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

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

Choosing The Best Web Server For Your Online Business

What is a web server? Basically, a web server embodies the theory of supply and demand: it supplies your website when the people demand it. When a user wants to view your website, the server finds the URL?s file and uploads it to the user?s browser. However, there are many different kinds of servers to choose from, so how do you find the right one?

The Virtual Private Server is a great choice for larger businesses that have complicated needs. It?s best if you have some experience working the program, because you have to know how to control the settings, but if you can read and understand the manual, you?ll be fine. The plus to a Virtual Private Server is that it?s a single server that branches out, letting you work independently while paying with the other host customers. You can also have up to 50 websites. It can be costly at over 100 dollars a month, but if you?re concerned about security and control, a Virtual Private Server is probably the way to go.

The more popular server is Virtual Hosting. This is a single server that is shared with many users. Because it?s controlled by an administrator, you don?t need to worry about technical skills. However, you don?t have as much control as you would with a Virtual Private Server, because every time you want to change something in your settings, you have to contact the admininstrator. Secondly, you?re only allowed one website, so if you want to start a second site, you have to create a new account. The good news is, it?s a great deal at only about 20 to 50 dollars per month. So if you have a small business with just one or two websites, and you don?t want to worry about technical skills , Virtual Hosting is the best choice.

You also have to think about web server software. One type is Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). It only works with NT-based server systems, as NT is a Microsoft product. It has crash protection and plenty of support, so you don?t have to worry about viruses. Also, if you use NT, you get IIS free with it.

However, the most popular type is Apache. It?s always free, and while it isn?t supported like IIS, it?s always updated and easy to use. So if you?re looking for something safe, IIS is a great choice, but Apache is more popular for a reason.

These are only a few of the servers and software you have to choose from, but they?re a start. If you do your research and think of what will best benefit your business or webpage, you can make a well-informed decision that will let you be a successful host.

Robert Michael is a writer for Daily Servers which is an excellent place to find servers links, resources and articles. For more information go to: http://www.dailyservers.com

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

Dedicated server is better than shared server

Web host company offers two options such as shared server space or dedicated server at the time of leasing server. Dedicated server is a single web server within a network of computers that is dedicated only to one customer. Mostly large businesses use dedicated servers because it satisfies the requirements of large businesses due to several reasons.

Dedicated server is best option instead of shared server because it enables you to install data applications. It offers full control over server operating system and enables the customers to customize hardware as well as software setup to meet exact requirements. Web host provides hardware of the computer, network connectivity and routing equipment with dedicated server whereas client controls and maintains server software.

Dedicated server is the best option for the people who want huge amount of data space and bandwidth. These servers offer complete control on entire network. Major advantage of dedicated servers is that it provides each and every service at the small cost. Sometimes it enables the clients to install desired software with superior flexibility and administrative options. The clients don?t share resources in dedicated server.

These servers offer ability to manage firewalls and password access due to security purposes. Basic requirement to have a dedicated server is technical skill. A person with a great technical knowledge can easily handle all problems of dedicated servers. Dedicated servers are costlier than shared servers.

Dedicated servers are categorized as managed dedicated servers and unmanaged dedicated servers. Several things such as operating system, hardware options, space and bandwidth are such options that should be considered while selecting dedicated servers .