Virtual Web Servers - The Perfect Alternative to Shared Hosting

If you're like most webmasters out there, you've probably started off with shared hosting at one point or another. Though shared hosting has some advantages, by nature the hosting is shared with plenty of other websites. In order to cut costs, shared hosting companies over pack many accounts all on one single server. This can cause plenty of problems which shared hosting is all too known for, especially slow download speeds as well as sporadic downtime.

If your website is seeing a good amount of success, many would suggest that you switch to your own dedicated server. If you've seen the prices for a dedicated server, you know that costs can run high.

There is a solution in between shared hosting and dedicated hosting which is called a virtual web server. A dedicated virtual web server will let you operate your own websites as if you actually owned the server virtually. Each virtual web server has direct control over its own resources like RAM, CPU, and others. Each and every virtual web server is completely isolated from other virtual web servers, so you won't be affected in any way by the actions of other webmasters and their domains/servers.

If you treat your website like a business, or even if it is an e-commerce site, then getting a virtual web server is probably the best route for you to take. When it comes to giving your website a home on the Internet, you'll definitely want a presence that's going to be up at all times, with top download speeds.

You also have the option of installing any application on your server that you'd like. No longer are the problems of not being able to run certain web applications on your shared server because your hosting company doesn't support them. If you want something, simply install it on your virtual server. A single virtual web server will give you the flexible solution that you need for web hosting.

Published by Doug Smith. Find more information on virtual web servers or find out more about getting your own virtual private server

Running Your Own Web Server

This article will cover the basics about running your own web server out of your home. However, before I provide some direction on how to go about doing this I am going to give you the "pain points". I am also going to give you some reasons why running your own web server might not be for you.

Why you don't want to run your own web server?

If you are looking to sell something online you should look at a business web hosting solution. Two reasons. One, you are not going to be able to harden your server enough to make it secure for conducting business transactions. Second, you need to ensure that your site is available to your customers 24/7/365 or as close to 100% uptime as you can get. With web hosting you can typically get 99% uptime. You are very unlikely to come close to this trying to run your own server. Your uptime will be based on the uptime of your internet service provider. Plus every time you update Windows you will likely need to reboot your machine. And, are you familiar with...

- How to setup and configure a router?
- The difference between a physical and a software firewall?
- Do you know how to setup, configure, and secure a web server?
- Do you know enough about networking to run and maintain a server?

It is certainly within the realm of a fairly technically savvy person to setup and administer their own web server on the internet, but it takes some work, and any claims that it is easy to do should be met with guarded skepticism. This advice is coming to you from someone that ran their own web server on the internet for almost two years.

On the other hand it is pretty easy to (relatively speaking) setup and run a web server against your localhost (127.0.0.1) address. This web server will only be available to you local PC, but can serve as the test platform for your web site.

Some direction on running your own web server

Well, if you have read the last section and are still reading then you are looking for some direction. I am going to be offering information from the perspective that you are somewhat familiar already with the terms I am throwing about. The links I have provided here will go into more detail. Again, setting up and maintaining your own web server is not easy and requires a broad range of technical knowledge.

I will be showing you how to setup the Apache web server on your PC running under Windows. I am running Windows XP - Professional. You can run a web server using Windows XP - Home or Windows 2000. I mention this as any specific guidance I am giving you might vary if you are using something other than XP Professional. Also, I have not tried doing this on any other version of Windows.

Getting the software

You can go directly to Apache and get the webserver. But, what if you want to add blog software, forum software, Php, and other packages that do not come standard with the web server itself? Like I said this stuff is not easy. But wait, I am about to turn you on to one of the most comprehensive web packages available. This web package could probably be installed by your Grandmother without difficulty! All you need to do is download the file (it is a huge 186mb file). Once you download it installation is so simple it is ridiculous. The folks that did this are just brilliant. Most software shops could take a lesson from them in installation and configuration management.

This software comes bundled with blog software, forum software, MySQL database, apache security module and much more. The price is right as well. This site is not really easy to find in the search engines which goes to show that sometimes some of the best stuff on the web is buried quite deep. The url is http://www.devside.net/

Figuring out if IIS (Internet Information Server) is enabled?

I am assuming that you are going to install and use Apache as your web server. As such you need to see if IIS is running on your machine as there might be a port conflict as port 80 is the default port.

Some misc. advice (You may likely need to do a bit more digging to deal with the advice given here.)

Setting up your router

- DO NOT open up your entire DMZ to the internet are you will be toast!!!
- Only open up port 80 and port 23 (if you plan on letting people download stuff using FTP. Note, they can download files using http which runs on port 80).

Port Forwarding
- Find a service like ZoneEdit. This is what I use. It is free for low to medium traffic sites.

Your ISP

- Some ISP's block port 80. You can still run your webserver, but it will have to be done on another port (81, 82, etc...)
- Some ISP's have policies that do not allow their customers to run websites. You should read your internet service agreement for details.

For another decent link to a site with good information on setting up a web server go to http://www.diywebserver.com/

Eric Matthews is the owner of http://www.anglesanddangles.com which provides information on web development covering technologies like PHP, Html, Perl CGI, as well as other resources to assist you with your website.

Monitor the Uptime of Your Websites and Servers. Downtime is Expensive!

There are companies, which websites are essential for their business success, as they are generating the most or the whole of the company?s revenue. Maybe also you belong to them. When this kind of website (server) is down, your business is affected. If your website is hosted by another company, you probably have some sort of ?uptime? guarantee. Nevertheless, what exactly is uptime and how do you measure it. The basic definition of uptime is the period of time when your site is up and running, being accessible and able to satisfy customers.

The opposite, when your site is not accessible, it is down. And that is how you measure downtime. Faulty routers, malfunctioning LANs, or a loss of electrical power typically causes most of the downtimes; only rarely are caused by a natural disaster. Most often, it is caused by failures from the telecommunications company or an application failure, not a fire, flood or other catastrophe.

The cost of downtime calculation of course depends on many factors, like the products and services you provide, the size of your company, the number of online sales, etc. Even if you do not sell any products or services online, there is still a cost of downtime, but then in terms of damage of reputation etc. Calculate the cost of downtime is difficult and varies from one company to another. There is no ?average business?, so the statistics that quantify the cost of downtime for average businesses are not helpful.

The cost of downtime include direct costs such as the labor charges for a team of technologists who had to resolve the outages. The indirect costs are much more difficult to calculate and include potential lost revenue, reductions in worker productivity, damaged reputation with customers and in the marketplace, lost future sales and the cost of storing unsold goods. Financial analysts and accountants at your company can help you come up with the factors for your particular business.

If your website is generating profit for your business, you will for sure monitor it by an external monitoring service. The on-line market offers you to choose from different services to get uptime reports, statistics and get notifications as soon as your website is down. You can not let your customers to inform you about your own downtime.

To understand the importance of being aware of downtime, and to be alerted as soon as possible when a problem occurs, have a look at these numbers:

• According to a report by Cumulus Research Partners website downtime, caused by problems such as network failures, costs European businesses more than ? 5 billion a year.
• In the automotive industry downtime is often worth some $1.000 a minute.
• According to a recent study conducted by ARC Advisory Group, accounting for nearly five percent of total North American production, more than $20 billion is lost each year due to unscheduled downtime. Clearly, the traditional "fail and fix" approach to maintenance is no longer a viable MRO strategy.

Many hosting providers guarantee 99 % uptime. 99 % uptime sounds good, but means that your site could be down more than 3.5 days a year, and in today's Internet that is unacceptable. Comparing to that, 99.9 % uptime is much better, but with 8 hours and 45 minutes of possible downtime do not have to be always enough. The table below shows the percentage of uptime and the related downtime per year.

99 % .......... 87 hours, 36 minutes (more than 3.5 days) 99.9 % ....... 8 hours, 45 minutes, 36 seconds 99.99 % ..... 52 minutes, 33.6 seconds 99.999 % .... 5 minutes, 15.36 seconds 99.9999 % .. 31.68 seconds

As you can see, a 99 % uptime may not sound too bad, but it can cost you quite a lot of loss in revenues.

There are more than 30 uptime monitoring websites worldwide, while some of those have also affiliate partners. Among those are: Alertra, AlertSite, Dotcom monitor, InternetSeer, Jaguard, RedAlert, SiteUptime, WatchMouse, WebsitePulse and others. Almost all of them offer some prepaid packages based on monthly fees, varying by number of possible monitored sites (servers), additional services and by the complexity of the service. The price of their basic prepaid package is $5 - $40 per month. For this price you can monitor only 1, or maximum of 3 devices, choose from quite a lot of protocols, allow to send notifications to multiple contacts via e-mail, IM, pager or SMS, allow to choose between daily, weekly, or monthly reports by email and of course uptime performance and statistics available on-line. The Professional packages can go up to $180 per month or even higher.

There are just two completely free 24/7 monitoring services: Montastic and mon.itor.us.

Montastic?s biggest advantage is simplicity of the service, while it offers just basic service including real time monitoring and alerting by e-mail one contact person ? the registred user, or by RSS feed, when the website is down and when it is back again. It allows to monitor only http websites, limited to the number of 100 (what is not a limit at all), checking it every 10 minutes from two different locations.

Meanwhile mon.itor.us provides network, website and server monitoring service supporting 11 protocols with possibility to monitor unlimited number of devices and alert unlimited number of contact persons by e-mail, RSS feed, IM message, pager or SMS. There are also other remarkable features as personalized interactive interface, where you can add server performance and availability tests, set daily, weekly or monthly reports sent by e-mail. Tests are performed from 3 geographically distributed servers, and they are always adding more interesting features as they are still in beta version.

Peter Cernak works at Sourcio. The company develops mon.itor.us and offers a wide range of IT services and Open Source solutions for small and medium-size businesses.

Embedded web server-more than just an operating system

Embedded web server isn't new term. Web server is jus a method of delivering web pages (or other contents) to the user. Market is full of such systems allowing interconnection of domestic devices and other web-enabled appliances. It is hard to understand how microcontroller can drive web server. Embedded web server usually is highly optimized machine code. Usually implemented in the C language. In order to write optimized embedded web server it is necessary to write code from scratch. What parts need to be implemented while creating embedded web server:; Microcontroller hardware; Network protocols for embedded web server; Implementation and optimisation techniques. Microcontroller hardware is a computer on a chip which has program memory for code storage, EEPROM, RAM, I/O and other peripherals. Network protocols can be used for embedded web server: HTTP-document request/response TCP-reliable communications IP-low-level data transport ICMP-diagnostics (ping) SLIP-serial interface Modem emulation HTTP request is Hyper Transfer Protocol which defines a request - response mechanism for obtaining documents from web server. Web browse sends request to web server in multiline string format like: GET /index.htm HTTP/1.0 User-Agent: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (Win95; I) Pragma: no-cache Host: 10.1.1.11 Accept: image/gif, image/x- xbitmap, image/jpeg, */* Accept-Encoding: gzip Accept-Language: en Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1,*,utf-8 In embedded systems all this information isn't needed. For instance we don't care about browser information, HTTP version isn't important because usually simplest HTTP interface is used. Simply you can trim the rest part of message and send line: GET / HTTP/1.0 because most web servers interpret this as request of index.htm.

Http://www.scienceprog.com - embedded related info. Scientific, embedded, biomedical, electronics articles. Interesting electronics and embedded projects

Web Servers and Firewall Zones

Web and FTP Servers

Every network that has an internet connection is at risk of being compromised. Whilst there are several steps that you can take to secure your LAN, the only real solution is to close your LAN to incoming traffic, and restrict outgoing traffic.

However some services such as web or FTP servers require incoming connections. If you require these services you will need to consider whether it is essential that these servers are part of the LAN, or whether they can be placed in a physically separate network known as a DMZ (or demilitarised zone if you prefer its proper name). Ideally all servers in the DMZ will be stand alone servers, with unique logons and passwords for each server. If you require a backup server for machines within the DMZ then you should acquire a dedicated machine and keep the backup solution separate from the LAN backup solution.

The DMZ will come directly off the firewall, which means that there are two routes in and out of the DMZ, traffic to and from the internet, and traffic to and from the LAN. Traffic between the DMZ and your LAN would be treated totally separately to traffic between your DMZ and the Internet. Incoming traffic from the internet would be routed directly to your DMZ. Therefore if any hacker where to compromise a machine within the DMZ, then the only network they would have access to would be the DMZ. The hacker would have little or no access to the LAN. It would also be the case that any virus infection or other security compromise within the LAN would not be able to migrate to the DMZ.

In order for the DMZ to be effective, you will have to keep the traffic between the LAN and the DMZ to a minimum. In the majority of cases, the only traffic required between the LAN and the DMZ is FTP. If you do not have physical access to the servers, you will also need some sort of remote management protocol such as terminal services or VNC.

Database servers

If your web servers require access to a database server, then you will need to consider where to place your database. The most secure place to locate a database server is to create yet another physically separate network called the secure zone, and to place the database server there. The Secure zone is also a physically separate network connected directly to the firewall. The Secure zone is by definition the most secure place on the network. The only access to or from the secure zone would be the database connection from the DMZ (and LAN if required).

Exceptions to the rule

The dilemma faced by network engineers is where to put the email server. It requires SMTP connection to the internet, yet it also requires domain access from the LAN. If you where to place this server in the DMZ, the domain traffic would compromise the integrity of the DMZ, making it simply an extension of the LAN. Therefore in our opinion, the only place you can put an email server is on the LAN and allow SMTP traffic into this server. However we would recommend against allowing any form of HTTP access into this server. If your users require access to their mail from outside the network, it would be far more secure to look at some form of VPN solution. (with the firewall handling the VPN connections. LAN based VPN servers allow the VPN traffic onto the network before it is authenticated, which is never a good thing.)

Chris Weight is a writer for http://www.stekno.com , information for IT professionals

Should You Invest In Dedicated Server?

There are millions of websites out there, and most of these websites are hosted on shared servers. The owners of these websites know that they are to getting too much traffic, so it's smarter to outsource their hosting and have them hosted on someone else's server. Outsourced hosting costs $10-$100 a month, and it is a great solution for webmasters who are just starting out, and have a small site or sites. But what about dedicated server? At what point does it become worthwhile to use one? Dedicated server is, simply put, a server that is owned by someone else, but you have exclusive use of it.

Dedicated server may cost $500-$1000 a month to use. You can alternatively buy your own server for a one time cost, but this requires having a technical person who will be able to address any problems, so if you don't have a technician at hand, dedicated server is your best option. What will you gain from using a dedicated hosing server?

1. A more reliable host - you don't share your bandwidth with outer webmasters, as you do in the shared hosting situation. This promises a more reliable connection that will not be interfered with what other webmasters are doing.

2. Faster load time - you're not sharing resources with other sites, so your site will upload much faster

3. You can consolidate all your websites into one server - this will lower the over all costs, if you have more than one website.

4. Better security - your own dedicated server is much more private that shared servers, where others can prey into your business. This in itself is a prime motive for many businesses to use dedicated hosting.

To conclude, dedicated hosting is recommended if you take your website seriously and conduct some real activity on the web. This can be even more true if you conduct any kind of ecommerce or password based activity, that require greater security. Just make sure you use a professional company that will take good care of your website.

Want to learn more about dedicated servers? Visit Alex Dale's dedicated-servers-solutions.info. We talk more about dedicated hosting and dedicated hosting plans.

Dedicated Server Price Check by www.vipwh.com

 The price of dedicated hosting services has really come down in the past couple of years. In fact, prices have dropped so much for the "budget dedicated server" market.

The price of dedicated hosting services has really come down in the past couple of years. In fact, prices have dropped so much for the "budget dedicated server" market.

The price of dedicated hosting services has really come down in the past couple of years. In fact, prices have dropped so much for the "budget dedicated server" market. While competitive conditions in both the hosting industry and the computer hardware industry have contributed to the reduction in dedicated hosting costs, don't think that prices were that inflated in the first place. Budget servers are fantastic but it takes more than a competitive market to offer services at such great prices. 

Much thanks to the great overbuilds of networks, data centers and computer hardware in the dot-com days, companies with a bit of buying power can acquire the hard-resources it takes to provide a good quality un-managed dedicated server for a great price. Finding a dedicated server for $199 a month or less these days is not that difficult. When shopping for your dedicated server, consider more than just price. 

Managed Services 

Before just lining up the amount of ram, the processor speed, the data transfer and the price ask yourself - what else can this company do for me that I need now, or may need down the road. While there are plenty that do it, a 1 person effort to maintain a mission critical or high traffic server is no easy task. It helps to have others helping look out for your interests as well. Check to see if your host provides managed services such as backups, monitoring, firewalls and intrusion detection. Sometime they may be included in the plan but nearly always can be negotiated in at a reasonable price and can be well worth the investment. 

Technical Support 

The level of support received with your dedicated services is important as well. Some dedicated hosts offer email only support in order to keep costs down while others flat out charge a fee for a support ticket. Your preferred method of receiving support plus the level and frequency in which you will need it should certainly be considered. 

The Quality of Your Network 

Most dedicated hosting providers these days have pretty substantial internet connectivity. Nonetheless, it is something you should be aware of. Look for a host that has redundant connectivity via multiple providers insuring as much connectivity uptime as possible. Some of the major connectivity providers these days are Sprint, UUNet, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest and Cogent. 

Summary 

A very cheap server deal does not simply mean you are dealing with an overly generous hosting company or that another provider is ripping you off at a higher rate. While some hosts do price more competitively than others, there are associates costs that must be covered. When shopping for your next dedicated server just keeps in mind you may not always be comparing apples to apples. 

Please refer following web sites for useful resources related to web site hosting: 

http://www.vipwh.com
http://www.thehostingguide.com

Paras Shah

Chief Technology Officer
VIP PowerNet, Inc.

Phone: (713)787-6501
Email: paras@vippowernet.com
http://www.vippowernet.com