic elements of any web hosting plan are disk space, which is the space allotted to you on the web server to store your website; and bandwidth, which is the amount you have available to transfer web pages from the web server to the browsers of visitors to your website.

The amount of bandwidth that you require depends on two factors: the size of your site; and the popularity of your site, which translates to the number of users who view your web page. In addition, the type of downloads that visitors perform also has to be considered. Read the rest of this entry »

Web Hosting Blog – MIAMI - Terremark Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMRK), a leading global provider of managed IT infrastructure services, today announced the initial deployment of its Enterprise Cloud in Latin America. Terremark’s highly reliable cloud computing solutions will leverage Cisco’s Unified Computing System to provide customers highly agile and scalable cloud-based resources from its massively connected Network Access Point (NAP) do Brasil in São Paolo. The NAP do Brasil is the largest peering point in Latin America and offers customers a true, multinational cloud infrastructure capable of meeting industry standards for compliance. Terremark’s Brazilian cloud deployment is connected to its cloud infrastructure currently available at the company’s North American and European facilities.

“Terremark has been at the forefront of the global shift to cloud computing, and a leading service provider in testing and deploying our breakthrough Unified Computing System platform,” said Soni Jiandani, vice president, Cisco’s Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group. “Cisco Unified Computing System innovations such as memory expansion and the Virtualized Network Interface Card, combined with the power of the Intel Xeon 5600 series processor, have created the highest performing system available to customers today. Cisco’s architectural innovations make the Unified Computing System the ideal platform for running today’s most important business applications.” Read the rest of this entry »

Parallels Summit 2010 enabled Hosters to get up close to Parallels engineers and learn more about Parallels products. Held at the Fontainebleau Resort in Miami, attendance was strong and included many of the top Web Hosting companies from the United States and Europe. Industry experts provided detailed information on potential growth for Hosting companies to consider. Parallels enabled attendees to get up close and personal with Parallels software engineers to ask questions and also demo current and future releases of software. Hosters could also get certified on Parallels products at the Summit so they can provide better support to their customers. Hundreds of vendors also attended and showcased how their products work cohesively with Parallels software offerings.

Parallels, Inc. is a privately held company based near Seattle, Washington that develops desktop, server virtualization, and web hosting operations software. Over the years, Parallels has acquired some of the most popular control panel platforms available to Web Designers and Web Hosts. SWsoft’s acquisition of Parallels was kept under wraps until January 2004, two years before Parallels desktop software received widespread popular acclaim.

Parallels has turned arguably in to a small monopoly. Consumers in the Web Hosting industry have expressed concerns that mass acquisitions of hosting control panels by one company will drive up pricing and reduce competition thus resulting in less feature rich control panels. Thousands of Web Designers and Web Hosts have staked their businesses on some of the products Parallels has swooped in and purchased.

Quite simply, Parallels has acquired all of the quality control panels that were in the market with exception of cPanel. Only cPanel has the features and polish that Parallels Plesk has. Major hosting companies such as iPower and BlueHost use skinned versions of cPanel for their shared hosting platforms. Other control panels leave a lot to be desired in the feature and reliability departments and are not an option for most Web Hosting companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Parallels Plesk 9.x is leaps and bounds ahead of Plesk 8.x in terms of features, ease of use, and stability. Parallels is continuing this trend in Plesk 9.5 by improving stability and security in Plesk 9.5 which releases on March 11.

According to Craig Bartholomew, Vice President of Panel Products, the main goals of Plesk 9.5 were to improve security by introducing PCI compliance and improve overall reliability. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Find a new host and don’t rush into anything.
   Assuming you haven’t committed to a long-term hosting contract you can start looking for a new host at any time. When you are ready to move, don’t rush to give your money away only because the host’s website looks trendy or they are having a promotional offer. Instead, be sure to do research at places like FindMyHost.com and internet forums. Another good indicator of a host’s credibility is to check out the type of clients they are hosting. Be sure to check that the host’s IP addresses are not listed on Spamhaus, SBL, and other blacklists to avoid dealing with a company that hosts spammers. DNSStuff.com has great tools for verifying that a company’s IP addresses are clean. To get the company’s IP address, you can usually just ping their website and use that IP address in your research. If the host’s IP’s are blacklisted, chances are your outbound e-mails from your e-commerce store won’t ever get to your customer. Your e-mails to your customer will probably never make it either.
   
   
2. Make a full backup of your existing system.
   You should be doing this at least a few times a week already, but if you haven’t now is the time to make a backup. This means that you should segment your backup checklist into the following categories:
   • Downloading all your source code from your web directory to your local computer.
   • Making a MySQL dump from your current host, using the command line or the backup tool in phpMyAdmin.
   • Don’t forget to export or save your SSL certificate if you have one. You should backup all associated SSL files, particularly the “csr” and “key” files, otherwise you may have to pay for a certificate all over again.
3. Take inventory of installed modules, plugins, and extensions.
   Having the right plugins is just as important as having your data and there is a possibility that your application may not work if modules like curl, gd, imagemagick, and other popular PHP extensions aren’t installed. Read the rest of this entry »

Google has announced the public release of its own proprietary programming language named ‘Go’. The company has been using the programming language internally for a while – but has now made the entire platform available to outside programmers under an open source license. That means it is pretty much free for anyone to do anything with at this point.

You can view the official Google Go website here: http://golang.org. Where the programming language is described by Google as: “a systems programming language, expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected”. Not certain exactly what that is supposed to mean, but one thing is for sure. When Google introduces something, people take notice. Google claims that the advantages of the new programming language are ease-of-use and speed. According to the Go website, ”Go compilers produce fast code fast. Typical builds take a fraction of a second yet the resulting programs run nearly as quickly as comparable C or C++ code.”

You can view a brief video tutorial on Go from Google Go team member Russ Cox to get an introduction to the new language. The video again re-iterates the theme of speed. Mr. Cox claims that most of his builds take well under a second. There is an example in the video of over 120,000 lines of code running in under ten seconds. Yeah, that’s Google fast. For those interested in just getting started, you can see a full written tutorial with source code examples here: http://golang.org/doc/go_tutorial.html.

So what impact will this new programming language have on the web hosting business sector? It is obviously way too early to tell whether the new language will catch on in a big way, or if the hosting infrastructure to support it will grow rapidly. One hosting provider, however, has already launched a product line specifically designed with the Google Go programming language in mind. According to a recent blog post, UK hosting provider 34SP.com has set up a brand new VPS template, pre-installed with Go, ready for rapid development testing. The company’s blog post says, ”The Go Development VPS template is currently built upon a 64-bit image of Ubuntu Server 9.04, using the latest (as of Friday 12th of November) build of Go and includes a sample ‘Hello World’ script in the /root directory, ready to build. To get you started, the following instructions should allow you to compile and run your very first application with Go”. Click here to read the Google Go blog post in its entirety.

So time will tell if the new Go programming language becomes a mainstream programming platform. It is certain that when Google announces and supports a new computer programming product, the information on it is quickly distributed to many tens of thousands of the world’s top engineers. That fact alone means that Go will probably be a force to be reckoned with in the near future.

Keeping your data backups onsite can be risky. If there’s ever a fire or a robbery, you could lose both – your backup copy and your master copy. Of course, shipping your backup tapes or DVDs to an off-site location every day can also be inconvenient.

That’s why so many people today are choosing to send their backup data, over the internet, to an off-site storage facility.

Given that web hosting prices are so cheap, it can be tempting to use your web hosting account as an online file storage or backup device for your home computer. After all, you can now get unlimited disk space and bandwidth for as little as four dollars per month.

But before you start uploading the entire contents of your hard drive, there are a few things you need to keep in mind… Read the rest of this entry »

IT managers today are facing more viruses, security threats, security updates, and data protection issues than ever before. Maintaining a large amount of desktop machines one by one is time consuming and very expensive. Windows licensing is also expensive and upgrades can be a nightmare (Windows XP to Vista).

What if there was a solution that would remove the need for maintenance on physical desktop computers and placed them in a virtualized environment? Virtualized Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) deserve a real look for SMB’s in todays Software virtualizing desktop computers is becoming commonplace for most large companies. Virtual Desktops are housed in a data center on large servers utilizing NAS for backing up. Users connect through a dummy terminal or thin client loaded on to an already existing desktop computer. No expensive desktop is required as the server is doing all of the processing. The local dummy terminal or thin client can even be a linux computer reducing costs.

The experience is identical to having a physical computer sitting on their desktop. Employees would not even know their ‘computer’ was located in a data center miles away.

Virtualization has many benefits, but the most relevant are:

• Security Updates – Can be pushed out at once to all VDI’s
• Data Security – Housed in Data Centers and not physical machines in office
• Maintenance – Reduced man hours
• Same Desktop even when traveling Read the rest of this entry »

Many small business owners struggle with planning their online presence.

The key to remember when going online with your business is that you want to give customers information about what your business does and is about. If you have a physical location, you want to show potential customers how to find you. You may also want to post information about your services, or a menu if you are a restaurant.

Most businesses do not require an expensive web site design if they are not doing online commerce. Sure, it would be great to have a beautiful web site that pleases the eye, but a custom design is not really required. Customers only care about finding your business or learning more about you. If you can set up an online brochure of sorts with contact details, maps, and product or service information that is current, you are helping those customers learn more about you.

Many of the following questions are asked when the decision has been made to go online:

• What kind of web site do you require?
• How do you find a web designer?
• What is your budget?
• Do I have the time to manage a web designer?
• Will I have time to properly update my site on a regular basis? Read the rest of this entry »