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. Read the rest of this entry »

CLICK HERE FOR PART I
CLICK HERE FOR PART II

How It Works

From any web hosting company’s point of view, it’s quite logically simple. For the hosting company to get the desired profit margin there has to be a minimum number of accounts that must “exist” in each server. That’s simple business mathematics.

Anything that endangers the host’s ability to obtain their profit level has to be “eliminated”. Thus, at any given package or price, if a customer’s site becomes a danger to the server’s stability and performance by using too much of anything, it would result in the dreaded action called “account suspension”.

Web hosts use this misleading marketing strategy simply because other hosts do – it’s the name of the game! They figure that mainstream consumers don’t have any inkling how little bandwidth they actually need, and will probably never know that unlimited is really just an illusion. And for the most part, most consumers don’t really understand bandwidth.

Here are a few ways you can be tricked into the “unlimited bandwidth” mentality:

• The secret of “unlimited” is actually concealed in the web hosting company’s Terms of Service. It may come as a surprise but in truth, “unlimited” = 15 GB. Read the fine prints. Read the rest of this entry »

CLICK HERE FOR PART I

The Web Hosting Company’s Side of the Story

Web hosting service companies are banking on the fact that most hosting users will only consume a small fraction of the bandwidth. They realize that the overwhelming majority of consumers that start websites are not really going to gain any significant traffic – at least not for a while; nor could they be bothered to create or upload enough content to use more than a few gigabytes per month, max. Most websites will realistically only consume a few hundred megabytes of bandwidth and disk space. Let’s put that into figures – this may be a little fuzzy but it’ll give you a rough idea.

Say, yours is a smallish web site and you get about 500 visitors per day. That would mean you probably have about 5 to 20 gigabytes of data transfer per month. Of course it all depends on the number of pages viewed by each visitor, the file sizes of the pages and the file sizes of images and other multimedia elements on the web pages.

The point is, it is extremely rare that a web site reaches the bandwidth levels of unlimited proportions. Web hosting companies know with reasonable certainty that web sites hosted on their servers will only take up negligible amount of bandwidth in general. With this assumption, web hosting services hope to properly share the bandwidth of their machines among the thousands of websites; thus feel risk-free to declare that they provide unlimited bandwidth, though in actuality there is no such thing.

Your next question probably is: Are unlimited bandwidth web hosting actually a scam then? Not at all, NO – we’re not saying unlimited bandwidth is completely fraud; at least not in the sense that most modern fraudulent acts are being committed. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

When Sports by Brooks broke the biggest sports scandal of the year, ServInt made sure it was up and running.

If you know sports, you know Sports by Brooks.
Since 2001, Sports by Brooks has broken some of the most compelling, and controversial stories in sports. In November 2009, when Brooks broke the story that Tiger Woods was on the receiving end of his wife’s golf club, traffic to SbB skyrocketed!

It’s the kind of event that could have crippled a site hosted elsewhere, but ServInt made sure Brooks’ readers could see every breaking update.

Traffic growth is good. Unless it shuts you down!
As one of the first outlets to break a story that would dominate world headlines for weeks, Sports by Brooks became a primary source of late-breaking news for sites like CNN, Fox News Channel, TMZ, and dozens of other news organizations.

As a result, his already popular site was in imminent danger of being brought to its knees — unless something happened fast. Brooks’ team placed an urgent phone call to ServInt, detailing their concerns, and ServInt’s engineering teams instantly sprang into action.

The Solution
Sports by Brooks was hammered with traffic and required a mammoth resource response. ServInt’s hardware and network engineers immediately set out to more than quintuple the server resources dedicated to site. This massive deployment spanned several product lines, including ServInt’s new Solo Series Dedicated servers, as well as an auxiliary cluster of highdensity SuperVPS server environments.

The result?
In just a few short hours (and on a holiday weekend no less) Sports by Brooks had the system resources in place to not just avoid collapse, but to actually improve site performance in the midst of an ongoing traffic surge.

We’re a phone call away
In a post-emergency discussion, Brooks said “It was the accessibility that made the difference. My guys made one phone call, and we immediately got the response we needed.”

Popular sites need more than just a Web host; they need a partner that’s available 24/7/365. In Brooks’ case, he also needed a partner during one of the busiest holiday seasons in America, and during the biggest story he’d ever broken. ServInt was there and got the job done.

About ServInt
ServInt is a pioneering provider of high-reliability, managed web hosting for businesses worldwide.  ServInt’s commitment to Green IT services is demonstrated by its award-winning Virtual Private Server (VPS) solutions.  ServInt was founded in Northern Virginia in 1995 as one of the first web-hosting companies to offer a Managed Dedicated Server solution.  From multiple world-class data centers, ServInt now provides its scalable suite of VPS and Managed Enterprise Server packages to thousands of customers in more than 60 countries.  To learn more about ServInt hosting solutions, please call 1-800-573-7846 or visit www.servint.net.

Web Hosting Blog – McLean, VA - ServInt, a pioneering provider of managed web hosting for businesses worldwide, today introduced its KickStart program to simplify the sign-up, turn-up and migration processes for its new customers.

KickStart is an important part of ServInt’s significant new investments to maintain the industry’s most responsive levels of customer service.  The program includes new online tutorials and walk-through instructions, streamlined internal processes and extensive “real-person” interaction between ServInt Managed Services Team members and new customers.

“ServInt often is perceived as a web host that caters to savvy Internet professionals.  However, we also serve large numbers of business-hosting beginners who select us based on our reputation for excellent technology and customer service,” said ServInt Founder and Chief Executive Officer Reed Caldwell.  “Recently, we’ve seen strong growth in this customer segment and we want to ensure their specific service requirements are met – especially while getting their sites launched and operational.  This can often seem like the most daunting phase of the hosting experience, and we are committed to making it as simple as we can.” 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 »

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 »