In Search of Webhosting: First Understand the Industry

In search of a webhosting company for personal or small business purposes? We advise you to take a look at this article to understand the hosting industry and study its dynamics to know what to look for before you make your choice.

First, a brief introduction to the webhosting chain: the end consumer is served by about 3 upstream providers: the webhosting provider that they have direct contact with, the webhost's upstream company who maintains the servers and sells space to webhosts, and above that, the datacenter that provides the connection and houses the servers. Some webhosts are also the server admins and liase with the datacenters directly.

The webhosting industry has been claimed to be near saturation point as there are hundreds of web-hosting providers clamouring to provide cheaper and better services to businesses and individuals. This upsurge of supply is largely due to resources becoming readily available (and at cheaper costs) with plunging diskspace and data-transfer prices. The barriers to entry in the web-hosting space is low as large resellers of server space provide cheap hosting and reselling plans that create opportunites for new webhosts to join in the market. With increasing number of suppliers with ever cheaper reselling plans, more webhosting businesses are sprouting up to provide web-hosting solutions to business and individual websites due to lower fixed costs and investment. In addition, this increase in supply is not caused by factors in any particular country. The internet is global and as such, datacenters in US, or in fact, any part of the world, can provide the server and webspace for a local webhosting company. It is taking place in internet space and consumers and providers can easily find each other and exchange services in the global space.

Increasing the supply is naturally a good thing for the customer who is on the demand side. This inbalance has caused new web-hosting providers to offer extremely low prices for their webhosting plans or packages in order to compete in the tough market. Customers get to choose from a myriad of hosting providers who are constantly lowering their prices. However, this might not be a good thing. By offering low prices, companies are earning small margins that may not cover their support costs. Support is vital in the webhosting business as most customers want to be able to get help with their web-hosting accounts. If the profits do not justify the costs, web hosting companies will easily close down - and take their clients' sites with them.

So what are the factors to look at when choosing a host for your website?

Support is the single most important factor for any individual or small business looking for a webhost for their websites. Any internet web hosting provider that does not respond to emails for at most 24 hours is probably having problems providing fast and reliable support services. These services are essential to customer satisfaction and especially for customers who are new to webhosting will need guidance with publishing their websites on the webhosting account provided. The webhosting business is about relationships between webhost and webhosting customers. You should want to know that you can get help when you need, and want to be informed when your website is going to be offline for maintainance.

Stability comes in second as a factor when choosing a webhost. Stability refers to how much uptime you can expect from the webhosting provider. This actually depends on the providers' servers and network. If they do not have reliable and stable providers, it would affect their servers and cause problems for your website. An uptime of about 99.5% is considered reliable in the industry as there are external factors which may be beyond control of the provider. External agencies like Alerta.com provide server monitoring services that webhosting companies might use to proof their reliability.

Cost is a factor depending on the purpose of the website and budget. Personal /Individual websites might have smaller budget and choose to go with a cheaper webhosting provider, possibily in exchange for support and stability. Business sites might have larger budgets and should definitely place stability and support above all else. The cheaper webhosting deals that offer enormous diskspace and huge amounts of data-transfer at a dollar rates has continuously proven to be a one-off hit that attracts customers in numbers, but fail in providing quality support. Large numbers of client sites also cause sustained high server loads that might cause the server to crash and thus affecting stability.

Location of the server is generally not an important issue depending on your ISP/country's connection to the datacenter where the server is located. Pings to the server can normally tell you the network latency to expect when people from your area access your site. Lower ping rates means that your site will load faster.

Lastly, take time to identify and contact a webhost to ask about their service. This would give you an idea of the kind of support that you might receive and help you in deciding if you want to go with the web-hosting provider.

Managed Hosting

Managed hosting is a dedicated server that is accompanied by a full suite of technical support, maintenance and monitoring services. This differs from dedicated Web hosting, where customers are provided with their own servers but are still responsible for virtually all administrative and maintenance duties.

Managed hosting are meant for those websites that are designed to host busy e-commerce sites and dynamic, database driven Web pages. Perfect for organizations that dont have the time or capital to invest in server administration.

MANAGED SERVER = DEDICATED SERVER + COMPLETE SUPPORT TO SERVER ADMINISTRATION

A managed server will come equipped with all the features of a dedicated server, plus instead of leaving most of the administrative tasks to the customer, a managed provider will typically handle that as well.

Many companies will often assign you a dedicated service representative who will cater only to you and a handful of other accounts. This support also comes in the form of proprietary control panel technology that enables the inexperienced administrator to easily set up and maintain sites on a server. This is achieved through an intuitive and user friendly point and click method rather than by typing complicated commands at a prompt line.

Hosting companies offer a supplementary suite of features and services that related to managed hosting, including application and database management, high-availability services and load balancing. These hosting companies will back up their services with performance guarantees and Service Level Agreements.

Unmanaged services, on the other hand, give the customer complete remote server administration capability and freedom. The downside to this is that unmanaged servers require a large amount of time and technical expertise, as the customer is ultimately responsible for the instillation and management of the server - not the Web host. For this reason, unmanaged servers are only recommended for individuals and companies with extensive server administration resources or expertise, as well as a significant amount of time available to take care of the server.

Conclusion on managed hosting

If you're unsure about which service to choose, give serious consideration to choosing a managed server. While taking the managed route is more expensive, it is also much more reassuring for the inexperienced administrator. Remember, you can always downgrade your account to an unmanaged service later, once you've acquired some expertise in server administration. Though once you opt for the personal attention you will receive through a managed host, you might think twice of turning into an unmanaged service later on.

Small And Medium Businesses Embrace Servers Running Linux

Although we are aware of Linux adoption by large enterprises, most people do not know that there are sizeable numbers of installations in small and medium businesses (SMBs) as well. This base is set to grow as server vendors lob tailor made Linux servers and applications at SMBs.

Country manager, pSeries & Open power, IBM says, "Unlike large enterprises, SMBs do not have to face the challenge of migrating legacy applications. The popularity with SMBs has helped Linux grow at 30 percent globally".

The general consensus is that Linux did better in 2004 than anyone had predicted. Director Enterprise Marketing & alliances, Customers solution Group, HP India says, " As per IDC India, Linux in the server market grew by 48 percent in OND, 2004 over JAS, 2004, while the windows and Unix markets showed a modest 3 percent and 3.4 percent growth respectively during the same period."

For any OS to succeed, applications need to be made available. SMBs can be major draw for Linux servers as it offers them lower TCO and tighter control on their IT spends. Since many SMBs already have home grown applications, a proprietary OS will be the single largest area of spending. It is here that Linux offers a big advantage.

The availability of version 2.6 of the Linux kernel in Red hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Novell's SuSE 9 will give a big boost to vertical scalability. As SMBs become a part of the global supply chain, they want enterprise applications on Linux to keep their investment low. This trend will be a key enabler for the Linux server market worldwide.

Why Linux Based servers?

Cost is a factor and Linux offers better security as the source code of proprietary software is always kept a secret. With a community supporting it, any security hole in Linux is quickly found and patched.

Linux not only lets an organization save on software costs, it also offers long term long term saving on hardware. Instead of being forced to upgrade software with Linux, an SMB can take control of its IT strategy. Chief technology officer of IDBI bank says, "You decide when you wish to upgrade, not the vendor, hence you get tighter control on your spending." This can be particularly important for users, such as SMBs that cannot afford to keep up with the pace of change in commercial software.

Business application and Linux

There is credit to Oracle for driving the Linux server market. During the early part of 2004, Oracle came up with a value offering. It offered pre- configured Oracle E-Business Suite special edition on Lintel Boxes for a 10 user License for $36,000USD. The traction of this offering was seen towards the end of 2004 when we closed a dozen deals that were in various stages of implementation, says General Manager, Oracle India. This is a testimony that SMBs are opting for Linux servers. SAP is following Oracle in making application available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Customized and certified

All server vendors including HP, IBM and SGI are throwing their weight behind Linux and each has a SMB specific business strategy with significant initiatives to lure them.

HP has announced that some of its high end computing tools from the HP-UX environment are ported onto Linux and made available to SMBs. This includes a clustering solution called HP service guard for high availability of applications and management tools such as Systems insight Manager(SIM) and open view that offer third party integration. Additionally HP is creating a reference architecture stack, including hardware, OS, database and Middleware. HP certifies a stack so that customers can feel more confident on deploying their core business application on Linux. Linux servers are popular in high performance computing(HPC) environments such as research labs.

IBM has recently launched a new family of eserver Openpower systems based on its Power5 processor specially designed for Linux. The Power5 comes with a micropartitioning technology called Virtualisation Engine(VE) wherein each processor can be sliced into ten virtual partitions with each partition acting as a new server. IBM's eserver Openpower 710 is a single CPU processor with 3 HDDs and 512 MB memory with RAID level 1 and 5. This eserver offers SMBs an affordable alternative to higher priced entry level Unix or Linux system. Openpower offers a 64bit platform at a price point of a 32 bit offering. We believe that it is the right product for the mass market.

Sun Microsystems has the Sun fire V20 and V40 severs based on the 64 bit AMD Opteron processor, which has been successful with SMBs. It also offers the Solaris 10 Opetron combination. Sun is aiming to position Solaris 10 as its trump card to take the fight to commercial Linux with support - email, phone and onsite - available at a small price. Advanced scientific research, elite foods, Sage Design systems, Centre for DNA fingerprinting and diagnostics, are Sun customers running there core application on Linux.

Linux servers are used by SMBs for CAD analysis, CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and FEA(Finite Element Analysis). Linux systems are rugged as they come with SGI Propack over and above the standard Linux Kernel. This gives customers the ability to scale there computing environments with independent I/O, memory and power supply.

Web Hosting: Shared or Dedicated - Which Should You Choose?

Before you begin your search for a web host you should first determine whether you need shared web hosting or dedicated web hosting.

A shared web hosting account is an account on a web server that hosts other shared accounts. The number of accounts on one shared server can vary widely; some servers host a few hundred, while others have thousands of sites hosted on one server. Hosting your website on a shared server is a workable solution for many small businesses, as shared hosting accounts are priced much lower than dedicated servers. Shared web hosting accounts have limited access to the core administrative functions of the server. Most web hosting companies offer comprehensive technical support for users of shared hosting plans. Complete technical support is usually included in the price of your account plan.

A dedicated server is usually dedicated to one, or just a few websites, usually for the sole use by one company. The cost of a dedicated server is higher than that of a shared hosting account. With a dedicated server, you have access to the core administrative functions of the server. With most dedicated server plans offered by hosting companies, you're pretty much on your own where technical support is concerned. If you don't have an IT staff or a server administrator to provide support, you may want to find a person to help you manage your dedicated server. Many hosting companies that offer dedicated server plans also offer "per issue" support, meaning that you'll pay a certain amount, usually an hourly fee, for technical support issues. Some dedicated server plans have optional "support tickets" that you can purchase in advance.

Another option is what's called a "managed dedicated" hosting plan. With a managed dedicated plan, you get a dedicated server and the hosting company also provides comprehensive support like you usually find in a shared hosting plan. This is a good alternative for companies that don't have an IT staff or a server administrator and don't want to get involved at all in the technical aspects of running a server. The price for a managed dedicated server is usually higher than for an unmanaged dedicated server plan as you're getting technical support included.

Whatever type of web hosting plan you choose, make sure that the plan you've chosen fits your needs.

Choosing a Web Host Based On Price? Dont!

It's tempting. There are so many companies offering cut-rate hosting - loaded with astounding post-futuristic techno-gizmo features ! - that it just makes sense to save a few dollars, right?

Think again. First, consider how much you would be saving. If you run a business site, saving $5, $10 or even $15 a month is not a big saving. No going concern will become a stopping concern on account of even $15 a month. But the wrong web host can stop a business cold.

Here are three reasons to look beyond price when choosing your web host.

1. Usability. Confession time: I chose my first website host based on price. The control panel was not easy to use, and I often found myself traveling in circles trying to enter it. I switched to my second web host based not just on price, but on usability, and I instantly became a pro. Well, not quite. But I was able to manage my email accounts and learn about CGI, and check my traffic stats and edit my html files right on the server. Not bad for a newbie who couldn't even find his files on his previous host's server.

2. Service. I thought my second host had great service. They even answered my emails. Until the dreaded day that some guy with a chip on his shoulder filed a phony spam complaint. I was out in the cold. In fact, they would not answer my emails or even speak to me at all. Meanwhile, my ISP responded to the same phony complaint immediately, sharing with me a copy and giving me a chance to deal with it. That ISP is now my third web host. I pay a little more, but the personal service is worth it. I have no hesitation recommending http://www.phastnet.com to anybody who wants the assurance that they won't be hung out to dry at the first whiff of somebody in a bad mood.

3. Reliability. When that phony spam complaint struck, my website was down for four days. Ouch! But there are many other things that can bring down a site. What is your web host's uptime? And how reliable is its reporting? Other things can happen, like a form not functioning - meaning lost sales. Worse still, what if Google comes crawling just when your site is down? Search engines don't like sending people to unreliable sites. Companies like http://www.dotcom-monitor.com monitor websites for a variety of measures, and the cost is nothing compared to the cost of lost sales.

Sure, save a few bucks on hosting, and pay a whole lot more in lost sales and increased stress. Your web host is your Internet landlord. Take as much time choosing your web host as you would the place you live in. Price alone just is not enough.

10 Helpful Tips to Follow When Switching Web Hosts

You've made your decision to move from your website from your current web host to a new web host. The following tips will help you make the transition easier and make you aware of some potential pitfalls to avoid.

1) Make sure the new web hosting plan you've chosen offers you the storage capabilities to handle all of your current website storage requirements. If your website is 50MB, you need to make sure your new hosting plan offers that much space, or more. If you're not sure how much space your website is using, ask your current host. You can also usually find this information on your web hosting control panel.

2) How does your current web host determine what your storage amount is used for? Find out what your current and new host includes in your plan's storage amount. Are your emails and log files counted towards your total storage, or just your web files?

3) What operating system does your current hosting plan use? Windows or Unix? Sometimes this can make no difference, in other cases it can make the difference between a working website and a broken website. If your site is currently on a Windows server and your website uses ASP scripting, you'll find it difficult to make things work well on a Unix server, as ASP is a Windows based programming language. Find out ahead of time whether your current hosting plan is on a Unix or Windows server.

4) Does your site currently use FrontPage? Find out if your new host supports FrontPage. And make sure your new host supports the same version of FrontPage you currently use.

5) Find out if your new hosting plan offers you the same amount of bandwidth that your current host offers. You don't want to be surprised by unexpected overage charges at the end of the month.

6) Does your new web hosting plan give you the same amount of email accounts, autoresponders and mail forwards that you currently use?

7) Does your site use a shopping cart that your current hosting plan provides? Can you move the cart to your new host? If not, does your new host have a suitable shopping cart replacement?

8) If you are using any scripts on your website, make sure that your new hosting plan supports all of your scripts. Find out in advance if you'll need to make any modifications to your scripts to get them working on the new server.

9) Make sure to set up your existing email accounts on your new server before transferring your domain name to the new server. At MateMedia (www.matemediainc.com) we see this overlooked quite often.

10) Do you know how to upload your website files to the new server? If you don't, you'll need to find out if your new web host will upload your files for you. Some hosts will do this at no charge, some will do it for a fee, yet other hosts won't do it all because of liability issues.

Once all your files are uploaded to the new server, you'll want to double check that the site looks and functions properly on the new server. Most hosts can provide a preview link for you to see how your site looks before the domain name is transferred over. If your host does not provide a method for you to preview your site, you can modify your hosts file to preview your site. The host file tells your computer where to go to look for sites that are listed in that file. This works with any version of Windows. The file name is the same, the location can change. Here's how to modify your hosts file:

The file HOSTS should be in the c:windowssystem32driversetc You might only find a file named HOSTS.SAM (as in SAMPLE). That is OK; we can modify the HOSTS.SAM file as well and do a SAVE AS HOSTS.

In either case, double click on the HOSTS file to open it. You will be prompted by Windows to select an Application (Program) to use to VIEW the file.

Scroll the list and select Notepad. Click the OK button. The NOTEPAD program will now open, displaying the file HOSTS. You will see examples listed (The # symbol is used to comment out line or remarks.), the format is this. IP address (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx SPACE name)

So, to tell your computer that www.yourwebsite.com is at the address (replace with your real IP) 12.345.678.90 add the following entry to the bottom of the hosts file:

12.345.678.90 www.yourdomain.com (As in the example).

Click on FILE, slide down and click on SAVE AS.

In the Save As Type field, select ALL FILES. (Ensure that no .SAM is shown after the filename HOSTS. Click SAVE. You may be warned that the file already exists; this is fine, click YES.

Close Notepad, by clicking on FILE, slide down to EXIT, and click.

Now when you open your web browser, or try to ping the site, your system will go to the IP address you typed in the HOSTS file.

Remember to undo this when finished testing or your machine will always want to go to that IP address whenever you want to go to that site.

After you're satisfied that your site looks ok and functions ok, you can go to your registrar (the company where your domain name is registered) and modify the nameservers associated with your domain name to your new web host's nameservers. If you don't know your new host's nameservers, ask them. Most hosts have that information listed somewhere on their website or in the email you first get after signing up for an account.

Once the dns modification is completed it'll be 24-48 hours before you'll see your site on the new server.

Most whois utilities will display the nameservers of the current host. A good one is at http://whois.sc. Check your domain name and see if the nameservers you added are listed. If so, you have completed the website transfer to your new web host. Only after you've confirmed this is it ok to cancel your old web hosting account.

How Multiple Server Hosting impacts your websites uptime

This article describes the technology behind multiple server hosting and how you may utilize it to maximize your site's security and uptime

Hosting of web sites has essentially become a commodity. There is very little distinguishing one hosting company from the next. Core plans and features are the same and price is no longer a true determining feature. In fact, choosing a host based on the cheapest price can be more expensive in the long term with respect to reliability issues and possible loss of sales as a result of website downtime.

Selecting a host from the thousands of providers and resellers can be a very daunting task, which may result in a hit and miss approach. But although hosting may have become a commodity, one distinguishing feature that you must always look out for is reliability.

At the heart of any hosting company's reliability is redundancy. This ensures that if a problem exists at one point, there will be an alternative which ensures continuity as seemlessly and transparently as possible.

Most hosts do employ redundant network connections. These are the high speed pipes that route data from the server to your web browser. But, redundant 'multiple web servers' have been extremely rare and very expensive, requiring costly routing equipment which has previously been used only in mission critical applications of Fortune 500 companies.

However, a very neat but little known Domain Name Server(DNS) feature called 'round robin' allows the selection and provision of a particular IP address from a 'pool' of addresses when a DNS request arrives.

To understand what this has to do with server reliability it's important to remember that the Domain Name Server (DNS) database maps a host name to their IP address. So instead of using a hard to remember series of numbers (IP address) we just type in your web browser www.yourdomain.com, to get to your website.

Now, typically it takes at at least 2 to 3 days to propagate or 'spread the word' of your DNS info throughout the internet. That's why when you register or transfer a domain name it isn't immediately available to the person browsing the web.

This delay has stymied the security benefits of hosting your site on multiple servers, as your site would be down for a couple of days if something went awry with one server. You would have to change your DNS to reflect your second server and wait days before the change was picked up in routers on the internet.

However, the round robin DNS strategy solves this predicament, by mapping your domain name to more than one IP address.

Select hosting companies now employ the DNS round robin technique in conjunction with'failover monitoring'.

The DNS round robin failover monitoring process starts by a web hosting company setting up your site on two or more independent web servers (preferably with different IP blocks assigned to them). Your domain name will therefore have 2 or more IP Addresses assigned to it.

Then the failover monitor watches your web server(s) by dispatching data to a URL you specify and looking for particular text in the results. When the system detects that one of your IP addresses is returning an error, and the others aren't, it pulls that IP address out of the list. The DNS then points your domain name to the working IP address/s

If any of your IP's come back online they are restored to the IP pool. This effectively and safely keeps your site online - even if one of your web servers is down.

The average failure detection and recovery time with a system like this can be as low as 15 minutes. This time varies depending on the speed of your site and the nature of the failure and also how long other ISP's cache (save) your DNS information.

The time taken for other ISP's caching your information can be manipulated in the failover monitor by lowering the "time to live" (TTL) cache settings. These are the settings that other ISP's will use to determine how long to cache your DNS information.

Of course you must bear in mind the matter of how frequently data is synchronized between your website's servers. This will be the hosting company's responsibility, and this may become complicated where databases and user sessions are involved.

The very expensive hardware based failover monitoring systems that point a virtual IP address to other ISP's, while behind the scenes juggling a number of unique IP addresses on different servers, is of course the most 'elegant' solution to multi server hosting.

That way, the whole issue of ISP's caching your information does not come into play.

Therefore, for site's that need to have true 99.99995% uptime, without huge outlays of money, the technology is readily available and certain proprietory failure monitoring systems are now relatively cheap to apply.