If you are responsible for IT infrastructure of Small to Medium sized businesses (SMB) or remote offices of larger enterprises, major challenge would be of meeting more stringent compliance requirements for protecting private information.

If a disaster happens to your server, data must be backed up & could be recovered without any big loss. You probably choose backing up all your server data with a trusted server host. Most of the IT managers are increasingly looking to online backup and recovery services for server data protection. The dependency of a more distributed workforce on 24/7 access to business data stored on servers ensuring productivity requires a solution that meets Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives.

The attractive price and predictability of a “SaaS” subscription model is more scalable & flexible over a more costly and cumbersome tape backup system allows IT to do more with less resources and ensuring business continuity.

Achieving critical business objectives for maximum productivity

Main objective of backup and recovery is to make sure that a business would be able to recovers from various server data failures such as individual file loss to an entire system in the optimum timeframe as well as to recover to a version of the data that results in minimal loss of productivity. All the information and applications required to run a business are maintained on the variety of server platforms available with vendors in market. It could be physical system set aside within your IT Infrastructure to the dynamic virtual servers. Unlike usual desktops or laptops, servers run 24/7 to provide resources to the users connected to it.

These servers generally store a wide range of data types from different applications required for the business. Server data can be classified by its impact on business operations: mission critical (revenue producing or customer facing); business critical (supporting cross-organization functions); or operationally critical (important to individual departments).

This helps small to medium business or remote offices of large business, meet these two objectives with cost effective online server backup and recovery services supporting a wide variety of server platforms and data types help companies against traditional tape backup methods that require onsite IT professionals to run and maintain them.

Online services can mitigate much of the load of server data protection for backup and recovery requirements. These services transfer most critical data automatically offsite and offer better response time for recovery at less expense. Though it provides greater security for information through encryption in transit and in storage.

Online data protection is uniquely qualified
The previous section introduced a number of ways online data protection enables IT to focus on managing information and keeping workers productive rather than managing backup and recovery tasks in a diverse and distributed infrastructure.

• Backups are completely automated — the vendor, rather than IT, takes on most of the responsibility to ensure the success of backup, restores, and prevention of data loss

• Security is maximized — data is immediately stored offsite, with encryption ensuring data privacy in transmission and in storage

• Demonstrable — consistent best practices in data protection are in place globally and maintained by the vendor, according to the rules of the customer to accommodate variations in regional environments

• Cost Savings — The cost and effort of maintaining, updating and extending the infrastructure for data protection is borne by the service provider rather than the customer, especially important in extending data protection systems to remote offices

An online data backup and recovery service can increase the coverage and frequency of automatic backups with minor impact on IT related capital expenditures and operating expenses. Broader, more frequent and more consistent protection reduces the risks to worker productivity, and risk of non-compliance repercussions.

The immediacy and comprehensive nature of online backup can also address Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) within a DR or business continuity plan. Though a majority of companies do establish their own RTO/RPO goals, few feel they consistently achieve their objectives.6 Online data protection moves data immediately offsite, and recovery from the vendor is dependent only upon the capability to receive the data in a “hot-standby” facility or other datacenter.
The following sections help companies identify and assign value to these cost categories. These costs can then be incorporated in a Return on Investment (ROI) analysis.

Article Sponsored By Atlantic.Net

Established in 1994, Atlantic.Net is a market-leading Cloud Hosting Solutions Provider renowned for providing exceptional infrastructure as a service, simplifying complex technologies and building a brand that people trust.

Atlantic.Net provides industrial grade and massively scalable cloud server platform backed by world class data center infrastructure. Please visit www.atlantic.net/cloud and take advantage of a free trial of world class cloud servers today!

Server hosting is not unknown or new terminology these days. Most of organizations are now adopting a simple way of managing IT infrastructure to suite the requirements through different types of server hosting services. Server hosting basically has unlike meanings with various components that are analogous to the same concept. Finally it leads to the same basic thought of serving the clients expenditure.

Servers can refer to a software computer program that responds to the request of client programs, a physical computer dedicated to running one or more such services, to serve the needs of programs running on other computers on the same network. Defined function of hosted service is the connecting all the vital services to the end-users over the Internet. The hardware that is stored at a location for web interactivity is most crucial part of Server hosting. It is collocated to a secure facility which is common for web entrepreneurs to use.

Some common hosting options are:

Managed hosting - refers to the isolated control of particular client over entire computer resources. Company leasing the hardware has complete control over the hardware, operating system, software, etc. Managed server hosting allows cost reduction involved in personnel & maintenance of Infrastructure. It also gives liberty to the administrator for investing time in some important task rather than monitoring systems.

Dedicated servers – They are single computers in a network that is apprehended in reserve for serving to the particular networks. The concept is widely used all over the Globe, and its co-relation is implied in context. In web hosted system, a dedicated hardware server is a leased service. User can rent a computer, its software, and Internet connection which works only for specific client. A dedicated server can also refer to a computer that manages printer resources & alike.

VPS hosting – Clients who deploy VPS get opportunity to share all the resources located on the same hardware. The client’s resources and data are separate, but the server is same. Although they share the hardware, clientele retain their own private software and functions to which other customers do not have access.

Hardware stipulations for each client vary and depend on its required common application. Many server apparatus do not support a graphical user interface (GUI). Redundancy is a key factor that develops reliability. It is necessary for clients to have virtual access to their host plans. Clients have the knack to control and manage hardware apparatus from outside the infrastructure that deploys it.

Many organizations set up a web host service that manages the payload of Internet transactions and utility. Typically, web hardware services are rented, bought, or leased due to the limited security and lack of physical infrastructure. The companies who sell, rent, supply rack-space, or lease hardware are tremendously trustworthy and the best option for Server hosting.

Article Sponsored by:

Established in 1994, Atlantic.Net is a market-leading hosting solutions provider renowned for providing exceptional infrastructure as a service and simplifying complex technologies.  Atlantic.Net’s Cloud Hosting service allows customers to build, test, and deploy Windows or Linux servers in the cloud in seconds.

Serving as a trusted advisor to the global community with its innovative, industry-specific hosting solutions, the company is dedicated to implementing custom-tailored solutions that allow organizations to reinvigorate their bottom line. It operates a SAS 70 Type II audited and certified hosting solutions platform to assist businesses with their advanced IT needs.  For more information, visit www.atlantic.net or www.atlantic.net/cloud.

When you want to see consistent performance of your sites or website, what strikes your mind first – Cloud hosting or VPS / Shared hosting? On one side, Cloud gives you benefit of using scattered resources through many servers & keeps your website up always. On other side, VPS gives you flexibility of using only on server through local storage & abundantly reduces cost for maintaining number of servers.

Cloud hosting is a relatively new and evolving technology and as such some service providers have struggled with their deployments which doesn’t really justify the ‘cloud’ moniker. The better quality cloud promises the higher gains & less dependency on single physical server. Scattered architecture & shared processing power, hard drives, and memory allows users to achieve a much higher level of flexibility than any entry level dedicated server. It’s possible only when you have many servers to balance the hardware load.

The definition of Virtual Private Server Hosting is a method of dividing a server such that each piece is allowed to act as a virtual dedicated server. Each VPS runs its own operating system, has its own bandwidth and disk space, and can be individually rebooted. VPS hosting gives the customer more independence than shared hosting services at a lower cost than a physical dedicated server.

Cloud hosting focuses on preserving your website up and managing it to cope up at the peak time of usage very easily. This is accomplished by sharing the resources required for your website from many clustered servers thus reducing the dependence on single physical server.

In contrast, Shared or VPS style hosting is still a lot more cost effective than cloud hosting for several reasons. Essentially a single server with local storage is divided into many individual virtual machines which the service provider can then deploy. The need for capital expenditure in this system is abundantly reduced which benefits the end users if the high availability features of the cloud are not required.

VPS is unmonitored service; the customer is left to monitor and administer their own server. This type of service is generally offered with no limit on the amount of data-transferred on a fixed bandwidth line. Usually, unmetered hosting is offered with 10 Mbit/s, 100 Mbit/s or 1000 Mbit/s.

Both Cloud & VPS Hosting are best at their side in unique sense & allow users to choose their hosting service to suit the requirement. If you have better infrastructure & want to share resources, there is nothing like Cloud hosting. But if you want to save on pennies & less infrastructure, go for VPS & use unlimited data transfer.

Article Sponsored by:

Established in 1994, Atlantic.Net is a market-leading hosting solutions provider renowned for providing exceptional infrastructure as a service and simplifying complex technologies.  Atlantic.Net’s Cloud Hosting service allows customers to build, test, and deploy Windows or Linux servers in the cloud in seconds.

Serving as a trusted advisor to the global community with its innovative, industry-specific hosting solutions, the company is dedicated to implementing custom-tailored solutions that allow organizations to reinvigorate their bottom line. It operates a SAS 70 Type II audited and certified hosting solutions platform to assist businesses with their advanced IT needs.  For more information, visit www.atlantic.net or www.atlantic.net/cloud.

Cloud Hosting: Hype or Opportunity?

“Cloud Hosting” has been creating quite a buzz around these days. You might be hearing the phrase for the first time but the technology is not something new at this time of technical revolution.

Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting service delivered through multi-server system, also called as Clustered Hosting. Though Cloud hosting is not precisely defined yet however, in general, a cloud hosting can be considered when it is delivered from a completely redundant, group of servers which need dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources to keep the system up.

Non- technically, Cloud hosting involves a number of servers connected to each other (called as cloud), and servers can use resources from all the servers in that cloud. They share processing power, hard drives, and memory. In Cloud hosting, if one server is down, sites use resources from other servers instead. Servers can be easily added or removed as per requirement.

In cloud hosting, client leases complete virtual & dynamically scalable infrastructure on need-based method. Each server in cloud has a Software is installed on it called as ‘Hypervisor’. Hypervisor is a small piece of code which controls the virtual machines. Typically cloud hosting is billed hourly or monthly as per usage, and controlled via a web interface or API.

Advantages of Cloud Hosting

Cloud has all servers connected together virtually. This system has number of advantages as it has shared resources. Most importantly, it balances overall load between the servers, especially reduces the dependency on individual physical servers for delivering the service and offers flexibility to deploy resources as required.

• Good scalability - Easily increase or decrease resources without moving sites to other servers.
• Better uptime – By sharing resources, dependency on single server is reduced.
• Different technologies – can be used together that can’t work together on regular server system.

For example, .php and .asp files can work on the same site, even in the same folder, drawing on technologies within the cloud.

• No need to install hardware or software - Just connect with a cloud that has the hardware or software required.
• Instant Delivery - Servers can be deployed instantly.
• Pay - only for the resources required.

Critical part of Cloud Hosting

As cloud hosting has most of the advantages over other web hosting types, it also has some drawbacks if system lacks resources. If used better infrastructure, you can witness what cloud hosting can do for you!

- Low performance – If the connections between servers are not working properly, Sites using cloud hosting can show downtime. Before deploying Cloud Hosting, you need to have a good internet infrastructure.
- New terminology – Organizations tend to use traditional server systems as cloud hosting is relatively new service & it doesn’t have a long track record. Although organizations using cloud hosting are saving huge pennies on resources & different servers.
- Data Security is major issue with Cloud system.
- People might wonder where the data has been located. (There is no control over the physical location of data in cloud hosting)

Who we recommend

Established in 1994, Atlantic.Net is a market-leading hosting solutions provider renowned for providing exceptional infrastructure as a service and simplifying complex technologies.  Atlantic.Net’s Cloud Hosting service allows customers to build, test, and deploy Windows or Linux servers in the cloud in seconds.

Serving as a trusted advisor to the global community with its innovative, industry-specific hosting solutions, the company is dedicated to implementing custom-tailored solutions that allow organizations to reinvigorate their bottom line. It operates a SAS 70 Type II audited and certified hosting solutions platform to assist businesses with their advanced IT needs.  For more information, visit www.atlantic.net or www.atlantic.net/cloud.

Everyone seems to be talking about how marvelous cloud hosting is. So what is Cloud Hosting – really? And why does it seem like it has taken the world of website hosting by storm?

Cloud Hosting, a.k.a. Clustered Hosting, simply refers to a type of web hosting service that allows a network of various connected servers to share and deliver resources. This network of servers does not have to be in the same place. The fact is most of them are located in data centers strewn all over the globe. From a layman’s point of view, a website that is cloud-hosted runs on multi-connected servers, instead of being limited to only one server just like the traditional web hosting; in short, the website has access to several servers. Virtually speaking, this type of hosting has limitless processing power as you can always scale up and add another server – at any given time.

Why Cloud Hosting Works

A decade ago, most resources have been inhibited by the restrictions not just of the hardware but also the applications at hand. Resources may be limited to the server’s processing capability, the amount of RAM, bandwidth and storage. Of course, there’s the budget to consider and a variety of other reasons that slow down business expansion.

Cloud Hosting balances the load of power and resources to provide users with constant and continuous connectivity. It enables the management and sharing of huge amounts of data and plenty of room to scale up or down for unpredictable demands. Users are not restricted to the boundaries of one hardware or server, since server resources, load balance and security are virtually managed and handled. Online operations gain access to enhanced processing power with the number of distributed servers.

Cloud Hosting involves three fundamental elements:
•   Virtualization – simply entails separation of applications from infrastructure.
•    Utility computing – server capacity is accessed accordingly; across a grid that depicts variably priced and shared service.
•    Software as a Service – or SaaS means applications are available on subscription basis and upon demand.

Cloud Hosting Users

You may be wondering who uses cloud hosting. Well, for one, it is ideal for web developers who require a seriously straightforward applications platform without the hassles of trying to figure out how the technological aspect of the operations works.  This type of service provides website developers more room and flexibility to get on with their innovative ideas, rather than fret about web servers.

Many companies take the help of cloud web hosting services to initially mark their online presence. If you’re planning to put up your online business, this web hosting service is by far the most cost effective. Cloud servers are primarily meant to help beginners. The cloud lets you have the agility and be more business-aligned for optimized performance. With more resources available, you can expand your business without having to incur additional inventory or overhead.

Is Cloud Hosting Right for You?

So many things have to be taken into consideration in assessing if cloud hosting is right for you and your website development services. It is vital, however, that you understand as much of the benefits (and probably drawbacks) as you can to determine if cloud hosting can respond to your website’s needs and requirements. Take note of the following benefits that cloud hosting can provide.

Advantages/Benefits of Cloud Hosting

Cost Savings
Web hosting IS expensive. The hardware itself comes at a high cost; apart from that, you need to place the computer in a “controlled-environment” location. You also need a round-the-clock administrator to make sure everything runs smoothly all the time; and if you can’t do it yourself, you probably have to employ someone. Even if your website doesn’t have that much activity, you still pay for the server upkeep. With cloud hosting, you enjoy the benefit of redundancy, so you reduce hardware inventory; thus, lessening power requirements, too.

Cloud hosting companies only bill you for your actual computing power consumption. It’s just like being billed for the amount of water and electricity you consume – you only pay for what you use. So if there are “surges” in the traffic, you can simply pay for the additional virtual space for that particular period. When traffic is slow, you’re not unnecessarily paying for extra bandwidth.

Scalability
When your business grows, it may become necessary to expand your website features, which requires additional bandwidth, of course. One definite advantage of Cloud Hosting is its resilience; when your website hosting needs expand, cloud hosting easily adapts and allows for a seamless website transition. You save a lot with this flexibility that cloud hosting provides; you can easily scale your bandwidth based on the shifting degrees of Internet traffic. It’s not even necessary to request extra bandwidth from a host. And most significant of all, you won’t feel apprehensive about losing customers because there is no available bandwidth.

Decreased Downtime
There are many reasons why your business can experience a slowdown, if not complete standstill. Technology can be pesky at times; and even the most powerful computers built by giants are prone to crash in the wrong conditions. A frequently downed server on a regular web hosting plan may mean your website is not running and is unavailable to consumers, or at the very least, so slow in delivering data that your customer may decide to just leave your site.

This is a common scenario when a spike in Internet traffic is felt in a particular website. When a website gets more attention, the server may experience an overload; which can cause it to slow down at the very least or completely shut down, at the worst. With cloud hosting, it is far more unlikely for your site to crash because of a remarkable increase in traffic; since the load is spread through multiple computers. If one server’s hard drive fails, your site is not affected because your data remains mirrored on other servers; moreover, you website continues to function because there is no single point o f failure. In cloud hosting, if a server goes down, the other servers in the network can easily take up the slack and allow your website to remain up and running, even with the spike in traffic.

The Downside
With all these advantages and benefits, it may sound like cloud hosting is your near-perfect dream web hosting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work perfectly in the real world. Right now there’s one major issue that seem to plague this type of hosting, which is the lack of control over where your data is stored and that actually triggers security issues, although this has been contained to minimal.

Cloud Hosting is a developing technology. Cloud Hosting has a more intricate infrastructure than other types of hosting and there’s a greater possibility for things to go wrong, given the probability of human error – the host administrators may not be totally proficient with their craft, for instance. Well, sometimes even competent technology personnel makes mistakes – and even cloud hosting sites can go down.

Be that is it may, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks and everybody thinks the future of web hosting is veering towards cloud hosting. Somehow, all popular websites use some type of cloud hosting, one way or another. And the trend seems to be likewise spreading to smaller sites.

Approved Cloud Hosting Providers

You may have heard rumors that virtualization, cloud hosting, VPS services, and other “virtual” solutions are more expensive, unreliable, slower, have a complex migration, and are difficult to manage. However, all of these could be far from the truth.  What is certain is that with virtualization you will be spending more time and energy on your business and improving your offerings than on worrying about datacenter issues and downtime.

Virtualization is a loosely used term for too many offerings and solutions that today’s web hosting companies are trying to sell you. What is virtualization? At the most fundamental level, virtualization is the ability to run one environment, such as an operating system, inside of another environment (such as an operating system). Imagine running Windows Vista inside of Windows 7 or running multiple instances of Linux inside of Windows (or any other operating system).  Virtualization simply lets you allocate different amounts of resources and privileges to other parts of the physical server.

You may be asking yourself how this is any different from the classic shared hosting environments you are used to renting from GoDaddy, 1and1, and others. All of these services are “shared” in nature, but you aren’t actually renting a piece of the entire server that your website is on, only some web space to upload your files over FTP and to run your website through their web server.

Which sort of virtualization is right for your needs? If you have a small website with a few hits, then you should continue paying your webhost $10/month or less for your FTP space and web server access. But what if you have something more complex such an open-source forum, a small MySQL database, some custom PHP content, and your website? Again, it depends on how much traffic you get. If you receive very little traffic, shared hosting may still be your solution. By now you must be wondering why you’d ever need anything besides shared hosting for $10/month.

The answer is you probably don’t and the salesman on the other end of the phone is trying to sell you services that are too powerful for your needs. What if you really have a need for serious web hosting services? It’s clear that there are plenty of companies that have a requirement for better computing resources, so what sorts of requirements do you need to justify higher costs and a more sophisticated hosting environment?

Part 1 – Ownership:

When you own your own servers, much like you own your car, your sense of ownership may provide you with a false feeling of security. It’s true that by owning your servers you feel like no one can access or tamper with them, but what about the downsides? Hard drive failures, motherboard failures, network card failures, power supply failures, etc. In addition to your responsibility of maintaining the hardware, you will probably also need to purchase remote IP KVM’s or computers with remote access integrated into the motherboard which carry a higher price tag, remote power rebooters so you don’t have to painfully wait for datacenter technicians to restart your servers, and shipping spare parts when they are needed. With a virtual solution all of these problems do not exist. In a virtual environment, you can experiment and customize your server as much as you want, break it, and just start a new virtual instance at any time without worrying about anything.

Part 2 – Convenience:

When you own your own servers and you need a new database server, web server, or any other type of server you or someone else must purchase, ship, rack mount, configure, and deploy this server. These steps must be repeated for every server you purchase. If you want to run a real web-business, you’ll also need to install and configure power rebooter devices, remote access devices, miles of wiring, and thousands of strap ties. Your deployment time per server is hours or even days (if it’s a server being shipped to the datacenter).  Add to this the operating system installation and configuration time (one DVD per server, not everyone uses automatic deployment systems).

You’ll probably also run into other issues such as running out of screws, special rack mounting kit problems, cuts and scrapes on your hands, gas, and datacenter trips. Even if your boss is paying for all of this, it’s still your time that you’re spending! Last but not least, you’ll have to pay for the entire server up front (hundreds or thousands of dollars). If you want to upgrade, buy the new equipment and plan to take at least one more trip to the datacenter. With a virtual solution you just click a button to specify your desired operating system, hard disk size, RAM amount, CPU speed or count and click deploy. Within several minutes your server (one or one hundred) will be up and running. You’ll receive the SFTP/SSH access information by e-mail and all you need to do is install Apache (or something else) upload your files and you’re ready to go!

Part 3 – Performance and Reliability:

Traditional servers are only as powerful and reliable as you pay for them to be. As you start adding more redundancy features, RAM, and advanced configurations server costs (especially new ones) start getting very high, very fast. It’s true that some physical servers are extremely powerful, but most of the time their capabilities are heavily under-utilized, or not utilized properly because of poor code or system architecture. Virtual servers offer a cure to this problem because you quickly become disciplined and develop your system to run on multiple servers, have better application level redundancy, and embrace a horizontal architecture early on. With dedicated or co-located solutions, many customers feel that getting the latest Quad-core Quad-xeon processor with 64GB’s of RAM will speed solve all of their performance and reliability problems, but it won’t. The only thing such a complex and expensive system will do is embrace poor development practices and become a single point of failure for your entire system.

Part 4 – Price:

This is a touchy subject because virtualization advocates swear by the lower costs of virtualization, and virtualization opponents can’t wait to prove high operational costs. In reality, these costs skew depending on your business and technical requirements and usage patterns . Without going into a very deep analysis, price varies based on your virtual hosting provider. Usually total pricing depends on how many servers you need, how much storage you use, and how much bandwidth you use.

The general rule of thumb is that when your storage and bandwidth requirements are extremely high, buying storage and bandwidth in bulk (colo) is cheaper. Oddly, your costs also go down with virtualization when you have many servers because you start saving a large amount of money on system administrators, power rebooters, hardware replacements, datacenter management, and everything else. For some of you the most important benefit of hosted virtual servers will be that there are zero up-front and commitment costs. If you want a particular server, just start it up. If you don’t like the performance, cancel it any time you want.

In some sense this is like a dedicated server package, but you have no commitment, setup fee, wait time, or month to month plans. You also don’t pay any additional costs because you manage your own server, without depending on support that may never answer, or may have an accent too heavy to understand.

In summary, virtualization is a good solution for businesses, developers and anyone else who has requirements for rapid deployment of servers and is familiar with operating and managing Windows or Linux systems. Virtual servers are also great for prototyping, scaling your infrastructure on-demand, and extremely easy-to-use management tools. You should use every resource available to you on the internet and triple check everything sales guys tell you. Amazon has a convenient cost calculator and so does the Rackspace Cloud. Use these resources wisely, and your web business will be up and running quickly and cost effectively.

Article written by Dan Khasis at www.dankhasisllc.com.

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.

Why “Unlimited” Is Not Possible

The network lines that carry data around the web which may be an optic fiber line, cable line or a simple copper wire have a finite capacity and there is a limit to the amount of data that can be transferred by these lines at any given time. Moreover, the hard drive of a web server has, likewise, a limited amount of space determined by its actual physical size.

Therefore, it’s categorically impossible to have “unlimited” something in an environment with limited resources. “Extreme amounts of bandwidth” yes, but not “unlimited bandwidth”.  So now you ask, why do all these web hosting company’s offer unlimited bandwidth then? And more importantly, how in the world do they get away with it?

Check back next week for Part II and the web hosting side of the story.

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.

One can assume Parallels tried to acquire cPanel. To date, cPanel is still not under the Parallels flag.

Brief history of Parallels acquisitions:

2003 – Yippi-Yeah! E-Business GmbH (makers of Confixx) and Plesk
2004 - Parallels (SWsoft and Parallels operated independently until 2008).
2007 – Positive Software (H-Sphere)
2008 - ModernGigabyte, LLC (ModernBill)
2008 - WebHostAutomation Ltd developers of HELM Control Panel

PARALLELS PLANS FOR ACQUIRED CONTROL PANELS
Control panels such as Helm, H-Sphere, Confixx, and even ModernBill have been brought in to Parallels very recently. Web Hosts who utilize the products acquired by Parallels want to know what Parallels future plans encompass.

Web Hosts still using these platforms are wondering what they can expect from Parallels in the way of support, upgrades, and security patches. Hosts with hundreds or thousands of customers are also wondering about possible migrations if support for their chosen platform is dropped.

Do they need to convert over to Plesk as soon as possible? Can Parallels help in migrating their customers off the old legacy control panels to Plesk?

Most Web Hosts know what a pain and nightmare migrations can be when you are dealing with thousands of accounts. Compatibility issues, billing, automation, and downtime are all concerns.

Hosts who decide migration is too large a product or too expensive may choose to remain on Helm, Confixx, or H-Sphere. In this case, Hosts need to know if they can expect timely security updates and new feature updates.

During a recent trip to Parallels Summit 2010 in Miami, FL, I posed a few questions to Parallels upper management concerning all of these acquisitions, name changes, and future plans in the hopes concerned Web Hosts and Web Designers understand the product life cycle of their respective platforms.

Parallels Q & A
I sat down with Parallels’ Craig Bartholomew, Vice President of Panel Products for a Q&A session.

Q: What is Parallels end goal for legacy products such as Helm, Confixx, and H-Sphere?
A: Parallels’ end goal is to have satisfied customers. Many hosters have built their Hosting businesses around Helm, Confixx, or H-Sphere and Parallels wants to see these hosters grow, prosper, and offer more services over time.

Q: Will any new development be done on Helm, Confixx, or H-Sphere?
A: There is a dedicated team of developers working on Helm, Confixx, and H-Sphere. They prioritize customer requests and work on meeting the needs of the customer base.

Q: What can current users of legacy software expect in the way of security updates and patches?
A: The development team does patches and updates – including hotfixes in the environment of the hosters on critical issues.

Q: Does Parallels have an end-of-life date set for any of these legacy platforms? If so, is there a timeframe you can share with us for each?
A: Hosting is a service business, and hosters need confidence that they can keep their service running without stoppage and risk. Parallels has no end-of-life date for any of these hosting systems.

Q: Will Parallels help migrate Web Hosts from Helm, Confixx, or H-Sphere to Plesk? If so, what are the costs associated with this?
A: Parallels is offering free Transfer Assistance for any customer who wishes to move to the new Plesk 9.5. Parallels has issued new License Keys for Plesk 9.5 to qualify Hosters for this free service – which will only be available for 9.5. This release is hotfix-capable and provides greater security with PCI Compliance.

Q: Does Parallels have any plans on acquiring other control panels or virtualization companies?
A: Parallels is always interested in companies with strong technologies built by intelligent people and used by loyal customer bases.

I also posed similar questions to Serguei Beloussov, CEO and chairman in a one-on-one meeting. Serguei said to expect security updates and patches. However all new development involving new features had been stopped on Helm, Confixx, and H-Sphere. While this is comforting on some levels that security updates will still be released, it is clear that future features will come only on the Plesk platform.

Serguei said Parallels focus was now on improving Plesk, Virtuozzo, Parallels Billing, and Site Builder and not on legacy products. He encouraged consumers to convert over to Parallels new product lines to ensure they would get the latest technology improvements.

As Craig Bartholomew mentioned in the Q & A session, security patches and updates would be released as needed. This is indeed reassuring to Web Hosts who have made the decision to remain on platforms other than Plesk.

Furthermore, those who wish to migrate will receive free assistance from Parallels when moving to the new release of Plesk 9.5. While migration is never an easy task, having a company such as Parallels offering free migration assistance is a good option for large and small web hosts with limited time or budgets.

Every cloud has a silver lining
Some may argue that acquisitions are all about gaining market share and not improving the product. Some may also argue that Parallels is guilty of buying their competition only to force customers in to their product line. The truth is Web Hosts still have alternatives with cPanel, Direct Admin, and other billing control panels on the market.

Good news for Web Hosts using Parallels products is that for the time being, Parallels plans on supporting all acquired panels. Support and security updates will be maintained for the foreseeable future. New features for Helm, H-Sphere, and Confixx are stopped.

There will always be those who are unhappy with choosing a platform only for it to be discontinued, purchased, or phased out. The up side for panels acquired by Parallels is that there is a very strong desire within Parallels to turn out top notch software with features and automation as key components.

Click here to view the Parallels Summit 2010 Photo Gallery

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.

“Hosting customers value security, and those doing ecommerce transactions want to be able to easily pass PCI scans. Plesk 9.5 is the most secure and supportable version ever.  Parallels stands behind it with free Transfer, Installation, and Migration support.”

Hot Fix Updates.
It’s no secret that Plesk users are most concerned with security and updates that don’t break the system. In order to be secure, you need to update your control panel whenever a new version arrives. I have personally experienced corrupt databases and other odd issues when trying to upgrade to a newer version of Plesk. Frustrating to say the least.

Plesk 9.5 sports a new hot fix update system that addresses the age old ‘breaking’ of Plesk panel upgrades. In my opinion, this update is worth its weight in gold. If you’ve been using another control panel due to this, you might want to take a look at the new Plesk 9.5.

Security.
Realizing that most small businesses need to be PCI compliant, and that most hosting consumers require PCI compliant environments, Parallels has brought PCI Compliance to Plesk 9.5. Web Hosts should be very interested in this feature as it can be a nice selling point for small business clients.

In addition to security and reliability, many new features have been added. So what else has been added?

Google Tools Integration.
Now Web designers and Web hosts can utilization Google Tools while logged in to Plesk. Google Tools integration also allows Hosts and designers to monetize customer sites by offering clients sponsored search through their existing web pages. Parallels demonstrated the Google Tools integration and it was very easy to use. Users without a Google Tools account are able to easily create one from within the control panel itself.

Suite version now available.
Plesk 9.5 introduces a new licensing option called the Plesk 9.5 Suite. The Suite version release will include Plesk 9.5 Unlimited domain license, Parallels Billing 1000 User license and Parallels Site Builder 100-domain license. Best yet, pricing is the same as the regular Plesk 9.5 unlimited domain license version making this great value for Web Designers and small Web Hosts.

Support.
Free support is now included for installations, migration assistance, or upgrades from previous versions of Plesk. This is great news for small Web Hosts, however, it is not all-inclusive support. Anything lying outside of the basic install, migration, or upgrade will require paid support unless you are a Parallels partner.

Our wish list for future versions of Plesk is simple: Speed.
Page load times within Plesk have always been an issue. In comparison to cPanel, Plesk control panels load much slower. Clients can wait a long time for page loads in the control panel. Slow loads can be quite annoying when you have a lot of work to be done. Web designers and web hosts often bear the brunt of the slow page load times when their customers complain.

The good news is that Parallels says speed is on their radar and they expect to resolve this issue by the end of the year with a new AJAX based Plesk version. We think when the speed issue is resolved Parallels will have a cPanel killer on its hands.