Virtual Web Servers: Perfect For Mid-sized Web Hosting Needs, Part 2

Usually it takes a person with quite a bit of experience to be able to successfully setup, maintain, and configure a web server. The problem with this is that there are not enough of these experienced people to prepare a web server for all of the individual web sites on the internet today.

One way to help fix this problem is to use virtual web servers. A virtual web server allows one very experienced person to setup a single server that will be able to host many different web sites across many domains. This also allows different web sites to be configured individually and be able to use more resources than they would be able to use if they were not hosted on a virtual web server.

Since each web site can be fully configured, you will have quite a bit of control over all of the different features of your web site.

A virtual web server allows each web site to have its email, FTP access, and many other configuration files to be configured exactly the way you want them to be. Also a virtual web server allows access to different types of databases which can make your web site more dynamic.

Many virtual web server plans allow unlimited email addresses and built-in spam filters and virus protection. They also allow unlimited anonymous and non-anonymous FTP sites, so that you can offer file upload and downloads to your clients.

However the best feature of a virtual web server is that you have complete control over how your web site is configured to run, so you can do almost anything that you want to do. You do not have to be an expert, because many of these services offer a management tool, so that you can do all of the configurations without knowing exactly how to do it by hand.

Learn how to get a virtual web server at http://www.webserversintl.com

Website Updates are a SNAP With Server Side Includes

If you ever had to make a change to your website that needed to be carried onto every page, you know what a tedious job it is.Well, have I got news for you. It doesn't have to be. Welcome to the world of Server Side Includes, also known as SSI. The best part about SSI is that it will make your life as a site owner 'oh so sweet.' You're going to want to kiss me after I give you the lowdown on this little beauty.

Let me give you an example. Let's say you have a site with over 50 pages and you need to add another link to your navigation bar. Can you imagine how long it would take you to open each page and update it? By putting your navigation bar into an SSI file, you would only open up that one file and update that -- and the change to your navigation bar will show up site wide. See how simple that was? By editing one file you have updated your entire site instantly.

The most common use of an include file is for your top navigation, your bottom text navigation, copyright, logo or any other piece of info needed to appear on all pages of your site.

So how do you create an SSI file? Glad you asked! An include file can be an HTML file or a simple text file. It should be whatever HTML coding you need for that element of your site, minus the or tags which should remain on your individual pages.

An easy way to make them is to design your web page and cut and paste the code you want into individual files and name them things like topnavigation.htm or bottomnav.htm. By giving them descriptive names, you'll know at a glance which file is which when it comes time to perform those updates.

After creating the files you plan on using as your includes, you'll need to open your web pages and insert a line of code where you want the SSI information to show up in your documents.

The code looks like this:

If your includes are located at the root level on your web server your path would look like this:

That's it. Pretty simple, really. After you get the hang of it you'll wish you would have learned about them years ago. They really do make global updating a snap.

Here are a couple of good sites to learn more about SSI:

Big Nose Bird-
http://www.bignosebird.com/ssi.shtml

CGI Resource-
http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Documentation/Server_Side_Includes/

New Breed Software
http://www.sonic.net/~nbs/unix/www/ssi/

Web Reference
http://www.webreference.com/programming/ssi/intro/

Before you start implementing SSI you need to ask your web host if they support them (most do), and also if they will need to be named with any special extensions. Some servers may require you to give them specific extensions like .asp (if it's NT) or .shtml (for many Unix servers). Although the majority won't, it's always better to ask first. Better safe then sorry.

By designing your website with server side includes you'll save yourself a ton of headaches when it comes time to updating your site. SSI is a Webmaster's best friend, so I suggest you spend some time getting acquainted.

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Monitor the Uptime of Your Websites and Servers

Websites are nowadays used to do business and earn profit. If you belong to those who own such a website or just planning to start on-line business, you will have to monitor the uptime of your websites or servers. Do not let your clients to let you know about your downtime.

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 (http://www.montastic.com) 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 (http://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 (http://www.sourcio.com). The company develops mon.itor.us and offers a wide range of IT services and Open Source solutions for small and medium-size businesses

Virtual Dedicated Server Hosting

A virtual private server, also known as virtual dedicated server, provides one of the ways of partitioning one server computer into multiple servers. By this, each server has the facade and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine or computer. In each virtual private server hosting, a full-fledged operating system can independently run and reboot each server.

Virtual private server hosting is not a new technology as it had been in common practice in mainframe computers. However, it has its rebirth with the improvement of virtualization software and technologies for other architectures. In all, virtual dedicated server hosting acts as a bridge between shared web hosting services and dedicated server hosting services. The biggest advantage of using virtual private server hosting is its cheaper cost, in comparison to a dedicated server.

A virtual private server hosting generally runs its own copy of operating system with customers having super-user-level access. Above all, in virtual private server hosting, you can easily install almost any software that runs on the OS. At times, certain software does not run well in a virtualized environment. This includes firewalls, anti-virus clients, and even the virtualizers.Having said that, Arachno Net provide their virtual private servers, complete with raid disc mirroring, a secured /tmp directory, firewall and brute force detection system already installed.

Recent time has witnessed the massive increase of the number of virtualization clients. These virtualization clients, usually, run on a single machine. A virtual private server web hosting generally has limited processor time, RAM, and disk space. You will be surprised to know that at times virtual private servers are also employed as honeypots. These honeypots allow a machine to purposely run software with known security flaws. They, of course, make sure that it is done without endangering the rest of the server. Multiple honeypots can be quickly set up through virtual private servers in this fashion.

While choosing a virtual private server hosting company, ask the following questions. Finalize your selection only if you are convinced:

1. What are the specifications of the host server, that is, the RAM, CPU, and network throughout?

2. How many virtual private servers are run on the host server that you'll be on?

3. How is resource contention handled? In other words, what happens if all the other virtual private servers on your host server are running CPU/RAM-intensive processes?

4. Last but not the least, do you have a dedicated minimum amount of RAM/CPU/Network usage? If so, how much?

All these questions are satisfactorily answered by virtual private server hosting provided by Arachno Net. Arachno Net provides network monitoring, daily data backups, 99.7% uptime through multiple oc3 Internet connectivity, and backup power UPS and generators. For more information on virtual private server hosting, virtual private server, virtual dedicated server, and dedicated server hosting, just click www.arachnonet.com .

Reg is a well known author who writes for http://www.arachnonet.com, about evolving trends and practices in web hosting technologies.

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: A Smart Choice for Web Site Hosting by www.vipwh.com

Hosting your personal or business web sites on your own dedicated server may seems expensive choice in comparison to shared web hosting, but at the end, it proves a smart choice. Shared web hosting, no matter how well managed, cannot be 100% reliable and stable. However if you have your own dedicated server you can manage to avoid most of the variables affecting the reliability and stability of a server, commonly experienced by shared hosting accounts; variables such as: overload, bad codes and scripts from other users (especially beginners); and, too many applications and components uploaded, and so on.

On a dedicated server you will install only software and applications you want to use, while on a shared hosting server you will find a host of other software and applications installed for other users.

By the very nature of the account, a dedicated server: reduces your dependency on the web host; and bypasses time delays and possible expenses incurred from these. With dedicated server hosting you can provide instant support to your own clients whenever required, which is not possible if you are on a shared server. A reliable and fast support service is vital for your own business growth just like the stability and reliability you wish for your own website. In business, reliability is reflected through word-of-mouth as one of the most effective promotional activities.

For people with clients, such as Graphic Designers and Web Designers a dedicated server is invaluable. A dedicated server will bring extra income into the studio, not just as a hosting facility, but, as a designer knows only too well, for the extra bread and butter income value. If you have 24hour access to your own dedicated server then you can adjust, correct or update a clients website in minutes, allowing you to keep the dollar back in your studio and not in someone elses. Ready availability results in reduced labour costs for the client, but higher studio-income frequency for the designer. Hence you will see the return of all your regular offline clients, bringing their web work with them.

The need for a dedicated server to your average shared server user is realized when stats tell you: how quickly people left your site because it was taking too much time to download; or how many daily visitors you are down by, because your site was not up. The true negative is the worry of how many lost visitors could have been your future paying-customers. The loss could easily equal the value of the upgrade to a Dedicated Server!

For a business, a website that is quickly downloadable and up all the time gives the visitor encouragement that your service is just as reliable, hence you will be more likely to make a sale. It will also enhance the companys image and encourage existing customers to refer your service to others. This will result in more sales for less promotion.

If you are serious about your online presence you need to get a Dedicated Server.
Paras Shah
Chief Technology Officer
VIP PowerNet, Inc.
Ph: (713)787-6501
Email: paras@vippowernet.com
http://www.vipwh.com
http://www.vippowernet.com
http://www.thehostingguide.com