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

Select a Web Server Dedicated to Your Success

If you have a successful online business, you might want to consider looking for dedicated web hosting. The dedicated web hosting gives you the opportunity of having an entire server at your disposal, and that server is not shared with anybody else.

Even for a person who doesn't know too much about servers, the advantages are clear right from the start: you, as the webmaster, have full control over YOUR OWN server, including options of what operating system to use, the type of hardware, etc. You can customize everything according to your own personal desires, while the administration is handled by the hosting company.

The most important advantage of using an online dedicated web hosting is that your website performance (like loading time, which is an important factor for your visitors) will not be affected by the traffic of the other websites with which you would have been sharing your server's bandwidth.

The online dedicated web hosting environment provides you with an exclusive server or servers devoted to the sole purpose of serving yourself and your business only. You do not share hard disk space with other customers, and you avoid shared hosting.

Before dedicated web hosting existed, a web site developer used to have two hosting options, the low-priced shared hosting model and the premium-priced dedicated web hosting. A person who bought space on a shared host would get a certain amount of disk space and monthly transfer, and would have the web site served from a common web server.

The hosting company, in its' attempt to increase the popularity of their products, would provide a wide range of options for the web site developer. But, limitations would still be there. For example, if a customer needed a non-standard program installed or maybe wanted to use a privileged account in order for a particular utility to run, he would be completely not be able to achieve these goals.

A good example would be a web site which required a database to store the precious information in. Many hosting companies provide the standard MySQL database to use on their servers. If your application requires another type of database though, then it could prove to be incompatible with the shared hosting account. And trust me, databases are a very important element in the success of your internet business.

A dedicated web server can be customized anyway you want. But, there's also a catch. Because it can handle much more traffic than a shared hosting account, the far better performance doesn't come cheap. On average, dedicated web hosting can cost the savvy webmaster hundreds of dollars per month depending on the size of the server, network connectivity and the amount of management required from the hosting company.

Webmasters who don't quite fit into the standard shared hosting model and find that it doesn't work for them, or whose sites grow very popular and require a large amount of resources have the alternative of dedicated web hosting.

Reliable, affordable dedicated web hosting service
Dediated web hosting.
http://www.dedicatedwebhostings.com
More tips and advice on web server selection

http://www.webhostingbin.com

How Good Free Web Hosting Servers Really Are?

There are a number of websites offering free web hosting. Tripod.com or geocities.com being the most popular among them. So, the question is : Are free servers really good?

Well, the answer is simple. You don?t get anything free in life and same goes for the net.

To be frank, some of the websites host you on really fast high-end servers even with your free account, but there are many drawbacks still.

To start with, nearly every free server puts up this huge banner right on top of every page in return for their free service. This is totally annoying and not desired at any cost.

To further increase their unusability they come with very limited bandwidth or monthly transfers. So, even if you get a healthy 20 MB for free, you are limited to a very narrow monthly transfer limit of around 50-100 MB a month. Huh ? What does that mean? It simply means and if you are serious about making money on the internet, a lot of people are going to visit your website. This in turn burdens your web server and a free web server, well, it will just collapse!

Thirdly, you get an ugly looking URL which no one save the program that generated can remember eg. www.freeserverxyz.com/abc/~uv/

And that by no means is acceptable. Some of the companies have gotten round this and provide you with a cleaner whateveryouchoose.freeserverxyz.com. This is at least better than the previous mammoth.

Fourthly, nobody trusts a website hosted on a free server. Would you for instance make a $50 purchase from a URL like www.freeserverxyz.com/abc/~uv/ ? I certainly think not. To come around this problem, some free servers allow you to host your privately registered domain name for free. There is a catch here too. For this you will either have to transfer your current domain to them or register a new domain, either ways, you are at their mercy for domain pricing and still stuck with a banner on top of your page with limited monthly transfers.

However, if you still tight on budget and at any rate cannot afford a paid hosting, then I sincerely recommend one free server to you. Netfirms (www.netfirms.com) is one of the most renowned free web hosting providers with the provision of hosting your own www.yourchoice.com.

You could check out http://www.0host.com though not a kind you would expect; it does have a pretty much exhaustive list of free web hosts.

Gautamm Mehra is a young entrepreneur and IT consultant. He was introduced to computers in 1989 and has since than had a passion for everything digital. You can write to him at gautam [dot] mail [at] gmail [dot] com

Inexpensive Web Hosting - Running Your Own Server Or Not?

As there are so many hosting companies competing for your business, you'd get far less troubles than if you tried to get your own one.

Are you technologically savvy? Do you understand what it takes to secure a server? Do you have access to a broadband connection? Are you willing and able to devote the amount of time it'll take to solve the inevitable glitches that come your way one after another?

To host your own server you will need: a computer that must be used ONLY as a server with enough capacity to manage the amount of requests that may receive, a Network Interface Card (NIC) and a broadband connection with a high upload rate, and an internet service provider (ISP) in conditions to handle web traffic.

If this sounds like it's trying to scare you, then you're following completely. If there are so many inexpensive hosting companies out there, you need a very strong motive to prefer doing it yourself. If one company didn't bring you the service they had promised, it's not enough to stop seeking any other way out. There must be another inexpensive hosting service out there.

You may not consider everything you just read to be crucial information about hosting. But don't be surprised if you find yourself recalling and using this very information in the next few days.

If your site is promotional in any way - whether you're selling a product, a service, yourself - an amateurish presentation fraught with technical glitches and poor layout could cost you your business. The average web-surfer has a 20-second attention span, and if they encounter one problem accessing your site, they are unlikely to return.

With minimal research, you can really take advantage of the fierce competitiveness in the inexpensive web hosting industry and find a service that offers mouth-watering promotions, and innovative features unique to your needs. Most likely, if you're considering running your own server it's because your website generates a ton of traffic on more than one website or application. Fortunately, running your own server is not your only option. You can find many inexpensive hosting providers that could assign you a dedicated server for a fee, of course.

Then you will have your OWN server and nobody else will be able to use it, you won't share it at all, either storage, memory or bandwidth. And the performance of your site will not be affected by the traffic and usage patterns of any other customer. With a dedicated server you will have your own IP address and root (admin) access. You have full control over server usage and software installation. Dedicated servers allow you an unlimited number of email accounts and databases and the speed is inordinately faster.

These services, offered by many inexpensive providers, can be "managed" or "unmanaged". In the "unmanaged" ones, you are the administrator, so you must have time and skills, that's why most people opt for the "managed" package. i think you should consider an inexpensive dedicated server as a viable alternative to keep your business running smoothly and yourself well rested.

Now that wasn't hard at all, was it? And you've earned a wealth of knowledge, just from taking some time to study an expert's word on hosting.

Sandra Ruiz-Aguilar is a Native Spanish Speaker and Systems Analyst from Argentina doing freelance English - Spanish Translations for fifteen years. Lately getting into Internet Marketing. Website: http://englishspanishtranslation.4t.com

Have A Big Website - Worried About Server Load

Have we ever thought how big websites could be configured to handle massive amount of traffic? How thousands of businesses worldwide are facing challenges everyday to make sure there are no connection failures due to heavy load or congestion of traffic at the website.

The answer is straight, every organization will have to monitor and baseline amount of traffic by going for stress test to find out if the current hardware could be supportive enough to handle a specific amount of load. One such great software is the ?Web Application Testing? or WAPT, which is a great utility for any website?s sustainability. This software is load, stress and performance testing tool for web sites and intranet applications with web interface. WAPT is designed for MS Windows 2000/XP/2003 and Windows 98/Me operating systems. The question that should be asked is why should we consider WAPT or why should the organization consider Load or stress testing? We certainly believe, major performance issues would arise if stress test has not been performed.

This could very well mean that after the server reaches a certain level of concurrent connection made by visitors, it would consume its hardware resources to process every visitor?s request. If there is a lot to process, the server might give priority to web application than its local resource ending up in a system crash.

Thus, the goal of WAPT is very simple; it helps the organization?s web servers to become active at every stage of stress, whether it?s a web development or website traffic processing power. WAPT can perform a stress test by simulating several thousands of concurrent connections to check the web server/website performance and if it finds any bottlenecks it would warn and suggest fixing this issue by recommending the very next thing.
There are lots of new features added in WAPT 4.0
- You can use multiple virtual profiles to test a single scenario
- There is support for IP spoofing where each virtual user can run with individual and unique IP address
- Each Virtual can be configured with different username and password and is compatible with Windows Integrated Authentication or Basic Configuration.
- You can see and configure the type of reports even a test run summary report is generated
- There is command line interface available
- There is a support for persistent cookies
- All the test scenario and profiles are stored in XML format The Main features of WAPT 4.0
- You can have the application run and understand multiple languages
- There is cool recording feature which you can use to record any configuration and stress test simulations for later review or demonstrations as it supports playback of HTTPS/SSL 2.0 & 3.0 pages. You can also record the user connection speed using the keep-alive connections to a HTTP 1.0 or HTTP 1.1 pages or even HTTPS/SSL pages.
- You can generate data for run-times on specific scheduled intervals by randomizing the delay between the page hits.
- It also has a support for proxy servers for HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4 & 5 and supports cookies as well.
- All the authentication request can be handled using NTLM (windows Integrated Authentication) or using the basic authentication.
- If you would like to call the website by a different name, then you also have the facility to add custom host headers
- All this the scenarios can be configured using the user friendly Wizard
- You can choose the reports to be either graphical or in plain text along with full virtual server logs
A must tool for administrator or other user who would to maintain their website efficiently.

Ted Peterson writes for CoreDownload, a shareware archive where you can find utilities like WAPT to test your server

Have a big website? Worried about server load ?

If you have a big website, then it happened more that once to see it moving very slow. There is a way to do some testing and find out is the problems are caused by the hardware, or by the website itself.

Have we ever thought how big websites could be configured to handle massive amount of traffic? How thousands of businesses worldwide are facing challenges everyday to make sure there are no connection failures due to heavy load or congestion of traffic at the website.

The answer is straight, every organization will have to monitor and baseline amount of traffic by going for stress test to find out if the current hardware could be supportive enough to handle a specific amount of load. One such great software is the ?Web Application Testing? or WAPT, which is a great utility for any website?s sustainability. This software is load, stress and performance testing tool for web sites and intranet applications with web interface. WAPT is designed for MS Windows 2000/XP/2003 and Windows 98/Me operating systems. The question that should be asked is why should we consider WAPT or why should the organization consider Load or stress testing? We certainly believe, major performance issues would arise if stress test has not been performed. This could very well mean that after the server reaches a certain level of concurrent connection made by visitors, it would consume its hardware resources to process every visitor?s request. If there is a lot to process, the server might give priority to web application than its local resource ending up in a system crash.

Thus, the goal of WAPT is very simple; it helps the organization?s web servers to become active at every stage of stress, whether it?s a web development or website traffic processing power. WAPT can perform a stress test by simulating several thousands of concurrent connections to check the web server/website performance and if it finds any bottlenecks it would warn and suggest fixing this issue by recommending the very next thing.

There are lots of new features added in WAPT 4.0

- You can use multiple virtual profiles to test a single scenario

- There is support for IP spoofing where each virtual user can run with individual and unique IP address

- Each Virtual can be configured with different username and password and is compatible with Windows Integrated Authentication or Basic Configuration.

- You can see and configure the type of reports even a test run summary report is generated

- There is command line interface available

- There is a support for persistent cookies

- All the test scenario and profiles are stored in XML format

The Main features of WAPT 4.0

- You can have the application run and understand multiple languages

- There is cool recording feature which you can use to record any configuration and stress test simulations for later review or demonstrations as it supports playback of HTTPS/SSL 2.0 & 3.0 pages. You can also record the user connection speed using the keep-alive connections to a HTTP 1.0 or HTTP 1.1 pages or even HTTPS/SSL pages.

- You can generate data for run-times on specific scheduled intervals by randomizing the delay between the page hits.

- It also has a support for proxy servers for HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4 & 5 and supports cookies as well.

- All the authentication request can be handled using NTLM (windows Integrated Authentication) or using the basic authentication.

- If you would like to call the website by a different name, then you also have the facility to add custom host headers

- All this the scenarios can be configured using the user friendly Wizard

- You can choose the reports to be either graphical or in plain text along with full virtual server logs

A must tool for administrator or other user who would to maintain their website efficiently.

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

Mircea Ionescu writes for CoreDownload, a shareware archive where you can find utilities like WAPT to test your server.

Virtual Web Servers: Perfect For Mid-sized Web Hosting Needs, Part 1

The internet has exploded over the last ten years with many people doing more and more tasks online everyday. As the internet continues to grow, the amount of space available for web sites to expand will shrink. Another very important fact that needs to be considered when creating a web site is how you are going to host the web site.

Large companies can afford to have a dedicated web server or servers, but smaller companies and individuals usually can not afford to have a dedicated server for their web site. For these individuals there are a few alternatives available. They can either use a web hosting service to host their web sites, or they can use a virtual web server to host their web site. Both of these alternatives have strengths and weaknesses.

A web hosting plan usually allows you to upload your web files to their server and then they configure everything so that anyone on the internet can access it. These plans are usually fairly inexpensive, but they are also limited in the amount of options that you can configure on your own.

However since the configuration of these plans are very easy, you do not need to have a large internal I.T. department to implement your plans. Web hosting plans are also a very good fit for your web site if you do not need to have access to a database.

Virtual web servers are a great way to maximize the use of a single server to service many web sites across several domains. The virtual web server uses one server and one operating system to host many different web sites. The difference between virtual web servers and hosting plans is that you have access to mail, FTP, and all of the configuration files on the virtual server.

This gives you quite a bit more control over all of the functions that a normal web server would allow you to do. However you need to know more about configuring a web site if you use a virtual web server. The best thing about a virtual web server is that you have much more control and the ability to do many different things that you can not do with a web hosting plan.

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